The Paper Magician

A guard came around the corner, a brawny man with a mustache and a neck so muscled it looked as if he bore steel cords beneath the skin. He wore a pistol at one hip and a club at the other, and his face settled into the sort of look that guaranteed no criminal would dare sneeze on his watch, let alone escape. Ceony froze under that stare until she validated that, as with all the previous visions, this man could not see her. She waved a hand in front of his face as he passed to be sure. She didn’t play a role in this vision, then.

“Sit up for breakfast!” the guard shouted, pulling his club from his belt and beating it along each prison door, lifting a small metal flap that revealed wrought-iron bars just wide enough to let a plate of food slip past. “Sit up or don’t get fed, your choice!”

Ceony winced at the loud clamor of the club on iron, then dared to peek into one of the cells.

She stumbled back from its bars until her shoulders touched the opposite stone wall.

Lira.

Lira lay in that cell, her hair long and frayed at the ends, her body draped in a brown prisoner’s uniform, her eyes downcast. She sat up before the guard’s club reached her cell, but that didn’t stop him from rattling her door all the same.

Lira in prison. If only.

Ceony tiptoed away from her and peered into the next cell, seeing a lanky, dark-skinned man with a long scar across his nose. She didn’t recognize him, but the face in the next cell sparked a memory—the thick chin, small eyes, and crinkled forehead looked just as they had on the WANTED poster she had spied at the post office two years ago:

WANTED

GRATH COBALT

FOR CRIMES AGAINST THE STATE

Ceony stepped back from the bars. She remembered what the poster had said. Remembered the way it had made her scalp itch. Excision. Grath Cobalt was an Excisioner—and the most dangerous Excisioner in all of Europe, so rumor told.

Ceony’s back hit the cool stone behind her once more as she watched the powerful man now in chains and behind bars, jarring ever so slightly as the guard’s club passed over his door. Now that she studied him, she noticed he had lost weight from what the poster had depicted of him. Lost muscle. He looked . . . docile.

“These are your hopes,” she whispered as another strong guard pushing a wheel-cart of food came down the forlorn hallway. “These are your hopes, aren’t they, Thane? You hope I’ll continue to learn paper magic, that I’ll study it like you have. You hope these Excisioners—the people you’ve been hunting down—will finally be arrested and pulled from society.”

“But it won’t happen,” said a sickly sweet voice down the corridor.

Ceony whirled around. Lira—the real Lira—stood at the end of the hallway clad in black, her long dagger cradled in her right hand. A heavy leather sack hung off her left shoulder. The vision of the prison began to shift and blur around them, as though Lira’s presence made the dream harder for Thane’s heart to grasp. Like a sleeper being woken from a dream.

Ceony’s spine went rigid and she stepped back, ready to call for the bulky guard—but he had vanished. Both guards had, and the cells around her stood empty, leaving Ceony alone in the midst of a dripping, warping prison with only Lira and Fennel as company.

Fennel growled, his paper lips almost rippling with the sound.

“What do you want?” Ceony asked, her voice quivering almost as much as the rest of her did. She touched her shield chain, then reached shaking fingers into her bag.

“Me?” Lira asked with a red-painted mouth, taking a broad, strong step forward, then another. The bag on her shoulder swayed stiffly with the movements. “I want Emery’s whore dead. I don’t like sharing.”

“I’m not . . . his whore,” Ceony said, stepping back once, twice, three times. Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to hold her ground. She had come here knowing she’d have to face Lira. That, and Ceony would rather go down fighting than be crushed like a cockroach backed into a corner.

Lira quirked a brow at Ceony’s stance—perhaps she was impressed. Or amused. Thane’s wife—hopefully ex-wife—wasn’t as easy to read as Thane himself.

“I don’t care what you are,” Lira said, the words so light they chimed like laughter. “But Emery’s heart is mine—it always has been, my dear. Even if the rest of him defies everything I believe in . . .” She lifted a long-nailed hand and squeezed it into a fist. “His heart is still worth something to me. A heart that’s known love is stronger than one that hasn’t, did you know that?”

Lira took another step forward, and her dark eyes dropped to Ceony’s chest. “You’d make an interesting pet. Have you known love? Hate? I wonder how strong your heart is. Why don’t we find out?”

“No!” Ceony shouted, fingers clutching the first Folds they felt in her bag. At the same moment, Lira dropped the leather bag from her shoulder and, with a quick command, half a dozen severed hands rose from its mouth, bloodied and raw at the wrist, their fingers pale and violet, their nails jagged and blue. They floated on invisible wings, their stiff, foul fingers wriggling and reaching.

Lira swiped her own hand forward, and her army of extremities sailed down the hallway toward Ceony like a wave of hornets.