The Paper Magician (9 page)

Ceony scooped him up in her arms and held him delicately to her chest, careful not to cry on him.

So very wrong.

She paused at her room, but rather than go in, she continued walking until she reached Mg. Thane’s. Cradling Fennel in one arm, she pushed the door open, lit a candle on the dresser, and took a look.

It was all as she had left it, minus the laundry on the bed. Feeling a chill, Ceony hugged Fennel closer and walked past the dresser, the bookshelves, the window with its darkening light. She paused by the closet and hamper and absently sifted through Mg. Thane’s clothes, some of which had been in her washbasin just days ago. In the back of the closet she found Mg. Thane’s white dress uniform—white, as that was the color that represented paper. The double-breasted jacket, gold-polished buttons, and thick cuffs all looked new and neat, as though the uniform had never been worn. Ceony couldn’t help but think that Mg. Thane would look rather dashing in it. A good thing he had not worn it at their meeting yesterday, or Ceony may have found herself tongue-tied and very flustered.

She frowned. A pointless thing to think.

She pulled away from the closet. Fennel wriggled in her grasp. She set him down and dug her cold hands into her skirt’s pockets. Something brushed the knuckle on her right hand.

From her pocket she pulled a tiny snowflake, the one she had stowed there after her first day as a Folder. She rubbed her thumb over its tiny, delicate cuts, grateful she hadn’t yet washed this particular skirt. The snowflake still felt frosty, just like real snow. Snow he had made for her. All of it had been for her in one way or another, hadn’t it?

In the glow of the candlelight she said, “I have to do it. I have to save him.”

For she knew no one else would.

Biting her lip, Ceony hurried from the room, protecting the light of the candle with her hand as she went, quietly calling Fennel to follow. She went across the hall to the library and set the light down on the table under the window. Sitting down, she grasped a green square of paper of medium thickness and began Folding, leaning on her memory until she made a bird. The Folds hummed beneath her fingers.

Taking a pink piece of lightweight paper, she Folded another, then another with white. She imagined Mg. Thane’s hands over her own, guiding her Folds, and squinted in the candlelight to ensure all her edges aligned and all her creases were straight.

When she had six birds, she commanded them, “Breathe,” feeling a confidence above her station.

Five came to life. The pink one, the second she had made, remained still and lifeless, as a folded piece of paper should be. Somewhere in the folds of its body Ceony had done something wrong, but now was not the time to determine what.

Two of the five living birds took off into flight, one began grooming itself, one watched her without eyes, and the last hopped about the table, making Fennel growl. Ceony shushed the dog and, finding a pen, pulled a white piece of paper over to her.

She began writing, the pen’s ink flowing in quick strokes over the parchment. She wrote quickly, but cautiously enough not to misspell anything. She didn’t know if this trick would work, but she couldn’t afford to have something as simple as bad grammar mess it up.

When she had finished, she called to the birds, “Come here. Come here, please!” and whistled to them in her best birdsong.

The two escapees flew down. The others came closer. They stood in two rows before her on the table.

Taking a deep breath to keep her voice smooth and calm, Ceony read, “A woman stormed into the dining room, her dark chocolate hair nearly black and her eyes almost as dark.” She pictured the scene in her mind—Lira’s confident stature, the curl to her red-painted lips, the length and sharpness of her fingernails as she dipped them into her vial of blood. “She was an evil woman and wore it in her face and clothes. She had a sneer that could sober any drunkard, and her dark arts left blood on her fingertips.”

The story, at least the beginning of one, formed in ethereal colors before the birds, forming the shape of Lira just as Ceony remembered her, and Ceony credited herself as having a picture-perfect memory. The dining room formed around the image of Lira, but Ceony concentrated on Lira, which made the background fade to mottled blurs while Lira’s face became sharp.

“I need you to find her,” Ceony said, letting the illusion slowly dissipate. “Find her and come back to me. Can you do that?”

The birds hopped in place. That was as much of an affirmative as Ceony expected to get.

Nodding, Ceony moved to the window and, with a great heave that seemed to rock half the room, opened it high enough for five paper birds to fly out. The wind felt cool, but no rain threatened the sky. At least Mother Nature was on her side tonight.

Then, with Fennel at her heels, Ceony gathered what she needed.

She took a small stack of paper from each pile in the library and set it aside, then went into Mg. Thane’s bedroom for the larger pieces, which she rolled together and fastened with a hair tie. In her room, with the door closed, she retrieved her Tatham pistol and stashed it at the bottom of the bag. She barely had time to so much as look at it over the past weeks, but she had made sure to keep it clean. The heft of it in her bag felt . . . soothing. Back in the library, she found an atlas and ripped out two maps, one of England and another of the entire continent of Europe, just in case. As she shoved the maps into her knit bag, Ceony had a sinking feeling that, if it came down to using the Europe map, she would never find Lira. It was far too big . . .
and Mg. Thane had only two days, at most, to live . . .

She shook her head once. “I’ll find her,” she said, half to herself and half to Fennel. “I’ve got to.”

When Ceony had everything packed save the food downstairs—where she dared not go—she reluctantly turned in for bed, though sleep came only in discomforted spurts. At dawn she rose and trudged downstairs.

Only Mg. Aviosky had stayed, and she slept on the couch in the front room. Leaving her, Ceony grabbed cheese, bread, and a chunk of salami for her pack. Enough to survive two days. Then she knelt beside Mg. Thane’s still body. He breathed slow, raspy breaths.

She pressed an ear to his chest, which one of the magicians had had the decency to clean up. The only telling sign of the accident now was the blood around his ripped collar.

Pft . . . pft . . . 
, the heart pattered. The second beat sounded so faintly Ceony couldn’t hear it.

Looking at his pale face, a knife of fear passed through Ceony’s own heart. The Excisioner, Lira, had taken Mg. Thane down so easily. What chance did Ceony have against her?

Just don’t touch her
, she thought, remembering the Cabinet’s discussion the night before. Ultimately, Ceony knew her only chance would be the element of surprise.

“Please live,” she whispered to Mg. Thane. “I don’t mind being a paper magician if you’re the one to teach me, so please live. Otherwise I’ll be ornery for the rest of my life and no good to anyone.”

She touched his hair, took a deep breath, and retreated back up the stairs to wait. She thumbed through the library, picking out books on Folding and flipping through their pages, pausing wherever something looked important or interesting, then staring at the pictures—or the text—until she felt the information write itself in her memory. She listened for Mg. Aviosky’s stirring downstairs, hoping the woman would sleep long.

Instead, her ears picked up the faintest tapping on the library window.

She turned and saw a paper bird in the morning light, its tail bent at an awkward angle and the tips of its right wing ragged, as though it had experienced a bit of a stir. Opening the window, the green bird flapped in. It was the first of the six she had crafted.

Ceony cupped the paper creature in her hands. “Tell me you found her. Tell me you saw something, please.”

The bird hopped.

“Is that a yes?”

The bird hopped.

“Could you take me there? If I mended you?”

The bird hopped.

Growing jittery, Ceony set the bird down and straightened its tail, then shuffled through Mg. Thane’s things until she found some glue, which she used to seal the tiny tears on the bird’s wings. It pecked at the stuff, getting glue on its paper beak.

“Stop that,” Ceony said, hefting her heavy bag onto her shoulder. She scooped up the bird, stepped into the hall, and then stopped.

What would she do, hire a buggy? How would she explain? Could she even afford one? How far out was Lira? The paper bird couldn’t tell her.

And what if Mg. Aviosky had woken and was waiting for her to come down? She had no time to argue her way out! She had to move swiftly, before Lira did . . .

Pausing, Ceony turned about and looked at the stairway behind her, the one that led to the mysterious third floor. The “big” spells, as Mg. Thane had put it. Even during Mg. Thane’s absence, she hadn’t ventured up there. Could something useful be up there?

Swallowing hard, Ceony took the stairs two at a time. The top seven all groaned in protest of her weight. She wondered if the knob would be locked, but when she reached out and clasped it, it turned with only mild resistance.

She smelled old dust and mildew, and the temperature felt decidedly cooler than downstairs. The third floor looked to be all one room with an extraordinarily high ceiling from which dangled a rope that opened a door facing the sky.

Ceony gaped at the two things the morning light streaming through dirty windows revealed to her. Fennel hopped up the stairs behind her and sniffed her shoes.

The first was a giant paper glider, the sort that boys folded at their desks and threw at girls they liked when the teacher’s back was turned. The second looked very similar to the bird Ceony held in her hand, albeit unfinished.

Both were three times the size of the buggy that had dropped Ceony off at the house just weeks earlier.

“You
are
mad,” she whispered, walking toward the glider. It had a thin coat of dust on the top, and two handholds near the nose. No seat to sit in, no belt to strap in.

Surely Mg. Thane hadn’t flown
in
this. No one could fly! It must have been a prototype. Surely a man couldn’t find groceries a bothersome chore if he could retrieve them in this!

She marveled at it, and the handholds near its nose. So it
did
fly, or was supposed to. Only something like this would enable her to catch up to Lira. Mg. Thane depended on her.

For the first time since her assignment, Ceony found herself wishing for a more boring solution.

Straightening her shoulders and balling her hands into fists, she said, “Let’s go, Fennel,” and walked around the glider’s long wing. One hand on the green bird and the other on her bag, she stepped over the glider’s nose and straddled it. The thick paper had been greatly reinforced and didn’t bow under her weight.

Thank the heavens.

Ceony pulled the cord to the door in the ceiling. A few dead leaves fell down on top of her, carrying the scent of dew and the sound of birdsong.

Taking a deep breath, Ceony lay on her stomach and grabbed the handholds of the glider. She could only pray it worked like an animation, or else she’d never find the right spell in time.

She commanded the bird, “Take me to Lira.”

The little bird flapped its wings and flew out the door.

“Breathe,” Ceony told the glider.

It bucked beneath her like a wild bull. Ceony shrieked. Fennel jumped onto the glider and growled.

Ceony gripped the handholds and pulled them toward her.

The glider arched its pointed nose upward and took off through the gap in the roof.

C
HAPTER
7

C
EONY
FLEW
UP FROM
the yellow cottage disguised by spells and into the sky itself, gaze locking onto the little green bird that banked hard to the west.

Ceony, her knuckles white from gripping the handholds on the glider and her right elbow latched securely around Fennel’s neck, attempted to follow. She leaned in with the glider and pulled the right handhold harder than the left, but she oversteered and went veering hard to the south, then hard to the north, then hard to the southwest. Trying to force herself to remain calm, even as the glider rose higher and higher into the sky, Ceony guided the massive spell back and forth until its nose pointed toward the distant speck of green that was her guide. Then she lay low—wind blowing strand after strand of orange hair from her braid—and zoomed toward it.

With the help of currents and updrafts, the glider flew faster than the bird, so Ceony had to reel it in with care every few minutes. Pulling too hard on the handholds made the glider climb, and pushing made it descend, but switching between the two and lifting her body higher off the paper seemed to slow it down fairly well.

When she finally took a moment to look around her, she gasped with surprise. One would think a girl who attended the top-ranking magic school in the country would have had some spell or another take her high enough for the view she saw now, but that was not the case. She had never seen London in such great expanse.

The city, in which Mg. Thane lived on the far, far south side, stretched before her in a motley assortment of colors that grew less and less sharp the farther she flew. It took on the shape of a triangle, and Ceony swore she could see the Masters’ Tower of the Tagis Praff School for the Magically Inclined beyond a line of trees that must have been Dulwich Park. Streets like slick eels wound through the city, none of them quite straight, and many of them looking quite lost. She saw the Mill Squats where she had grown up, mostly brown buildings too close together for her to discern her house, as well as Steelworks Avenue, which led to the catering house that had employed her before her accident with one of its most prestigious customers—something that Ceony didn’t regret, but didn’t like to ponder.

Homes, shops, trees, even the smokestacks all grew smaller and smaller as she looked over her shoulder, sailing away on the air the way a sea captain might sail on the sea. How foolish of her to ever think Folding was pointless. Surely no Smelter would be able to fly like she did! Mg. Thane needed to patent the glider. That was, if he ever got the chance to.

The thought sobered her. Ceony faced forward, catching the green bird in her vision. Mg. Thane would have the chance. Ceony would make sure of it. However, she had to admit that once the little green bird got to where it was going, she wasn’t entirely sure what to do. Fortunately the sights below—roads diverging for thick forests and country cabins, rivers weaving in and out of the trees—and the wind singing loudly in her ears made it difficult to think of the consequences of her rash actions.

On and on the little bird flew, its wings never tiring, though on occasion a sudden gust would send the poor thing off track, and it had to flap relentlessly to get back on course. The morning sun turned the sky light blue, then a solid cerulean as it reached and passed its peak. Fennel huffed softly under her arm, thankfully not squirming. Ceony’s fingers felt ready to break from her hand, and her stomach rumbled, but she dared not release the handholds long enough to either rest her fingers or fish her lunch from the heavy bag at her hip.

They flew until Ceony smelled brine flies and seawater, and she saw the great azure expanse of the English Channel ahead of her. Judging by the coastline, the bird had directed her right to the edge of Foulness Island. Adequately named, given the circumstances.

Her stomach churned and her white grip on the glider’s handles brightened as she squeezed all the harder.
Please not the ocean
, she thought. She didn’t know if she could follow Lira past the coast. The ocean was so endless, so vast . . . and she couldn’t swim. Ceony hadn’t stepped foot in water any deeper than what a bathtub could hold since she was a little girl, and she never would, if she had any say in the matter. She could still taste the algae of the Hendersons’ fishpond in her mouth, hear the silence of water in her ears.

She swallowed against a dry throat and prayed.

Thankfully the small bird began to descend, sea-spray splotching its wings and slowing it down. Ceony pushed her glider faster until she came up beside it. Daring to release one handhold, she snatched the bird from the air and tried to determine how to land without breaking every bone in her body.

“Here, is it?” Ceony shouted over the whistle of the wind, her voice only cracking once. The bird pulsed beneath her.

Ceony circled the glider around a dozen times, taking each loop lower and lower, aiming for a spot well away from the water.

“I don’t suppose I can command you to land, can I?” she asked the glider. “Take me to the ground, softly?”

The glider seemed to heed her as the birds had last night. It arched its wings up and dropped in altitude, making Ceony’s stomach lurch, but its speed slowed and it glided
almost
smoothly onto a length of dirt patched with crabgrass.

Ceony’s fingers stubbornly held to their pained, crooked positions even as she unhooked them from the handholds. The glider continued to slide along the ground, and she looked over the sides, checking for puddles to ensure her ride would stay dry. “Cease,” she commanded it, and the glider drooped and teetered onto its left side. “Cease,” she told the little bird, and it too went still. She tucked it into the large crease along the center of the glider’s body, hoping to give it time to dry off without being blown away.

Fennel in her arms, Ceony gazed out onto the rocky coast along the sea edge made purple and orange by the lowering sun ahead of them, which cast a golden road across the seawater as it considered its set. Ceony looked about the unfamiliar place ridged with black rocks of all shapes and sizes and free of trees. No sandy beaches comprised the coast here, just steep cliffs formed by the bellies of long-dead volcanoes. One wrong step on those and she’d drown.

Ceony sucked in a long breath and pulled a piece of cheese from her bag.

“Stay quiet, Fennel,” she instructed as she set the dog down on the ground. “Stay away from puddles and let me know if you smell anything sour.”

Ceony nibbled on the cheese as she walked toward the rocks, searching for a safe way down. She thought Lira very smart. If Ceony were a criminal, she would try to escape England as quickly as possible after committing such a heinous deed. Straight for the coast, where a ship of her accomplices could pick her up. The only faster way out of the country seemed to be by paper glider, and Ceony greatly doubted Lira had one of those.

Ceony pulled her Tatham pistol from her bag and held its wooden and steel barrel against her breast, pointing the muzzle over her shoulder. She found a drop between two large crags that did not look too steep and carefully climbed her way down. Fennel sniffed all about it before following after, slipping only once. Down on solid rock, much closer to the water, Ceony smoothed her skirt and continued forward. She didn’t need to muffle her footfalls; the crashing of waves against yet more rocks below hid her presence, even if they did make her hands shake. She stayed close to the cliffs. Her heart quickened, and while the ocean air made her skin cold, her blood pulsed hot and her insides grew taut as guitar strings.

A burst of salty wind tossed the last locks of her hair from her braid. She snatched the whipping strands from the breeze and hurriedly tied them at the nape of her neck before climbing downward once more, where droplets of water from those crashing waves pattered her cheek. She tried to stand between them and Fennel, who began to huff excitedly—perhaps he had smelled something.

A loud, uneven cry pulled her attention toward the ocean. Whirling around, she pointed the pistol not at a person, but at a squatting seagull staring at her with red-veined eyes. Half-molted feathers and stitches speckled its neck. Pieces of dried, blanched skin hung off its face and legs in strips, and the top of its beak had been broken in half.

Ceony froze, clutching the pistol in her hands. A dead bird. A
living
dead bird. The work of an Excisioner.

The gull cried once more and flew out over the ocean. Ceony’s heart started beating again when it was out of sight.

Her teeth chattered. She told herself it was from the ocean’s cool mist.

Could Excisioners truly reanimate the deceased? The thought made Ceony shudder inside and out. But why a bird? Was it a messenger? Ceony hadn’t seen a note tied to its mangled legs . . . Perhaps it had already dropped its message off, or it was a spy of some sort. Ceony didn’t know enough about Excision to know. Perhaps someone was trying to contact Lira. Someone trying to help her escape.

The cheese she had eaten grew heavy in her stomach. Ceony scooped Fennel into her arms and turned him away from the ocean, as much for her own comfort as anything.

Ceony picked her way along the rocky coast for perhaps a quarter mile before she saw a dark half oval ahead of her—a cavern of some sort. A splendid place to hide, for sure. Clutching Fennel and readying her pistol, she crept toward it.

The sun had sunk one-third of its majesty behind the horizon when she reached the cavern. There were no lanterns or torches to light, but the cavern didn’t look too deep. Spying about and seeing no one, Ceony moved inside the cave, keeping her back to one of its rough walls.

Fennel squirmed. She hushe
d him. She didn’t need a paper dog reminding her what a fool brain she had inside her skull.

Her heart thrummed as she neared the back of the cave. She spied a pair of shoes set near the opposite wall. Someone else had been here, and recently, for the shoes looked fairly new and fairly clean, albeit not the ones Lira had worn at Mg. Thane’s home.

Pumpom . . . pumpom . . .
A heartbeat. But not hers. No, this one beat much slower than her own.

Ceony inched forward, squinting in the dim light slinking in through the cavern’s mouth. The base of the back wall jutted forward, making an uneven shelf about four feet high. Something glowed along its ridge.

Ceony gasped. There, in a shallow bowl amid the black rock, gleamed a pool of wine-colored blood shimmering gold about its edges. Beating calmly in its center rested Mg. Thane’s heart, just as she had seen it clenched in Lira’s hands.

Gooseflesh prickled her skin as Ceony approached it. Mg. Thane’s heart. She had found it.

She had found it too easily.

Fennel huffed and jumped from Ceony’s arms just as Ceony spun around, clutching her pistol in both hands. There, a few paces in from the mouth of the cave, stood Lira.

She looked just as she had in Mg. Thane’s dining room, though her pants had been torn just above the left knee and the humidity caused her hair to hang heavier from her scalp. Her dark eyes narrowed beneath rows of long, dark eyelashes, very different from Ceony’s blond. They made her look both menacing and beautiful. She could not have been any older than Mg. Thane. Not so much older than Ceony herself.

“I thought I hadn’t hit you hard enough,” she said, eyes dropping to the pistol for only a moment. Lira wore no guns that Ceony could see, only several vials of blood strapped to one side of a leather belt, and a long dagger strapped to the other. “But it seems my generosity in letting you live has turned against me.”

She smiled as if she had told a joke.

“Lira, isn’t it?” Ceony asked, leveling her pistol. She hoped the woman didn’t notice how it trembled in her hands. “I’m taking this back. Don’t interfere, and I won’t shoot you.”

Shoot her. Ceony had never shot a real person in her life, only targets.

Lira took a step forward. Ceony’s palms sweat. Lira, smirking, asked, “Do you even know how to use that?”

Gritting her teeth, Ceony leveled the pistol and cocked back its hammer. She could never afford the enchanted bullets that always met their mark, but she prided herself on her aim regardless.

The Excisioner took one more step forward and paused. She slipped a vial of blood off her belt. Ceony struggled to hold the gun steady. Mg. Thane’s heart beat loudly behind her—or was that her own pulse?

“Put it down,” Ceony said. Clearing her throat, she repeated, “Put it down or I’ll shoot you, I swear I will. I’m taking this heart back with me.”

Lira’s face turned to a scowl so gradually Ceony hardly saw it change. “I’m not letting some ginger tart take what’s rightfully mine.”

With a thumbnail she uncorked the vial and spilled blood into her palm. She stepped forward.

Ceony stepped back. “I’ll kill you!” she cried.

Lira began chanting in that mysterious tongue. Ceony didn’t understand any of it—the spells were so different from the materials she had studied. Lira’s hand began to glow gold. She took another step forward.