The Paper Magician (15 page)

Mg. Hughes’s lips continued to move, but no voice filled the words, leaving him little more than a mime. Ceony’s eyes darted between him and Thane, waiting for more information to pass between them . . . but they had become two marionettes, and Ceony was a poor lip-reader. Groaning, she resisted the urge to stamp her foot.

Fennel huffed behind her, and Ceony blinked, eyes burning from staring. As she moved away from Thane and Hughes and under a granite archway, however, she found not Parliament, but crowded hallways and stairs beneath a pebbled ceiling. A shrill bell rang over her head.

She stood at the end of the main hallway of Granger Academy, her secondary school.

The hallways were filled with young people chatting, walking, and eating lunch. One particularly frisky couple kissed by the tennis trophy case—which had far fewer trophies than Ceony recalled it holding—until a man in a sweater vest smacked a ruler along the boy’s backside and told the couple to get moving. Behind her a trio of girls with high hairstyles and brightly painted lips whispered to each other with hands shielding their mouths. The shortest of the group laughed so hard she snorted, which caused her companions to snicker in turn. The trio shifted as a narrow-bodied woman holding a clipboard walked down the staircase behind them, a pair of spectacles balanced on the edge of her nose. The woman didn’t look up at anyone as she passed by, including Ceony.

Ceony pulled her eyes from the people and refocused her attention on the building itself. She recognized Granger Academy, though the school looked a little different than she remembered it—some sort of linoleum tiles comprised the floor instead of the stiff maroon carpet she had tramped between classes for four years. The stair railings were pine with faded stain instead of oak. Other than that, the building looked the same. Granger Academy had been Emery’s secondary school as well—perhaps this was what it looked like when he attended.

Thoughts of Anise Hatter surfaced in her mind. She pushed them away. Today she walked Emery’s heart, not her own.

A flicker of black hair made Ceony jump, but it was only another girl not much younger than herself, a young woman who looked similar to Lira but with a broader face and stronger nose. Still, Ceony grit her teeth and said, “Who knows what we’ll encounter here, Fennel.”

She had to admit that the casual nostalgia of the school didn’t quite match the mood the previous visions of the chamber had born. Still, she would stay on alert, and hopefully Fennel would catch anything unusual that she missed.

Ceony touched the shield chain around her chest. If the water and blood had damaged it, the shift to Parliament, and now the school, had restored it. Good. She thought to take the time to Fold more birds against the hard school floor, but decided against it. The feeble paper heart she’d given Thane only allocated her so much time. She would have to trust her shielding spell and the fan to protect her.

She picked her way through the hallway lined with coat hooks and cubbies stuffed with books, crumpled homework, and lunch boxes. Class—or perhaps lunch—must have recently ended, for the hall filled with bodies. Ceony tried to evade them at first, but there were too many. They simply phased through her when she held her ground, reminding Ceony once more that she was the anomaly in this place. She and Fennel both.

The bulk of the students passed, followed by Mrs. Goodweather, Ceony’s algebra teacher, looking plumper and a bit younger than Ceony’s memory of her. Mrs. Goodweather swished by quickly in her tight purple skirt, and in her wake Ceony spied a group of boys, three standing and one on the floor with a book in his lap. He held a folded paper in his hands. The sight of his black hair made Ceony run to him.

“Em—” she began, but the chap on the floor was not Emery Thane in the slightest. He had shaggy black hair, yes, but his acne-pocked skin was too pale, his nose too pointed, and he wore a pair of finely wired glasses. Freckles like Ceony’s own speckled his hands, and his eyes were a light brown, not green.

Still, she recognized the half-folded item in his hands—a fortuity box. Or the beginning of one.

“Guess paper’s the only thing that’ll let you put your hands on it, eh?” asked one of the standing boys, and his companions sniggered. “Don’t you have anything better to do than take up space, Prit?”

Ceony rounded on the boys—she couldn’t
stand
bullies—ready to give them a piece of her mind in hopes that the vision would allow her to interact with them. As she opened her mouth for a retort, however, her words caught somewhere between palate and tongue and dribbled over her lips incoherently.

The boy doing the jibing had short ebony hair and bright green eyes.

Emery.

He looked different—much younger, and lankier as well. He must have come into his height at an early age, for he stood half a head taller than his comrades and could not have been a day older than seventeen. His face looked thinner, his jaw slacker, and Ceony spotted a distinct lack of maturity around his eyes. Eyes that held no sympathy. Eyes just “having fun,” as adolescent boys were bound to do.

“You dea
f
?” one of Emery’s friends asked, the one on the left with a square face and broad build. He nudged Prit with his foot. “Don’t you have anything better to do? We need this space for walking.”

Prit frowned, his eyes downcast. He tried to smooth the fortuity box against his book—an astronomy textbook—to make the next fold, but Emery wedged his toe between Prit’s legs and the book’s cover, then flipped the book over. It tumbled off Prit’s knee and onto the floor, closing on top of the fortuity box, ruining it. Not that it would have worked without the bonding, but still.

Emery and his companions laughed as Prit quietly gathered his book and stood. He turned his back on Emery just as the bullied had always been taught to do.
Just ignore them
, Ceony’s mother had always advised, but Ceony knew from experience that ignoring didn’t make pigs go away. The image of Mickel Philsdon surfaced in her mind, a broad-shouldered and stout boy who had called Ceony a walrus in the seventh grade, before Ceony had grown into her teeth. She had ignored him for two years, but the relentless torture had only gotten worse. It wasn’t until the first day of secondary school when Ceony rounded on Mickel and cut him a steaming piece of her mind that he stopped his torment. As far as Ceony was concerned, the only thing bullies understood was bullying, plain and simple. Mickel had avoided her after that.

“Stick up for yourself,” she found herself saying to Prit, who didn’t respond.

Emery shoved Prit in the shoulder, making the boy stumble. “A little faster, paper boy?”

Prit picked up his pace and disappeared into the crowded hallway.

Frowning, Ceony turned to Emery and said, “You used to be a real jerk, you know that?”

Emery reached down to where Prit had been sitting and snatched up a paper sack—Prit had left his lunch behind. He rifled through it, the friend on his right trying to peer around his arm to see what was inside.

“Dibs on the cookie,” Emery’s flunky said.

Emery grabbed a red apple and tossed the bag to his companion, then slid down to the floor, stretching his skinny legs in front of him. Rubbing the apple on his sleeve, Emery took a bite.

Leaning to one side, Emery reached beneath him and pulled a folded frog out from under his backside—more of Prit’s handiwork. He chuckled around a mouthful of apple and crumpled the frog in his hand. “What a barmpot,” he said, throwing the paper wad at a dark-skinned girl passing by. The girl gave him a sour look, but continued on her way without retaliation.

“Come on, Fennel,” Ceony commanded. As she lost sight of the paper magician, she took a deep breath. This was the past, after all. No use getting upset over it. “Still,” she said aloud, “I’ll have to ask you what changed your mind about Folding. And I hope you apologized to him.”

Students filtered from the halls into their respective classrooms, thinning out the population enough for Ceony to find a set of double doors that appeared to lead outside. She assumed those doors would either reveal to her another shade of Emery Thane’s heart, or warp her back to the third chamber itself, which she had yet to physically see. She hoped for the latter—she needed to escape Lira’s trap quickly, and the only plausible way out seemed to be at the heart’s end—she had to reach it, just as she had to play out each of these stories, one by one, to get there.

She opened the door and found herself in a familiar office—the first she had entered in this chamber, albeit lit with dim evening sunlight filtering through that square window and candles set on the desk and surrounding shelves. Ceony hesitated at the doorway to the office, the too-recent memory of it raking her brain with needles.

Emery sat at his desk, poring over a thin stack of papers, though not the Folding kind. He held a pen in one hand and tangled the other in his hair, worn shorter than in present day.

Fennel sniffed around the mauve rug strewn over floorboards stained with age. Ceony let the door shut behind her.

Everything in the office—smaller than the study at the yellow-brick house on the outskirts of London—spoke of Emery. Shelves, trunks, and furniture pressed against all four walls of the room, each set in an almost symmetrical order without allowing the tiniest bit of space to go unused. A fine-looking shelf of cherrywood held stacks upon stacks of paper in eggshell, chartreuse, and rose, all cut into different-sized rectangles and squares. Another shelf held together with metal clamps bore endless volumes of very old books, some of which Ceony recognized from a different shelf in Emery’s present bedroom. Atop that shelf rested an assortment of glass bottles filled with bright colors of sand layered on top of each other, and beside those, an empty picture frame. Ceony wondered if it had ever held a photo. She didn’t recognize it from the yellow-brick house.

A glass half-filled with some sort of tea sat at the end of Emery’s desk. Ceony touched it—cold. A sniff caught a hint of peppermint. Now that she thought of it, she hadn’t seen any coffee in Emery’s kitchen—perhaps he didn’t like the flavor. Or perhaps it made him jittery, and Ceony imagined “jittery” would not complement the list of Emery’s personality traits.

Carefully placed clutter littered the desk everywhere except a perfect rectangle where Emery read those papers—a jar filled with writing utensils and a compass, a short calendar depicting a different species of tree for each day of the year, a bottle of blotting sand. More papers, folders, and small racks holding more papers and folders. Her inspection hesitated on a model of the Surrey Theatre entirely crafted from paper, from the columns standing guard at the front entrance to the English flag that flew from the spire protruding from the top of the theatre’s dome. Ceony marveled at it for a few long seconds, wondering how much time and precision must have gone into such a detailed piece. Phasing or no, she dared not touch it, though the front doors
did
look like they were meant to open via the mouselike hinges that held them to the building’s foremost wall.

She glanced to Emery. He created such beautiful things.

Emery flipped one of his pages over and began to write along the bottom of the next. Ceony finally settled her attention on the documents—thick legal jargon in small print crammed between one-inch margins on all sides. Each paragraph had its own number, and some sentences had been typed in all caps and separated with bold lines. Across the bottom Emery scrawled his signature—he had stunning handwriting, his lowercase letters all the same width and the capital E and T of his name drawn with minimal flourish. Part of Ceony wanted to trace those letters just so she could learn to scrawl half as well.

He turned that page and began to scour the next, his lips in a frown, his eyes set in concentration and wrinkled at the outside corners. Ceony read the header at the top of the page: “BERKSHIRE COUNTY CLERK | DECLARATION OF DIVORCE.”

The light in the office dimmed as the sun finally dropped behind the world. Ceony spied the date he penned alongside his second signature. Exactly two years and five months had passed since this memory. Had he been living alone all this time?

Something clacked elsewhere in the house. Ceony stiffened and reached into her bag for her fan. But Emery had stiffened as well. He had heard it, too, which meant it couldn’t be Lira. The images of Emery’s heart reacted to Lira’s presence just as they reacted to Ceony’s—not at all. Whatever had made the noise had a place in this vision, though a prickling sensation still churned beneath Ceony’s skin.

Emery stood from his chair, its legs scraping against the old wooden floorboards as it slid away from the desk. His jaw set above the high collar of his shirt. Stepping around the desk, he phased through Ceony as he approached the door.

A moment passed before he folded his arms and said, “I didn’t expect to see you again.”

Silence answered him.

A long sigh passed over Emery’s lips. Ceony reached for his hand, but stopped herself. He said, “I have wards set up.”

Another moment passed before the door opened past its crack. Ceony squeezed her fan as Lira appeared, to remind herself this wasn’t the real Lira, the present Lira. Her hair was too short, and the malice in her face was less . . . prominent. In fact, she looked at Emery with the eyes of a lost hound dog and chewed on her lip like a scolded child. She wore a slim dress with a slimmer belt accenting her waist. The dress’s collar had been unlaced halfway down, revealing the soft curves of her breasts.

Fennel barked and Ceony seethed inside, despite knowing all that she did. She forced her grip around the fan to relax, lest she wrinkle it and destroy its enchantment. Lira’s tormented disposition was an act—that much was plain. Ceony didn’t buy it for a second.

And neither did Emery. His expression remained perfectly schooled, like that of a frustrated parent.

“I need help,” Lira whispered.

“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t march to the telegraph right now and report you,” he said, his voice stony. Ceony made a guess that Lira had been in more than one skirmish with the law since the last vision in this office. Ceony wondered if she’d bonded flesh yet, then cringed as the thought of
how
crossed her mind. She had no idea how one became an Excisioner, and she didn’t want anyone to enlighten her.