“You have to wonder, too, if it was more than just the reflections—if you could dive down into one pool and come up in the other one, in this world or some other world. There’s always been something off about those fountains. Did you know they were here before Brakebills? They built the school to be near them, and not the other way around. Or that’s what people say.”

Eliot snorted.

“Well that’s what people say, darling. Anyway,” Janet went on, “the thing is, Emily started spending a lot of time at Woof, just smoking and hanging out, and I guess mooning over her little affair. She spent so much time there that she started to recognize one of the faces in the fountain. Somebody like her, who was spending a lot of time at the other fountain, the one in the reflection. Let’s call her Doris. After a while Emily and Doris got to noticing each other. They’d acknowledge each other, a little wave, you know, just to be polite. Probably Doris was a little mopey, too. They got to feeling like kindred spirits.

“Emily and Doris worked out a way to communicate. Again, the exact details have eluded your intrepid correspondent. Maybe they held up signs or something. They must have had to be in mirror writing, to make sense as reflections, or am I getting that wrong?

“I don’t know how things worked in Woofland, where Doris lived, maybe magic is different there. Or maybe Doris was fucking with our Emily, maybe she was sick of hearing Emily whine about her love life. Maybe there was something really wrong with Doris, maybe she was something genuinely evil. But one day Doris suggested that if Emily wanted her lover back, maybe her appearance was the problem, and she should try changing it?”

A chill settled over the group, where they lay on the sun-warm turf. Even Quentin knew that using magic to alter one’s physical appearance never ended well. In the world of magical theory it was a dead spot: something about the inextricable, recursive connection between your face and who you were—your soul, for lack of a better word—made it hellishly difficult and fatally unpredictable. When Quentin had first gotten to Brakebills, he’d wondered why everybody didn’t just make themselves ridiculously good-looking. He’d looked at the kids with an obviously flawed feature—like Gretchen with her leg, or Eliot with his twisted jaw—and wondered why they didn’t get somebody to fix them up, like Hermione with her teeth in Harry Potter. But in reality it always ended in disaster.