“I don’t take things lying down, Quentin.” Penny’s voice was very loud in the empty infirmary. “I don’t want trouble. But if you come after me, I swear to you that I will get right back in your face. That’s just how it works. You think this is your own private fantasy world? You think you can do whatever you want? You try to walk all over me, Quentin. I’m going to come right back at you!”

They were both talking so loudly that Quentin didn’t even notice when the infirmary door opened and Dean Fogg came in, dressed in an exquisitely embroidered silk kimono and a Dickensian nightcap. For a second Quentin thought he was holding a candle before he realized it was Fogg’s upraised index finger that was softly glowing.

“That’s enough,” he said quietly.

“Dean Fogg—” Penny began as if here, finally, was a voice of reason he could appeal to.

“I said that’s enough.” Quentin had never heard the Dean raise his voice, and he didn’t now. Fogg was always a faintly ridiculous figure in the daytime, but now, at night, wreathed in his kimono, in the alien confines of the infirmary, he looked powerful and otherworldly. Wizardly. “You’re not going to speak again except to answer my questions. Is that clear?”

Did that count as a question? To be safe Quentin just nodded. His head hurt worse now.

“Yes sir,” Penny said promptly.

“I have heard absolutely enough about this. Who instigated this appalling incident?”

“I did,” Penny said instantly. “Sir. Quentin didn’t do anything, he had nothing to do with it.”

Quentin said nothing. That was the funny thing about Penny. He was insane, but he did have his insane principles, and he stuck to them.

“And yet,” Fogg said, “somehow your nose found its way into the path of Quentin’s forehead. Will it happen again?”

“No, sir.”

“No.”

“All right.” Quentin heard springs chirp as the Dean sat down on an empty bed. He didn’t turn his head. “There is only one thing that pleases me about this afternoon’s altercation, which is that neither of you resorted to magic to hurt each other. Neither of you is advanced enough in your studies to understand this properly, but in time you will learn that wielding magic means working with enormously powerful energies. And controlling those energies requires a calm and dispassionate mind.

“Use magic in anger, and you will harm yourself much more quickly than you will harm your adversary. There are certain spells . . . if you lose control of them, they will change you. Consume you. Transform you into something not human, a niffin, a spirit of raw, uncontrolled magical energy.”

Fogg regarded them both with stern composure. Very dramatic. Quentin looked up at the infirmary’s pressed-tin ceiling stubbornly. His consciousness was guttering and fading. Where was the part where he told Penny to stop being a dick?