The Paper Magician

Ceony sat in the living room to finish her cake with her parents while Marshall and Margo played with their new spells in their room. Zina had headed to Parliament Square for a date. Bizzy, the Jack Russell terrier Ceony had been forced to leave behind upon accepting her apprenticeship, curled up lazily at Ceony’s feet, lifting her head every now and then to beg for a crumb.

“Well,” Ceony’s mother said after her second piece of cake, “it does sound like it’s going well for you. Magician Thane seems like a very nice teacher.”

“He is,” Ceony said, hoping the poor lighting masked the blush creeping up her cheeks. She set her plate on the floor for Bizzy to lick. “He’s very nice.”

Ceony’s father clapped his hands down on his knees and let out a long breath. “Well, we’d better get you a buggy so you can head back before it’s too late.” He glanced out the window at the night sky. Then he stood, opening his arms for an embrace.

Ceony jumped up and hugged her father tightly, then her mother. “I’ll visit soon,” she promised. Without traffic, it took just over an hour to get from Emery’s cottage to Whitechapel’s Mill Squats, so Ceony didn’t drop in as often as she would have liked. She felt certain she could make the trip in a quarter hour on Emery’s paper glider, but he insisted that the world wasn’t ready for such eccentricity.

Ceony’s father called the buggy service, for which Ceony insisted on paying, and soon Ceony sat in the back of an automobile, chugging past the tightly spaced flats of the Mill Squats on a cobbled road winding between town houses. She passed the post office, the grocer, and the turn for the children’s park, taking the meandering route out of the quieting city. Soon her buggy’s lights were the only ones on the road. Ceony stared out the open window at the stars, which grew in number the closer she drew to Emery’s cottage. Invisible crickets sang from the tall grasses that lined the road out of London, and the river running alongside it bubbled and churned.

Ceony’s heart beat a little faster when the buggy pulled to a stop. After paying, she disembarked and stepped past the cottage’s menacing spells, which disguised it as a run-down mansion with broken windows and falling shingles. Beyond the fence, the home stood three stories high, made of soft yellow brick and surrounded by a garden of vibrant paper flowers, buds closed for the night. A light burned in the library window. Emery had been away all week at a Magic Materials in Architecture conference, which the Magicians’ Cabinet had insisted he attend. Ceony quickly straightened her skirt and rebraided her hair to smooth any loose ends.

The padding of paper paws capered behind the door before Ceony could finish turning her key. Once inside, Fennel jumped into her arms and wagged his paper tail, barking his whispery bark. His dry paper tongue licked the base of Ceony’s chin.

Ceony laughed. “I wasn’t even gone a full day, silly thing,” she said, scratching behind the dog’s paper ears before setting him back down. Fennel ran in two short circles before jumping onto a pile of paper bones at the end of the hallway. When enchanted, those bones formed the body of Emery’s skeletal butler, Jonto, to whom Ceony had finally become accustomed. Still, being routinely awoken by a paper skeleton dusting her headboard had been enough motivation for Ceony to start locking her door.

“Be gentle,” Ceony warned Fennel, who had taken to chewing on Jonto’s femur. Fortunately, his paper teeth did little damage to the bone. She stepped past the mess and flipped on the light in the kitchen. The simple room had a small stove to her right and a horseshoe of cupboards to her left, behind which rested the back door and the icebox. She didn’t see any dirty dishes in the sink. Had Emery eaten?

Ceony thought of preparing something just in case, but a flash of color from the dining room caught the corner of her eye.

There, on the table, sat a wooden vase full of red paper roses, so intricately Folded they looked real. Ceony approached them slowly and reached out a hand to touch their delicate petals, which had been Folded of the thinnest paper Emery had in stock. The flowers even had complex, fernlike leaves and a few rounded thorns.

Beside the vase rested an oval hair barrette made of paper beads and tightly wound spirals, heavily coated with a hard gloss to keep it from bending. Ceony picked up the barrette and thumbed its ornamentation. It would take her hours to craft something this intricate, let alone the roses.

The roses. Ceony pulled a small square of paper from the center of the bouquet. It read “Happy Birthday” in Emery’s perfect cursive script.

Her stomach fluttered.