The Paper Magician

CHAPTER 6



“NO, NO!” CEONY CRIED, tears streaming readily from her cheeks. She put an arm behind Mg. Thane’s neck and laid him down, gaping at the deep, scarlet hole in his chest, still rimmed with glittering gold magic. The hole grew smaller and smaller with each of her own heartbeats.

Fennel whined beside her, an airy, paper whine. Ceony, shaking, looked to the dog, then back to Mg. Thane, his skin growing paler and paler with each passing second.

She bolted upright and ran for the study, knocking a kitchen chair out of her way as she went.

Her mind swirled, her legs felt numb, and her hands perspired as she climbed over rubble in the hallway that had once been the front door and threw herself into the study. She ran for the shelves of paper, frantically sifting through them until she found a thicker piece. Not the thickest, but she had no time to be choosy.

She ran back into the dining room and slipped on spilled blood. She stumbled onto her knees and winced, but began Folding right there, against the wooden floorboards. She didn’t know the Folds—she couldn’t—but she had to try.

Visions of Mg. Thane’s handiwork zoomed through her mind. His Folding of the bird, the fish, the fortuity box. The paper trinkets, sculptures, and chains lying around the house. The few lessons on paper magic she had taken notes on at the school. The half-point Fold, the full-point Fold. Folds she didn’t know the names of. Anything. Just line the edges up.

She Folded the paper in half, then in half again, working it until she had the square that started Mg. Thane’s long-necked bird. From there she made up the rest, her brain summoning images from Anatomy of the Human Body. Her hands stilled. It looked something like a heart. Something like it . . .

She crawled to Mg. Thane, to the still-closing pit in his chest, and commanded the heart, “Breathe!”

It pumped weakly in her hands. She pushed it into the bloody cavity and withdrew her hands just before Mg. Thane’s skin closed around it.

The paper magician didn’t stir.

“Please,” she cried, his blood on her fingers. She patted his cheeks, slapped them, pressed her ear to his chest. She could hear the paper heart pumping weakly, like the heart of an old man on his deathbed.

He didn’t stir.

“You have to live!” she screamed at him, tears falling from her chin onto his chest. If magic couldn’t save him . . . this was all she had!

Breaths coming in short gasps, Ceony stood, ran up the stairs, and bolted to the library. Grabbing the telegraph, she connected the wires to the one person whose route she knew—Mg. Aviosky.

Her trembling fingers punched in the code quickly. She swallowed against a dry throat.

thane hurt stop come immediately stop emergency stop excisioner stole his heart stop

She backed away from the telegraph as though it were a corpse and pressed her palm to her mouth to suppress a sob.

Fennel barked at her feet, jumping wildly on his paper legs.

As soon as Ceony glanced at the dog, Fennel darted into the hallway. Ceony ran after him, following him back down the stairs and into the dining room. She heard Thane’s rasping breath just before she saw him.

“Thane!” she cried, dropping to her knees beside him.

He looked dead, his eyes merely slits and his veins showing through his white skin. He tried to lift a finger to point, but dropped it. “Window,” he said, the words straining through his throat. “Second . . . chain. Get . . .”

Ceony jumped up and ran back into the study, distinctly remembering the chains hanging over the window there. She counted the second one from the left and pulled it down, a tightly knit chain made of Folded rectangles. She also grabbed the second from the right, a looping chain of ovals.

Rushing back into the dining room, she showed them to Thane. “Which one?” she asked.

He weakly jerked his chin toward the tight-knit chain made of rectangles. “Around . . . chest,” he whispered.

Pinching the end of the chain, Ceony leaned over Thane and pushed it under his back, then brought it forward over his chest so that the ends overlapped.

“Ease,” Thane said weakly, and the chain tightened about him at the command. Thane sucked in a deep breath of air and coughed.

Ceony lifted his head to help him. When he finished, he opened his eyes and looked at her.

She gasped. His eyes . . .

Their light had vanished.

No brightness, no emotion. Just dead, glass eyes.

Her tears started anew.

“I telegrammed Magician Aviosky,” she said, every other word shuddering in her throat. “She’ll be here. Someone will be here to help you.”

“That was wise,” he said, his weakened voice almost a monotone. “The closest doctor is . . . far.”

“Oh heaven,” Ceony whispered, pushing locks of hair from Mg. Thane’s forehead. “What has she done to you?”

“Lira . . . took my heart,” he said matter-of-factly. Like a talking textbook.

“I know,” Ceony whispered. “Why?”

“To stop me.”

“From what?”

But Mg. Thane didn’t answer. His glassy eyes shifted slowly about their sockets, taking in the room with no expression.

Ceony kept brushing his forehead, even when she had pushed back all his black locks. “What is the chain?” she asked, wiping her cheek on her shoulder. If she could just keep him talking . . .

“A vitality chain,” he said quietly, his dull eyes now focused on the ceiling above him. “It will keep this new heart beating, for a time.”

“A time?”

“A paper heart will not last long, especially one crafted poorly,” he said. “The chain will make it last a day, two at best.”

“But you can’t die!” Ceony cried, and Mg. Thane didn’t so much as flinch at the volume, or at the tear that struck him on the bridge of his nose. He didn’t seem aware of her at all. “You have too much to teach me! And you’re too nice to die!”

He made no response.

Gently setting his head down, Ceony stood and retreated to the front room, stepping over debris and wiping away tears that refused to stop running from her eyes. She took a pillow from the couch and a blanket from a chest shoved behind it and tried to make Mg. Thane as comfortable as possible, for she dared not try to move him. Fennel sat by his side, still whining and wagging his tail anxiously behind him.

Two hours after sunset, three people climbed their way over the rubble-filled hallway and into the dining room. Ceony knew all three, if two only from memory. Mg. John Katter, a Smelter, and Mg. Alfred Hughes, the Siper, both sat on the Magicians’ Cabinet—Katter for Agriculture and Hughes for Criminal Affairs. Mg. Aviosky stood among them.
     



Ceony, who had cried herself sore and dry, retold the story with every detail she could muster, including her reading on Mg. Thane with the fortuity box. She wondered if, perhaps, she had mistakenly willed Lira’s appearance, and that this was all her fault.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mg. Aviosky assured her as Magicians Katter and Hughes studied Mg. Thane lying on the floor by the light of four candles. “The only one who can manipulate Emery Thane’s future is Emery Thane himself.”

Mg. Hughes hovered over Mg. Thane for some time, prodding his neck and chest with rubber gloves. Ceony knew he was a Siper, and she wondered, briefly, if the gloves were enchanted, especially since he tucked the pair into his coat pocket instead of tossing them in the trash. “It’s Excision work all right,” he said in low tones, “and powerful at that. I thought the wards would keep them from coming here, Lira especially.”

“Wards?” Ceony asked, heart thumping. “What wards? Why would she hurt Magician Thane? Who is she?”

Mg. Hughes frowned and stroked his short, white beard. Mg. Aviosky put a hand on Ceony’s shoulder and said, “Perhaps you should go to bed, Miss Twill. You’ve had a hard day.”

“No!” Ceony cried. “You have to let me stay here with him. You have to let me help!”

Mg. Aviosky frowned, and in the dim lighting it made her look much older, and much taller. “You may no longer be a pupil at Tagis Praff, Miss Twill, but you are still under the board’s jurisdiction. Go upstairs and get some rest. It is not a request. I will discuss matters further with you in the morning.”

Ceony’s skeleton slumped within her skin. She stepped away from Mg. Hughes so she could see Mg. Thane on the floor. His eyes were closed and his breathing sounded even, albeit faint. Mg. Katter scribbled something in a notepad beside him.

Clutching her hands over her breast, Ceony stepped past Mg. Thane, watching him, and took to the stairs. Mg. Hughes shut the door behind her, but she knew he didn’t lock it, since he wouldn’t have the key to do so.

Hesitating for a moment, Ceony tromped up the stairs and to her bedroom door, where she then slipped off her shoes and carefully, very carefully, snuck her way back downstairs, skipping the squeaky ninth step.

She squatted on the first stair, shying away from the thin light filtering through the door’s keyhole, and listened.

“. . . getting close,” Mg. Hughes’s voice said quietly. “Emery’s the one who tipped us off for the Lillith capture, if you remember. That was less than two months ago.”

“But have there been attempts on the other members?” Mg. Aviosky said, sounding very worried. More worried than Ceony had ever heard her sound.

“Magician Karl Tode was killed yesterday morning in a similar manner,” Mg. Hughes replied. “A hunter, like Emery. But it wasn’t Lira’s handiwork. She’s . . . much cleaner than her accomplices.”

Mg. Katter said, “But that’s it. Nothing else since they took out Piper last year. Don’t you remember what Gabon Suter said when we arrested him? Reeling around in his chair like a madman . . . ‘We’ll get the rest. Hunt us down like animals, but we’ll turn on you . . .’?”

“It could just be a personal vendetta in this case,” Mg. Aviosky said. “Unless my information on their relationship isn’t accurate.”

“?‘I’m leaving,’?” Mg. Hughes said, repeating the words Ceony had related to him, “?‘and I’m taking you with me.’ That’s all she said. No letters, no ceremony. I know this woman, Patrice. She wouldn’t just do the deed for revenge and not make a show of it, unless she did so outside of Miss Twill’s witness.”

“Perhaps,” Mg. Katter cut in, “she’s finally gotten smart. In and out, job done.”

Mg. Hughes said, “No. Not her.” He paused. “She knows Emery is critical to the syndicate, they all do. He’s personally invested in it. That, and she’s always kept a . . . keen . . . interest in him.”

Syndicate? Ceony thought. Her legs began to cramp, but she dared not move, not yet. Excisioners, and a syndicate?

Was Mg. Thane personally policing the dark-magic ring? And what “keen interest” did Mg. Hughes refer to?

The floorboards shifted again, and someone blocked the light coming through the keyhole. Ceony held her breath, but the door didn’t open. Instead someone leaned against it, which made the talk in the dining room that much fainter.

“Sounds like she plans on leaving England,” Mg. Katter said, so muffled Ceony could barely tell one word from the next. “Perhaps Europe altogether.”

“So what do we do?” asked Mg. Aviosky, the one against the door.

“Document it,” Mg. Hughes said slowly. “Gather what evidence we can, sketches and the like. Find any blood on the floor that Lira might have used.”

“Go after her?” asked Mg. Katter.

“It has to go through the Cabinet,” Mg. Hughes replied, sounding exasperated. “We have to get approval, sanction off this house, assign a force.”

Ceony clutched her skirt in her fists. Approval? Lira would be long gone by then!

“She’ll be out of reach by then,” said Mg. Aviosky, as if she had heard Ceony’s thoughts and agreed with them.

“You must understand, Patrice, that Excisioners are a tricky matter,” Mg. Hughes explained. “They are wildly dangerous, and if they touch you, they can pull magic through your body. It is a killing magic. One cannot merely race in and capture them. And if she disappeared in a blood cloud as Miss Twill stated, she could be anywhere within a thirty-mile radius by now.”

A moment of silence made Ceony aware of her pulse drumming in her ears. Her face felt hot, and her eyes stung. Would they really let this woman get away?

“What of Emery Thane?” Mg. Aviosky asked, almost too soft to hear.

Another long pause before Mg. Hughes said, “We make him as comfortable as we can.”

No! Ceony’s mind screamed, and she clamped both hands over her mouth to keep herself from shouting. How could they? How could they let him die?

Ceony shivered. Standing, knees creaking, she tiptoed her way up the stairs, unable to bear any more words from the Cabinet. At the top of the stairs her tears started anew, only these ones felt very cold.

He was going to die. Magician Emery Thane was going to die, and without his own heart in his chest. It seemed so very wrong.
     


Soft padding announced Fennel coming down the hallway. He paused and stretched as a real dog would, then scratched at the turquoise collar around his neck.

Ceony scooped him up in her arms and held him delicately to her chest, careful not to cry on him.

So very wrong.

She paused at her room, but rather than go in, she continued walking until she reached Mg. Thane’s. Cradling Fennel in one arm, she pushed the door open, lit a candle on the dresser, and took a look.

It was all as she had left it, minus the laundry on the bed. Feeling a chill, Ceony hugged Fennel closer and walked past the dresser, the bookshelves, the window with its darkening light. She paused by the closet and hamper and absently sifted through Mg. Thane’s clothes, some of which had been in her washbasin just days ago. In the back of the closet she found Mg. Thane’s white dress uniform—white, as that was the color that represented paper. The double-breasted jacket, gold-polished buttons, and thick cuffs all looked new and neat, as though the uniform had never been worn. Ceony couldn’t help but think that Mg. Thane would look rather dashing in it. A good thing he had not worn it at their meeting yesterday, or Ceony may have found herself tongue-tied and very flustered.

She frowned. A pointless thing to think.

She pulled away from the closet. Fennel wriggled in her grasp. She set him down and dug her cold hands into her skirt’s pockets. Something brushed the knuckle on her right hand.

From her pocket she pulled a tiny snowflake, the one she had stowed there after her first day as a Folder. She rubbed her thumb over its tiny, delicate cuts, grateful she hadn’t yet washed this particular skirt. The snowflake still felt frosty, just like real snow. Snow he had made for her. All of it had been for her in one way or another, hadn’t it?

In the glow of the candlelight she said, “I have to do it. I have to save him.”

For she knew no one else would.

Biting her lip, Ceony hurried from the room, protecting the light of the candle with her hand as she went, quietly calling Fennel to follow. She went across the hall to the library and set the light down on the table under the window. Sitting down, she grasped a green square of paper of medium thickness and began Folding, leaning on her memory until she made a bird. The Folds hummed beneath her fingers.

Taking a pink piece of lightweight paper, she Folded another, then another with white. She imagined Mg. Thane’s hands over her own, guiding her Folds, and squinted in the candlelight to ensure all her edges aligned and all her creases were straight.

When she had six birds, she commanded them, “Breathe,” feeling a confidence above her station.

Five came to life. The pink one, the second she had made, remained still and lifeless, as a folded piece of paper should be. Somewhere in the folds of its body Ceony had done something wrong, but now was not the time to determine what.

Two of the five living birds took off into flight, one began grooming itself, one watched her without eyes, and the last hopped about the table, making Fennel growl. Ceony shushed the dog and, finding a pen, pulled a white piece of paper over to her.

She began writing, the pen’s ink flowing in quick strokes over the parchment. She wrote quickly, but cautiously enough not to misspell anything. She didn’t know if this trick would work, but she couldn’t afford to have something as simple as bad grammar mess it up.

When she had finished, she called to the birds, “Come here. Come here, please!” and whistled to them in her best birdsong.

The two escapees flew down. The others came closer. They stood in two rows before her on the table.

Taking a deep breath to keep her voice smooth and calm, Ceony read, “A woman stormed into the dining room, her dark chocolate hair nearly black and her eyes almost as dark.” She pictured the scene in her mind—Lira’s confident stature, the curl to her red-painted lips, the length and sharpness of her fingernails as she dipped them into her vial of blood. “She was an evil woman and wore it in her face and clothes. She had a sneer that could sober any drunkard, and her dark arts left blood on her fingertips.”

The story, at least the beginning of one, formed in ethereal colors before the birds, forming the shape of Lira just as Ceony remembered her, and Ceony credited herself as having a picture-perfect memory. The dining room formed around the image of Lira, but Ceony concentrated on Lira, which made the background fade to mottled blurs while Lira’s face became sharp.

“I need you to find her,” Ceony said, letting the illusion slowly dissipate. “Find her and come back to me. Can you do that?”

The birds hopped in place. That was as much of an affirmative as Ceony expected to get.

Nodding, Ceony moved to the window and, with a great heave that seemed to rock half the room, opened it high enough for five paper birds to fly out. The wind felt cool, but no rain threatened the sky. At least Mother Nature was on her side tonight.

Then, with Fennel at her heels, Ceony gathered what she needed.

She took a small stack of paper from each pile in the library and set it aside, then went into Mg. Thane’s bedroom for the larger pieces, which she rolled together and fastened with a hair tie. In her room, with the door closed, she retrieved her Tatham pistol and stashed it at the bottom of the bag. She barely had time to so much as look at it over the past weeks, but she had made sure to keep it clean. The heft of it in her bag felt . . . soothing. Back in the library, she found an atlas and ripped out two maps, one of England and another of the entire continent of Europe, just in case. As she shoved the maps into her knit bag, Ceony had a sinking feeling that, if it came down to using the Europe map, she would never find Lira. It was far too big . . . and Mg. Thane had only two days, at most, to live . . .

She shook her head once. “I’ll find her,” she said, half to herself and half to Fennel. “I’ve got to.”

When Ceony had everything packed save the food downstairs—where she dared not go—she reluctantly turned in for bed, though sleep came only in discomforted spurts. At dawn she rose and trudged downstairs.

Only Mg. Aviosky had stayed, and she slept on the couch in the front room. Leaving her, Ceony grabbed cheese, bread, and a chunk of salami for her pack. Enough to survive two days. Then she knelt beside Mg. Thane’s still body. He breathed slow, raspy breaths.

She pressed an ear to his chest, which one of the magicians had had the decency to clean up. The only telling sign of the accident now was the blood around his ripped collar.

Pft . . . pft . . . , the heart pattered. The second beat sounded so faintly Ceony couldn’t hear it.
     



Looking at his pale face, a knife of fear passed through Ceony’s own heart. The Excisioner, Lira, had taken Mg. Thane down so easily. What chance did Ceony have against her?

Just don’t touch her, she thought, remembering the Cabinet’s discussion the night before. Ultimately, Ceony knew her only chance would be the element of surprise.

“Please live,” she whispered to Mg. Thane. “I don’t mind being a paper magician if you’re the one to teach me, so please live. Otherwise I’ll be ornery for the rest of my life and no good to anyone.”

She touched his hair, took a deep breath, and retreated back up the stairs to wait. She thumbed through the library, picking out books on Folding and flipping through their pages, pausing wherever something looked important or interesting, then staring at the pictures—or the text—until she felt the information write itself in her memory. She listened for Mg. Aviosky’s stirring downstairs, hoping the woman would sleep long.

Instead, her ears picked up the faintest tapping on the library window.

She turned and saw a paper bird in the morning light, its tail bent at an awkward angle and the tips of its right wing ragged, as though it had experienced a bit of a stir. Opening the window, the green bird flapped in. It was the first of the six she had crafted.

Ceony cupped the paper creature in her hands. “Tell me you found her. Tell me you saw something, please.”

The bird hopped.

“Is that a yes?”

The bird hopped.

“Could you take me there? If I mended you?”

The bird hopped.

Growing jittery, Ceony set the bird down and straightened its tail, then shuffled through Mg. Thane’s things until she found some glue, which she used to seal the tiny tears on the bird’s wings. It pecked at the stuff, getting glue on its paper beak.

“Stop that,” Ceony said, hefting her heavy bag onto her shoulder. She scooped up the bird, stepped into the hall, and then stopped.

What would she do, hire a buggy? How would she explain? Could she even afford one? How far out was Lira? The paper bird couldn’t tell her.

And what if Mg. Aviosky had woken and was waiting for her to come down? She had no time to argue her way out! She had to move swiftly, before Lira did . . .

Pausing, Ceony turned about and looked at the stairway behind her, the one that led to the mysterious third floor. The “big” spells, as Mg. Thane had put it. Even during Mg. Thane’s absence, she hadn’t ventured up there. Could something useful be up there?

Swallowing hard, Ceony took the stairs two at a time. The top seven all groaned in protest of her weight. She wondered if the knob would be locked, but when she reached out and clasped it, it turned with only mild resistance.

She smelled old dust and mildew, and the temperature felt decidedly cooler than downstairs. The third floor looked to be all one room with an extraordinarily high ceiling from which dangled a rope that opened a door facing the sky.

Ceony gaped at the two things the morning light streaming through dirty windows revealed to her. Fennel hopped up the stairs behind her and sniffed her shoes.

The first was a giant paper glider, the sort that boys folded at their desks and threw at girls they liked when the teacher’s back was turned. The second looked very similar to the bird Ceony held in her hand, albeit unfinished.

Both were three times the size of the buggy that had dropped Ceony off at the house just weeks earlier.

“You are mad,” she whispered, walking toward the glider. It had a thin coat of dust on the top, and two handholds near the nose. No seat to sit in, no belt to strap in.

Surely Mg. Thane hadn’t flown in this. No one could fly! It must have been a prototype. Surely a man couldn’t find groceries a bothersome chore if he could retrieve them in this!

She marveled at it, and the handholds near its nose. So it did fly, or was supposed to. Only something like this would enable her to catch up to Lira. Mg. Thane depended on her.

For the first time since her assignment, Ceony found herself wishing for a more boring solution.

Straightening her shoulders and balling her hands into fists, she said, “Let’s go, Fennel,” and walked around the glider’s long wing. One hand on the green bird and the other on her bag, she stepped over the glider’s nose and straddled it. The thick paper had been greatly reinforced and didn’t bow under her weight.

Thank the heavens.

Ceony pulled the cord to the door in the ceiling. A few dead leaves fell down on top of her, carrying the scent of dew and the sound of birdsong.

Taking a deep breath, Ceony lay on her stomach and grabbed the handholds of the glider. She could only pray it worked like an animation, or else she’d never find the right spell in time.

She commanded the bird, “Take me to Lira.”

The little bird flapped its wings and flew out the door.

“Breathe,” Ceony told the glider.

It bucked beneath her like a wild bull. Ceony shrieked. Fennel jumped onto the glider and growled.

Ceony gripped the handholds and pulled them toward her.

The glider arched its pointed nose upward and took off through the gap in the roof.