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But he didn’t stop her

“I had a pet theory about you” Pearl ran her finger down a column “Which was that I couldn’t find your discipline last tiht you were a bit young for your age Personality is a factor—h to have a discipline, but emotionally you weren’t there yet You hadn’t come into focus”

That was kind of e And like his crush, it had probably been obvious to more people than he realized

“I guess I’m a late bloomer,” Quentin said

“There you are” She tapped the page “Repair of small objects, that’s you”

“Repair of small objects”

“Uh-huh!”

He couldn’t honestly say that it was everything he’d hoped for

“Small like a chair?”

“Think smaller,” she said “Like, I don’t know, a coffee cup” She shaped her hands around an invisible s, reconstitutions, that kind of thing?”

“Maybe I don’t know” He couldn’t actually say that he’d ever noticed Maybe he just hadn’t been paying attention

It was a bit of an anticliround, sodown thunderbolts, or th of repair of s Quentin of his last delusions about hi the hi

But it wasn’t going to kill him It wasn’t sexy, but it was real, and that hat mattered now No ive up your drea He was going to live in the real world froh,a lot about hiht it would be painful, and it was, but it was a relief too These were things he’d been scared to face his whole life, and now that he was looking theht

Or ht At any rate he wouldn’t have to be retroactively expelled from the Physical Kids Repair of small objects would have made the cut

“Off you go,” Pearl said “Fogg will probably have you take over the First Year class on Minor Mendings”

“I expect he will,” Quentin said

And he did

CHAPTER 3

Quentin thought he’d find teaching satisfying, but he didn’t actually expect to enjoy it That seemed like too much to hope for But as it turned out he did enjoy it

Five s a week at nine AM he stood up in front of Minor Mendings, chalk in hand, scribbled lecture notes in front of him, and looked out at the students—his students now—and they looked back at him Mostly their faces were blank—blank with terror, blank with total confusion, blank with boredom, but blank Quentin realized now that that must be how he used to look When you were just one of the class you tended to forget the professor could see you

His first lecture was not a success He stuttered; he repeated hiht and stopped cold, dead air, while he tried to figure out where he’d been going with this a second ago He’d prepared ten points he wanted to cover, but he was so afraid that he’d run out of ed out the first point for half an hour and then had to rush through the other nine at top speed to fit the was a skill you had to learn, like everything else

But gradually it dawned on hi about His track record in life and love wasn’t exactly flawless, but he did possess a large a of supernatural forces, and teaching was just athat information out of his head and into the clever, receptive heads of his students in orderly installdoain Fillory had never really needed him that badly, had it Fillory prettyas they were in the choppy, frigid waters of introductory gramarye, would have been lost without hiood to be needed

Knowing his discipline helped too He’d always considered hi sense of exactly who he was as a s He saw that now Give Quentin a broken object and in his hands it woke up, as if from an unhappy dream, and remembered that it had once been whole A smashed coffee cup, so utterly hopeless and without power, bestirred itself and regained soumption It hadn’t always been this way No—it had once had a convenient handle It had once had the power to hang on to a liquid instead of letting it gush through its shattered innards onto the floor

And with a little encourageic He’d als Doingfor your whole life You’d always knohat you wanted to say, it was on the tip of your tongue, you alot it—and then there it was Casting the spell was like finally finding the words: there, that’s what I

All he had to do was explain this to his students As a faculty member he was also expected to conduct independent research, but until he could co hat he did He did it five days a week, a lecture at nine and then Practical Applications at two

At the same time he settled back into the rhythm of life at Brakebills, which wasn’t so different as a professor than it had been as a student He didn’t have ho lectures, which was fine because he didn’t have much else to do anyway He held himself appropriately aloof from his students, and so far the other faculty, appropriately or not, left the new fish to his own devices

Little things had changed Ruh Fogg hadn’t seen it hi with pride about it Apparently all the old European institutions had theic school hadn’t really arrived till it was haunted The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained so back to an infaun to breed Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act

Which sounded interesting, but so far the resulting offspring had been either predictably derivative (in fiction) or stunningly boring (nonfiction); hybrid pairings between fiction and nonfiction were the ht the proble with each other and proposed a forced ra about the ethics of literary eugenics which ended in a furious deadlock

Quentin could feel hi at in honey So about what it would be like to stay there forever And hehadn’t interrupted him: his father died

It caught Quentin off guard It had been a long time since he’d felt close to his father He didn’t think about him much, or his mother It had never even occurred to him that his father could die

Quentin’s dad had lived an unspectacular life, and he slipped out of the world at sixty-seven with the unshowiness that was his tradeed to spare Quentin’scorpse: she was doing an artist’s residency in Provincetown, and his body was discovered by the woorously Catholic Ukrainian as in every way more spiritually prepared for the experience than Quentin’s mom would have been

It happened in mid-October, about six weeks after Quentin caht him the nehich had been transmitted to him via the school’s one ancient rotary telephone When Quentin understood what Fogg was telling him he went very cold and very still It was impossible It made no sense It was as if his father had announced that he was going to take upand march in the Cinco de Mayo parade His father couldn’t be dead—he wouldn’t be It just wasn’t like him