“That is true.”

“Or get expelled.”

Quentin appeared to accept her reasoning at face value. Old people: you never knew what you were going to get.

“Do you still want to know where the secret passage is? To the wine closet?”

“Sure,” Plum said, though not unshakily. She managed a bitter little laugh. “Why the hell not?”

But she meant it. Fuck it. They could take Brakebills away from her—apparently—but at least the honor of the League would live on eternally. She would always have that.

“You want the next panel over,” Quentin said. “You don’t count the half-panel.”

Aha. She drew the same rune-word she had before, and the door opened, and she peered inside. It was just what she thought: a cakewalk. Not even one hundred yards, more like seventy-five.

After all that the timing was pretty close to perfect. Plum had just closed the secret door to the wine closet behind her—it was concealed behind a trick wine rack—when Wharton came bustling in through the front door with the rumble and glow of the cheese course subsiding behind him. Her hair was a mess, but that was just part of the effect. It was all extremely “League.”

Wharton froze, with a freshly recorked bottle in one hand and two inverted wineglasses dangling from the fingers of the other. Plum regarded him calmly. Some of the charm of Wharton’s face came from its asymmetry: he’d had a harelip corrected at some point, and the surgery had gone well, so that all that was left was a tiny tough-guy scar, as if he’d taken one straight in the face at some point but kept on trucking.

Also he had an incredibly precious widow’s peak. Some guys had all the luck.

“You’ve been short-pouring the Finns,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “You have my pencils.”

“Yes.”

“It’s not the pencils I mind,” Wharton said, “so much as the case. And the knife. They’re antique silver, Smith and Sharp. You can’t find those anywhere anymore.”

She took the case out of her pocket. She wasn’t going to give an inch, not even after everything else. Especially not. To hell with the ghost, and to hell with Brakebills, and to deepest darkest hell with the Chatwins. The world had split open under her feet, and nothing would ever be the same, but she would still play her part to the hilt. To the end. They couldn’t take that away.

“Why have you been short-pouring the Finns?”

“Because I need the extra wine.”

God, was he really an alcoholic? Nothing should surprise her at this point, but still. He didn’t seem like the type. Epifanio, maybe, but not Wharton. And Wharton wouldn’t be an enabler like that.

“But what do you need it for?” Plum held the case just out of reach. “I’ll give you back the pencils and all that. I just want to know.”

“What do you think?” Wharton said. “I leave it out for the damn ghost. I thought the wine might keep it happy. That thing scares the shit out of me.”

Wharton had a lot to learn about ghosts. She sighed and sat down on a crate. All her strength was gone.

“Me too.” She handed him the case.

Wharton sat down next to her and pulled over a little table. He placed the two glasses on it.

“Wine?”

“Thanks,” Plum said. “I’d love some.”

If not now, when? He poured, properly this time, even a little heavy. The dark liquid looked black in the glass, and she had to restrain herself from gulping it.

Fresh tobacco. Black currants. God, it was so good. She kept it in her mouth for a count of ten before she swallowed. If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine. She smelled wet hay from a tumbledown field in Tuscany in the early morning, after the sky turned light, but before the sun burned off the dew.

It reminded her of somewhere else too, a place she’d never seen, let alone smelled—someplace green and unspoiled and far away, which she knew well even though she’d never been there, just as it knew her well. She felt its pull on her, as she always had. But for the moment she let its name escape her.

CHAPTER 9

They’d only been at the Newark Airport Marriott for a week and already Quentin didn’t know how much longer he could stand it. This was not somewhere humans were supposed to stay more than one night in a row. It was not a long- or even medium-term residence. The walls were thin, the food was lousy, and the interior decoration was worse. This place was bad for your soul.

He didn’t see much of the others, apart from Plum. Pushkar was busy overflying the East Coast at high altitude with Lionel and the bird, scouring it for any signs of the suitcase and/or the Couple. Stoppard was building something large and complicated out of tiny metal parts in his bedroom, from which he emerged only once or twice a day, at odd hours, wearing an oil-stained apron. The bird had sent Betsy off with a credit card to buy supplies. Meanwhile Quentin and Plum had been tasked with figuring out how to break the famous incorporate bond.

It was a bear of a problem, nasty and complicated, a real tarball. Quentin had heard about incorporate bonds, though he’d still never seen one in real life. The theory went as follows: picture a two-dimensional world, an infinite plane, full of infinitely flat two-dimensional objects. You, a three-dimensional being, could theoretically lean down from above it and fasten one of those objects in place, anchoring it permanently to its plane from above; if you did it carefully you might not even damage it too much. In the case of an incorporate bond the same operation was performed in three-dimensional space, using a four-dimensional anchor to fix the object immovably with respect to the fabric of three-dimensional space-time.

It was about as difficult as it sounded, and messy and expensive to boot. Four-dimensional paperweights didn’t grow on trees, or at least not in this plane of existence they didn’t. Incorporate bonds were the last word in magical security, and the Couple must have gone through a good deal of trouble to cast the spell, but in doing so they’d rendered the case unstealable. Except that the bird thought it wasn’t.

In Quentin’s experience magical creatures like the bird didn’t tend to know a lot about magic from a technical point of view. They didn’t work magic themselves, they just were magic, so the theory of it didn’t really matter. Also a lot of them weren’t terribly bright. But the bird had some ideas about it, or someone had supplied it with ideas, and on the face of it they weren’t demonstrably nonsense. But carrying them out posed a raft of thorny practical issues, and the bird had generously left the working out of said problems to Quentin and Plum.

At first it was fun: it was a dense, rich, genuinely hard problem, and they attacked it with a will. The issue of the suitcase’s Chatwin connection receded to the back of Quentin’s mind as they scribbled flow charts on hotel stationery, then on reams of printer paper filched from the business center, then finally on a fat roll of butcher’s paper from an art supply shop. The spell kept ramifying into more and more secondary and tertiary and quaternary spells, to the point where they had to color-code them, and the color-coding eventually ran to a full 120-count pack of Crayolas. Quentin and Plum argued more vehemently than was strictly necessary over which colors should go with which spells.

That should probably have been a warning sign. After a week they’d drilled down far enough that they were staring at some real bedrock problems, questions that looked like they ought to have answers but which kicked back everything they threw at them. He might have given up if it hadn’t been for Alice.

For years, seven of them, he’d thought of Alice as someone who belonged to the past. She wasn’t dead, but she was gone. He was resigned to living his life without her. But when he saw her that night in the mirror at Brakebills all that ended, and she came surging roughly back into his present.

He hadn’t seen her since Ember’s Tomb, and their reunion was so chaotic and unexpected that in the moment he didn’t know what to think or feel or do—Fogg was right, he hadn’t followed protocol, because the protocol was designed to banish or kill anything that made it inside the Brakebills cordon, and he wasn’t going to do that. And he hadn’t wanted to say why. Just like that Alice was there, right there, close enough to talk to, close enough to kill him. Or to kill Plum, whom until that night he knew only as a face in the crowd. But she hadn’t.

There was a part of him that wished he hadn’t seen Alice at all, that he hadn’t been in the Senior Common Room that night, that it hadn’t been his turn to eat with the First Years. It wasn’t enough that he’d lost her once and spent seven years getting over it—now Alice had to hunt him down, cross worlds to find him and get him thrown out of the only home he had? When he kicked in that mirror part of him had meant it: he wanted to send her back, push her back down. He knew Brakebills was over for him even before Fogg fired him. He knew it as soon as he saw her.

Because he’d felt her presence. He was sure he had. She wasn’t gone: her body had burned, but the essence of Alice was in there somewhere, the Alice he knew, trapped inside that toxic blue flame like a fly in amber. He’d recognized her, the old Alice, the one he used to love, twisted and distorted but real, and he couldn’t leave her there. If there was some way to get her out, he would find it. That was his job now. Teaching would have to wait.

He was ready. The whole business of getting kicked out of Fillory had been good for him. It made him tougher, more grounded in reality, to the point where he could deal with getting kicked out of Brakebills. He was basically homeless, and getting increasingly less respectable, but he knew who he was and what he had to do.

He just needed a plan. He needed to get himself together—he needed resources, he needed somewhere to live. He needed to find out everything he could about niffins. For that he needed money, and to get money they would have to break this damn bond.

They weren’t going to do that without help. Unfortunately the only magician Quentin could think of who was smart enough to help them was very far away, on another continent in fact. It was a place that he and Alice had known well.

When Quentin first suggested a field trip to Antarctica Plum wasn’t enthusiastic. It was cold there, and a pain to get to, and also Professor Mayakovsky was kind of a dick. But Plum was a creature of enthusiasms, and it didn’t take her long to come around to the idea. It would be an adventure! She could be a goose again! She’d loved being a goose.

“Except,” she said, even more excited, “why be a goose? We’ve been geese. We could go as something else! Anything else!”

“I was thinking of going as a human being,” Quentin said. “Like on an airplane.”

Plum was already at her laptop and Googling.

“OK, check this out. What’s the fastest migratory bird on Earth?”

“An airplane.”

“Whatever, you are like the bullshittest magician ever. Look at this, it’s called the great snipe.”

“Are you sure that’s a real bird? It sounds like something from Lewis Carroll.”

“‘Some have been recorded to fly nonstop for forty-eight hours over 6,760 kilometers.’ I’m quoting here.”

“From Wikipedia.”

But still. He looked over her shoulder. The great snipe was a plump little wading bird, roughly egg-shaped, with a big long bill and zigzaggy brown stripes, like a not particularly exotic seashell. It didn’t look like a speed demon.

“‘Female great snipe are, on average, significantly larger than the male,’” Plum said.

“We’d need something to base the spell on, like some great snipe DNA. At least the first time we did it. I don’t think we can do the transformation based on an image from a Wikipedia entry.”

“Are you sure? They have it in hi-res.”

“Even so. Plus I’m kind of concerned about the cold. That bird doesn’t look like it was evolved for Antarctica.”

“Except it’ll still be summer,” Plum said. “Backward seasons.”

“Even so.”

“Stop saying that.” Plum frowned, then brightened up again. “OK, forget about birds. I don’t know why I was even thinking birds. We could be fish! Or whales—blue whales!”

“We’d still have to go the last bit. After we got to Antarctica.”

“We’d just swim under the ice!”

“That’s the North Pole. Antarctica is a continent. Under the snow it’s all rock.”

She huffed her annoyance.

“Whatever, Nanook.”

But of course she was right: it would be cool to be a blue whale. The idea grew on him. There was no particular reason to do it, other than it would be more interesting, but that seemed like enough. What else was magic for? It was safe: they were legally protected, and barring scattered orca attacks blue whales had no natural predators. The only downside was that even though they were fast swimmers by cetacean standards they turned out to be painfully slow compared with most birds, let alone the great snipe—20 mph was about a blue whale’s top speed, at least over long distances. At that rate it would take them a couple of months to get to Antarctica.

“I doubt we could delay the job that long,” Quentin said.

“Yeah,” Plum said sadly. “It would have been nice though. Oh well, another dream dies.”

But in the end they found a way to save it. They flew commercial most of the way, as far as Ushuaia, a small but unexpectedly charming port in Tierra del Fuego that claimed the distinction of being the southernmost city in the world. It was squeezed into a narrow strip of land between the Beagle Channel and the snow-covered peaks of the Martial Range behind it, as if it were backed up against them and trying not to fall into the freezing water. From there they could cross the Drake Passage to the coast of Antarctica in the form of blue whales.