The Master Magician

She leaned against the hallway wall by her bedroom door. “He must be safe, then,” she said. Hearing the words out loud gave her some small comfort.

Ceony waited several long minutes there, hoping she’d hear Emery unlock the front door, but the cottage remained silent. Peeling herself from the wall, Ceony went to the library and scrawled a note on a yellow square of paper there:

Patrice told me Saraj had been spotted near Berkshire. Please be careful.

Love you.

She Folded the paper into a songbird and left it on Emery’s bedroom windowsill, making it look like she’d sent the bird from the mansion. Then she slipped back through the lavatory glass and into her room at Mg. Bailey’s residence, where she finally managed to get a few hours of sleep.



Three days.

Three days of waiting for Saraj to make his move, of sending out birds to survey the area, of searching Mg. Bailey’s daily newspapers for articles about Excisioners. Three days since her run-in with Saraj in Reading, and she hadn’t heard one peep.

Not from him, and not from Emery.

Ceony still sent her birds—or moths, or bats—to Emery every evening as soon as twilight promised to hide their departure, but she hadn’t received a response. That made four days without any contact with him, and she knew he’d returned to the cottage. She’d checked Cottage One through the glass in the lavatory and seen his wet towel hanging on the wall.

So why had Emery stopped responding to her?

She doodled water lilies in the margins of her ledger as this question plagued her. She sat at the table in the apprentices’ study, across from Bennet, who labored over the links of an expansion chain. The command “Enlarge” would make the wearer of the chain appear larger to passersby. How large depended on the thickness of the paper. A rather complicated illusion spell, given the make of each link. It was one Ceony planned to use in her preparations for her magician’s test: #37. Something to defend against a tramp.

But, once again, Ceony found she had a hard time concentrating on her studies.

Mg. Bailey had certainly given her space, though he still asked her to sit in on Bennet’s evening lessons. He’d stopped ragging on Emery, but Ceony’s relationship with the belligerent Folder had hardly become peaches and cream. In fact, Mg. Bailey’s demeanor toward Ceony had soured further, if such a thing were possible. For days he’d looked at her with outright suspicion, treating her as the suspect to his detective. She could only guess that the man had noticed a scratch on his Mercedes and assumed Ceony to be the guilty party. And she was, more or less. Still, Ceony didn’t care enough to ask Mg. Bailey if his breeches had grown too tight. She had enough men to worry about!

What if . . . she wondered, stilling her pen, What if Emery’s grown tired of me?

Preposterous. Wasn’t it? They got on splendidly, all the time. He loved her. They’d even discussed marriage! Ceony could laugh at the idea of him growing bored with her.

And yet she didn’t. She blinked rapidly to hide a tear, then glanced at Bennet to see if he’d noticed, but his chain spell demanded all his attention. Taking a deep breath, Ceony finished her doodle.

What if he’s using Magician Bailey as an excuse to distance us? she wondered. What if all of this is meant to be some sort of cushion so he can break our relationship cleanly?

Mg. Emery Thane had been married before, and it had ended very, very badly. Ceony had seen firsthand the damage that relationship had done to him, the jagged crack it had left in his heart. Surely that canyon had not yet been filled. And what if it never was? What if Emery couldn’t handle the commitment once Ceony graduated from his tutelage and their romance became public?

What if Ceony was only ever meant to be a secret?

You’ll kill yourself thinking like that, she chided herself, gripping her pen tighter. Be reasonable. There must be an explanation.

She wondered where Emery had gone the day she’d transported to his cottage and left that warning. He hadn’t even replied to that.

“Do you remember Magician Whitmill?”

Ceony glanced up at Bennet’s words. He held a completed chain link in his hands, and his blue eyes smiled at her. They made her think of a teddy bear.

Ceony blinked to clear her mind, to pull her thoughts away from Emery for long enough to search her memory for the name. It rang a bell, and her mind zoomed back nearly three years to her first semester at Tagis Praff. She sat in the auditorium of the school on the aisle, beside a classmate she didn’t know, but whose face she recalled with perfect clarity, for all the good it would do her. In her mind’s eye she looked ahead at the stage, at the portly Polymaker with gray-streaked hair and a gray-streaked mustache. She laughed.

Bennet smiled. “So you do?”