She chewed her lip, studying him, then she tapped his hands, one, two, like a child playing a game, and the sparks went out. There was nothing there that interested Professor Sunderland. Or Pearl—now that they were colleagues he should get in the habit of calling her by her first name.
She snipped a lock of his hair and burned it in a brazier. It smelled like burning hair. She scrutinized the smoke.
“Nope.”
Now that the pleasantries were out of the way she was all business. He could have been a tricky flower arrangement that she couldn’t get quite right. She studied him through a graduated series of smoked lenses while he walked backward around the room.
“Why do you think this is so difficult?” Quentin asked, trying not to run into anything.
“Mm? Don’t look over your shoulder.”
“My discipline? Why do you think it’s so hard to figure out?”
“Could be a few things.” She smoothed her straight blond hair back behind her ears and switched lenses. “It could be occluded. Some disciplines just by their natures don’t want to be found. Some are just really minor, pointless really, and it’s hard to pick them out of the background noise.”
“Right. Though could it also be”—he stumbled over a stool—“because it’s something interesting? That no one’s ever seen before?”
“Sure. Why not.”
He’d always envied Penny his fancy and apparently unique discipline, which was interdimensional travel. But from her tone he suspected she could have listed a few reasons why not.
“Remember when I made those sparks, that one time?”
“I remember. Aha. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. Stand still.”
He stopped, and Pearl rummaged in a drawer and took out a heavy, brass-edged ruler marked in irregular units that Quentin didn’t recognize.
“Close your eyes.”
He did, and immediately an electric bar of pain flashed across the back of his right hand. He clamped it between his knees; it was ten seconds before he even recovered enough to say ow. When he opened his eyes he half expected to see his fingers sheared right off at the second knuckle.
They were still there, though they were turning red. She’d whacked them with the sharp edge of the ruler.
“Sorry,” she said. “The pain response is often very revealing.”
“Listen, if that doesn’t do it I think I’m all right with not knowing.”
“No, that did it. You’re very sensitive, I must say.”
Quentin didn’t think that not wanting to get smacked across the knuckles with a ruler made him unusually sensitive, but he didn’t say anything, and Pearl was already paging through a huge old reference book printed all in jewel type. Quentin had a sudden crazy urge to stop her. He’d been living with this for so long, it was part of who he was—he was the Man Without a Discipline. Was he ready to give that up? If she told him he’d be like everybody else . . .
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 time because you didn’t have one yet. I always thought you were a bit young for your age. Personality is a factor—maturity. You were old enough to have a discipline, but emotionally you weren’t there yet. You hadn’t come into focus.”
That was kind of embarrassing. 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 mug. “Have you had any special luck with that? Lesser bindings, 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 anticlimax. You couldn’t call it sexy, exactly. Not breaking new ground, so much. He wouldn’t be striding between dimensions, or calling down thunderbolts, or manifesting patroni, not on the strength of repair of small objects. Life was briskly and efficiently stripping Quentin of his last delusions about himself, one by one, shucking them off in firm hard jerks like wet clothes, leaving him naked and shivering.
But it wasn’t going to kill him. It wasn’t sexy, but it was real, and that was what mattered now. No more fantasies—that was life after Fillory. Maybe when you give up your dreams, you find out that there’s more to life than dreaming. He was going to live in the real world from now on, and he was going to learn to appreciate its rough, mundane solidity. He’d been learning a lot about himself lately, and he’d thought 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 them in the eye they weren’t quite as scary as he thought.
Or maybe he was tougher than he thought. 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.