Dangerous Women Part 2

“Does with what?”

“The extra wine. He must be saving it. I bet he ends up with an extra bottle every night.”

There were eight girls in the League, of whom six were present, and Emma was the youngest and the only Second Year, but she wasn’t cowed by her elders. In fact, she was, in Plum’s opinion, even a bit too keen on the League and her role in same. She could have made just a little show of being intimidated once in a while. Plum was just saying.

“I dunno,” Plum said. “I guess he drinks it.”

“He couldn’t get through a bottle a night,” Darcy said. She had a big poofy 1970s Afro; it even had an Afro pick sticking out of it.

“He and his boyfriend, then. What’s his name. It’s Greek.”

“Epifanio.” Darcy and Chelsea said it together.

Chelsea lay on the couch at the opposite end from Darcy, her honey-blond head on the armrest, knees drawn up, lazily trying to mess up Darcy’s mirror tricks. Darcy’s spells were marvels of intricacy and precision, but it was much easier to screw up somebody else’s spell than it was to cast one yourself. That was one of the many small unfairnesses of magic.

Darcy frowned and concentrated harder, pushing back. The interference caused an audible buzz, and, under the stress, Darcy’s reflection in the mirror twisted and spiraled in on itself in weird ways.

“Stop,” she said. “You’re going to break it.”

“He’s probably got some set spell running that eats it up,” Emma said. “Has to feed it wine once a day. Like a virility thing.”

“Of course that’s where your mind would go,” Plum said.

“Well,” Emma said, flushing mauve—gotcha!—“you know. He’s so buff.”

Chelsea saw her moment and caused Darcy’s reflection to collapse in on itself, creepily, like it had gotten sucked into a black hole, and then vanish altogether. In the mirror it looked like she wasn’t even there—her end of the couch was empty, though the cushion was slightly depressed.

“Ha,” said Chelsea.

“Buff does not mean virile.”

That was Lucy, an intensely earnest, philosophical Fifth Year; her tone betrayed a touch of what might have been the bitterness of personal experience. Plump and wan and Korean, Lucy floated cross-legged in one of the room’s irregular upper corners. Her dark straight hair was loose and so long that it hung down past her bum.

“I bet he gives it to the ghost,” Lucy went on.

“There is no ghost,” Darcy said.

Somebody was always saying that Brakebills had a ghost. It was like Plum saying there was a League: you could never prove it either way.

“Come to that,” said Chelsea, who had consolidated her victory over Darcy in the mirror game by plopping her feet in Darcy’s lap, “what does ‘virile’ mean?”

“Means he’s got spunk in his junk,” Darcy said.

“Girls, please,” Plum said, by way of getting things back on track. “Neither Wharton’s spunk nor his junk are germane here. The question is, what to do about the missing wine? Who’s got a plan?”

“You’ve got a plan,” Darcy and Chelsea said at the same time, again. The two of them were like stage twins.

“I do have plan.”

“Plum has a plan,” intoned tiny, cheery Holly from the one good armchair.

Plum always had a plan; she couldn’t help it. Her brain seemed to secrete them naturally. Plum’s plan was to take advantage of what she perceived to be Wharton’s Achilles’ heel, which was his pencils. He didn’t use the school-issued ones, which as far as Plum was concerned were entirely functional and sufficient unto the day: deep Brakebills blue in color, with “Brakebills” in gold letters down the side. But Wharton didn’t like them—he said they were too fat, he didn’t like their “hand-feel,” and the lead was soft and mushy. Wharton brought his own from home instead.

In truth, Wharton’s pencils were remarkable pencils: olive green in color and made from some oily, aromatic wood that released a waxy aroma reminiscent of distant exotic rain forest trees. God knows where he got them from. The erasers were bound in rings of a dull grey brushed steel that looked too industrial and high-carbon for the task of merely containing the erasers, which were, instead of the usual fleshy pink, a light-devouring black. Wharton kept his pencils in a flat silver case, which also contained (in its own crushed-velvet nest) a sharp little knife that he used to keep them sharpened to wicked points.

Moreover, whatever life Wharton had led before becoming a magician-in-training at Brakebills, it must have included academic decathlon or debating or something, because he had a whole arsenal of spinning-pencil tricks of the kind that people commonly used to intimidate rival mathletes. He performed them constantly and unconsciously and seemingly involuntarily. It was annoying, even over and above the wine thing.

Plum planned to steal the pencils and hold them for ransom, the ransom being an explanation of what the hell Wharton did with all that wine, along with a pledge to stop doing same. By 11:30 p.m. that night, the League was yawning, and Darcy and Chelsea had restored Darcy’s reflection and then begun wrangling with it all over again, but Plum’s plan had been fully explained, fleshed out, approved, improved, and then made needlessly complex. Cruel, curly little barbs had been added to it, and all roles had been assigned.

It was rough justice, but someone had to enforce order at Brakebills, and if the faculty didn’t, then the League’s many hands were forced. The faculty might turn a blind eye, if it chose, but the League’s many eyes were sharp and unblinking.

Darcy’s image in the mirror shivered and blurred.

“Stop it!” Darcy said, really annoyed now. “I told you—”

She had told her, and now it did. The mirror broke: there was a loud sharp tick, and a white star appeared in the glass in the lower right-hand corner, with thin cracks branching out from it, as if some tiny invisible projectile had struck it there. Plum thought of Tennyson: The mirror cracked from side to side …

“Oh, shit!” Chelsea said. Her hands flew to her mouth. “I hope that wasn’t, like, super expensive.”

The instant it happened, the mirror’s face went dark, and it stopped reflecting anything in the room at all. It must not have been a real mirror at all but a magical device designed to behave like one. At first Plum thought it had gone completely black, but then she saw that there were soft shadowy shapes there: a sofa and chairs. The mirror, or whatever it was, was showing them the same room they were in, but empty, and in darkness. Was it the past? The future? There was something uncanny about it—it was as if someone had been there moments ago and had only just left, turning out the lights on their way out.

Plum got up at 8:00 the next morning, late by her standards, but instead of rejuvenating her brain, the extra sleep had just made it all muzzy. She’d counted on feeling all sparkly with excitement and anticipation at the prospect of the impending prank, but instead she just drifted vaguely into the shower and then out of it and into her clothes and downstairs in the direction of her first class. Her mind, she had often noticed, was a lens that alternated between states of lethally sharp focus and useless, strengthless blurriness, apparently without her having any say in the matter. Her mind had a mind of its own. This morning it was in its strengthless blur mode.

As a Fifth Year who’d finished all her required coursework, Plum was taking all seminars that semester, and her first class was a small colloquium on period magic, fifteenth-century German, to be specific—lots of elemental stuff and weird divination techniques and Johannes Hartlieb. Tiny Holly sat opposite her across the table, and such was Plum’s strengthless, blurry state that Holly had touched her sharp little nose meaningfully, twice, before Plum remembered that that was the signal that Stages One and Two of the plan had already been completed successfully. She snapped into focused mode.

Stage One: “Crude but Effective.” A few hours earlier Chelsea’s boyfriend would have smuggled her into the Boys’ Tower under pretense of a predawn snog, not out of character for either of them. Nature having taken its course, Chelsea would have torn herself from the arms of her beloved and gone and stood outside of Wharton’s door, her back pressed against it, smoothed back her honeyed locks from her forehead in an automatic gesture, rolled her eyes back into her head, and entered his room in a wispy, silvery, astral state. She tossed his room for the pencil case, found it, and grasped it with both of her barely substantial hands. She couldn’t get the pencil case out of the room that way, but she didn’t have to. All she had to do was lift it up against the window.

Wharton himself might or might not have observed this, depending on whether or not he was asleep in his blameless couch, but it mattered not. Let him see.

Once Chelsea got the case over by the window, earnest Lucy would have line of sight from a window in an empty lecture hall opposite Wharton’s room, which meant she could teleport the pencil case in that direction, from inside Wharton’s room to midair outside it. Three feet was about as far as she could jump it, but that was plenty.

The pencil case would then fall forty feet to where keen Emma waited shivering in the bushes in the cold February predawn to catch it in a blanket. No magic required.

Effective? Undeniably. Needlessly complex? Perhaps. But needless complexity was the signature of the League. That was how the League rolled.

All this accomplished, it was on to Stage Two: “Breakfast of Champions.” Wharton would descend late, having spent the morning searching his room frantically for his pencils and not finding them. Through a fog of anxiety, he would barely notice that his morning oatmeal had been plunked down in front of him not by some anonymous First Year but by tiny Holly in guise of same. The first mouthful would not sit right with him. He would stop and examine his morning oatmeal more closely.

It would be garnished, not with the usual generous pinch of brown sugar, but with a light dusting of aromatic, olive-green pencil shavings. Compliments of the League.

As the day wore on, Plum got into the spirit of the prank. She knew she would. It was mostly just her mornings that were bad.

Her schedule ground forward, ingesting the day in gulps like an anaconda swallowing a wildebeest. Accelerated Advanced Kinetics; Quantum Gramarye; Joined-Hands Tandem Magicks; Cellular-Level Plant Manipulation. All good clean American fun. Plum’s course load would have been daunting for a doctoral candidate, possibly several doctoral candidates, but Plum had arrived at Brakebills with a head full of more magical theory and practice than most people left with. She wasn’t one of these standing starters, the cold openers, who reeled through their first year with aching hands and eyes full of stars. Plum had come prepared.

Brakebills was an extremely secret and highly exclusive institution—as the only accredited college for magic on the North American continent, it had a very large applicant pool to draw from, and it drank that pool dry. Though, technically, nobody actually applied there: Fogg simply skimmed the cream of eligible high school seniors, the cream of the cream really—the outliers, the extreme cases of precocious genius and obsessive motivation, who had the brains and the high pain tolerance necessary to cope with the intellectual and physical rigors that the study of magic would demand from them.

Needless to say, that meant that the Brakebills student body was quite the psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality. Moreover, in order to actually want to work that hard, you had to be at least a little bit fucked up.

Plum was a little bit fucked up, but not the kind of fucked up that looked fucked up on the outside. She presented as funny and self-assured. When she got to Brakebills, she rolled up her sleeves and cracked her knuckles and did other appropriately confident body language, then she waded right in. Until they saw her in class, a lot of the First Years mistook her for an upperclasswoman.