The pencil case would then fall forty feet to where Emma waited shivering in the bushes in the cold November predawn to catch it in a blanket. No magic required.

Effective? Undeniably. Needlessly complex? Perhaps. But needless complexity was the League’s signature. That was how the League rolled.

Then it was on to Stage Two: “Breakfast of Champions.” Wharton would descend late, having spent the morning frantically searching his room. Through a fog of anxiety he would barely notice that his morning oatmeal had been plunked down in front of him not by some anonymous First Year but by the purple-eared Holly in guise of same. The first mouthful would not sit right with him. He would stop and examine his morning oatmeal more closely.

It would be garnished, not with the usual generous pinches of brown sugar, but with a light dusting of aromatic, olive-green pencil shavings. Compliments of the League.

—

As the day wore on Plum got into the spirit of the prank. She’d known she would. It was mostly just her mornings that were bad. It took a lot of energy to keep being Plum. Some days she just needed a few hours to get up to speed.

Her schedule ground forward: Accelerated Advanced Kinetics; Quantum Gramarye; Joined-Hands Tandem Magicks; Manipulation of Ligneous Plants. Plum’s course-load would have been daunting for a doctoral candidate, possibly several doctoral candidates, but Plum had arrived at Brakebills with a head full of more magical theory and practice than most people left with. She wasn’t one of these standing-starters, the cold-openers, who reeled through their first year with aching hands and eyes full of stars. Plum was clever, and Plum had come to Brakebills prepared.

As the only accredited college for magic on the North American continent, Brakebills had a very large applicant pool to draw from, and it drank that pool dry. Technically nobody really applied there, Dean Fogg simply skimmed the cream of high school seniors off the top. The cream of the cream—the outliers, the extreme cases of precocious genius and obsessive motivation, the statistical freaks who had the brains and the high pain tolerance that the study of magic required. Fogg took them aside and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse; or at any rate if they could refuse it, they wouldn’t remember it.

Privately Plum thought they could put a tiny bit more emphasis in the selection process on emotional intelligence, along with the other kind. The Brakebills student body was a bit of a psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality and to actually want to work that hard you had to be at least a little bit screwed up.