The Paper Magician

She turned back for the cave. Her soul yearned to run, but her body refused. It wasn’t broken, only felt broken. Exhausted. Distant.

She stumbled into the cave, followed its wall with one hand until she reached the bowled shelf that held Emery’s heart, still beating strong.

She checked her bag, empty save for Fennel. She spoke to the dog silently in thought, thanking him, promising to restore him as soon as she was able. Then she picked a few pieces of him apart, careful not to damage the greater part of his body, and tiredly Folded the links for a vitality chain, just large enough to encircle a grown man’s heart.

Ceony fled the cave and climbed up the rocks before the boat reached the shore. She didn’t look back.

She found the enormous glider where she had left it and flew to London, carrying Emery’s heart next to her own.





CHAPTER 16



AS WIND RUSHED OVER her aching body and numb hands, Ceony’s mind drifted back to Emery’s home. Her home. What if he had passed on while she had been away? What if she had been too slow? Could an animated heart revive an inanimate body?

His heart fluttered weakly against hers, having lost much of its lingering strength since she lifted it from the enchanted pool.

But she still had time. Surely she still had time. Stories like this one weren’t meant to end badly.

Magicians Aviosky, Hughes, and Katter would have noted her absence by now, but she found herself not caring for whatever repercussions they could offer her. She didn’t regret her decision, even if her clumsy paper heart didn’t pull Emery through this. She prayed her Folding had held up.

The magicians had, at least, left the giant door in Emery’s roof open. The glider swooped up and landed gracefully, even without her directing it. It knew its master’s house.

Ceony pulled stiff fingers from its handles, massaging them against her hip to coax movement back into the knuckles. Her head felt full of clouds, but not in the dreamy sense. Just the empty one.

The floorboards creaked under her feet. Her bag swung at her side like a broken pendulum from a derelict grandfather clock, and she felt as if she were made of paper herself. She leaned on the stairwell wall as she descended down to the second floor, holding Emery’s heart to her breast, its small vitality chain soaked red. She had left her shoe wedged between the rocks of the island shore, not wanting to stay any longer than was absolutely necessary. Her sore, socked foot muffled every other step.

She passed Emery’s room, the door ajar, the bed empty. They must not have moved him. He was downstairs, still alive. Waiting for her. They wouldn’t have buried him without her. She hadn’t been gone that long.

Had she?

Past the library, the lavatory, her bedroom. She leaned on the wall as she took the stairs to the first floor.

Mg. Aviosky opened the door, eight steps below her.

“Ceony Twill!” she exclaimed with all the anxiety of a worried mother, the sternness of an academy principal, and the relief of a farmer feeling spring’s first rain on his skin. Her eyes widened round as dinner chargers. Ceony must have been a sight to see.

Mg. Aviosky’s face paled and she started up the steps, but Ceony’s words made her pause. “I’m not hurt,” she said. And she wasn’t, not really. The blood running down her blouse wasn’t hers.

She gently pulled Emery’s heart from beneath her collar. Mg. Aviosky pressed a hand to her mouth.

“That isn’t . . . ,” she whispered through her fingers.

Ceony took the last eight steps down, pushing past Mg. Aviosky, who didn’t stop her. Ceony didn’t have the energy for an argument, not right now. She saw no trace of Magicians Hughes and Katter.

Her own heart quickened at the sight of Emery, the real Emery, lying in his makeshift bed on the dining room floor just as she had left him. His skin almost held the pallor of death. His lips were almost violet. His eyes were almost sunken.

Almost, but not quite. Her paper heart still beat within his chest.

Mg. Aviosky closed the stairway door and asked the question surfacing in Ceony’s own mind. “Will it work?”

“I don’t know,” Ceony whispered. It scared her that a magician as experienced as Aviosky would ask that. What if it didn’t?

She walked around to Emery’s left side and knelt beside him. She held his heart in one hand and reopened his shirt with the other. His flesh felt cool, but not cold.

“There’s still magic left in it,” she said. She knew only because no heart could beat on its own without its body, not without a spell, and Lira’s magic had been strong. Hopefully it would be enough.

She placed the heart upon his chest. His skin glimmered with the gold residue of Lira’s spell, and the cavity opened. The sight of an open chest would have terrified Ceony had she not just lived in one, more or less.

“How long was I gone?” she asked as her paper heart greeted her with a feeble, soggy pulse.

“One night,” Mg. Aviosky answered, barely audible.