The Magician King

assortment of people. The place could have passed for a halfway house for teenage runaways if it weren’t also a halfway house for twentysomething, middle-aged, and elderly runaways. There were your standard goth casualties, pale and skinny and worryingly scabby, but there was also a guy with five-o’clock shadow in a wrecked business suit of not negligible quality talking on a cell phone, saying “yah, yah, uh-huh” in a tone of voice that suggested that there was actually somebody on the other end who cared whether he said uh-huh or nuh-uh. There was a sixtysomething woman with an arctic-white Gertrude Stein haircut. An old Asian guy was sitting on the floor with no shirt on, all by himself. In front of him on the white pile carpet stood a burned-out brazier surrounded by a ring of ashes. Guess the cleaning lady hadn’t come today.

Quentin stopped on the threshold.

“Julia,” Quentin said. “Tell me where we are.”

“Have you not guessed yet?” She practically glittered with pleasure. She was relishing his discomfort. “This is where I got my education. This is my Brakebills. It is the anti-Brakebills.”

“These people do magic?”

“They try.”

“Please tell me you’re joking, Julia.” He took her arm, but she shook it off. He took it again and pulled her back down the stairs. “I’m begging you.”

“But I am not joking.”

Julia’s smile was wide and predatory. The trap had sprung and the prey was writhing in it.

“These people can’t do magic,” he said. “They’re not—there’s no safeguards. They aren’t qualified. Who’s even supervising them?”

“No one. They supervise each other.”

He had to take a deep breath. This was wrong—not morally wrong, just out of order. The idea that just anybody could mess around with magic—well, for one thing it was dangerous. That’s not how it worked. And who were these people? Magic was his, he and his friends were the magicians. These people were strangers, they were nobody. Who told them they could do magic? As soon as Brakebills found out about this place they’d shut it down with a goddamned vengeance. They’d send a SWAT team, a flying wedge with Fogg at the head of it.

“Do you actually know these people?” he said.

She rolled her eyes.

“These guys?” She snorted. “These guys are just losers.”

Julia led the way back into the living room.

The only thing the denizens of the safe house had in common, besides their general seediness, was that a lot of them had the same tattoo: a little blue star, seven-pointed, the size of a dime. A heptagram, but solid, colored in. It winked at Quentin from the backs of their hands, or their forearms, or the meaty part between their thumb and forefinger. One of them had two, one on each side of his neck, like Frankenstein’s neck bolts. The shirtless Asian guy had four. As Quentin watched he started in on some involved casting Quentin didn’t recognize, staring glazedly through the web of his working hands. Quentin couldn’t even look.

A redheaded man with freckles, a pint-sized Dennis the Menace type, was sitting up on the gray slate mantelpiece by himself, monitoring the scene, but when he saw them he boosted himself down and strutted over. He wore an oversized army jacket and carried a beat-up clipboard.

“Hi folks!” he said. “I’m Alex, welcome to my dojo. You are—?”

“I am Julia. This is Quentin.”

“Okay. Sorry about the housekeeping. Tragedy of the commons.” In contrast to everybody else in the room, Alex was chipper and businesslike. “Check your stars, please?”

Julia did the thing again where she showed him the nape of her neck.

“Right.” Alex’s ginger eyebrows went up. Whatever he saw impressed him. He turned to Quentin. “And you —?”

“He does not have any,” Julia said.

“I don’t have any.” He could speak for himself.

“So did he want to take the test? Because otherwise he can’t stay here.”

“I understand,” Julia said.

The really incredible thing was that she wasn’t even mouthing off to this guy. She was being civil! She, a queen of Fillory, respected the fucked-up protocol of this place.

“Quentin, he wants you to take a test,” she said. “To show you do magic.”

“I want lots of things too. Do I have to do it?”

“Yes, you have to fucking do it,” she said evenly. “So do it. It is just the first level, everybody who comes here does it their first time. You just make a flash. You probably have a fancy name for it.”

“Show me.”

Julia ran through three well-rehearsed hand positions, lickety-split, snapped her fingers, and said:

“?s?k!”

The snap produced a little pop of light, like a flashbulb.

“Okay?”

“Hang on,” Quentin said. “Those hand positions weren’t quite generic. Can you—?”

“Come on, people,” Alex said, not so chipper now. “Are we doing this?”

Quentin saw now that Alex had eight stars, four on the back of each hand. That must make him king of the flophouse.

“Come on, Quentin.”

“Okay, okay. Show me again.”

She did the spell again. Quentin came at it, trying to crook his fingers the way she did. Brakebills taught you all straight lines, your hands approximating platonic geometry, but these positions were loose and organic. Nothing lined up. And it had been two years since he’d worked with real-world Circumstances. He tried it once, snap, and got nothing. Then nothing again.

This earned him a round of ironic applause. The locals were taking an interest in this transaction.

“I’m sorry, one more try and then you’re out,” Alex said. “You can come back in a month.” Julia began to show him again, but Alex put a hand over hers. “Just let him try.”

The bouncer, Potions Master, had come in from the front door and was watching with his arms folded. Quentin could hear other people saying “?s?k!” Every time they did, a flashbulb would go off.

Screw this. He wasn’t going to pick up some corrupt hedge-witch spell in thirty seconds that would probably screw up his technique. He was classically trained, and a master sorcerer, and a king to boot. Let there be light.

“,” he said. “”

Let’s see who here’s got good Aramaic. He closed his eyes and clapped his hands loudly.

The light was white and blinding—a flashbulb at close range, right up in your face. For a second the whole room—shitty carpet, listing torchiere lamps, staring faces—was frozen, all the color driven out of it. Quentin had to blink his vision back to normal, and he’d had his eyes closed.

There was a beat of silence.

“Holeeee . . .” someone said. Then everybody started talking at once. Alex didn’t look happy, but he didn’t throw them out either.

“Sign in,” he said. He blinked and blotted his eyes on his sleeve. “I don’t know where you learned that, but just get your flash working next time.”

“Cheers,” Quentin said.

Alex peeled a blue star sticker off a sheet and stuck it on the back of Quentin’s hand. Then he handed Quentin the clipboard. Where it said “Name” he wrote King Quentin and handed it to Julia.

When she was done Quentin dragged her out through the kitchen, with its bumpy linoleum floor and its fifteen-year-old Easy-Bake-looking range and its countertops crowded with a multicolored metropolis of unwashed glassware. Enough was enough.

“What the hell are we doing here?” he hissed.

“Come on.”