Plum wound up having a pretty good day; at any rate it was a lot better than Wharton’s. In first period he found more pencil shavings on the seat of his chair. Walking to lunch he found his pockets stuffed full of jet-black pencil eraser rubbings. It was like a horror movie—his precious pencils were being tortured to death, minute by minute, in an undisclosed location, and he was powerless to save them! He would rue his short-pouring ways, so he would.

Passing Wharton by chance in a courtyard, Plum let her eyes slide past his with a slow smile she felt only a little bit bad about. Was it her imagination, or did he look just the slightest bit haunted? Maybe Brakebills did have a ghost after all. Maybe it was Plum.

Finally—and this was Plum’s touch, and she privately thought it was the deftest one—in his fourth-period class, a practicum on diagramming magical energies, Wharton found that the Brakebills pencil he was using, on top of its bad hand-feel and whatever else, wouldn’t draw what he wanted it to. Whatever spell he tried to diagram, whatever points and rays and vectors he tried to sketch, they inevitably formed a series of letters.

The letters spelled out: COMPLIMENTS OF THE LEAGUE.

CHAPTER 8

Dinners at Brakebills had a nice formal pomp about them. When one was cornered by sad, nostalgic Brakebills graduates who had peaked in college and were back reliving their glory days, sooner or later they always got around to reminiscing about evenings in the ol’ dining hall. It was long and narrow and shadowy and paneled in dark wood and lined with murky oil paintings of past deans in various states of period dress. Light came from hideous, lopsided silver candelabras placed along the table every ten feet, and the candle flames were always flaring up or snuffing out or changing color under the influence of some stray spell or other. Everybody wore identical Brakebills uniforms. Students’ names were inscribed on the table at their assigned places, which changed nightly according to, apparently, the whims of the table.

That night Plum ate her first course as usual, two rather uninspired crab cakes, skipping the wine, as she usually did, then excused herself to go to the ladies’. As Plum passed behind her Darcy discreetly held out the silver pencil case behind her back, and Plum pocketed it. She wasn’t going to the ladies’, of course. Well, she was, but only because she had to. She wouldn’t be going back after.

Plum walked briskly through the empty House to the Senior Common Room, which the faculty rarely bothered to lock, so confident were they that no student would dare to cross its threshold unchaperoned. But Plum dared.