It was coming back to him, the purpose of all this. He waited, bouncing on his toes, hands clumped under his armpits to keep his fingers warm, getting increasingly self-conscious about being naked, until Plum found hers. Then he clamped the feather between his chattering teeth, and they did the spells at the same time.

This time the change was bad, and he threw up when it was done, though granted throwing up isn’t as big a deal to a bird as it is to a human. He made a neat, hygienic job of it—business as usual. After its brief reunion with humanity his brain went animal again, this time having to endure the insult of being squeezed into the tablespoon volume of a seabird’s skull. He got oriented in time to watch Plum dwindle into the shape of a seabird twenty yards away, her pale body feathering over and collapsing in on itself into—he didn’t even know what kind of bird she was. Or for that matter what he was.

He was whatever kind of bird that feather had belonged to. A moment of contact with Plum’s turmeric-yellow, perfectly circular eye, then they both took flight.

Onward and upward.

CHAPTER 10

Quentin had never heard of anybody going to Brakebills South in the gap between fall and spring semesters, which this was, and he wasn’t even a hundred percent positive they could get in. They might find the building shut down, Mayakovsky gone or in hiding, the whole place sealed off. If that happened they’d have to reassess pretty fast and make a break for one of the non-magical research stations on the coast, where their arrival would be hard to explain at best.

They spiraled in from above, balancing on their aching wings, steeling themselves for the moment when their webbed seabird feet would skip off the surface of some hard invisible dome—but the moment never came. Apparently Mayakovsky considered five hundred miles of Antarctic no-man’s-land enough of a defense against home invasion. They alighted on the flat roof of one of the towers and became human again.

Quentin figured it was better to let Mayakovsky find them rather than the other way around—he didn’t want to startle the old magician into some lethal display of defensive magic—so they made as much noise as possible coming down the stairs. First stop was the laundry, where they secured some Brakebills South robes: the nakedness issue was starting to feel urgent again.