The Paper Magician (5 page)

She had gotten down a frying pan and stoked the stove when she heard the strangest rasping sound coming down the stairs, along with the soft padding of paper on wood. Thinking it Jonto, she readied a spatula in her defense, but when the door to the stairs creaked open, something much shorter emerged from behind it.

Ceony gaped in surprise. There, wagging its little paper tail, stood a paper dog.

Dozens of pieces of paper formed its body, interlocking almost seamlessly from head to foot to tail. It had no eyes, being made of paper, but had two nostrils and a distinct mouth that opened and rasped at her in a strange sort of bark. It looked something like a Lab-terrier mix, its head only reaching Ceony’s knee.

Barking once more, the dog sprinted up to Ceony and began sniffing her shoes.

With parted lips and tingles running down her back, Ceony set the spatula down by the stove, knocking the fennel stock to the floor. She crouched and stroked the dog’s head. It felt surprisingly solid beneath her fingers, and its paper body made her fingertips buzz almost as though she were stroking real fur.

“Why hello!” she said, and the dog jumped and pressed its front paws against her knees, then actually licked her with a dry, paper tongue. Ceony laughed and scratched behind its ears. It panted with excitement. “Wherever did you come from?”

The door squeaked again, announcing Mg. Thane’s arrival. He looked a little tired, but no worse for wear, and still wore that long indigo coat. “This one won’t give me hives,” he said with a smile that beamed in his eyes. “It’s not the same, but I thought it would do, for now.”

Wide-eyed, Ceony slowly stood, the paper dog yapping in its whispery voice and nudging her ankles with its muzzle. “You made this?” she asked, feeling her ribs knit over her lungs. “This . . . this is what you were doing last night?”

He scratched the back of his head. “Were you up? I apologize—I’m not used to having others in the house again.”

Again
, she thought, wondering. Mg. Thane seemed old enough to have had, perhaps, one apprentice before her, if that’s what he meant. She had never bothered asking Mg. Aviosky about Mg. Thane’s previous pupils. And she didn’t ask, not now. Not with this wonderful pup sniffing at her ankles.

He had made this for her. Because of Bizzy.

She looked from him to the dog, then back at him. She pinched the back of her arm to keep herself from crying, for her eyes had already made the decision without her consent.

“Thank you,” she said, perhaps too quietly. “This . . . this means a lot to me. You didn’t have to . . . thank you.” She grasped the spatula. “Do you want some breakfast? I was about to make some—”

“I have good timing, then,” Mg. Thane said, momentarily distracted by something up the stairs. “If you don’t mind.”

She shook her head no. Mg. Thane’s eyes smiled and he vanished back up the stairs.

Ceony retreated back to the icebox for more eggs, the paper dog trailing behind her, sniffing the floor as it went. She watched its paper joints move together as a whole—so that’s what Mg. Thane had meant.

She scooped the fennel off the floor.

“I think I’ll name you Fennel,” she said to it, slipping eggs into the pockets of her apron. “It may be a better cat name, but since you’re not quite a real dog . . . well, it suits you.”

Fennel merely cocked his head to the side, not quite understanding.

Mg. Thane ate his breakfast in the study, where he laid out several books and ledgers across his tidy-cluttered desk. Ceony practiced her reading illusion until just after lunch—she could get three of the fourteen pages to form in the air around her now, and Fennel tried to chase the mouse every time it appeared. The dog provided quite the distraction, but Ceony didn’t mind one bit. She even fastened Bizzy’s old collar around Fennel’s neck. It fit perfectly.

Just after noon Mg. Thane called her into the library to show her the variety of papers kept on the table there, explaining the importance behind their thickness and grain. He seemed somewhat distracted and repeated himself here and there, but Ceony didn’t point it out to him. She was merely relieved that the man hadn’t assigned her physical labor. And, while the thought of such chores didn’t irk her quite the way it had yesterday, she found herself almost grateful for the lesson. What Mg. Thane was teaching her had started to weasel its way into that part of her that wanted to
know
. She found herself paying rapt attention to Mg. Thane’s lecture, and when she recited the details of the paper back to him at the end of the lesson, she beamed under his compliment, simple as it was.

“That’s quite accurate,” he said. He peered out the window, seeing something Ceony didn’t beyond its glass.

“Are you stuck on something?” she finally asked as he put the sheets of paper into the wrong piles on the desk. She took them from his hands and placed them correctly, being sure to keep all the stacks straight.

“Hm?”

“Stuck on something,” she repeated. “You’re somewhere else today.”

Unless he was always like that in the afternoon. Ceony had known him not quite a full day, so she had nothing to compare him to. She felt sure it wasn’t madness, though.

“I suppose I am,” he said after some thought, blinking and returning to the present. “I’ve a lot on my mind, what with a new apprentice and all.”

“Am I your first?”

“Second and a half,” he answered.

“Hal
f
?” Ceony asked. “How do you have half of an apprentice?”

“The last one didn’t stay his full term,” he explained without really explaining at all.

Full term?
Ceony thought as a bead of fright washed down her throat. Was he in an accident? Quit? Laid of
f
? Did magicians often lay off their apprentices?

Ceony bit the inside of her cheek. Surely Mg. Thane wouldn’t fire her. The country was too desperate for paper magicians to lose any aspiring Folders, and she’d already bonded paper.

She hadn’t considered the security of her position until now, and it made her stomach curdle. She’d worked so hard to get where she was now—even if it was on the path to becoming a Folder, not a Smelter—and she had still required the luck of receiving a scholarship.

For a moment she saw stars as she remembered the car crash, smelled burning onion as Mrs. Appleton had screamed at her after spilling that wine—

She blinked the memories away. This apprenticeship wasn’t just another job; there would be no going back were she to be laid off. She’d be bound to paper and only paper, yet not legally authorized to do anything with it. She’d be a spent magician.

“You look like you’ve eaten something sour,” Mg. Thane said, pulling a thick sheet of slate-colored paper from the upper-right pile on the desk, just beside the telegraph.

“I was just thinking of what a waste it would be, to bond something and then quit, is all.”

“I agree. Well, let me show you some basic Folds, unless you covered that at Praf
f
?”

Ceony shook her head no.

Mg. Thane dropped to the floor with his board, setting the square of paper on top of it. “Let’s see how astute you actually are, Ceony,” he said. A challenge, then.

She focused. The paper magician Folded the paper from corner to corner so it made a triangle. The thick parchment held the Fold well. “This is a half-point Fold—any Fold that turns a square into a triangle. And this is a full-point Fold”—he Folded the paper in half again—“any Fold that turns a triangle into a smaller triangle. With none to spare, of course.”

Ceony nodded, watching quietly. He had done these two Folds when making the paper bird yesterday, before turning them into a second square and then the kite. He had her repeat the Folds and say their names, all while emphasizing that the paper’s edges had to be completely aligned for the magic to take. Then his eyes took that faraway look again, becoming not quite as bright as they should have been.

“We’ll start you on animation,” he said, peering out the window again. “It’s a good place to learn the Folds.”

“I can work on this,” Ceony said, “if you need to do something else.”

Though deep in that space of wanting and knowing, she wished he’d stay and teach her.

What a silly thought that was.

Mg. Thane nodded and stood, his long coat rustling about his legs. She felt the disappointment keenly. When he disappeared into the hallway, Fennel poked his head in and trotted right up to Ceony’s hip, where he turned around three times before lying down and sleeping. Ceony had a feeling a dog made of paper couldn’t get tired, though. Must have all been in the enchantment.

She held her half-point and full-point Folds in her hands and stared out the open doorway, wondering after Mg. Thane. A thread of guilt tugged between her ribs as she remembered his working late to create Fennel for her. But surely that couldn’t be the source of his . . .
mental absence. And she’d been on her best behavior. Today, at least.

“I ought to make it up to him,” she murmured to Fennel. “After all, any apprentice needs her magician’s favor, or I’ll be here six years instead of two.”

Though her mind knew the Folds, she practiced them until her hands knew them, too, then resigned herself to the kitchen, where she pulled spices and wines out of the cupboards and recited
Pip’s Daring Escape
under her breath, testing out different voice inflections that might coax the images on page four to life. She set one pot of water on the stove to boil for pasta and washed out last night’s saucepan, setting it on the stove as well. She melted butter and added flour and milk to start a white sauce, something with lemon and garlic to go with the tied-up chicken in the icebox. When she couldn’t find a lemon, she settled on tomato and basil. Everyone liked tomato and basil, and if Mg. Thane kept the ingredients stocked in his house, Ceony could be confident that he liked them as well—and that they were safe to use. Ceony had noted throughout her life that people with one sort of allergy often had others. She’d already started her apprenticeship on the wrong foot; hives would only make the other foot wrong, too.

When the chicken was nearly done, the bread sliced, and the sauce stirred into the penne, Mg. Thane emerged from his study.

“I need to give you more assignments if you have time to do this,” he commented as Ceony peeked into the oven to check on the poultry. “I don’t think this house has smelled this good since I’ve lived in it.”

Ceony stifled a grin at the compliment and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “I wanted to thank you, for everything. And apologize, for my behavior yesterday. I wasn’t quite myself.”

“This wasn’t necessary,” he said, his bright eyes curious.

“It will be done in just a minute,” she said, scuttling to the cupboards to locate the green ceramic bowl she had seen earlier. It rested on the highest shelf, so Ceony climbed onto the counter to grab it. “If you want to sit down, I set the table already.”

Mg. Thane smiled, or did something between a smirk and a smile. It touched both eyes and lips. “All right. Thank you. But then I’m assigning you reading material and giving you two hundred sheets of paper to Fold.”

Ceony dumped the pasta into the ceramic bowl and set it on the table first, then carefully transferred the chicken and roasted vegetables to a broad plate—Mg. Thane had no serving trays—and set that in front of Mg. Thane. He said nothing, but the arch of his eyebrows told her he was impressed. At least, Ceony hoped that’s what it meant. It could also have meant that the magician had been saving that chicken for something else, and noted that Ceony had cooked it without permission. If that were the case, hopefully the taste would smooth out any hard feelings.

Ceony sat on her chair on the other side of the square table, then stood up again and asked, “Do you know how to carve a bird?”

“I believe Jonto does.”

Ceony paled. She spied mirth in his eyes. Was that a joke?

Regardless, she picked up a fork and knife and sliced into the chicken herself. Gathering a few teaspoons of courage, she asked, “I was also wondering if my apprenticeship included a stipend of some sort, or a wage.”

Mg. Thane laughed—light laughter that didn’t come from the chest or the throat, but somewhere in between. “Ah, I understand. The plot thickens.”

Ceony flushed. “No, what I said earlier was sincere, really. But people should talk over dinner, especially if they’re going to live in the same house, and I thought my wages would be a good place to start, is all.”

“The school board decides your stipend,” Mg. Thane said, scooping up some tomato-basil pasta onto his plate. “So yes, you have one. I believe it’s ten pounds a month, plus anything else I decide to pay you on the side.”

Ten pounds?
She focused on loading her own plate to hide her wide eyes. More than she had thought. She could send half of that home every month, should she be frugal.

She glanced back to the paper magician. “And . . . what will you pay me on the side?”

Mg. Thane held his fork loosely in his hand. “I’ll not starve you, if that’s your worry.”