The Paper Magician

“I have good timing, then,” Mg. Thane said, momentarily distracted by something up the stairs. “If you don’t mind.”


She shook her head no. Mg. Thane’s eyes smiled and he vanished back up the stairs.

Ceony retreated back to the icebox for more eggs, the paper dog trailing behind her, sniffing the floor as it went. She watched its paper joints move together as a whole—so that’s what Mg. Thane had meant.

She scooped the fennel off the floor.

“I think I’ll name you Fennel,” she said to it, slipping eggs into the pockets of her apron. “It may be a better cat name, but since you’re not quite a real dog . . . well, it suits you.”

Fennel merely cocked his head to the side, not quite understanding.



Mg. Thane ate his breakfast in the study, where he laid out several books and ledgers across his tidy-cluttered desk. Ceony practiced her reading illusion until just after lunch—she could get three of the fourteen pages to form in the air around her now, and Fennel tried to chase the mouse every time it appeared. The dog provided quite the distraction, but Ceony didn’t mind one bit. She even fastened Bizzy’s old collar around Fennel’s neck. It fit perfectly.

Just after noon Mg. Thane called her into the library to show her the variety of papers kept on the table there, explaining the importance behind their thickness and grain. He seemed somewhat distracted and repeated himself here and there, but Ceony didn’t point it out to him. She was merely relieved that the man hadn’t assigned her physical labor. And, while the thought of such chores didn’t irk her quite the way it had yesterday, she found herself almost grateful for the lesson. What Mg. Thane was teaching her had started to weasel its way into that part of her that wanted to know. She found herself paying rapt attention to Mg. Thane’s lecture, and when she recited the details of the paper back to him at the end of the lesson, she beamed under his compliment, simple as it was.

“That’s quite accurate,” he said. He peered out the window, seeing something Ceony didn’t beyond its glass.

“Are you stuck on something?” she finally asked as he put the sheets of paper into the wrong piles on the desk. She took them from his hands and placed them correctly, being sure to keep all the stacks straight.

“Hm?”

“Stuck on something,” she repeated. “You’re somewhere else today.”

Unless he was always like that in the afternoon. Ceony had known him not quite a full day, so she had nothing to compare him to. She felt sure it wasn’t madness, though.

“I suppose I am,” he said after some thought, blinking and returning to the present. “I’ve a lot on my mind, what with a new apprentice and all.”

“Am I your first?”

“Second and a half,” he answered.

“Half?” Ceony asked. “How do you have half of an apprentice?”

“The last one didn’t stay his full term,” he explained without really explaining at all.

Full term? Ceony thought as a bead of fright washed down her throat. Was he in an accident? Quit? Laid off? Did magicians often lay off their apprentices?

Ceony bit the inside of her cheek. Surely Mg. Thane wouldn’t fire her. The country was too desperate for paper magicians to lose any aspiring Folders, and she’d already bonded paper.

She hadn’t considered the security of her position until now, and it made her stomach curdle. She’d worked so hard to get where she was now—even if it was on the path to becoming a Folder, not a Smelter—and she had still required the luck of receiving a scholarship.

For a moment she saw stars as she remembered the car crash, smelled burning onion as Mrs. Appleton had screamed at her after spilling that wine—

She blinked the memories away. This apprenticeship wasn’t just another job; there would be no going back were she to be laid off. She’d be bound to paper and only paper, yet not legally authorized to do anything with it. She’d be a spent magician.

“You look like you’ve eaten something sour,” Mg. Thane said, pulling a thick sheet of slate-colored paper from the upper-right pile on the desk, just beside the telegraph.

“I was just thinking of what a waste it would be, to bond something and then quit, is all.”

“I agree. Well, let me show you some basic Folds, unless you covered that at Praff?”

Ceony shook her head no.

Mg. Thane dropped to the floor with his board, setting the square of paper on top of it. “Let’s see how astute you actually are, Ceony,” he said. A challenge, then.