The Paper Magician

She squinted, watching herself fill wine glasses. She looked awful in that dress. It accentuated all the wrong places. Thank goodness she hadn’t known Thane then. Her ears burned at the thought.

Ceony recognized one man in particular at the table her younger self served. Though he was a few years short of middle-aged, he had gray hair with a receding hairline and a long gray mustache that framed the sides of his mouth. He boasted broad shoulders and a well-tailored suit—perhaps the best-tailored in the entire ballroom, with three real-gold buttons and a red-pleated cummerbund. Oh yes, she remembered him. Him and his foul talk about the Mill Squats where she had grown up, blathering nonsense about its education and a nonexistent prostitute program just because the district was a poor one. Ceony remembered this night distinctly. She had hated that man, and she had done a good job of keeping her temper controlled, until—

She held her breath and watched, waiting for that moment. Waiting . . .

There it was. Ceony—younger Ceony—reached over to fill the man’s wine glass, and his ungloved hand swooped right under her skirt. She still remembered his clammy fingers against her thigh.

Younger Ceony jumped back, scowled, and dumped the rest of that expensive mulberry wine right onto the man’s lap. The man yelped and leapt up so quickly his chair fell backward and clamored against the marble floor. The sound—both the chair and the man’s curse—echoed through the entire ballroom.

Beside her, Thane burst into laughter.

It startled Ceony. She glanced to Thane, ogling him, then realized he had been watching as well. He had seen Ceony dump half a pitcher of vintage wine onto the best-dressed man in the establishment, embarrassing the both of them in front of England’s finest.

And Thane laughed.

“What’s gotten into you?” the balding man across from Thane asked, oblivious.

“One of the waitresses just dumped a pitcher onto Sinad Mueller’s lap,” he chortled, picking up a sage-green cloth napkin to dab at his eyes.

Ceony paled. Had he said . . . Sinad Mueller?

Time seemed to freeze as that name processed in Ceony’s mind. Sinad Mueller. The Mueller Academic scholarship. The scholarship Ceony should have been first pick for, but had lost last minute, crushing her dreams of pursuing magic. The scholarship that—once lost—resigned her to a life of housework just to earn enough for school to become a half-decent chef. It all made sense now.

Ceony stared as she watched her younger self storm back into the kitchen—where she would promptly be fired—as Sinad Mueller continued shouting expletives. Two of his colleagues darted from their chairs with napkins ready to make a futile attempt at cleaning the man up.

She released the rail and took a step back. All her muscles went lax.

That was why Ceony had lost the scholarship. She had dumped a pitcher of wine onto the very man who would have awarded it to her.

“He deserved it.”

Ceony turned to see a second Mg. Thane standing over the one sitting down. This one wore a long indigo coat and his arms folded across his chest.

Ceony’s eyes darted between the two Thanes, nearly identical, and gasped. “Thane?”

But the second Thane didn’t look at her, only at the scene unfolding below. He appeared almost as unaware as his counterpart. And yet, when he spoke, it seemed as if he spoke to her.

“Sinad Mueller is a vile man behind closed doors,” he said. “You can hear it in his voice, the way he talks, the way he looks at women—even young men. He hoards his money and doles it out publicly to only the best specimens, and he makes sure half the country knows of his ‘generosity.’ He plays the school board like a fiddle, and I for one believe he cheated on his exit exams. He enchants rubber about as well as a tire salesman.”

Ceony clutched the strap of her bag and felt Fennel circle her legs. “He knew who I was.”

“I found out who you were,” Thane said, and Ceony wasn’t sure if it was in response to her statement or merely the next line of his monologue. “He revoked your scholarship, so I stepped in.” He chuckled to himself and rubbed his chin with his thumb. “I wanted to see the look on his face when that ‘petulant, fiery girl,’ as he put it, waltzed into Tagis Praff and stuffed his manner and his foul money right back into his coat pocket.”

Ceony glimpsed the ballroom floor, but Sinad Mueller had already left the room. “You gave it to me to spite him?” she asked. “Fifteen thousand pounds just to spite someone you didn’t like . . . not that I’m ungrateful. You have no idea how much it means to me—”