recognize them.
They were also magicians, and good ones, better than she was. And they lived in a big house in the south of France. It would take her a while to get used to them.
And to forgive them.
“When were you going to tell me?” she demanded, as they sat ranged around some deep glasses of local red at a stylish reclaimed-wood table on the stone patio behind the house. A blue swimming pool shimmered in the late afternoon sun. It was like a goddamned cigarette ad.
“Really! I’d like to know! You were here all this time, doing magic and scarfing humane local foie gras and I don’t even know what else and you didn’t even tell me? Instead you made me pass a test. Another test! As if I haven’t passed enough tests in my life!”
Maddeningly, a tear coursed down her cheek. She snapped her hand to her face like she’d been stung.
“Julia.” You could practically feel it when Failstaff talked, his voice was that deep. It practically rattled the silverware.
“We’re sorry,” Asmodeus said, all sisterly. “We all went through it.”
“Believe me, it gave us no pleasure to think about you at that Bed-Stuy safe house.” Pouncy set his wine glass aside. “But think about it. When you dropped off the radar on FTB we had a pretty good sense that you’d hooked up with the magic scene. So we waited. We gave you time to get your feet under you, get the basics out of the way, all that low-level crap. Get your finger positions straight, crack the major language groups. To see if this was for you or not.”
“Well, thanks a fucking million. That was really thoughtful of you.” All that time she’d spent wandering in the wilderness, wondering if there was anything out there, and they’d been here this whole time, watching her. She took a shaky breath. “You don’t know what I went through.”
“We know,” Failstaff said.
She looked at them, sipping their wine, a fancy Rhone red so dark it was almost black, lolling in the golden fucking Merchant-Ivory sunlight. The house was surrounded by hay fields gone to seed. They seemed to absorb sound, leaving them alone in an ocean of hush.
“You were paying your dues,” Pouncy said. “Call it a rite of passage.”
“Let’s call it what it is,” Julia said. “You were testing me. Who do you think you are? To test me?”
“Yes, we fucking tested you!” Pouncy was exasperated, but in a decorous, good-natured way. “You would have done the same thing to us! We tested the shit out of you. Not to see if you were smart. We know you’re smart. You’re a goddamned genius, though Iris says your Old Church Slavonic is crap. But we had to know why you were here. It wouldn’t work if you were just here to play with us. It wasn’t enough for you to love us. You had to love magic.”
“We all did it, Julia,” Asmodeus repeated. “Everybody here did, and we were all pissed when we found out the truth, and we all got over it.”
Julia snorted. “You’re what, seventeen? Are you going to tell me you paid your dues?”
“I paid, Julia,” she said evenly. A challenge.
“And to answer your question,” Pouncy said, “who do we think we are? We are us. And you’re one of us now, and we’re damn glad you’re here. But we don’t take chances on people.” He waited for that to sink in. “There’s too much at stake.”
Julia crossed her arms fiercely, or with all the ferocity she could muster, to avoid giving them the impression that they were entirely forgiven. But God damn them all to Hades, she was curious. She wanted to know what the hell this place was, and what they were up to. She wanted to know what the game was, so she could play too.
“So whose house is this?” she said. “Who paid for all this?”
Obviously there was a lot of money washing around here. She’d stood by while Pouncy called the rental car company and, in fluent French, simply bought the scraped-up Peugeot with a credit card.
“It’s Pouncy’s,” Asmodeus said. “Mostly. He was a day trader for a while. He was pretty good at it.”
“Pretty good?” Pouncy lifted his finely drawn eyebrows.
Asmo shook her head. “If you’d gone into the math just a little further you could have done so much better. I keep telling you, if you look at the market as a chaotic system—”
“Whatever. It wasn’t an interesting problem. It was a means to an end.”
“If you’d just stake me—”
“We all put in money when we came here,” Failstaff said. “I put in all mine. What was I saving it for? What else is money for except to live like this, with them, somewhere like Murs?”
“No offense, but it all sounds kind of culty.”
“That’s exactly what it is!” Asmodeus said, clapping her hands. “The Cult of Pouncy!”
“I think of it more like CERN,” Pouncy said. “It’s an institute for high-energy magical studies.”
Julia hadn’t touched her wine. More than wine right now, she wanted control, a thing that was not fully compatible with wine.
“So I’m looking around for like a Large Hadron Collider or its magical equivalent.”
“Bup-bup-bup,” Pouncy said. “Baby steps. First we power-level you up to two hundred fifty. And then we shall see what we shall see.”
It emerged that the house at Murs was, in its way, a natural outgrowth of the safe-house scene. The scene was a filter: it caught a very few, rather unusual people, culled them out of the everyday world and into the safe houses, and gave them magic to chew on. Murs filtered the filtered, double-distilled them. Most people in the magic scene were happy chilling in the safe houses, faffing around with three-ring binders. It was a social thing for them. They liked the double-life aspect of it. They’d gone behind the veil. They liked knowing they had a secret. It was what they needed, and it was all they needed.
But some people, a very few people, were different. Magic meant something else to them, something more primal and urgent. They didn’t have a secret, the secret had them. They wanted more. They wanted to penetrate the veil behind the veil. They did not faff, they learned. And when they hit the ceiling of what they could learn in the safe-house scene, they banged on it till somebody in the attic opened up a trap door.
That’s when they ended up in Murs. Pouncy and his gang skimmed off the cream of the safe houses and brought them here.
Life was easy in Murs, at least at first. There was a living wing and a working wing. Julia was assigned a beautiful bedroom with a high ceiling and wide floorboards and big stripey-curtained windows that let in floods of that champagne-y French light. Everybody cooked and everybody cleaned, but they’d worked out a lot of magic to smooth the way—it was amazing to watch the floors repel dust and herd it into neat little piles, like iron filings in a magnetic field. And the produce was second to none.
The others didn’t welcome her with open arms, exactly. They weren’t open-arms types. But there was respect there. She was geared up to prove herself all over again, since based on her life thus far she was used to having to prove herself to a new gang of assholes every six months or so. And she would have, she really would have. But they weren’t going to make her. The proving was done with. The journey was the test, and she had arrived. She was in.
It wasn’t Brakebills. It was better. She felt like she’d finally won—she’d won ugly, but she’d won.
They knew about Brakebills at Murs. Not much, but they knew. Their attitude toward it was bracingly snobbish. They considered Brakebills—to the extent that they considered it at all—rather cute: a sanitized, safety- wheeled playpen for those who didn’t have the grit and the will to make it on the outside. They called it Fakebills, and Breakballs. At Brakebills you sat in classrooms and followed the rules. Perfectly fine if you like that kind of thing, but here at Murs you made your own rules, no adult supervision. Brakebills was the Beatles, Murs was the Stones. Brakebills was for Marquis of Queensberry types. Murs was more your stone-cold street-fighting man.
Most of them had even been in for the Brakebills exam, like her, though unlike her they didn’t realize that till they’d gotten to Murs and Failstaff, who had a special touch with memory spells, had wafted away the magic that was fogging their brains. They took a certain pride in it, the refuseniks. Gummidgy (Julia never did figure out what the deal with her name was) even claimed to have beaten the exam and then—a historic first—declined Fogg’s offer to matriculate and walked away. She’d chosen the life of a hedge witch instead.
Privately Julia thought that that was completely demented, and that the Brakebills crowd probably had slightly more on the ball than the others were giving them credit for. But she enjoyed the snobbism nonetheless. She’d earned that much.
