The Paper Magician (20 page)

Looking away from Mg. Aviosky’s eyes, Ceony said, “I took Magician Thane’s glider—it’s in the attic—and used a bird scout—a paper bird, that is—to follow Lira. She must have seen the glider and gotten scared and fled. I chased her to the coast, where she had taken camp. I tracked her to the water. I think she escaped. I . . . I saw a boat in the water. It might have been for her.”

Mg. Aviosky raised one brow. “And she left the heart behind?”

Ceony nodded.

“Foolish to come all this way and leave the very objective of her attack in a camp,” Mg. Aviosky said. “I’ll trace your coordinates and send some detectives in.”

Ceony’s breath caught at that. She hoped Mg. Aviosky didn’t notice.

“I think I’d like to rest now,” Ceony managed. She was unsure of what anyone would find on that beach—had the men taken Lira or left her? “And eat. I can look at a map and guess where the camp was . . . telegram you the location tonight, perhaps.” Buy some time.

Mg. Aviosky appeared suspicious, but she receded. Ceony was, after all, one of her best students, detention or no. Another purse of the lips and Mg. Aviosky stood and said, “I want them by tonight, unless you want the Cabinet hounding you. Magician Hughes is a very impatient man and keen on details.” She adjusted her glasses. “I’ll leave the buggy running, just in case,” she said, and took her leave.

Leaning against the warm glass of the window, Ceony waited until Mg. Aviosky passed through the paper charms disguising the cottage’s appearance before she rose from bed and padded lightly to Emery’s room.

The door creaked loudly as she opened it. Emery lay still atop his bed, two blankets covering him. Curtains drawn.

She opened them halfway to give him some sunlight. He looked healthier, ruddier.

“I’m not sure what to do,” she admitted, watching his chest rise and fall with every steady breath. “I have to tell Magician Aviosky where. I don’t want to talk to the Cabinet. But . . . I left her there on the rocks. I didn’t know if writing it would work, but the blood made some sort of connection, and it did,” she said, rubbing her left arm absently. “But I’m not like her. Please don’t think I’m like her.”

Moving to his bedside, she squeezed his warm hand briefly before making her way to the lavatory to clean up. She never wanted to look at another’s blood again, if she could help it.

Before she went to bed she pulled an old-edition atlas from one of Mg. Thane’s many bookshelves and telegrammed a rough span of coordinates to Mg. Aviosky.

She had a hard time sleeping after that.

C
HAPTER
17

T
HE NEXT DAY
C
EONY
rose early, started a fire in the front room’s hearth, and rested her curling iron beside the coals.

Mg. Aviosky had apparently cleaned up the broken dishes and turned the dining room table upright, but Ceony, after hunting through cupboards for cleaning supplies—swept and mopped the floor and wiped down all the counters. She washed the dishes in the sink, dried them, and set them carefully onto their respective shelves. She browsed through the icebox to get ideas for lunch and dinner. She had milk and an apricot for breakfast.

Upstairs in the lavatory—which had the best mirror in the house—Ceony carefully curled her locks and pushed a headband into her hair. After examining herself, she took the headband out and instead pinned back the sides of her hair and set a simple olive barrette over them. Her mother had always said olive looked best with red hair, even if Ceony’s hair was far more orange than it was red.

She took a kohl pencil from her makeup bag and carefully lined her eyes, then smudged some of the kohl between her fingertips and pinched her blond lashes to darken them. She thumbed a bit of rouge on her cheeks as well and changed into her second-best set of clothes: a navy-blue skirt that cinched just above her hips, and a peach-colored blouse with frilled collar, which she tucked into it. She considered, briefly, wearing her
best
clothing—a sage-green dress with short sleeves and slim fit—but she didn’t want to overdo it.

Content with her appearance—even confident with it—she stepped into Emery’s room to check on him. He was unmoved, but she thought his breathing sounded a bit easier.

She sat on the bed beside him and ran her fingertips through his dark hair, then traced her pinky finger over his brow. Felt his temperature. Normal. She fetched him some broth and carefully poured it bit by bit into his mouth. There was little for her to do beyond that.

Downstairs she made cucumber sandwiches and potato salad, despite doctor’s orders. Enough for two, but with Emery unchanged, she ate alone and stored the rest in the icebox for later. After suffering a few stomach cramps, she cooked sausage gravy, biscuits, and asparagus for dinner. Again she made enough for two and waited until eight o’clock. Emery didn’t wake, however, so she let the food grow cold while she fed him more broth and wiped his face and neck with a damp towel. She ate quickly—standing at the table rather than sitting—and afterward retrieved
Pip’s Daring Escape
from her bedroom. She pulled the chair from the library into Emery’s room, sat on it, and read the book with all the feeling and charisma she had. Images of the small gray mouse and his adventure through a cat-strewn garbage dump to retrieve a beloved toy played out in ghostly apparitions over Emery’s torso. Still, he didn’t wake.

Ceony washed her face, hung up her clothes, and went to bed late.

She rose with the sun the next day, bathed, and set her curling iron by the fire as she swept the front hall and dusted the front room, even picking up Jonto’s collapsed form to reach the windowsill. Back in the lavatory she curled her hair with a little more flare and fastened it with a tie behind her left ear, so that the curls hung neatly over her shoulder. After applying some kohl and rouge, she changed once more into her peach blouse and navy skirt. She skipped breakfast and got to work on her few pieces of dirty laundry.

Her white blouse—the one she had worn through Emery’s heart—was ruined, but the skirt only needed some patchwork to be wearable. She scrubbed it and hung it outside to dry beneath a clear, sunny sky and set to work on lunch. She made cucumber sandwiches once more, but ate them alone. For dinner she planned rosemary chicken.

She pulled the chicken from the icebox, a shriveled onion from a cupboard below the sink, and some dried rosemary that hung on a string opposite the dining room door. As she cut into the chicken breasts, however, her hands stilled as watery blood dribbled from the meat.

Lira froze . . . and never moved again.

She set the knife down and examined her hands, seeing blood where she knew there was none.
Paper
, she reminded herself.
It was a
paper
spell, nothing more.

But paper illusions didn’t have any effect on real people, did they?

She bit her lip. She still hadn’t heard back from Mg. Aviosky. Did her old teacher suspect her? Had she even received the telegram?

She glanced into the dining room, to the stairs that led to the second floor, where Emery slept. What would Ceony tell
him
?

“This is nonsense,” she said aloud, snatching up the knife and cutting the chicken crosswise. She seasoned and breaded it and shoved it in the oven. The aromas of home cooking and the washing and hiding of the knife helped to soothe her.

Ceony checked on Emery, and though he truly looked just like a man taking a nap, he didn’t wake.

After dinner Ceony retrieved her bag and took Fennel to the library, where she sat at the desk and tried multiple Folds of paper to see if she couldn’t rebuild him herself. She was still too green, though, and the connections in his body and the crisp lines of each unique Fold confused her. Even if she
had
watched Emery create the pup, she didn’t think she’d be able to copy it. The spells were just too advanced.

Giving up and trying not to feel heartsick, Ceony browsed the books in the library until she found a novelette entitled
The Barn Spider
, which had line sketches every few pages for reference. She read it to Emery, but being unfamiliar with the tale, she couldn’t make a single illusion appear for him. Something she would have to practice.

That night, as she slipped
The Barn Spider
back onto its shelf, the telegraph began tap-tapping. Ceony wrung her fingers together until it finished, then read Mg. Aviosky’s words while biting her first knuckle.

checked coordinates stop no sign of lira stop cabinet investigating stop hope all is well stop

For some reason, the news that the others hadn’t found Lira did little to pacify Ceony’s nerves. If anything, it scared her even more.

It took several hours before she fell asleep, her thoughts lingering somewhere on the Foulness coast, replaying her confrontation with Lira over and over again. Pressing two fingers to her neck, she felt her own pulse, the
poom
of its
PUM-Pom-poom
too faint to detect.

She woke late the next morning, and went about her morning routine: curling her hair, applying her makeup, getting dressed, and doing chores.

For breakfast—or rather, brunch—she cooked bacon, eggs, and toast. Enough for two. After eating alone, she counted up what groceries Emery still had and determined she would need to go to the store soon. She’d prefer not to go alone.

She went outside, the warm summer sun shining between clouds at the cottage. Beneath the eave in the backyard rested an actual garden of actual plants, not just the paper imitations. It looked well tended, though a few baby weeds had grown between mint, parsley, and what looked like radishes. Ceony picked them out by the root one by one and set the pile aside to mulch. She stuck her index finger into the soil—it needed to be watered.

When she returned to the kitchen for a pitcher, however, she heard a faint but familiar sound in the dining room—an airy sort of clap, meant to be a bark.

She felt her insides break apart into puzzle pieces and slowly set themselves together again, but with her heart wedged into the base of her throat.

Fennel ran into the kitchen yapping wildly, his paper paws skidding along the smooth wooden floorboards. He fell over once, picked himself up, and ran for Ceony’s feet. Ceony, mouth in a wide O, knelt down to intercept him. Fennel licked her sleeves with his paper tongue and wagged his tail so fiercely she feared it would fly off his rump and land in the icebox.

“There we are!” she exclaimed, scratching Fennel behind his ears and under his chin. “That wasn’t so long, was it?”

But she knew Fennel hadn’t magically reanimated himself. Her pulse thudded loudly enough in her ears for her to distinctly make out its quiet third beat.

Two breaths later, the door to the stairwell swung open and Emery stepped out, wearing his same indigo coat but a clean shirt and pants—the gray slacks Ceony had washed just yesterday.

She stood slowly, feeling her face turn pink. He walked with a slight hunch that whispered of mild discomfort, but otherwise seemed perfectly healthy.

His eyes found hers—his beautiful green eyes—and they smiled.

“I have a distinct feeling I’ve missed something rather spectacular,” he said. His voice was a little rough, and he cleared it before adding, “That, and I’m incredibly hungry.”

“Oh!” Ceony said, pushing past Fennel to the bread box. “I can make you something. Sit down. Do you like cucumbers? But of course you do . . . They’re your cucumbers.”

He quirked an eyebrow, but his eyes still grinned, and the sentiment even reflected in the tilt of his lips. “I believe I’m well enough to make my own sandwich, Ceony.”

But she shook her head and pulled out the cutting board and the last of the cucumber from the icebox. Emery paused for a moment between dining room and kitchen before giving up and taking a chair.

“How do you feel?” Ceony asked, her pulse still thundering in her ears. It made her hands shake as she peeled and cut the cucumber. She forced herself to slow down so she wouldn’t slice open a finger.

“Like someone has been tromping around in my chest, looking at things they shouldn’t be looking at.”

Her knife froze mid-slice. She met his eyes and saw knowledge behind their amusement.

Her neck and ears burned. “Y-You know what happened, don’t you?”

He twisted a piece of hair around his finger. “It’s my heart, Ceony. Of course I would know what’s in it. Most of it, at least.”

Most of it?
she thought, opening a cupboard door to block Emery’s view of her blushing face. She tried to focus on cutting the cucumber.
How much is “most of it”?

She thought of their brief conversation from the fourth chamber and worried her clothes would ignite, her skin felt so hot.

The cupboard door shut, and Ceony jumped to see Emery beside her, taking the knife from her hand and setting it down on the countertop. “But I don’t know what happened before, or after,” he said. His eyes dropped to her neck. Reaching out a hand, he tilted her chin up with a knuckle. Ceony realized he was studying the faded bruises there, left by the fingers of one of Lira’s undead hands.

She pulled back and pushed her hair over her shoulders to mask them. “I stole your glider,” she said.

“Did you now?”

She nodded. “I sent out paper birds to scout and followed them. I think she—Lira—intended to escape on a boat—”

“But she didn’t.” It wasn’t a question. His eyes seemed determined, wondering.

Words spilled from her mouth. “I met her at the coast, in a cave. She put some sort of spell on you—on your heart—and that’s how I got stuck inside. I didn’t mean to ‘tromp.’ I had no choice.”

She found herself speaking faster with every sentence, unable to look away from those penetrating eyes. “And I thought if I could just make my way to the end I could get out. She was in there, too, somehow, but not always. I tried to go quickly. I didn’t want you to die.

“And then I got out,” she blurted, and he nodded. So he
did
remember that part. Ceony’s feet had gone cold for all the blood rushing to her face. “And she was there, and all the spells got wet and she grabbed me and said she’d take my heart, too, and—”

She stepped farther away from him, the small of her back hitting the rim of the sink. “I’m not like her, Emery. I didn’t mean . . . but it happened.”

His forehead wrinkled. “Didn’t mean what, Ceony? What happened?”

“
We both ran for the dagger at the same time,” she explained, as though Emery would understand her story despite its lack of context. “I g
rabbed it first. I hurt her.” She touched her face where the blade had cut into Lira’s skin. “She bled everywhere. The paper . . . t
here was paper all over the rocks because of the spell you gave me. The bursting spell. And I wrote on them that she’d be frozen forever . . .”

A lump formed in Ceony’s throat, forcing her voice to grow quiet. She tried to swallow it down, but doing so only made it ache. “And it worked,” she whispered. “She’d still be there if they hadn’t come for her. I wrote it in blood and it worked . . .”

Tears clustered in the corners of her eyes, and she blinked rapidly to clear them. “I’m not like her,” she squeaked. “I’m not an Excisioner . . .”

Emery’s hand on her shoulder brought her gaze back to him. How silly she must have looked, must have sounded.

“No, you’re not,” he said, sounding much surer than she felt. “You’ve bonded to paper; you can’t be. It’s impossible.”

She stared at him, gaze moving from one green eye to the other. “But Lira—”