The Paper Magician (19 page)

No. Not cared for. One didn’t rip out the heart of a man because she
cared
for him. No, to Lira, Emery’s heart was a souvenir, a trophy. Something to be owned. A sick sort of revenge for hunting Lira and her kind down. Emery may have been Lira’s lover once, but he had become her bane. Her nemesis. Her scourge.

And she hated it.

Swift as a falcon Lira drew her long dagger from her belt, her enthusiasm knocking its sheath askew. She held the knife out to her side like a broken wing and rushed Ceony. A distraction—Lira didn’t attack with the dagger, but with her crimson-stained hand.

“You must understand, Patrice, that Excisioners are a tricky matter,”
Mg. Hughes had said.
“They are wildly dangerous, and if they touch you, they can pull magic through your body. It is a killing magic.”

Ceony dashed to the side. Her right foot caught between two rocks, causing her to pitch forward. Lira’s outstretched hand swiped the air where Ceony’s head had been. Struggling, Ceony jerked her foot free, leaving her shoe wedged in its place. Jagged rock bit into her sole through her soaked and soiled stocking, but Lira didn’t allow her any time to dwell on it.

Lira spun, dagger windmilling through the air. Ceony leapt back, barely avoiding the tip of the blade as it whistled past her breast. Darting into a few inches of water between teethlike stones, Ceony yanked a paper glider from her bag.

The Folds fell apart in her hands. Too much water damage.

Lira charged. Ceony shrieked and scrambled to higher ground, dodging the hand that sought to enchant her own skin. Ceony rifled through the bag until she found a spell she could use.

“Breathe!” she commanded the paper bat, who took to the air with a two-sheet wingspan. It needed no more instruction than that, perhaps sensing its surroundings the same way Fennel did. The bat flew straight for Lira’s nose.

Ceony’s fingers grasped the binding chain, a chain woven with tight double rows of V-shaped links. The second spell Emery Thane had taught her in the chamber of doubt.

Ceony whirled around, hair fanning around her neck.

Lira snatched the bat from the air and crumpled its right wing.

“Bind!” Ceony ordered the chain.

Like a shark in deep waters, the chain darted from her hands toward Lira—

—who cut it into two uneven fragments with a broad sweep of her dagger. The binding chain’s pieces flopped to the rocks like fish out of water.

“As I said,” Lira spoke, only somewhat breathless, “no power at all.” Advancing, she took the last vial of blood from her waist and threw it at her feet. A cyclone of scarlet smoke enveloped her—the same spell she had used to escape the dining room after stealing Emery’s heart.

Only instead of fleeing, Lira reappeared a foot in front of Ceony.

Ceony’s exhaling breath dug claws into the soft flesh of her throat. Her hand shot into her bag for the rhombus, her last spell—

Lira grabbed her elbow—skin on skin—and held the dagger’s edge just below Ceony’s chin.

Lira grinned.

Ignoring the blade, Ceony shoved Lira away with all the strength her fatigued arms could muster and yanked the simple diamond-Folded paper from her sack.

“Do you know what happens when paper vibrates very, very fast?”

Lira growled and rammed into Ceony, shunting her into an eroded rock shelf opposite the ocean. Lira’s hand clutched Ceony’s neck. The point of the dagger pressed into her ribs. Lira smelled like blood and old, rusted coins.

Lira began to chant, and Ceony felt warm. Eerily warm. Too warm. Lira’s ancient spell seemed to coax Ceony’s very spirit from her bones.

She couldn’t get away. She clutched Emery’s spell in her hand, but she couldn’t get away.

She had to use it. Here. Now.

“Burst,” Ceony whispered, releasing the paper.

The rhombus began to quiver, faster and faster, buzzing like a hornet as it slowly, leisurely fell toward the ground. The buzz grew louder, higher, louder, higher . . .

The diamond-Folded paper exploded in a burst of fireworks and flame, blasting outward like a pistol with a blocked barrel.

The explosion flung Ceony sideways against the cliff. The ragged rocks cut through the fibers of her blouse and into her skin. She fell onto her elbow and hip, the taste of ash filling her mouth.

For several heartbeats everything looked white and bright, like the morning sun itself. As color, shape, and shadow gradually returned to her eyes, a high-pitched note rang in her ears, a tuning fork struck and never stilled.

She pushed herself up, arm aching, hip stiff. The rocky beach swished back and forth. Her temples throbbed with her pulse:
PUM-Pom-poom
.

Emery.

Across the rocks, nearly to where the ocean lapped at the shore, Lira sputtered and weakly tried to push herself onto all fours. Ebony drapes of damp hair hung over her cheeks.

Ceony forced herself up, clinging to the rock shelf. The morning spun and tilted. That constant note—perhaps a high B-flat—continued to ring inside her skull.

She had to act. Lira had touched her—all it would take was a quick recovery to recast whatever heinous spell the burst had interrupted.

Bits of half-soaked papers lay scattered over the ground, fallen from Ceony’s bag. Lira’s dagger lay on its side halfway between them, its hilt resting in a patch of lichen. Several gulls cried as they flew over the ocean, abandoning the site of the explosion.

Though the ocean still swayed in her vision, Ceony ran for the blade. Lira, peering up through her hair, staggered to her feet and sprinted for it as well.

Both their hands lunged for the knife.

Ceony’s fingers grasped it first.

Hefting the surprisingly heavy blade, Ceony shouted an unintelligible cry and arched the blade up and over her in an imperfect crescent. She felt something tug back on her swing, but not hard enough to stop it. The sharp blade pulled clean through.

Lira screamed.

Blood rained over the shore. Lira stumbled back, both hands rushing to her face to stanch the steady flow of red water pouring from a split cheek and gouged eye.

Ceony dropped the dagger, feeling her stomach flip inside out. Lira cried again and lashed out, backhanding Ceony across the jaw.

Ceony fell, catching herself on raw palms. Lira dropped to her knees, gasping and cursing, blood pouring between her fingers. She tried to chant her healing spell but choked on every other word. Her blood had spilled everywhere—it dyed the tiny pools and streams of high tidewater, stained the lichen, painted crimson streaks across rocks and paper.

Paper. Crumpled, damp, and torn paper, wet with blood.

Numb, Ceony reached for a drier piece singed about the edges. Lira’s blood sluggishly soaked through its fibers.

Her mind felt detached, her thoughts vacant as she touched the blood—the body’s ink—with an index finger. Her mind didn’t really process the idea; it merely materialized behind her eyes like a thread of nostalgia, as though it had always been there. It and nothing else.

She wrote nine letters and, with a shaky but strong voice, read them aloud.

“Lira froze.”

And she did.

Ceony stared at the still image of Lira hunched over and cradling her ruined face, tendrils of ice climbing up her legs and hunched back. Her grunts and gasps vanished, her lips parted midbreath. Strands of wild hair hung in the air free from gravity’s hold, as though someone had molded them in place with glue.

Ceony gaped. She had read the paper like an illusion. Like
Pip’s Daring Escape
. But this wasn’t a story. Or, rather, it was
her
story. Not an illusion at all.

She stared at her bloody finger, but her thoughts—her ability to process—remained far from her. She returned to the page, wrote, and read, “. . . and never moved again.”

The statue of Lira remained unchanged.

Ceony stood, letting the bloody paper fall to the rocks. A small whirlpool of hungry saltwater lapped up the words, sucking them back into the ocean. She backed seven steps away from Lira before a spot of brown on the ocean drew her eyes, close enough that she didn’t need to squint to make out its shape.

A boat. It held two men, their features too distant to be distinct. One rowed, oars flapping in sync on either side of the boat. The other knelt at the boat’s helm, peering toward the coast.

Ceony thought of the morbid seagull she had seen upon her arrival and tensed. The creature had been sent by someone, why not these two? Only the boat’s nearness pushed her legs to move.

She turned back for the cave. Her soul yearned to run, but her body refused. It wasn’t broken, only felt broken. Exhausted. Distant.

She stumbled into the cave, followed its wall with one hand until she reached the bowled shelf that held Emery’s heart, still beating strong.

She checked her bag, empty save for Fennel. She spoke to the dog silently in thought, thanking him, promising to restore him as soon as she was able. Then she picked a few pieces of him apart, careful not to damage the greater part of his body, and tiredly Folded the links for a vitality chain, just large enough to encircle a grown man’s heart.

Ceony fled the cave and climbed up the rocks before the boat reached the shore. She didn’t look back.

She found the enormous glider where she had left it and flew to London, carrying Emery’s heart next to her own.

C
HAPTER
16

A
S WIND RUSHED OVER
her aching body and numb hands, Ceony’s mind drifted back to Emery’s home. Her home. What if he had passed on while she had been away? What if she had been too slow? Could an animated heart revive an inanimate body?

His heart fluttered weakly against hers, having lost much of its lingering strength since she lifted it from the enchanted pool.

But she still had time. Surely she still had time. Stories like this one weren’t meant to end badly.

Magicians Aviosky, Hughes, and Katter would have noted her absence by now, but she found herself not caring for whatever repercussions they could offer her. She didn’t regret her decision, even if her clumsy paper heart didn’t pull Emery through this. She prayed her Folding had held up.

The magicians had, at least, left the giant door in Emery’s roof open. The glider swooped up and landed gracefully, even without her directing it. It knew its master’s house.

Ceony pulled stiff fingers from its handles, massaging them against her hip to coax movement back into the knuckles. Her head felt full of clouds, but not in the dreamy sense. Just the empty one.

The floorboards creaked under her feet. Her bag swung at her side like a broken pendulum from a derelict grandfather clock, and she felt as if she were made of paper herself. She leaned on the stairwell wall as she descended down to the second floor, holding Emery’s heart to her breast, its small vitality chain soaked red. She had left her shoe wedged between the rocks of the island shore, not wanting to stay any longer than was absolutely necessary. Her sore, socked foot muffled every other step.

She passed Emery’s room, the door ajar, the bed empty. They must not have moved him. He was downstairs, still alive. Waiting for her. They wouldn’t have buried him without her. She hadn’t been gone that long.

Had she?

Past the library, the lavatory, her bedroom. She leaned on the wall as she took the stairs to the first floor.

Mg. Aviosky opened the door, eight steps below her.

“Ceony Twill!” she exclaimed with all the anxiety of a worried mother, the sternness of an academy principal, and the relief of a farmer feeling spring’s first rain on his skin. Her eyes widened round as dinner chargers. Ceony must have been a sight to see.

Mg. Aviosky’s face paled and she started up the steps, but Ceony’s words made her pause. “I’m not hurt,” she said. And she wasn’t, not really. The blood running down her blouse wasn’t hers.

She gently pulled Emery’s heart from beneath her collar. Mg. Aviosky pressed a hand to her mouth.

“That isn’t . . . ,” she whispered through her fingers.

Ceony took the last eight steps down, pushing past Mg. Aviosky, who didn’t stop her. Ceony didn’t have the energy for an argument, not right now. She saw no trace of Magicians Hughes and Katter.

Her own heart quickened at the sight of Emery, the real Emery, lying in his makeshift bed on the dining room floor just as she had left him. His skin almost held the pallor of death. His lips were almost violet. His eyes were almost sunken.

Almost, but not quite. Her paper heart still beat within his chest.

Mg. Aviosky closed the stairway door and asked the question surfacing in Ceony’s own mind. “Will it work?”

“I don’t know,” Ceony whispered. It scared her that a magician as experienced as Aviosky would ask that. What if it didn’t?

She walked around to Emery’s left side and knelt beside him. She held his heart in one hand and reopened his shirt with the other. His flesh felt cool, but not cold.

“There’s still magic left in it,” she said. She knew only because no heart could beat on its own without its body, not without a spell, and Lira’s magic had been strong. Hopefully it would be enough.

She placed the heart upon his chest. His skin glimmered with the gold residue of Lira’s spell, and the cavity opened. The sight of an open chest would have terrified Ceony had she not just lived in one, more or less.

“How long was I gone?” she asked as her paper heart greeted her with a feeble, soggy pulse.

“One night,” Mg. Aviosky answered, barely audible.

Ceony nodded. Reaching into Emery’s still-warm chest, she pulled out her paper heart and pressed his own back into place.

Emery’s back arched and he sucked in a rush of air. The cavity closed so suddenly Ceony barely had time to pull her fingers free. The golden glimmer vanished.

Ceony held her breath. Emery remained still, asleep.

Pressing her ear to his chest, she listened for the heartbeat. It met her with a drowsy but steady
PUM-Pom-poom
.

She smiled. She didn’t have the strength to do anything more.

“He’ll be all right, but call a doctor,” she said, her voice light and airy. She thought she sounded like a child. She smoothed Emery’s hair back from his forehead and, though Mg. Aviosky watched from the foot of the bed, leaned down to kiss him on the cheek.

“Miss Twill—” Aviosky began as Ceony stood, but the woman didn’t finish her sentence, whatever it may have been. Perhaps because Ceony looked so terrible. Perhaps because Mg. Aviosky saw this as a good deed. Perhaps it was the way Ceony’s legs shook as though they had aged one hundred years in the space of one night.

Mg. Aviosky’s gaze prickled Ceony’s back as Ceony stepped away from Magician Emery Thane, pulled herself up the stairs, and collapsed into her own bed.

Ceony awoke with lead bones and a mild headache in the center of her forehead. Soreness had settled into her muscles—her legs and forearms especially—warning her of further soreness on the morrow. She felt her pulse tickling hot spots on her back where she had skidded across the rock shelf along the Foulness coast. Her stomach, though it felt quite small, chortled in protest for food, and she had hardly enough saliva in her mouth to swallow.

Someone handed her a glass of water.

She didn’t recognize the man kneeling at her bedside, but Mg. Aviosky stood behind him and helped Ceony prop herself up on a pillow. Ceony drained the cup in four and a half gulps and thirsted for more.

She noticed the conical stethoscope around the stranger’s neck—he looked about fifty, with thorough hair loss and round-lensed spectacles—and concluded he was the doctor she had asked Mg. Aviosky to retrieve. She hadn’t intended the doctor for her own use.

Morning light in the window told her she’d been asleep for some time.

“Dehydration,” the doctor said, pressing his finger into Ceony’s wrist, then watching to see how long his white print took to recolor. “And quite scratched. And in need of a bath. But you’ll certainly survive, Miss Twill.”

Ceony cleared her throat. “Emer—Thane—Magician Thane,” she stuttered, feeling her cheeks heat under Mg. Aviosky’s scrutiny. “Is he all right?”

Mg. Aviosky said, “As you predetermined, Miss Twill, he will be healthy after a few days’ rest. Dr. Newbold has affirmed it.”

Releasing a long breath of relief, Ceony sunk down into her pillow. Dr. Newbold leaned forward and touched his stethoscope to her chest with no formality, but doctors tended to be quite familiar. Nodding his head once, he said, “Liquids and soft foods for twenty-four hours. If you have to chew it, don’t eat it, unless you want to cramp.”

He rifled through a short-handled bag on the floor, one that had been patched several times, for Ceony noticed the stitchings along its seams were three distinctly different shades of black. From the bag Dr. Newbold pulled a shallow jar of green gel. It looked like the aloe cream the nurse at Tagis Praff always kept on the third shelf of the medicine cabinet between beds one and two.

“This will help your abrasions heal more swiftly,” he explained. “Twice a day, or whenever they sting.”

“And Em—Magician Thane?” she asked.

“No abrasions on him,” Dr. Newbold answered. “Magic wounds are a strange sort. Tricky. If he acts oddly after he wakes, call me back.” He held up a finger as a warning. “And let him wake on his own. The body often knows what it needs without our meddling.”

“But how will I know if he’s acting strange?” Ceony asked. “He’s strange already.”

Mg. Aviosky clucked her tongue, and Ceony felt herself smiling. When Mg. Aviosky clucked again, Ceony wiped the grin from her face and managed to force a flush down into her chest, where the magician wouldn’t see it.

To the doctor, Mg. Aviosky said, “Will you return tonight to check on his progress?”

Dr. Newbold shook his head in the negative. “No, no, I don’t believe it’s necessary. He seems stable to me, especially now that he’s in his own bed. I don’t like patients lying on the floor unless they absolutely must.”

“I can tend to him,” Ceony said, sitting up. Her back ached as she did. “I don’t mind, and it’s just watching to make sure nothing seems amiss, right?” she asked, glancing from the doctor to Mg. Aviosky. “I’m his apprentice and I’m all right. And I know you’re busy, Magician Aviosky.”

Mg. Aviosky pursed her lips into a thin line, but Ceony wasn’t sure if it was in regard to her statement or not. Mg. Aviosky always looked pursed.

“Things have gone from very hectic to very calm very quickly,” the magician said. “It disconcerts me. But if you believe it is well, Dr. Newbold, I suppose I’ll be wont to agree with you.”

“It is well,” the doctor said, closing his bag and standing with a grunt. His right knee popped as he did so. “But telegram if anything does go amiss.”

“Me as well,” Mg. Aviosky said to Ceony, clasping her hands behind her back. She still wore the same clothes she had donned when first responding to Ceony’s call, and Ceony found herself grateful not only for the woman’s quick response, but also that she had stayed beside Emery when the others had left him for dead.

Ceony smiled. “Of course. I’ll let you know any and every change, Magician Aviosky. I promise it.”

Mg. Aviosky smiled as much as her stern countenance would allow. “I am glad to hear it. I apologize for this incident disrupting your learning.” She looked at Ceony with a critical eye. “I admit I’m not a fan of mixed genders in apprenticeships, and our only other Folders are likewise male, but I’m willing to consider reassignment.”

Ceony bit down on her tongue to keep from blurting an adamant “No!” at the very idea. Instead she calmly, politely, said, “
Magician
Thane has been a good teacher thus far, and very patient with me. I’d like to continue apprenticing under him as far as the situation allows.”

Mg. Aviosky nodded, a fraction of skepticism marring her otherwise poised visage, but she said nothing. “Dr. Newbold,” she said, turning to the man who stood at eye level with her. “Thank you for your time. I’ll send your bill through the Cabinet. If you would excuse us.”

Ceony chewed on her lip as the doctor nodded and left. She had assumed Mg. Aviosky would go with him. What more was there to say?

Once Dr. Newbold had departed, Mg. Aviosky sat straight-backed on the edge of Ceony’s narrow bed and said, “Tell me precisely what happened.”

Ceony curled in on herself. “I’m rather hungry, Magician—”

“Is it so long a story?” Mg. Aviosky interrupted. “You fled the premises against instruction to pursue an Excisioner!” She gasped at the very idea. “And yet you not only survived, but rescued the heart of perhaps the most talented Folder in England. I deserve the details, Miss Twill.”

“You didn’t ‘instruct’ me to stay,” Ceony countered. “Just to leave the dining room. Which I did.”

Mg. Aviosky rubbed the bridge of her nose under her glasses. “This feels very much like detention again, Ceony.”

“It’s just . . . private, I guess,” she replied.

“Private?” the magician repeated, obviously surprised at Ceony’s choice of adjective. “How so? What is so private that you can’t tell me?” She paled. “You didn’t bargain—”

“No, no,” Ceony said, glancing down to her hands. To the blood underneath her nails. In her mind’s eye she saw Lira’s frozen form, hands clutching her bleeding eye.
Blood magic
, Ceony thought.
Does that make me an Excisioner, too?

It was the thought Ceony hadn’t dared consider until now. What would Mg. Aviosky—and the Magicians’ Cabinet—do if they knew
how
Ceony had defeated Lira?