Professor Coldwater never mentioned their little adventure with the ghost again, which was fine with Plum, because she didn’t think there was much more to say there. Yup, sure, there had been a bonding moment in the senior common room, but she wasn’t going to make a big buddy-movie out of it. Still, she’d been curious about him after that. He knew magic that she did not; in fact he knew magic that she hadn’t even known she didn’t know. She wanted it. So she took his class on mending, which wasn’t hard, though it was harder than she expected, and she kept an eye on him.
She didn’t see much, or not at first at anyway. Just every once in a while you’d get a peek at something slightly nonstandard. You never knew what would bring it out—a chance remark, a question, some weird secondary magical effect nobody expected. Then his eyes would go blank and he’d turn and run at the blackboard like it was a window he was going to throw himself out of and go nuts on it with the chalk. Plum followed as best she could, though he knew some weird notations that didn’t even look terrestrial to her.
The day with the bottle had been like that. Plum had solved the set problem a bit differently than you were supposed to—rather than attack the bottle and the water separately, she’d taken a flyer on exporting the entropy of the whole bottle-and-water system into the surrounding atmosphere, thereby restoring it to order, more or less. She’d finished up with a few touch-ups from an elective on glassworking she’d taken in second year. It made sense in her head. But then somehow the bottle had gone all TARDIS on her.
Speaking of keen: Professor Coldwater had practically almost smiled when he saw it. He seemed to think it was important. He seemed to think she should pursue it. And so, while her classmates slacked and slumped their way through their last semester at Brakebills, she seemed to be pursuing it as a thesis project.
Plum finished out her audit of Mending and signed on for a senior independent study with Professor Coldwater. This had the nice effect of getting her assigned a private workshop: a pleasant, clean-swept, cubical room on the top floor of the lab building, with a shelf for her books, a cabinet for her stuff, an indestructible table for her to blow stuff up on, and two tall eight-paned windows through which the winter sun streamed and had its long wavelengths stripped out (not magically, that’s just physics), resulting in a cozy greenhouse effect.
Her first move was to scrap the bottle, and the water, and start over with something a little more substantial: a glass cube a yard on a side, fused at the seams, with one side left open. Her hope was that the magic wouldn’t care too much about the difference, because the presentation would be a bit more dramatic for the benefit of the Prize Committee, who were known to be partial to a bit of theater. Also you could learn a lot more about what’s going on with a container that you could actually stick your head into. She lucked out: the effect still held.
At first she’d figured that this was fundamentally illusion magic, a trick of perspective. But now that she could actually get a look at this thing, and the more ways she figured to measure it, the less likely that seemed. The box really did seem to be physically bigger inside. And that raised all sorts of other, weirder questions. Like, where was the extra glass coming from, of which this larger box was formed? Where did the extra space come from for that glass to exist in? Basically what the hell?
Fortunately, senior projects were blessedly pragmatic exercises, and the examiners didn’t really care that much why something worked, on a theoretical level, as long as it consistently, repeatedly did. So she went after the experimental side of things for a while. She broke down the original spells she’d cast in Mending class into their component effects, swapped them round, enhanced some, dropped others, more or less at random, just to see what would ensue. What ensued was the melting, discoloration, evaporation and explosion of a whole dynasty of glass cubes, the expense of which she had to justify to the projects committee, who were at pains to point out that glass cubes didn’t grow on trees, or at least not in this plane of existence anyway.
If Plum were a betting girl, she would have bet that she would take the prize. She was, to be totally un-modest about it, a pretty sharp magician, and she’d lucked into a really not insignificantly useful magical effect, which she could exploit in a very tangible, awardable way. Her only real liability was political: Coldwater hadn’t done her a ton of favors in that respect by more or less adopting her as a protégé. He didn’t seem that popular with the faculty, except with Professor Bax, who seemed nice enough, though he had a tiny bit of a boob-looking problem where Plum was concerned. But the only reason Bax wasn’t low man on the Brakebills academic totem pole was that Professor Coldwater now occupied that position.
Even then Plum would have had it pretty well sewn up if it hadn’t been for of all people Wharton—he of the pencils and the wine. Wharton had been assigned a private workshop too, right next to Plum’s, and she could not help but notice the steady stream of senior faculty going into and out of it making interested, encouraging sounds and nodding to each other. Wharton would never have been so careless as to hook up with a politically compromised faculty member like Coldwater; his advisor was Beauclerc, a middle-aged psychic specialist of Quebecois extraction with clear and unembarrassed designs on Dean Fogg’s job. He was almost obnoxiously Deanish-looking: I mean seriously, who actually goes to a barber and says, I would like a Van Dyke beard please? What is the path in life that leads you to that decision? And a prizewinning protégé like Wharton was exactly the kind of accessory a Dean-in-waiting like Beauclerc coveted.
Wharton was just one of those bastards on whom the gods smiled. Sometimes Plum suspected him of magically exporting his own entropy, pushing it out of his system, so that he lived inside a personal bubble of perfect order and good fortune. Moreover she suspected him, almost certainly unfairly, of exporting his entropy onto her, thereby doubling the chaos in her own personal bubble.
None of this mattered really. Plum knew as well as anybody, and better than most, that the senior prize was just another piece of academic hoop-jumping, exactly the kind that Plum felt she was currently outgrowing. It was just that Plum really wanted that fellowship.
Plum was not a sulker or a brooder. She knew this about herself. But occasionally, once in a blue moon, she was fully capable of something like panic, and whenever the subject of graduation came up she could feel panic drawing near. Panic had her scent, and it was stalking her on its huge paws, with their prickly claws and their soft, smothering pads. Plum was not a grind, but she operated very, very well within the confines of an academic setting. Outside—it was embarrassing to admit it, but the world outside of Brakebills made her nervous. She liked to know the rules of the game, and she had not fully parsed the rule-set of the outside world yet. There just didn’t seem to be any structure to it. It was all entropy: chaos left to run riot.
Brakebills had seemed to her like a safe place. She’d felt sure that Fillory couldn’t find her here. She’d been wrong about that, but at least it had taken a few years. She needed another bolt-hole to hide in. She needed to put Fillory off the scent, buy some time. She wanted to slow down time, throw a wrench in the works, so the seasons wouldn’t turn quite so fast. The mills of the gods, they ground slow, but not slow enough for Plum’s taste.
In that light the St. Margaret’s fellowship had taken on a holy golden glow. A fork was coming up in her future, and the St. Margaret’s fork held so many good things: windy streets and skeevy Scottish bars and weird Highland magical lore and skinny pale boys with good hair and compelling accents, and above all another year behind a fat thick defensive cordon against which bad things could batter themselves senseless, because they were not getting in. Not by the hair. Chinny chin chin.
This is what she wanted from magic. Magic had taken from her, and lo, it would give to her as well. It would set the world right. It would make her safe.
And then maybe, once she was safe, she could even think about fighting back.
But whenever she imagined the St. Marga
ret’s fellowship, the annoyingly handsome figure of Wharton (was that his first name or his last name? She didn’t even know) always pushed his way into the picture and took over the role of protagonist. Instead of her, Plum, with her stupid box-that-was-slightly-larger-inside. Once when she peeked, collegially of course, into Wharton’s workshop, she saw him manipulating hundreds of steel balls which wove in the air around him in complex patterns, doing God knew what but looking hella impressive.
Wharton knew a thing or two about theater too. Somehow his magic always seemed so much more magical than hers.
Professor Coldwater stopped by every few days to check on her. He would peer into her latest box, knock on the sides with his knuckles, sometimes stick his head or other extremities inside. After a month she’d made some respectable if not spectacular progress.
“It’s getting bigger,” Plum said. “It’s about half again as big by volume. So that’s something.”
“That it is,” Coldwater said. His voice sounded weird with his head in the box. He took it out. “Did you try sticking a couple of intensifier clauses onto that entropy spell?”
“Being as we’re trying to intensify the spell, yes, I put some intensifier clauses into the entropy spell.”
That was, like, the first thing she tried.
“How many—?”
“All of them.”
“Did you—”
“I put in the Flemish one that I’m not supposed to know about.”
“Right.” He fingered his chin and looked at the box. “What about some dampers?”
“Damping and intensifying at the same time.”
“Right.”
“That is a pointless thing. Why would I do that.”
It irked her the way he walked in and felt free to just dick around with this thing she’d been slaving over night and day.
“I don’t know.”
“So why do it?” Hands on hips.
“Because then we’ll know.”
She felt some bitter satisfaction when it emerged that damping and intensifying the spell at the same time did, predictably, eff-all. But then it turned out that the very act of damping and then stripping out the dampers had some kind of intensifying effect—wax on, wax off—which made no sense whatsoever, but hey, magic, it’s a journey of discovery. Assist to Professor Coldwater.
But she wanted to add, just for the record, that there was something weird about Coldwater’s emotional investment in this project. She was going to give him the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t have an inappropriate crush on her. If that was the secret, she was going to be really disappointed. And kind of skeeved.
Meanwhile, in non-magic-box-related news, Plum was going to graduate in about six weeks. The Fifth Years were already reverting to a state of nature. Everybody who’d been holding their breath for the past five years started letting it out. Even socially anxious, usually authority-respecting students began conducting risky experiments with sass. Professors went on with the show, but the students just looked at them like, can you not see the volcanic explosion of sun and green leaves that is occurring right outside the window? Our little world is ending, it’s crashing into the rogue planet Summer, and you want us to pay attention to dimorphic thought-vectors or whatever?
Plum proposed a complex regime, instantly universally accepted, whereby parties would be thrown by specific groups in specific venues, chosen semi-randomly via a complex matrix, and an elaborate system of awards, knighthoods, etc. should be awarded to those who showed outstanding bravery and fortitude in attending same. Even as she proposed it the idea struck her as kind of lame and fratty, but it immediately went viral anyway.
But Plum did not herself earn her knighthood. She had always been a social butterfly, but in those last six weeks she did her best to cocoon herself and turn back into a social caterpillar. Most nights she spent in her top-floor workshop, or in the library deciphering old tomes and rifling through the boxed papers of medieval magicians with really bad handwriting. Almost as indecipherable were the technical articles she called up from the one reputable scholarly journal of magical studies, the Analecta Magi, the house style of which seemed to be more about making you feel like an idiot than about conveying information. As far as Plum was concerned, however complicated your idea was, if you couldn’t explain it in a paragraph of clear simple language, you were trying to get away with something.
Though her own idea was getting complicated to the point where she was on the point of flunking her own test. She spent a lot of time just sitting staring at the glass box, which stared back at her looking like a huge cubical cyclopean eyeball. Things had progressed to the point where she could actually get bodily into the box, and sometimes she’d do that and just sit in there cross-legged. She’d put so many spells on the damn thing, she could no longer even remember what they were, and she was scared to start erasing them again for fear of knocking off one she really needed.
It was no good doing a reveal magic on the thing. It just looked like a nasty multicolored snarl. Maybe it would be enough, as it was, to get her the prize.
One afternoon Coldwater found her like that, sitting in the box like a toad in its hole. She couldn’t even look at him. He stroked his chin.
“I can’t tell you what to do,” he began.
“And yet.”
“And yet I’m telling you what to do. Wipe it all out.”
“What?” She didn’t look at him. Plum had reached the point in the process where she thought that no force on earth or in heaven could induce her to lift her head from where it lay buried in her hands.
“Scrub it out. Scrub it clean and start over. You’ve got too many conflicting spells to get a clear magical effect. You’ve got a fix here where you’ve fixed the fix, which then broke another spell, so you had to fix that. There’s too much interference.”
“. . .”
“What was that?”
Plum lifted her head out of her hands.
“I said, I do not have one of those. Fixes where I’ve fixed the fix, et cetera.”
“You do. Do you want me to show you where?”
Plum shook her head.
“Think about it,” he said. “You still have two weeks. You can make it.”
That night Plum thought about it, there in her workshop, till about two in the morning. She couldn’t go on, and she couldn’t go back. When she opened her eyes the blue girl was watching her.
It could have been a trick of the light, except that it wasn’t. The ghost wasn’t there in the room, she was in the reflected light on the windowpane—hardly more than a stray highlight, blue sky in the middle of the night, smeared and distorted. She neither moved nor spoke. It was like watching a fish from the safety of the dock.
Plum and the girl watched each other for a long minute. The ghost’s eyes were all-blue, solid blue, the same as the rest of her, which made her look blind. But Plum didn’t think she was blind.
“What do you want?” Plum said.
The girl’s blue eyebrows knitted. Her expression was hard to read. Wrong question? She didn’t know? She knew but she wasn’t happy about it? No way of knowing.
“Who are you here for?” Plum said. “It’s not me, is it? So who?”
The ghost swam deeper into the reflections on the glass and was lost.
Plum watched the window where the ghost had been for a while. The wind rattled the pane. Then Plum walked over to the glass cube and destroyed two months of work. She wiped it clean of magic. She broke her staff and drowned her book. Then she walked back to the House, through the trenches of drifted snow and the bitter early-morning cold, and went to bed. She would start over fresh in a few hours.
The next day she skipped her classes and started over, building up the lattice of spells around the cube all over again, carefully and methodically this time, no false starts, documenting everything properly. Over the next two weeks the interior of the cube gradually expanded again. It opened itself up, bloomed inwardly, became a t
iny model world. Worlds within worlds.
The day before the Prize Committee review Professor Coldwater breezed into her workshop.
“How’s it going?”
Being as how he had now seen her in states of extreme tiredness and dishevelment and emotional decrepitude, a certain informality had crept into their conversations.
Plum brought him up to speed on the latest technical developments, which at this point were pretty minor: tiny tweaks and hinks and yoiks, mostly far to the right of the decimal point. He’d been right, she’d gotten more space this time, by a couple of feet. It was a question now of wringing the last couple of inches out of this thing.
“It looks good, Plum,” he said. “It’s great work. I hope you’re proud of it.”
“I’m proud of it. I’m still not sure I’m going to win.”
“It’s good enough to win. I have no idea if it will, but it could. That’s all you can do.”
“So I’m done?”
Coldwater didn’t answer right away.
“What?” she said.
“All I can think of is that you might try tweaking the Circumstances a little. Get a little more power out of them.”
“The Circumstances.”
She’d established the Circumstances two months ago. She’d worked that stuff out before she cast the first spell.
“Not the big stuff. The tertiaries, the stuff about the caster’s motivation, that kind of thing. I don’t think you’ve allowed completely for how you feel about this project.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Plum folded her arms. She felt suddenly defensive.
“I just meant, you’re going to have to be honest with yourself about how badly you want that fellowship. Or at any rate, you’re going to have to be honest with the magic. You can’t lie to the magic.”
Unfettered III Page 3