It was the end of every fairy tale, all the prizes for which knights and princes had fought and died and clever princesses had guessed riddles and kissed frogs. Mayakovsky was right, this was grand magic, this was what a lifetime of solitary practice and toil bought you. Later it was hard for Quentin to remember details—the moonshine bleached them out of his brain cells like an industrial detergent—but he recalled a player piano that would improvise according to your mood, never repeating itself, optimizing the music according to how you responded, becoming more and more beautiful until it was the sound of everything you’d ever wanted to hear.

After a few minutes it was painful—he had to tell Mayakovsky to stop it before he broke down sobbing. Later he couldn’t have hummed the melody to save his life.

“This, Quentin. This is greatness. These are things you will never do. Never understand.”

It was true. Even with the strength he’d gained after his father died, he would never be in Mayakovsky’s league. It cost him nothing to admit it. He just wished that with all his genius Mayakovsky could help them.

But Plum was frowning.

“But I mean so why are you still here?” she said. “In Antarctica? If you’re this great wizard? I don’t get it. I mean, look at all this stuff! You could be famous!”

“I could be.” Mayakovsky said it sourly; the showman was gone. “But why? Why should I care if people know my name? People do not deserve Mayakovsky!”

“So you like being here? Alone like this? I don’t understand.”

“Why shouldn’t I like it?” He stuck out his lower lip. He didn’t much care for being psychoanalyzed. “Here I have everything. Outside there is nothing for me. Here I can do my work.”

“But she’s right, it makes no sense.” Quentin found his voice. “You’ve probably solved problems people have been banging their heads against for years. You have to go back and tell everybody.”

“I have to do nothing!” And then more quietly: “Enough. I will never go back. I am done with that.”

Even with his ordinary, averagely brilliant brain Quentin was beginning to understand. He knew a few things about Mayakovsky’s personal history: how he’d had an affair with a student named Emily Greenstreet that ended so disastrously that he’d had to flee to Brakebills South. And Quentin knew something about hiding out from the world, too. He’d done his fair share of it. He’d been so depressed and traumatized after what happened to Alice that he withdrew from the world of magic and swore never to cast a spell again. If he never risked anything more—he reasoned—he could never lose anything more. He could never hurt anybody else.