“Oh, they weren’t so bad,” Josh said. “You remember when Richard thought he could bring the weathervane to life? He was going to make it move around by itself. He must have been up there for three days rubbing it with fish oil and I don’t even want to think about what else.”

“That was unintentionally funny,” Janet said. “Doesn’t count.”

“You just never got the point of Richard.”

Janet snorted.

“I got plenty of Richard,” she said, with surprising bitterness.

A tiny hush fell. It was the first false note of the evening.

“But now we have a quorum again,” Eliot said quickly, “an eminently respectable quorum. Physical Magic always gets the best ones.”

“To the best ones,” Josh said.

Quentin raised his glass. He was up in the lofty branches of his fiery tree, swaying in the warm alcoholic breeze.

“The best ones.”

They all drank.

THE BEAST

THE BEAST

The entire time he’d been at Brakebills, through First Year, the exams, the whole disaster with Penny, right up until the night he joined the Physical Kids, Quentin had been holding his breath without knowing it. He realized only now that he’d been waiting for Brakebills to vanish around him like a daydream. Even aside from the many and varied laws of thermodynamics that were violated there on a regular basis, it was just too good to be true. It was like Fillory that way. Fillory never lasted forever. Ember and Umber promptly kicked the Chatwins out at the end of every book. Deep down Quentin felt like a tourist who at the end of the day would be herded back onto some dirty, lumbering, snorting tour bus—with ripped vinyl seats and overhead TVs and a stinking toilet—and shipped home, clutching a tacky souvenir postcard and watching as the towers and hedges and peaks and gables of Brakebills dwindled in the rearview mirror.

But it hadn’t happened. And now he understood, he really got, that it wasn’t going to happen. He’d wasted so much time thinking, It’s all a dream, and It should have been somebody else, and Nothing lasts forever. It was time he started acting like who he was: a nineteen-year-old student at a secret college for real, actual magic.