His first lecture was not a success. He stuttered; he repeated himself; he lost his train of thought and stopped cold, dead air, while he tried to figure out where he’d been going with this a second ago. He’d prepared ten points he wanted to cover, but he was so afraid that he’d run out of material that he dragged out the first point for half an hour and then had to rush through the other nine at top speed to fit them all in. It turned out that teaching was a skill you had to learn, like everything else.

But gradually it dawned on him that he at least knew what he was talking about. His track record in life and love wasn’t exactly flawless, but he did possess a large amount of practical information about the care and feeding of supernatural forces, and teaching was just a matter of getting that information out of his head and into the clever, receptive heads of his students in orderly installments. It was a long way from running a secret magical kingdom, but then again Fillory had never really needed him that badly, had it. Fillory pretty much ran itself. Whereas these kids, floundering as they were in the choppy, frigid waters of introductory gramarye, would have been lost without him. They needed him, and it felt good to be needed.

Knowing his discipline helped too. He’d always considered himself decent at magic, but he’d never had a strong sense of exactly who he was as a magician. Now he did: he was someone who fixed things. He saw that now. Give Quentin a broken object and in his hands it woke up, as if from an unhappy dream, and remembered that it had once been whole. A smashed coffee cup, so utterly hopeless and without power, bestirred itself and regained some of its old gumption. It hadn’t always been this way. No—it had once had a convenient handle. It had once had the power to hang on to a liquid instead of letting it gush through its shattered innards onto the floor.

And with a little encouragement from Quentin, it would again. God, but he loved doing magic. He’d almost forgotten how satisfying it was, even the little things. Doing magic was like finally finding the words you’d been groping for your whole life. You’d always known what you wanted to say, it was on the tip of your tongue, you almost had it, you knew it a moment ago but somehow forgot it—and then there it was. Casting the spell was like finally finding the words: there, that’s what I meant, that’s what I’ve been trying to say all along.