The Master Magician

Do you really want to involve another person in this? asked the voice in the back of her mind. Could Bennet end up traveling the same road as Anise and Delilah? Was she destined to leave a path of devastation behind her?

“I won’t let him come with me,” she told herself. “A drop-off at the train station, and that’s it.” After that, I won’t lean on Bennet for anything. Perhaps a touch of flirtation would help convince him.

Seizing a gray square of paper, Ceony scribbled across its surface and Folded it into a simple glider, which she directed to the window below hers. She watched until Bennet’s window opened and his hand guided the glider into his room.

The park will have to wait. Can you take me to the CLR? It’s vitally important and would mean the world to me.

Best to leave Mg. Bailey to his rest. Secrets make friendships fonder, no?

Turning from the window, Ceony opened her ledger with her free hand and flipped to her notes on Saraj, despite having memorized the words verbatim. She’d written both Delilah’s and Anise’s names in the corner and traced them over and over again until the letters were so thick the names were barely legible. Her conversation with Mg. Aviosky played through her mind. She mulled over that piece of brown glass stowed away in her purse.

Ceony realized she had found a gold coin in the murky sewage of her situation with Mg. Bailey—a sort of freedom she would never have back at the cottage.

Emery wasn’t here. She needn’t worry about hiding secrets or bending promises so long as she resided in this empty mansion so far from her dear tutor, and no one, not even Mg. Bailey, supervised her time.

She cradled the red songbird against her chest. Yes. So long as she resided with the petulant Folder, she could—and would—continue her pursuit of Saraj.



Enchanted lamps and fire workings kept the CLR aglow as Bennet, his hands sweaty, white, and gripping the steering wheel of his tutor’s car, pulled into the exact same parking spot Ceony had sat in nearly two years ago with Emery, before the paper magician had taken off to battle Saraj. Oddly, it was also the same place where he had first kissed her.

Ceony didn’t mention this to her comrade, of course.

“I don’t know what he’ll do if I’m caught,” Bennet wheezed, “but I don’t think it will be good.”

“You’ll be fine,” Ceony assured him. She squeezed his shoulder. “Thank you. I’ll be back before too long. Don’t wait up.”

“Are you sure? I can come with you, help you with whatever it is that needs doing. You shouldn’t go alone, Ceony. A woman out alone in the dark . . .”

I have to. No one else will get hurt if I’m alone. She smiled. “Unless someone robs the train, I’ll be fine. You wouldn’t be much good in a robbery like that anyway. Besides, you have Magician Bailey to worry about.”

Bennet swallowed, looking sallow and ill. “What should I say if he asks?”

“Nothing,” Ceony replied, slinging her bag over her shoulder. It pulled with the extra weight of her Tatham percussion-lock pistol, which she’d stowed in the very bottom, just in case. “I left an illusion in my room of me sleeping, if he bothers to check.”

“He’ll be able to tell.”

“Only if he’s looking closely,” she countered. “Be safe.”

Bennet nodded. “Best hurry. And then you can give me the details of why you need to be at the CLR so late at night. You can trust me, Ceony.”

Ceony made no promises, merely let herself out of the vehicle and strode to the station, where she purchased a ticket and boarded the last train for Reading. Only three other people rode in the car with her.

Ceony fiddled with her charm necklace as the train sped west, its wide wheels practically floating over the Smelter-enchanted rails beneath it. How the metal-induced spell of speed worked, Ceony didn’t know. None of her personal studies in Smelting came close to such a feat, which had only been built a few years back. She remembered glimpsing an article on it in the local paper, back when she’d still been a student at Tagis Praff.



Unease began to creep into Ceony’s resolve when the train met its destination, blowing out smoke and steam as the engine relaxed onto its rails for a night’s rest. She imagined it to be near midnight, and despite the glow of more magicked lamps in the Reading train station, Ceony couldn’t help but focus on the dark spots in between them and beyond. She slipped her right hand into her bag as she walked, touching both Folded and un-Folded papers, fingering the handle of her pistol.