He couldn’t honestly say that it was everything he’d hoped for.

“Small like a chair?”

“Think smaller,” she said. “Like, I don’t know, a coffee cup.” She shaped her hands around an invisible mug. “Have you had any special luck with that? Lesser bindings, reconstitutions, that kind of thing?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” He couldn’t actually say that he’d ever noticed. Maybe he just hadn’t been paying attention.

It was a bit of an anticlimax. You couldn’t call it sexy, exactly. Not breaking new ground, so much. He wouldn’t be striding between dimensions, or calling down thunderbolts, or manifesting patroni, not on the strength of repair of small objects. Life was briskly and efficiently stripping Quentin of his last delusions about himself, one by one, shucking them off in firm hard jerks like wet clothes, leaving him naked and shivering.

But it wasn’t going to kill him. It wasn’t sexy, but it was real, and that was what mattered now. No more fantasies—that was life after Fillory. Maybe when you give up your dreams, you find out that there’s more to life than dreaming. He was going to live in the real world from now on, and he was going to learn to appreciate its rough, mundane solidity. He’d been learning a lot about himself lately, and he’d thought it would be painful, and it was, but it was a relief too. These were things he’d been scared to face his whole life, and now that he was looking them in the eye they weren’t quite as scary as he thought.

Or maybe he was tougher than he thought. At any rate he wouldn’t have to be retroactively expelled from the Physical Kids. Repair of small objects would have made the cut.

“Off you go,” Pearl said. “Fogg will probably have you take over the First Year class on Minor Mendings.”

“I expect he will,” Quentin said.

And he did.

CHAPTER 3

Quentin thought he’d find teaching satisfying, but he didn’t actually expect to enjoy it. That seemed like too much to hope for. But as it turned out he did enjoy it.

Five mornings a week at nine A.M. he stood up in front of Minor Mendings, chalk in hand, scribbled lecture notes in front of him, and looked out at the students—his students now—and they looked back at him. Mostly their faces were blank—blank with terror, blank with total confusion, blank with boredom, but blank. Quentin realized now that that must be how he used to look. When you were just one of the class you tended to forget the professor could see you.