The Paper Magician

“Come on, Fennel,” Ceony commanded. As she lost sight of the paper magician, she took a deep breath. This was the past, after all. No use getting upset over it. “Still,” she said aloud, “I’ll have to ask you what changed your mind about Folding. And I hope you apologized to him.”


Students filtered from the halls into their respective classrooms, thinning out the population enough for Ceony to find a set of double doors that appeared to lead outside. She assumed those doors would either reveal to her another shade of Emery Thane’s heart, or warp her back to the third chamber itself, which she had yet to physically see. She hoped for the latter—she needed to escape Lira’s trap quickly, and the only plausible way out seemed to be at the heart’s end—she had to reach it, just as she had to play out each of these stories, one by one, to get there.

She opened the door and found herself in a familiar office—the first she had entered in this chamber, albeit lit with dim evening sunlight filtering through that square window and candles set on the desk and surrounding shelves. Ceony hesitated at the doorway to the office, the too-recent memory of it raking her brain with needles.

Emery sat at his desk, poring over a thin stack of papers, though not the Folding kind. He held a pen in one hand and tangled the other in his hair, worn shorter than in present day.

Fennel sniffed around the mauve rug strewn over floorboards stained with age. Ceony let the door shut behind her.

Everything in the office—smaller than the study at the yellow-brick house on the outskirts of London—spoke of Emery. Shelves, trunks, and furniture pressed against all four walls of the room, each set in an almost symmetrical order without allowing the tiniest bit of space to go unused. A fine-looking shelf of cherrywood held stacks upon stacks of paper in eggshell, chartreuse, and rose, all cut into different-sized rectangles and squares. Another shelf held together with metal clamps bore endless volumes of very old books, some of which Ceony recognized from a different shelf in Emery’s present bedroom. Atop that shelf rested an assortment of glass bottles filled with bright colors of sand layered on top of each other, and beside those, an empty picture frame. Ceony wondered if it had ever held a photo. She didn’t recognize it from the yellow-brick house.

A glass half-filled with some sort of tea sat at the end of Emery’s desk. Ceony touched it—cold. A sniff caught a hint of peppermint. Now that she thought of it, she hadn’t seen any coffee in Emery’s kitchen—perhaps he didn’t like the flavor. Or perhaps it made him jittery, and Ceony imagined “jittery” would not complement the list of Emery’s personality traits.

Carefully placed clutter littered the desk everywhere except a perfect rectangle where Emery read those papers—a jar filled with writing utensils and a compass, a short calendar depicting a different species of tree for each day of the year, a bottle of blotting sand. More papers, folders, and small racks holding more papers and folders. Her inspection hesitated on a model of the Surrey Theatre entirely crafted from paper, from the columns standing guard at the front entrance to the English flag that flew from the spire protruding from the top of the theatre’s dome. Ceony marveled at it for a few long seconds, wondering how much time and precision must have gone into such a detailed piece. Phasing or no, she dared not touch it, though the front doors did look like they were meant to open via the mouselike hinges that held them to the building’s foremost wall.

She glanced to Emery. He created such beautiful things.

Emery flipped one of his pages over and began to write along the bottom of the next. Ceony finally settled her attention on the documents—thick legal jargon in small print crammed between one-inch margins on all sides. Each paragraph had its own number, and some sentences had been typed in all caps and separated with bold lines. Across the bottom Emery scrawled his signature—he had stunning handwriting, his lowercase letters all the same width and the capital E and T of his name drawn with minimal flourish. Part of Ceony wanted to trace those letters just so she could learn to scrawl half as well.

He turned that page and began to scour the next, his lips in a frown, his eyes set in concentration and wrinkled at the outside corners. Ceony read the header at the top of the page: “BERKSHIRE COUNTY CLERK | DECLARATION OF DIVORCE.”

The light in the office dimmed as the sun finally dropped behind the world. Ceony spied the date he penned alongside his second signature. Exactly two years and five months had passed since this memory. Had he been living alone all this time?