The Paper Magician (12 page)

Fennel pawed at her leg. Ceony absently reached down to pet his head.

Surely Langston had been certified as a Folder by now. She wondered how long his apprenticeship had taken. She wondered if he had been happy to arrive at Mg. Thane’s abode. If he had been polite upon meeting his teacher. If he had been grateful, as she should have been.

“We need to go,” she said to Fennel, tearing herself from her ruminations. She gave a last fleeting look to Jonto—and to Thane—and hurried for the library’s unpainted door. She had to throw her shoulder into it to nudge past a half-rusted lock—

Ceony found herself stumbling over lush beige carpeting. The sun had vanished, replaced by the lights of hundreds of electric bulbs centered between violet-painted alcoves studded with thick gold tiles, enchanted by Gaffers—glass magicians—to spread light outward in nearly prismatic rays. Soft music from multiple instruments touched her ears, alongside the clinking of wine glasses and unintelligible murmurs of too many people idly chatting.

Ceony paused, taking in her new surroundings. Fennel ran a few yards more before skidding to a halt.

Ceony knew this place—she had catered multiple dinners here with her old employer. This was Drapers’ Hall on Throgmorton Avenue, the finest hall in London, if not in all of England. At least, the finest Ceony had ever visited.

She stood on the balcony between wide gold-leafed pillars, their chapiters carved in tiers. Beyond them a great mural of wingless angels surrounded by flora painted the ceiling. She ran a hand over the balcony’s gold-leaf railing. Though this was only a vision, little more than a dream, this one
felt
as though it were real.

She peered to the floor below. Round, white-clothed tables filled it in neat rows, while men and women in black carried silver trays and glass pitchers to and from the kitchen tucked away in the northeast corner. A string quartet played soft melodies in the southwest corner. Ceony recognized all of it, though her memory had a more up-front view. She had donned that same black dress and frilly apron before.

No . . .
she
had catered this event.

Pulling away from the railing, she looked about the balcony. Small tables, none large enough to fit more than four people, lined either edge of the mezzanine where it followed the curve of the wall. About a quarter of the tables were unoccupied, but Ceony walked briskly and searched them first, for if the heart had spit her out here, she knew Thane couldn’t be far.

And she was right. She spied Thane looking no different than she knew him now—save for the lack of that indigo coat—sitting at a small, square table with a balding man Ceony had never before met.

Thane leaned his chin into his palm, much the same way he had at his titling ceremony when he became a magician, looking every bit the part of bored. His companion must not have noticed, for the balding man prattled without the slightest hitch or hesitation, gesturing every now and then with a flick of his butter knife or a tip of his head.

“. . . and she insisted that all proper ladies needed satin scarves, and said that Mary Belle had three satin scarves all in shades of blue, so of course I had to allot her the money,” the stranger said, pausing only to take a sip of his drink—mulberry wine, and from a very expensive year, if Ceony remembered correctly. Yes, she remembered the wine served at this event
very
well. “With her coming-out party in May, I certainly can’t have her go without a satin scarf. I try very hard to keep in tune with women’s fashion, what with her mother away to Crafton and all.”

Mg. Thane tapped the nail of his middle finger against the edge of his plate, his food only half-eaten. He’d already drained his wine glass, and with most of the servers on the main floor, no one had come by to refill it. His eyes looked glazed—not from alcohol, but from tedium. Couldn’t this bald man see that?

“What do you think, Emery?”

Thane blinked, and Ceony caught the brief reigniting of his irises. “Oh yes. The neck, of course, is crucial for a proper coming out. The irony in covering it, of course, clashes with the event, but you can’t have your youngest colder than the other girls at the party.”

Ceony smiled at that, though the balding man only nodded and said, “Exactly. She’ll stand apart in all the wrong ways.”

Ceony laughed. Were Thane and this man even having the same conversation?

Thane’s gaze drifted back to the ballroom floor. Stepping beside him, Ceony tried to follow his line of sight, knowing it wasn’t worth trying to get his attention. She guessed he peered at the grandfather clock against the north wall, likely hoping for an escape of some sort.

Escape
. . .

Stepping around her teacher, Ceony leaned over the balcony in search of Lira—if she could find the Excisioner first, perhaps she could form some sort of upper hand—but instead spied a familiar braid of orange hair waiting tables below. That was
her
!

She remembered this event, though she didn’t recall Mg. Thane being at it. She would have remembered his face. Then again, at this event—a fund-raiser for some school board—she had only served on the floor, not in the balconies. The date was July 29, 1901. Just a week before the school year began at Tagis Praff.

It also happened to be her last day of work.

She squinted, watching herself fill wine glasses. She looked awful in that dress. It accentuated all the wrong places. Thank goodness she hadn’t known Thane then. Her ears burned at the thought.

Ceony recognized one man in particular at the table her younger self served. Though he was a few years short of middle-aged, he had gray hair with a receding hairline and a long gray mustache that framed the sides of his mouth. He boasted broad shoulders and a well-tailored suit—perhaps the best-tailored in the entire ballroom, with three real-gold buttons and a red-pleated cummerbund. Oh yes, she remembered him. Him and his foul talk about the Mill Squats where she had grown up, blathering nonsense about its education and a nonexistent prostitute program just because the district was a poor one. Ceony remembered this night distinctly. She had hated that man, and she had done a good job of keeping her temper controlled, until—

She held her breath and watched, waiting for that moment. Waiting . . .

There it was. Ceony—younger Ceony—reached over to fill the man’s wine glass, and his ungloved hand swooped right under her skirt. She still remembered his clammy fingers against her thigh.

Younger Ceony jumped back, scowled, and dumped the rest of that expensive mulberry wine right onto the man’s lap. The man yelped and leapt up so quickly his chair fell backward and clamored against the marble floor. The sound—both the chair and the man’s curse—echoed through the entire ballroom.

Beside her, Thane burst into laughter.

It startled Ceony. She glanced to Thane, ogling him, then realized he had been watching as well. He had seen Ceony dump half a pitcher of vintage wine onto the best-dressed man in the establishment, embarrassing the both of them in front of England’s finest.

And Thane
laughed
.

“What’s gotten into you?” the balding man across from Thane asked, oblivious.

“One of the waitresses just dumped a pitcher onto Sinad Mueller’s lap,” he chortled, picking up a sage-green cloth napkin to dab at his eyes.

Ceony paled. Had he said . . . Sinad Mueller?

Time seemed to freeze as that name processed in Ceony’s mind. Sinad Mueller.
The Mueller Academic scholarship
. The scholarship Ceony should have been first pick for, but had lost last minute, crushing her dreams of pursuing magic. The scholarship that—once lost—resigned her to a life of housework just to earn enough for school to become a half-decent chef. It all made sense now.

Ceony stared as she watched her younger self storm back into the kitchen—where she would promptly be fired—as Sinad Mueller continued shouting expletives. Two of his colleagues darted from their chairs with napkins ready to make a futile attempt at cleaning the man up.

She released the rail and took a step back. All her muscles went lax.

That was why Ceony had lost the scholarship. She had dumped a pitcher of wine onto the very man who would have awarded it to her.

“He deserved it.”

Ceony turned to see a second Mg. Thane standing over the one sitting down. This one wore a long indigo coat and his arms folded across his chest.

Ceony’s eyes darted between the two Thanes, nearly identical, and gasped. “Thane?”

But the second Thane didn’t look at her, only at the scene unfolding below. He appeared almost as unaware as his counterpart. And yet, when he spoke, it seemed as if he spoke
to
her.

“Sinad Mueller is a vile man behind closed doors,” he said. “You can hear it in his voice, the way he talks, the way he looks at women—even young men. He hoards his money and doles it out publicly to only the best specimens, and he makes sure half the country knows of his ‘generosity.’ He plays the school board like a fiddle, and I for one believe he cheated on his exit exams. He enchants rubber about as well as a tire salesman.”

Ceony clutched the strap of her bag and felt Fennel circle her legs. “He knew who I was.”

“I found out who you were,” Thane said, and Ceony wasn’t sure if it was in response to her statement or merely the next line of his monologue. “He revoked your scholarship, so I stepped in.” He chuckled to himself and rubbed his chin with his thumb. “I wanted to see the look on his face when that ‘petulant, fiery girl,’ as he put it, waltzed into Tagis Praff and stuffed his manner and his foul money right back into his coat pocket.”

Ceony glimpsed the ballroom floor, but Sinad Mueller had already left the room. “You gave it to me to spite him?” she asked. “Fifteen thousand pounds just to spite someone you didn’t like . . . not that I’m ungrateful. You have no idea how much it means to me—”

She turned back only to see the second Thane vanish. She darted from the railing, searching for him, but he had disappeared as easily as the moon on a cloudy night. If only she could put into words how much that scholarship meant to her, regardless of why she received it. The thank-you letter in Mg. Thane’s office couldn’t even come close to covering it. One more reason she couldn’t let him die.

Ceony’s gaze dropped to the ballroom and locked onto Lira, who appeared to be searching for her as well, near the string quartet. She held a small pool of blood in her palm and shook it slightly. A divining spell?

Ceony backed away from Lira’s view, slipping her hand into her bag and counting her thin arsenal. She had something, at least, but what real good would paper animals do against a practiced Excisioner? Folding had never been meant for combat! “I have to get out of here,” she whispered, picking Fennel up beneath his front legs. “I have to get out. Thane, where are you?”

But he didn’t answer. Whatever method he had used to speak to her earlier had been lost.

Swallowing and clutching Fennel to her chest, Ceony hurried across the balcony. Where could she hide? What sort of damage could she do with a mere stack of paper? There was a reason she never wanted to be a Folder!

I need to get out!
her mind screamed.

She slowed at the end of the balcony, then stopped altogether. Before her stood a door that she knew wasn’t part of the ballroom—a white door rimmed with scarlet, without knob or handle. Glancing behind her, she saw Lira’s head crowning the top of the stairs that led to the balcony.

Ceony pushed her way through the door and staggered through a puddle of blood.

She gasped and bit her lip to stifle a scream as the door behind her vanished. She had reentered the fleshy chamber of Thane’s heart and stepped right into a river of blood that flowed steadily past her ankles. The loud pulsing of Thane’s heartbeat reverberated through the chamber’s walls:
PUM-Pom-poom
.

Trying to steady her breathing, Ceony followed the river’s current, her knuckles straining with the closed fists at her sides. The blood flowed higher and higher up her leg until she waded with it above her knees. Almost too deep. She gritted her teeth and tried not to think of being pulled beneath its surface.

She saw another door, but this one made of flesh and veins, pulsing in rhythm with the rest of the room. One with no windows or knobs, no locks or hinges. Just flesh pressed tightly against flesh, like a long, swollen cut that wasn’t meant to heal.

Somehow, Ceony knew she needed to get through it.

Lira’s voice sounded softly above her, no doubt carried on the particles of a spell, for the woman lingered nowhere in sight.
Caught up in a vision, somewhere
, Ceony hoped. “Not that I’m discontented to leave you trapped in here, dearie,” the voice said, “but I don’t want you stinking up the place. Let’s get this over with, shall we? Swift and quick. I’ll even leave your body in one piece. Maybe two.”

Despite the wet heat of the chamber, gooseflesh pimpled Ceony’s arms. She clutched the strap of her bag and forced air into her lungs, though a flutter broke her breath here and there. She couldn’t fight Lira, not yet. Her best option was to keep going—find the end of Thane’s heart and, hopefully, its exit.

“I need you to fold up, Fennel,” she told the dog, her words nearly inaudible. “Fold yourself up and get into my bag, where it’s safe. Just for a little while.”

The dog quirked its head to one side.

“Go on,” she said, and the dog tucked its head down and its legs in. Ceony pressed against Fennel’s sides gently with her hands until he formed a thick, lopsided pentagon. She carefully wedged the creature into her bag, between sheets of paper.

Taking a deep breath and holding it in her throat, Ceony pushed herself between the fleshy walls of Emery Thane’s heart into the second chamber.

C
HAPTER
9

T
HE WALLS OF
T
HANE
’
S
heart pressed against her on all sides, pulsing with their loud
PUM-Pom-poom
and drowning out the unnatural light. They squeezed against her, tight and tighter, as if she were being run over by an empty buggy with more and more passengers climbing inside it, making its wheels crush her. It felt like drowning.

Her own muscles tightened as adrenaline surged through her body. She couldn’t breathe. Heat from the walls seeped past her clothes and into her skin, making her too warm, too hot. One would think a heart disconnected from its person as long as this one had been would feel cold, but not Emery Thane’s heart. Emery Thane’s heart defied the physics of everything Ceony had come to know over her nearly two decades of life. Though unless she found a way out, she wouldn’t see her twentieth year!

A tear squeezed through clenched eyelids. She clawed at the walls, trying to shove past them, gasping for air but finding none. She tasted blood on her lips—blood that wasn’t hers. She inched forward, pushing back against the flesh that pushed against her and tugged at her bag. Her head began to pound, her vision blurred—

A surge of blood from the river at her feet pushed against her rump, shoving her through the valve. Her hand touched open air. Digging her heel into flesh, Ceony pulled herself into the second chamber of Thane’s heart, gasping and choking, spitting and wheezing.

She bit down hard on her own teeth, sucking in mouthfuls of hot air, trying to calm her own trembling. Trying to prevent a sob.
It’s over, it’s over
, she told herself, and it helped somewhat.
I chose to do this. I can do this.

I
have
to do this.

She had barely caught her breath when she heard a suctioning sound from the valve behind her.

Ceony looked over her shoulder. The river that had pushed her out of the valve—and into a chamber almost identical to the first—continued to flow after her, filling the gutters around the edges of the heart and beyond. Flooding them . . .

“No, no,” Ceony said, shooting up with a renewed vigor. Her clothes, sticky from the bloody valve, clung to her clammy skin. “Stop, stop. Please stop.”

But the blood—thin blood, watery blood—continued to gush from the valve and overflow the rivers, inching closer and closer to Ceony’s feet.

Ceony backstepped to the center of the chamber, the highest ground. The first tides of blood touched her shoe.

Her skin turned to ice. Her lips numbed. “Thane!” she shouted, hugging her bag tightly to her. “Let me out of here!”

She took another step, the blood up to her ankles. At this rate it would fill the entire chamber in minutes. Ceony couldn’t swim. She had nowhere to go.

She really was going to drown.

“Thane!” she screamed, trembling from chin to ankle. Even her cry shook.

Anything but this. Anything but drowning.

The blood continued to flow, the heart’s thumping deafening. She squeezed her eyes shut, released her bag, and pressed her palms to her ears. Too much.

“Please, please, please . . .”

The lapping blood around her feet vanished, leaving her socks dry, albeit stiff. Biting her lip, Ceony opened her eyes to shelves of familiar books and a ray of dust-filled light. She released a long breath and offered a silent thanks to both God and the paper magician.

Images flickered around her: Thane in a gray coat instead of indigo, Folding on the floor, a blond man she didn’t know studying at the desk, another Thane in scarlet thumbing through books. The people flashed for half a second, sometimes a whole second, and then dissolved. Someone or something had pulled Ceony from the flooding chamber and stuck her here, but the heart itself seemed unsure as to what to show her.

She spied over her shoulder, but the tight valve she had just passed through no longer throbbed behind her. It had been replaced by a tall shelf of books, all as they had been in Thane’s true library, though she noted these had been arranged by color across the entire wall, from shelf start to shelf end. She gaped at them. Red books, dark and light, lined the left shelf closest to the door, and following them sat a few orange books, then tawny and yellow books, and then white. On the right shelf the colors continued—green, blue, violet, gray, and black. Incredibly aesthetic, but entirely absurd. Thane’s library didn’t look like this at all. Was this a past arrangement, or a future one?

Quick to her feet—which still wavered just a bit from her unpleasant traveling between chambers—Ceony took a moment to unfold and reanimate Fennel before picking through the titles, searching for something that might help her should Lira catch up to her. Something to fight with, to defend herself with. Even a heavy book for melee would do her better than nothing.

Her index finger passed over
Mating Habits of Crocodiles
,
A Living Paper Garden
, and
Frankenstein.

“Ah,” she said, her hand pausing on a short, fawn-colored volume where the orange covers shifted to the yellow spectrum:
Basic Chain Spells
. To her relief, the book felt solid beneath her fingers. Perhaps in a heart, knowledge was more stable than memory or thought. Judging by the window in his office, it was clear Thane knew paper chains well.

She opened
Basic Chain Spells
to the table of contents, the constant
PUM-Pom-poom
in the distance reminding her of the need for swiftness. Lira could have warped out of Thane’s heart and be throwing it into the ocean right now for all Ceony knew, and Thane’s time was ticking away besides.

Skipping the table of contents, Ceony began thumbing through pages illustrated with black-and-white diagrams of different chains from basic to complex. She spied the vitality chain Thane had used on both the birthing woman and himself, but kept turning the pages.

The word
shield
popped out at her, and she paused just past the book’s midway point. She read quickly.

The three-fold shield chain is the most basic of the defense chains. The breadth of its links does not matter, so long as their length is enough to encircle the item one wishes to protect.

A link is created by taking a standard 8
"
x 11
"
sheet and slicing it in half longways, as seen in Figure 1—

Ceony’s eyes scanned the figures and their captions, then she turned the page and scanned them again, committing them to memory. Setting the book down, she pulled sheets of paper out of her bag until she found pieces already cut as the diagram showed.

She began Folding, her hands unsteady, but not shaking quite as badly as they had when she formed Thane’s pathetic heart. She prayed it still beat. If he died . . .

Ceony didn’t want to think too hard on the idea.

She matched up the edges and creased them. Another flash of Thane appeared behind her with his Folding board, this one in the correct shade of indigo. He phased in and out, Folding different things with his hands, his voice pealing and cutting short. Ceony could barely make out a word he said, but she thought she heard her name.

She saw a flash of herself in her apprentice’s uniform before both apparitions vanished.

Ceony refocused on her chain. “Do you want to keep teaching me?” she asked as she started her second link, working a little faster now that her fingers knew the Folds. The faint tingling sensation she felt when Folding now had almost become natural to her. “I don’t mind, if you do.”

Ceony listened to the steady, distant beats of Thane’s heart as her fingers pressed paper and her nails set the Folds’ creases. When her chain reached just long enough, she hooked its ends together diagonally over her breast and pulled out another sheet of square paper, Folding something Thane had given her several days to practice—a paper fan.

“Made well, it can give gusts that would embarrass a thunderstorm,”
Thane had said. She had yet to test the spell’s true power, but she hoped the paper magician hadn’t been exaggerating.

The library began to waver about her as she finished—her small sanctuary had begun to collapse. She’d change scenes any moment now.

Stuffing her untested fan into her bag, she ran for the library door. Fennel loped behind her.

Ceony passed through the library door and, for the second time since meeting Mg. Thane, stepped into a room thundering with applause.

The Royal Albert Hall. She recognized the auditorium and the chandeliers, only these boasted electric bulbs. A spotlight blinded her, forcing her to shield her eyes with one hand. Unlike last time, she didn’t stand in the aisle, but on the stage.

Fennel panted at the sight of so many people. Ceony felt faint.

The glare of the spotlight diminished enough for her to take in her surroundings, the pale stain of the wooden stage, an older Tagis Praff standing at the podium stage left. Looking down, she saw herself dressed in a magician’s uniform, all its seams perfectly pressed. The white fabric fit her better than any clothes she had ever worn, and she noted she wore slacks, not a skirt. Didn’t all female magicians wear skirts with their uniforms?

“Ceony Twill,” Tagis Praff said, and the audience continued to clap. Ceony spied Thane in the front row, wearing his own uniform. Watching her with smiling, proud eyes. She drank that expression in, storing it in the deep wells of her memory.

Tagis Praff waved for her. Fennel trotted up to the podium, and Ceony, hesitantly, followed suit. She reached out to accept the magician’s hand.

The applause died and the spotlight vanished. Her sticky dress replaced the crisp white uniform of her dreams. The temperature dropped and Tagis Praff’s hand vanished, replaced by a long, stone hallway.

Ceony blinked twice and realized she was in a prison.

She gasped, having not expected a place so dreary to be within Thane’s heart. She stood at the end of the hallway, which was lined on either side by broad metal doors that bore the sheen of enchantment. Ceony had never been inside a real prison, but she had read books concerning them. And just like in those books, all the doors had locks, and the hallway had a gray, prestorm cast to it, made by thin trickles of sunlight that came through narrow windows between each cell. Windows that even a toddler could barely fit a hand through.

Ceony snapped her fingers to beckon Fennel to follow her, as her voice had been startled from her throat and floated somewhere between her lungs and her stomach. She took a step forward, her skirt swishing about her calves, the fabric cold after its dampening in the tight, suffocating passageway that had led her to this chamber. She hoped she wouldn’t have to pass through another. The thought gave her goose bumps, but the prison gave her chills.

A guard came around the corner, a brawny man with a mustache and a neck so muscled it looked as if he bore steel cords beneath the skin. He wore a pistol at one hip and a club at the other, and his face settled into the sort of look that guaranteed no criminal would dare
sneeze
on his watch, let alone escape. Ceony froze under that stare until she validated that, as with all the previous visions, this man could not see her. She waved a hand in front of his face as he passed to be sure. She didn’t play a role in this vision, then.

“Sit up for breakfast!” the guard shouted, pulling his club from his belt and beating it along each prison door, lifting a small metal flap that revealed wrought-iron bars just wide enough to let a plate of food slip past. “Sit up or don’t get fed, your choice!”

Ceony winced at the loud clamor of the club on iron, then dared to peek into one of the cells.

She stumbled back from its bars until her shoulders touched the opposite stone wall.

Lira.

Lira lay in that cell, her hair long and frayed at the ends, her body draped in a brown prisoner’s uniform, her eyes downcast. She sat up before the guard’s club reached her cell, but that didn’t stop him from rattling her door all the same.

Lira in prison. If only.

Ceony tiptoed away from her and peered into the next cell, seeing a lanky, dark-skinned man with a long scar across his nose. She didn’t recognize him, but the face in the next cell sparked a memory—the thick chin, small eyes, and crinkled forehead looked just as they had on the
WANTED
poster she had spied at the post office two years ago:

WANTED

GRATH COBALT

FOR CRIMES AGAINST THE STATE

Ceony stepped back from the bars. She remembered what the poster had said. Remembered the way it had made her scalp itch. Excision. Grath Cobalt was an Excisioner—and the most dangerous Excisioner in all of Europe, so rumor told.

Ceony’s back hit the cool stone behind her once more as she watched the powerful man now in chains and behind bars, jarring ever so slightly as the guard’s club passed over his door. Now that she studied him, she noticed he had lost weight from what the poster had depicted of him. Lost muscle. He looked . . . docile.