One morning, very early, Professor March was giving a lecture on weather magic and summoning cyclonic wind patterns. For a portly man he was surprisingly spry. Just looking at him bouncing on his toes, with his red ponytail and his red face, made Quentin want to go back to bed. In the mornings Chambers served tarry black espresso which he smelted in a delicate, gilded-glass exotic Turkish device. But it was all gone by the time Quentin came down for class.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again Professor March was addressing him directly.

“. . . between a subtropical cyclone and an extratropical? Quentin? In the French, please, if you can.”

Quentin blinked. He must have drifted off.

“The difference?” he hazarded. “There is no difference?”

There was a long, awkward pause, into which Quentin inserted more words in an attempt to find out what exactly the question had been, and to say “baroclinic zones” as many times as possible just in case they were relevant. People shifted in their chairs. March, having caught the delicious scent of humiliation, was prepared to wait. Quentin waited, too. There was something in the reading about this. He’d actually done it, that was the injustice of it.

The moment stretched on and on. His face was on fire. This wasn’t even magic, it was meteorology.

“I don’t understand—” came a voice from the back of the classroom.

“I’m asking Quentin, Amanda.”

“But maybe you could clarify something?” It was Amanda Orloff. She persisted, with the shit-eating blitheness of somebody who had academic cred to burn. “For the rest of us? Whether these are barotropic cyclones or not? I find it a little confusing.”

“They are all barotropic, Amanda,” March said, exasperated. “It’s irrelevant. All tropical cyclones are barotropic.”

“But I thought one was barotropic and one was baroclinic,” Alice put in.

The resulting mass wrangle ended up being so inane and time-consuming that March was forced to abandon Quentin and move on or lose the entire thread of the lecture. If he could have done so unobtrusively, Quentin would have run back to where Amanda Orloff was sitting and kissed her on her broad, unmoisturized forehead. Instead he settled for blowing her a kiss when March wasn’t looking.

March had segued into a lengthy spell that involved sketching an elaborate mandala-like symbol on the chalkboard. He stopped every thirty seconds and stepped back to the edge of the stage, hands on hips, whispering to himself, then dove back into the design. The point of the spell was fairly trivial—it either guaranteed hail or prevented it, one or the other, Quentin wasn’t really following, and anyway the principle was the same.