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“That is true”

“Or get expelled”

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

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

“Sure,” Pluh “Why the hell not?”

But she meant it Fuck it They could take Brakebills away froue 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 ti 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 calow of the cheese course subsiding behind him Her hair was a mess, but that was just part of the effect It was all extreue”

Wharton froze, with a freshly recorked bottle in one hand and two inverted wineglasses dangling froarded him calmly Some of the charm of Wharton’s face came from its asymmetry: he’d had a harelip corrected at soone well, so that all that was left was a tiny tough-guy scar, as if he’d taken one straight in the face at so

Also he had an incredibly precious ’s peak Souys 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?” Pluive you back the pencils and all that I just want to know”

“What do you think?” Wharton said “I leave it out for the da 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 nohen? He poured, properly this tilass, and she had to restrain herself fro it

Fresh tobacco Black currants God, it was so good She kept it in her mouth for a count of ten before she sed If there was any ic, it ine She smelled wet hay fro, 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 sreen and unspoiled and far ahich she kneell 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 kno er he could stand it This was not soht 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 orse This place was bad for your soul

He didn’t see much of the others, apart froh altitude with Lionel and the bird, scouring it for any signs of the suitcase and/or the Couple Stoppard was building soe and complicated out of tiny ed 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 Plu 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-di, could theoretically lean down fro it permanently to its plane froe it too much In the case of an incorporate bond the sa 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 hts didn’t grow on trees, or at least not in this plane of existence they didn’t Incorporate bonds were the last word in ood 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 ical creatures like the bird didn’t tend to know a lot about ic theic, so the theory of it didn’t really ht But the bird had some ideas about it, or someone had supplied it with ideas, and on the face of it they weren’t de 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 fro into more and more secondary and tertiary and quaternary spells, to the point where they had to color-code the eventually ran to a full 120-count pack of Crayolas Quentin and Pluued more veheo hich spells