The Paper Magician

She couldn’t get away. She clutched Emery’s spell in her hand, but she couldn’t get away.

She had to use it. Here. Now.

“Burst,” Ceony whispered, releasing the paper.

The rhombus began to quiver, faster and faster, buzzing like a hornet as it slowly, leisurely fell toward the ground. The buzz grew louder, higher, louder, higher . . .

The diamond-Folded paper exploded in a burst of fireworks and flame, blasting outward like a pistol with a blocked barrel.

The explosion flung Ceony sideways against the cliff. The ragged rocks cut through the fibers of her blouse and into her skin. She fell onto her elbow and hip, the taste of ash filling her mouth.

For several heartbeats everything looked white and bright, like the morning sun itself. As color, shape, and shadow gradually returned to her eyes, a high-pitched note rang in her ears, a tuning fork struck and never stilled.

She pushed herself up, arm aching, hip stiff. The rocky beach swished back and forth. Her temples throbbed with her pulse: PUM-Pom-poom.

Emery.

Across the rocks, nearly to where the ocean lapped at the shore, Lira sputtered and weakly tried to push herself onto all fours. Ebony drapes of damp hair hung over her cheeks.

Ceony forced herself up, clinging to the rock shelf. The morning spun and tilted. That constant note—perhaps a high B-flat—continued to ring inside her skull.

She had to act. Lira had touched her—all it would take was a quick recovery to recast whatever heinous spell the burst had interrupted.

Bits of half-soaked papers lay scattered over the ground, fallen from Ceony’s bag. Lira’s dagger lay on its side halfway between them, its hilt resting in a patch of lichen. Several gulls cried as they flew over the ocean, abandoning the site of the explosion.

Though the ocean still swayed in her vision, Ceony ran for the blade. Lira, peering up through her hair, staggered to her feet and sprinted for it as well.

Both their hands lunged for the knife.

Ceony’s fingers grasped it first.

Hefting the surprisingly heavy blade, Ceony shouted an unintelligible cry and arched the blade up and over her in an imperfect crescent. She felt something tug back on her swing, but not hard enough to stop it. The sharp blade pulled clean through.

Lira screamed.

Blood rained over the shore. Lira stumbled back, both hands rushing to her face to stanch the steady flow of red water pouring from a split cheek and gouged eye.

Ceony dropped the dagger, feeling her stomach flip inside out. Lira cried again and lashed out, backhanding Ceony across the jaw.

Ceony fell, catching herself on raw palms. Lira dropped to her knees, gasping and cursing, blood pouring between her fingers. She tried to chant her healing spell but choked on every other word. Her blood had spilled everywhere—it dyed the tiny pools and streams of high tidewater, stained the lichen, painted crimson streaks across rocks and paper.

Paper. Crumpled, damp, and torn paper, wet with blood.

Numb, Ceony reached for a drier piece singed about the edges. Lira’s blood sluggishly soaked through its fibers.

Her mind felt detached, her thoughts vacant as she touched the blood—the body’s ink—with an index finger. Her mind didn’t really process the idea; it merely materialized behind her eyes like a thread of nostalgia, as though it had always been there. It and nothing else.

She wrote nine letters and, with a shaky but strong voice, read them aloud.

“Lira froze.”

And she did.

Ceony stared at the still image of Lira hunched over and cradling her ruined face, tendrils of ice climbing up her legs and hunched back. Her grunts and gasps vanished, her lips parted midbreath. Strands of wild hair hung in the air free from gravity’s hold, as though someone had molded them in place with glue.

Ceony gaped. She had read the paper like an illusion. Like Pip’s Daring Escape. But this wasn’t a story. Or, rather, it was her story. Not an illusion at all.

She stared at her bloody finger, but her thoughts—her ability to process—remained far from her. She returned to the page, wrote, and read, “. . . and never moved again.”

The statue of Lira remained unchanged.

Ceony stood, letting the bloody paper fall to the rocks. A small whirlpool of hungry saltwater lapped up the words, sucking them back into the ocean. She backed seven steps away from Lira before a spot of brown on the ocean drew her eyes, close enough that she didn’t need to squint to make out its shape.

A boat. It held two men, their features too distant to be distinct. One rowed, oars flapping in sync on either side of the boat. The other knelt at the boat’s helm, peering toward the coast.

Ceony thought of the morbid seagull she had seen upon her arrival and tensed. The creature had been sent by someone, why not these two? Only the boat’s nearness pushed her legs to move.