The Glass Magician

The paper doll had proved tricky, not because of the abstract concept, but because the initial step required the assistance of another person. Ceony couldn’t very well trace her own silhouette onto paper, after all. With Emery gone and Jonto unable to hold a pencil steady, Ceony had telegrammed Mg. Aviosky to request the assistance of her apprentice, Delilah Berget. Delilah, a year Ceony’s senior, had taken two years to graduate from Tagis Praff instead of Ceony’s one, so they’d overlapped. Since Mg. Aviosky kept Delilah frightfully busy, the tracing hadn’t commenced until the evening before Ceony’s birthday.

Now Ceony sat on her bedroom floor with a pair of scissors she had purchased from a Smelter two years ago. The twin blades could cut through anything, and would never dull. Ceony studied them for a moment before taking them to the long sheet of paper etched with her front-facing silhouette. Had she become the Smelter she’d once dreamed of being, she would likely know how the spell worked by now. Not that she regretted the decision to apprentice under Emery, whether or not it had been hers to make.

Cutting out the silhouette was a slow process; Emery had warned her that one wrong cut would ruin the spell, and she didn’t want to start over again. Ceony had managed to cut out the left foot and up to the left knee before Emery appeared in the doorway, his indigo coat sweeping about his calves.

Ceony carefully pulled back the scissors before giving him her attention. Emery’s eyes sparkled with amusement. Had she done something funny?

“I’ve determined that I will teach you to cheat at cards for the day’s first lesson,” Emery announced.

Ceony dropped her scissors. “I knew you were cheating!”

“Astute, but not astute enough,” the paper magician replied, tapping his index finger against the side of his head. “Unless you can tell me how I did it.”

“A Location spell of sorts?”

He smiled. “Of sorts. Come.” He motioned with his hand.

Grabbing Fennel by his belly so he wouldn’t trample the paper doll, Ceony followed Emery into the hallway, shut her door firmly, and set the dog down. Fennel sniffed the floorboards before discovering something interesting in the bathroom, and vanished from sight.

In the library, Emery sat on the floor by the table littered with neat stacks of paper, each a different color and thickness. He set his Folding board down in front of him, then pulled an ordinary stack of playing cards from an inner pocket of his coat.

Ceony sat across from him—the position she took for most of their lessons. Emery shuffled the cards rather expertly, which made her wonder what sort of employment he had taken before becoming a Folder. Her journey through his heart hadn’t revealed those secrets, and so she decided it best not to ask.

“You remember the File-location spell I taught you, yes?” he asked.

Ceony did, as she remembered nearly everything that occurred in her life, whether she wanted to or not. For the most part, her photographic memory was a gift. Emery had taught her that spell the day after his recovery from losing his heart—the same day Ceony had begun calling him by his first name.

She recited the lesson. “So long as I have made physical contact with the papers in question, I can use a ‘sort’ command and then recite, verbatim, the written terms I am looking for.”

It would have been a useful spell to know while studying for midterms at the Tagis Praff School for the Magically Inclined.

“Precisely,” Emery said with a nod. “With playing cards—unless they’re from a tampered deck—you can do the exact same thing. And you can assign a card a gesture instead of a name, so that the gesture will call it forward in a game. Allow me to demonstrate.”

He fanned out the cards, perhaps to ensure he had, indeed, touched each of them, and then said, “Sort: King of Diamonds.” One of the topmost cards pulled out of the deck toward him. He plucked it up with his other hand and turned it so Ceony could see that it was the King of Diamonds.

He then turned the card away from Ceony and, as though talking to the king himself, said, “Re-sort: Gesture,” and tapped the right side of his nose once. Emery slipped the King of Diamonds back into the deck and shuffled it, dealing Ceony and himself five cards as though they were playing poker, which they had gotten into the habit of doing most Tuesday nights at a quarter past seven.

“Now,” Emery said, holding up his cards. “So long as I mumble ‘sort’ under my breath, or somewhere where the cards can hear me, I can signal the King of Diamonds by tapping my nose. I usually find it best to say the word before I enter the room where the game is being held. But mind that you must repeat the ‘sort’ command for each card you intend to steal.”

He coughed—Ceony thought she heard the word “sort” in the act—and tapped the side of his nose. The King of Diamonds flew out of the deck and right into Emery’s waiting hand.

“How deceitful of you,” Ceony said, though she couldn’t help but smirk. How angry Zina would be if Ceony used this trick against her the next time they played Hearts!