The Master Magician

“What did you find, little one?” she asked, chills pricking her sun-heated shoulders. The paper songbird bounced in her hands thrice before flying westward, keeping low to the ground. Ceony hurried after it, grabbing her long skirt in her hands as she went.

The bird flew quite a distance, heading away from the road. By the time it landed on a dirt path overgrown with weeds, not far from the town line and an exposed sewer pipe, Ceony’s face had flushed red, and perspiration clung to her hairline and camisole. Ceony knew the spell for a fan that would cool her quickly, but in her excitement, she settled for waving both hands before her face.

She looked about her. Some of the weeds and wild grasses here looked trod upon and torn, as though a brawl had occurred. Something shiny caught her eye—squatting, Ceony picked up a spent bullet, smashed. It must have struck something hard—perhaps the carriage itself? But Ceony saw no wheel tracks. The bullet was etched with a targeting spell, she noticed, meaning that at least one Smelter had been on duty. Unless, of course, the bit of metal was from the naval base. Ceony doubted it.

The white bird, its wings starting to bend backward from the brisk wind, perched on a skinny vine of sunburned morning glory, half rooted from the ground. Ceony dropped to her knees and pushed aside weeds and dirt. The summer sun glinted off a brown piece of glass barely larger than her thumbnail, perhaps from a beer bottle left behind by an off-duty naval officer. She wiped a thin layer of dust from it and saw her reflection on its smooth side—the inside of the bottle. Not a spotless reflection but adequate for her current needs.

“Good birdie,” Ceony wheezed, wiping the back of her hand over her forehead. “Cease.”

The proud bird toppled onto the ground, immobile.

Ceony held out the brown glass in her palm. She’d never attempted a mirror-based spell on something that wasn’t a mirror . . . but Gaffer spells could work on substances other than Gaffer’s glass, so it was worth a shot.

Ceony’s fingers fiddled with her charm necklace. She broke her bond with paper and became a glass magician once more.

Staring at her tinted reflection, she said, “Reflect, past.”

Her image contorted left, then right, then swirled. Her face vanished from the shard, and instead she saw strands of grass and a peep of sky laced with a single, stretched-out cloud.

Pressing her lips together, Ceony searched her memory of the Gaffer books she had read for pertinent manipulations to this spell. “Backward reflect,” she commanded it.

The reflection of the cloud slowly crawled off the glass.

“Tenth increase,” she said, and the reflection on the brown bottle reversed itself ten times as fast. The light darkened. A star appeared. Sunrise. The grass wavered in the wind.

“Tenth increase, tenth increase,” Ceony instructed, and the shard’s memories rewound faster and faster. This spell, something a Gaffer apprentice would likely learn in his or her first year, already felt far more complicated than nearly all the Folding spells Ceony knew. Perhaps another reason why paper magic had become so unpopular in England.

Day, night, day, night. Rain. The broken piece of bottle sped through its memories beneath Ceony’s scrutiny. It likely wouldn’t reveal anything useful—

“Hold,” Ceony instructed, catching sight of shadows, but they proved to be the silhouettes of two little boys, their indecipherable banter playing on the glass in tandem with their images.

She commanded the glass to continue back through its memories. A larger shadow appeared after another two days. “Hold,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.

The image played at normal speed. The mirror was masked by shadow at first; then something shifted and the sun highlighted tight curls on a head of hair. The head looked back, and in the distance, Ceony heard a whistle, someone yelling. Police officers.

The shadowy man disappeared from the reflection a moment later. The police officers never entered it.

“Saraj,” Ceony whispered, lowering her spyglass as it shifted back to a view of the swaying grass and summer sky. It had to be him. She had seen his darkened silhouette before and could summon the memory as easily as she could recall what she ate for breakfast. And in this location, with those sounds . . . she felt almost positive.

Her gaze fell back to the shard in her palm. One thing she knew for certain—the shadowy figure that grazed its surface had headed north, toward town. Not south, east, or west, all of which would eventually lead him to the ocean. To potential escape.

If her calculations were correct, Saraj had bunkered down in England, not fled it.

She let a curse roll off her tongue and savored the sharpness of it. Her heart palpitated inside a rib cage made of needles. She fisted the glass shard until its edges threatened to split her skin.