Quentin had never met anybody so staggeringly and unapologetically affected. It was hard to know how to respond. He summoned up all the wisdom he’d accumulated during his entire life in Brooklyn.

“Merits are for pussies,” he said.

Eliot looked at him appraisingly.

“Very true. But they’re the only cigarette I can stand. Disgusting habit. Come on, smoke one with me.”

Quentin accepted the cigarette. He was in unfamiliar territory here. He’d handled cigarettes before—they were common props in close-up magic—but he’d never actually put one in his mouth. He made the cigarette vanish—a basic thumb palm—then snapped his fingers to bring it back.

“I said smoke it, not fondle it,” Eliot said curtly.

He muttered something under his breath, then snapped his own fingers. A lighter-size flame sprang into being over the tip of his index finger. Quentin leaned in and inhaled.

It felt like his lungs had been crumpled up and then incinerated. He coughed for five solid minutes without stopping. Eliot laughed so hard he had to sit down. Quentin’s face was slick with tears. He forced himself to take another drag and threw up into a hedge.

They spent the rest of that afternoon together. Maybe he felt guilty for giving Quentin the cigarette, or maybe Eliot had decided that the tedium of solitude was ever so slightly greater than the tedium of Quentin’s company. Maybe he just needed a straight man. He led Quentin around the campus and lectured him on the underground lore of life at Brakebills.

“The keen-eyed incoming freshman will have noticed the weather, which is uncommonly clement for November. That’s because it’s still summer here. There are some very old spells on the Brakebills grounds to keep people from spotting it from the river or walking in by accident, that kind of thing. Fine old enchantments. Classic work of their kind. But they’re getting eccentric in their old age, and somewhere in the 1950s time started spinning off its axis here. Gets worse every year. Nothing to worry about, in the larger picture, but we’re a little behind the mainstream. Two months twenty-eight days, give or take a few hours.”

Quentin didn’t know whether to act as awestruck as he felt or try to produce an imitation of cool worldly ennui. He changed the subject and asked about the curriculum.

“You won’t have any choice about your schedule your first year. Henry”—Eliot only ever referred to Dean Fogg by his first name—”makes everybody do the same thing. Are you smart?”

There was no non-embarrassing answer to this.

“I guess.”

“Don’t worry about it, everybody here is. If they even brought you in for the Exam you were the smartest person in your school, teachers included. Everyone here was the cleverest little monkey in his or her particular tree. Except now we’re all in one tree together. It can be a shock. Not enough coconuts to go round. You’ll be dealing with your equals for the first time in your life, and your betters. You won’t like it.

“The work is different, too. It’s not what you think. You don’t just wave a wand and yell some made-up Latin. There’s reasons why most people can’t do it.”

“Which are what?” Quentin asked.

“The reasons why most people can’t do magic? Well.” Eliot held up a long, thin finger. “One, it’s very hard, and they’re not smart enough. Two, it’s very hard, and they’re not obsessive and miserable enough to do all the work you have to do to do it right. Three, they lack the guidance and mentorship provided by the dedicated and startlingly charismatic faculty of the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. And four, they lack the tough, starchy moral fiber necessary to wield awesome magical energies calmly and responsibly.

“And five”—he stuck up his thumb—”some people have all that stuff and they still can’t do it. Nobody knows why. They say the words, wave their arms, and nothing happens. Poor bastards. But that’s not us. We’re the lucky ones. We have it, whatever it is.”

“I don’t know if I have the moral fiber one.”

“I don’t either. I think that one’s optional, actually.”

Silent for a while, they walked along a lush, ruler-straight allée of fence trees leading back toward the lawn. Eliot lit another cigarette.

“Listen, I don’t want to pry,” Quentin said, “but I’m assuming you have some secret magical way of dealing with the negative health effects of all those cigarettes.”

“It’s kind of you to ask. I sacrifice a virgin schoolgirl every other fortnight by the light of a gibbous moon, using a silver scalpel forged by Swiss albinos. Who are also virgins. Clears my little lungs right up.”

After that Quentin saw Eliot most days. Eliot spent one entire afternoon teaching him how to navigate the hedge maze that separated the House—”as everybody calls it”—from the great lawn, which was officially named Seagrave’s Lawn after the eighteenth-century Dean who cleared and leveled it, and which “everybody” referred to as the Sea, or sometimes the Grave. There were six fountains scattered throughout the maze (the Maze), and each one had an official name, usually that of a deceased Dean, as well as a nickname generated by the collective unconsciousness of generations of Brakebillian undergraduates. The hedges that made up the Maze were cut in the shape of heavy, slow-thighed beasts—bears and elephants and other less-easily-identifiable creatures. Unlike ordinary topiary they moved: they lumbered along very slowly, almost imperceptibly, wading half submerged in the dark foliage like hippopotami wallowing in an equatorial African river.

On the last day before classes began, Eliot led him around to the front of the House, which looked out on the Hudson. There was a scrim of plane trees between the front terrace and the river and a flight of wide stone steps that led down to a handsome Victorian boathouse. They decided on the spot that they absolutely had to go out on the water, even though neither of them had any practical ideas about how to do it. As Eliot pointed out, they were both certified sorcerer-geniuses, and how hard could it be to row a damn boat?

With a lot of grunting and yelling at each other, they wrestled a long wooden double scull down from the rafters. It was a fabulous object, strangely light, like the husk of a colossal stick insect, wreathed in cobwebs and redolent with the heady smell of wood varnish. Mostly by luck they managed to turn it over and splash it down into the water without injuring it or themselves or getting so pissed off at each other that they had to abandon the whole project. After some early close calls they got it pointed in a plausible direction and settled into a slow, halting rhythm with it, hindered but not daunted by their incompetence and by the fact that Quentin was hopelessly out of shape and Eliot was both out of shape and a heavy smoker.

They got about half a mile upstream before the summer day abruptly vanished around them and became chilly and gray. Quentin thought it was a summer squall until Eliot explained that they’d reached the outer limits of whatever concealment spells had been applied to the Brakebills grounds, and it was November again. They wasted twenty minutes rowing up past the change and then drifting back down again, up and back, watching the sky change color, feeling the temperature drop and then soar and then drop again.

They were too tired to row on the way back, so they drifted with the current. Eliot lay back in the scull and smoked and talked. Because of his air of infallible entitlement Quentin assumed he’d been raised among the wealthy mandarins of Manhattan, but it turned out he’d actually grown up on a farm in eastern Oregon.

“My parents are paid not to grow soybeans,” he said. “I have three older brothers. Magnificent physical specimens—kind-hearted, thick-necked, three-sport athletes who drink Schlitz and feel sorry for me. My dad doesn’t know what happened. He thinks he chewed too much dip before I was conceived, and that’s why I ‘di’n’t come out reg’lar.’ ” Eliot stubbed out his Merit in a glass ashtray balanced precariously on the glossy wooden hull and lit another one. “They think I’m at a special school for computer geeks and homosexuals.

“That’s why I don’t go home in the summertime. Henry doesn’t care. I haven’t been home since I started here.

“You probably feel sorry for me,” he went on airily. He wore a dressing gown over his regular clothes, which gave him a shabby princely look. “You shouldn’t, you know. I’m very happy here. Some people need their families to become who they’re supposed to be. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But there are other ways to do it.”

Quentin hadn’t realized how hard-won Eliot’s air of ludicrously exaggerated insouciance must be. That facade of lofty indifference must be there to hide real problems. Quentin liked to think of himself as a sort of regional champion of unhappiness, but he wondered if Eliot had him outclassed on that score, too.

As they drifted home they were passed by a few other boats, sailboats and cabin cruisers and a hard-charging eight-woman scull out of West Point, which was a few miles upriver. The occupants looked grim and bundled-up against the cold, in gray sweatshirts and sweatpants. They couldn’t perceive, or somehow weren’t part of, the August heat that Quentin and Eliot were enjoying. They were warm and dry and didn’t even know it. The terms of the enchantment locked them out.

MAGIC

” The study of magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion. Magic is a craft. When we do magic, we do not wish and we do not pray. We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change to the world.

“This is not to say that we understand magic, in the sense that physicists understand why subatomic particles do whatever it is that they do. Or perhaps they don’t understand that yet, I can never remember. In any case, we do not and cannot understand what magic is, or where it comes from, any more than a carpenter understands why a tree grows. He doesn’t have to. He works with what he has.

“With the caveat that it is much more difficult and much more dangerous and much more interesting to be a magician than it is to be a carpenter.”

Delivering this edifying lecture was Professor March, whom Quentin had last seen during his Examination—he was the round, red-haired man with the hungry lizard. Because he was plump and red-faced he looked like he should be jolly and easygoing, but in actuality he was turning out to be kind of a hard-ass.

When Quentin woke up that morning the huge empty House was full of people—yelling, running, noisy people who dragged trunks thunder ously up stairs and occasionally banged open his door, looked him over, and then slammed it shut again. It was a rude awakening; he’d gotten used to wandering around the House by himself as its undisputed lord and master, or at least, after Eliot, its senior undersecretary. But as it turned out there were ninety-nine other students enrolled at Brakebills, divided into five classes that corresponded roughly to freshman through first-year graduate student. They had arrived this morning en masse for the first day of the semester, and they were asserting their rights.

They came in clumps, materializing ten at a time on the back terrace, each group with a hillock of trunks and duffle bags and suitcases beside it. Everybody except Quentin was in uniform: striped blazers and ties for the guys, white blouses and dark tartan skirts for the girls. For a college, it all looked a whole lot like a prep school.

“It’s jacket and tie at all times except in your room,” Fogg explained. “There are more rules; you’ll pick them up from the others. Most boys like to choose their own ties. I am inclined to be lenient on that score, but don’t test me. Anything too exciting will be confiscated, and you’ll be forced to wear the school tie, which I know very little about these things, but I am told is cruelly unfashionable.”

When Quentin got back to his room he found a closetful of identical jackets hanging there, dark blue and chocolate brown in inch-wide stripes, paired with white dress shirts. Most of them looked brand new; a few showed signs of incipient sheen at the elbows or fraying around the cuffs and smelled faintly but not unpleasantly of mothballs and tobacco and former occupants. He changed gingerly and looked at himself in the mirror. He knew that he was probably supposed to resent the uniform, but he relished it. If he didn’t feel like a magician yet, at least he could look like one.

Each jacket had an embroidered coat of arms on it, a golden bee and a golden key on a black background dotted with tiny silver stars. He would later hear other students call this device the key-and-bee, and once he started looking for it he saw it everywhere, worked into carpets and curtains, carved into stone lintels, pieced into the corners of parquet floors.

Now Quentin sat in a large square lecture hall, a corner room with high, lofty windows on two sides. It contained four rows of elegant wooden desks set on raked steps like an amphitheater, looking down on a large blackboard and a massive stone demonstration table that had been scorched, scratched, scarred, and scathed within an inch of its life. Particles of chalk dust hung in the air. The class had twenty students, all in uniform, all looking like very ordinary teenagers trying very hard to look cooler and smarter than each other. Quentin knew that probably half the Intel Science Talent Search winners and Scripps Spelling Bee champions in the country were in this room. Based on what he had overheard, one of his classmates had placed second in the Putnam Competition, as a high school junior. He knew for a fact that one of the girls had managed to take over the plenary session of the national model UN and push through a motion sanctioning the use of nuclear weapons to protect a critically endangered species of sea turtle. This while representing Lesotho.

Not that any of that stuff mattered anymore, but the air was still thick with nerves. Sitting there in his new-smelling shirt and jacket, Quentin already wished he were back on the river with Eliot.