“I don’t think anybody likes it. But it was good for me. I learned a lot.”

“Yeah. I liked it when we were animals.”

“That was good. Did they turn you into foxes?”

She shook her head.

“Bears and seals. For some reason they don’t do foxes anymore.”

When they’d gotten on the plane that morning Brakebills South had seemed very far away, but now they were here, just a short splash across the Drake Passage from Antarctica, and suddenly it was very close, and his memories of it felt very fresh. They’d been so innocent then, he and Alice, even after what happened when they were foxes. Their feelings had been so big and raw and urgent, and they’d had absolutely no idea what to do with them. He wished he had it to do over again. He would try to be a nicer, stronger person.

Except that wasn’t quite it. What he really wished was that he had Alice back now, in the present.

“Did you do that thing at the end, where you race to the pole?” Plum said. “I bet you did.”

“Yup. You win.”

Plum just seemed excited about going back.

“I bet you got there first.”

“That one you lose.”

“Ha!” Her laughter got lost among the waves. “I can’t believe the great Professor Coldwater got beat to the pole! Who beat you?”

“A better magician than me. Did you win your year?”

“I sure did,” she said. “By a mile.”

The moon came up, unnaturally bright, a wafer of white phosphorus, but the black water seemed to swallow light rather than reflect it. Even a ripple was enough to trip over, so they wound up taking big exaggerated steps. Farther out from the beach the water smoothed out but the swells got bigger. The few lighted windows in Ushuaia, which shut down after ten o’clock, looked inexpressibly cozy. Fortunately they were wearing warm clothes, parkas and long underwear, which if all went according to plan they would never see again.

They hiked out about a half mile, well out into the bay. According to the nautical charts Quentin had consulted that was far enough. They stopped and bobbed up and down on the water in place, comically, not quite in sync. They’d prepared as much of the spell as they could ahead of time.

Quentin took a deep breath and rolled his shoulders. It was rare for magicians to kill themselves with their own magic, but stories that ended that way usually began something like this.

“All right?”

Plum chewed her lip and nodded.

“All right.”

Quentin peeled open a Tupperware container full of a revolting paste he’d ginned up back in New York based on whalebone dust scraped from some scrimshaw he’d bought at an antique store. They each dipped in two fingers and anointed their foreheads.