Every magician had a natural predisposition to a certain specific kind of magic. Sometimes it was something trivial, sometimes it was genuinely useful, but everyone had one: it was a kind of sorcerous fingerprint. But they’d never been able to find Quentin’s. As part of his induction into the Brakebills faculty Quentin was required to state his discipline, at which point it occurred to him that he still didn’t know what it was.

Just as they had a dozen years ago they sent him to Professor Sunderland, a woman with whom he’d been seethingly, volcanically infatuated when he was an undergraduate. She met him in the same long sunlit lab she’d worked in back then; it was weird to think that she’d been here this whole time while he’d been off careening disastrously around the multiverse, and that they were now, for most practical purposes, peers.

If anything she was even more beautiful than she had been at twenty-five. Her face had ripened and softened. She looked more like herself, though what he’d thought of at the time as her serene, otherworldly quality now felt a bit more like a slight lack of affect—he hadn’t noticed how withdrawn and shut-down she was.

He’d felt so far below her then, he wasn’t sure she’d even remember him. But she did.

“Of course I do. You weren’t quite as invisible as you thought you were.”

Had he thought that? Probably he had.

“Does that mean my secret crush on you wasn’t as secret as I thought it was?”

She smiled, but not unkindly.

“The concealment of crushes probably isn’t your discipline,” she said. “Roll up your sleeves, above your elbows. Let me see the backs of your hands.”

He showed her. She gave them a brisk rub with fine powder and an irregular pattern of tiny cold sparks appeared on his skin, like a sparsely populated countryside seen from above by night. He thought he felt a web of icy prickles too, though that could have been his imagination.

“Mmmmm.”

She chewed her lip, studying him, then she tapped his hands, one, two, like a child playing a game, and the sparks went out. There was nothing there that interested Professor Sunderland. Or Pearl—now that they were colleagues he should get in the habit of calling her by her first name.

She snipped a lock of his hair and burned it in a brazier. It smelled like burning hair. She scrutinized the smoke.

“Nope.”

Now that the pleasantries were out of the way she was all business. He could have been a tricky flower arrangement that she couldn’t get quite right. She studied him through a graduated series of smoked lenses while he walked backward around the room.

“Why do you think this is so difficult?” Quentin asked, trying not to run into anything.

“Mm? Don’t look over your shoulder.”