The Paper Magician

CHAPTER 14



SHE PASSED THROUGH BLINDLY, pushing her tired limbs through the tunnel that constricted around her like the big snakes at the London Zoo. But as Ceony had decided with Shadow-Emery, she would not be the mouse. With a grunt and an extra shove with her left leg, she reached the other side of the valve.

Just like chamber three, the fourth chamber opened up already playing a vision, though this vision seemed . . . different. Ceony did not find herself in a room, garden, or city. She had a feeling that this place was not a memory, either. She had never seen this landscape before, and she had a distinct feeling that, outside of Emery’s heart, it didn’t exist.

Before her stretched miles and miles of dry ground—not quite desert, but not quite anything else, either. Just tired, bronze ground stretching in all directions, unbroken by mountains or rivers or forests. Not a single weed or mound marred its surface. It stretched forever until it met a gray-blue sky lined with pale cerise, a sky perpetually caught in the moments before sunrise. Nothing broke the sky, not a single cloud or strip of color, no birds or seedlings caught upon the wind. There was no wind.

Ceony smelled nothing, not even the scent of dust and earth, and she heard nothing outside of herself—no crawling creatures, no whistles, thunder, moans, threats. No weeping, no rain. No heartbeat. Silence surrounded her. Endless silence on an endless plane.

Only one thing disturbed the endlessness of the place. One thing, one very large thing that no heart-traveler could ever miss in her adventure.

A canyon. A giant crack zigzagged over the dry, bland ground far to her left. The . . . north, she supposed. It was as good a direction as any. No bridges spanned it; no rivers filled it.

Ceony approached the canyon carefully, testing the solidity of the ground around it as she neared. Bronze sand, the same color as the earth, filled its deepness. A deepness that Ceony could tell had once been much deeper than it was. As she thought it, she saw a handful of sand drop from midair and rain onto the canyon floor.

Crouching, Ceony felt the edge of the giant crack. None of it came away in her fingers, even when she scratched it with her nails. The rock stayed hard and firm. Another handful of sand dropped to the canyon floor, seeming to make no difference in the canyon’s depth whatsoever. But Ceony knew that enough handfuls would fill it, eventually. After all, it took time to mend one’s heart. Enough time could heal a heart as broken as this one. It was half-healed already.

“I’m dying, aren’t I?”

Ceony turned around to see Emery Thane standing before her in his indigo coat, looking just as he had at the banquet and the church, though more . . . tired. His shoulders slouched, and dark circles lined his eyes. He was a tad translucent, but Ceony didn’t point it out to him.

A sliver of the real Emery Thane. One she could interact with.

She answered, “Yes.”

He nodded once, solemn.

“But if you help me get out, I think I can save you,” she added, standing. “I’ve come all this way hoping there’d be a way out, at the end.”

Emery’s eyes scanned the expanse. “She’s too strong. I’ll never be able to stop her, or the others.”

“We can stop her if we work together,” Ceony assured him, and as she did, a realization struck her. Doubts, she thought. This chamber must be his doubts and regrets, just as the second chamber was his hopes. The heart had the dark to balance out the light, the uncertainty to balance the dreams. All carefully balanced, but with her caught in the middle. “But I need your help, Emery. I’m only an apprentice, and I haven’t been an apprentice for very long.”

“Hmmm,” he hummed, neither in agreement nor disagreement. His gaze fell to her bag. “May I see him?”

It took a moment of processing before Ceony understood the request. She carefully lifted Fennel from her bag and handed his broken body to Emery.

Emery examined the pieces, a slight frown touching his lips. He held out a hand. It took her a moment to understand what he wanted. Ceony reached into her bag and handed him paper, relishing the tingle it sent through her fingers.

He worked deftly, unsnapping the turquoise collar from about the crushed Folds and re-Folding, reconnecting pieces of paper. Ceony handed him a second and third piece of paper, watching with her hands clasped to her breast as Emery remade Fennel’s head, a perfect replica of what it had been before.

He handed the paper dog back to Ceony, who whispered, “Breathe.”

Fennel shook his head and squirmed in Ceony’s grasp, wanting to be put down. Ceony laughed and hugged the dog to her chest. Fennel licked her cheek twice before resuming his insistent squirming. Ceony set him down, and he ran in circles beside her, stretching out his legs.

“Thank you,” she said, grinning and wiping her eyes. “Thank you.”

He nodded, a slim acknowledgment of gratitude, and gazed over the expanse once more, toward the pink horizon. He didn’t seem to notice the canyon beside them.

“You might not live through this,” he said. “It will be my fault if you don’t.”

“Last I checked,” Ceony began, “I volunteered of my own volition to rescue you.”

“Yet you’re caught in your own curse,” he replied, gesturing to the nothingness before them.

Ceony pondered that for a moment before saying, “Emery.”

He glanced at her.

“I think you can break the spell holding me here,” she said, albeit with some hesitation. “After all, it’s your heart, isn’t it? You have more claim to it than anyone, especially Lira. How else could you be speaking with me if it weren’t true?”

She caught the slightest quirk to his lips—almost a smile, but the doubt that weighted the air prevented it from forming.

He didn’t reply, so Ceony asked, “Can you . . . see it? The spell? How it works?”

“No,” he answered. “But I can feel it. I suppose I could break it, though it will make me . . . tired.”

“Tired?” Ceony asked, the word reminding her of her own fatigue. “Will it . . . hurt you?”

Again, an almost-smile. This version of Emery Thane was more similar to the real one than the others, notwithstanding his pessimism. He said, “I think I’ll manage.”
     



Ceony beckoned Fennel to her. She felt light, invigorated, as if the last chamber hadn’t happened at all. As if her own chamber of hope had added this moment to its foundation. She could do this.

“I need you to teach me some new spells,” she said. “Anything that can help but won’t take much time. You taught me so much, but . . .”

“But it’s not much use against an Excisioner.” He nodded. “I know.”

Emery considered for a moment, a crooked finger tucked under his chin. “How much paper do you have left?”

She pulled the diminished stack from her bag and presented it to him.

He examined the paper, his eyes bobbing as he counted the pieces, and sighed, shoulders slumping. “I’m going to teach you something I really shouldn’t be teaching you.”

“But given the circumstances,” she urged.

He nodded. His lip quirked. “Given the circumstances. Just pretend to forget it once this is over . . . if either of us makes it past this.”

“We will,” Ceony assured him with a grin. “I know we will. I have some ideas of my own, but I’m not sure they will work.”

She knelt down, tucking her soiled skirt under her knees, and set the stack of paper on the hard earth beside her. Dirty paper should work just as well as clean, and she didn’t exactly have a table at her disposal.

Emery watched her for a moment, his eyes lacking their normal luster. Despite that, his expression still proved easy to read—curious. Doubtful, but curious. Finally he asked, “Why are you doing all of this?”

Ceony paused, one hand on the stack of paper. Fennel nuzzled her elbow. “Doing what?”

He gestured to the empty expanse surrounding them. “This. All of this. Why have you come so far to help me?”

She felt her cheeks grow warm and she looked away, stroking Fennel to occupy her hands. She supposed it wouldn’t hurt to tell this sliver of Emery Thane. She could never utter the words to the magician himself, but knowing the man she spoke to was only a figment pieced together by a suffering heart lent her courage.

“Because I think I’m falling in love with you,” she admitted, feeling her cheeks redden like the cerise sunrise. “I know I haven’t known you long, but after all this . . .” She lifted her eyes to the horizon where earth met sky. “I feel like I’ve known you forever. I don’t know how many women can claim to have walked a man’s heart, but I’ve walked yours, Emery Thane. And I like the dog.”

His expression didn’t change save for the tilt of his lips, which very nearly formed a smile before tuckering out and returning to their flat, doubtful line.

“Very well,” Emery said, kneeling across from her and pulling up his long, baggy sleeves. Not exactly the response she was hoping for, but a start. He continued, “I’ll start with the most complicated first, the one I shouldn’t be teaching you.”

Ceony nodded as he reached for a sheet of sea-green paper.

His eyes met hers. “Do you know what happens when paper vibrates very, very fast?”

“Something I’m not supposed to know,” she guessed.

“Correct,” he replied. “But allow me to explain . . .”