The Paper Magician

CHAPTER 8



A STEADY THREE-BEAT DRUM surrounded Ceony, vibrating in the very floor itself. When her eyes adjusted, she saw a crimson-cast room, its walls more bowed than straight. The one to her right appeared concave, and the one to her left looked convex. Even the floor wasn’t flat. She could see via a muted light, but when she searched she found no candles, lanterns, not even a single electric wire. The room’s heat pressed into her, and when she tried to stand she stumbled, the constant PUM-Pom-poom beat shaking her already shaky legs.
     



Fennel barked beside her—it seemed Lira’s trap, whatever it was, had caught him up as well.

She spied a narrow river of what looked like blood flowing between the wall and floor to her right, and she gasped. She had seen something like this room before, only it had been very small and had lain out on a metal table enchanted to stay cold. She had seen it after she had removed it from a dead frog.

This was Mg. Thane’s heart, and Ceony stood inside it.

PUM-Pom-poom. PUM-Pom-poom. Ceony couldn’t tell if she heard the throbbing walls or her own chest. She breathed hard and deep and spun around, examining the strange chamber, feeling as though her body couldn’t get enough air.

Something dark caught the corner of her eye and she turned to see Lira, who held the Tatham pistol in her hands like a child’s toy. She slipped the trigger guard over her index finger and spun the gun around her knuckle.

Fennel growled a soft, papery growl, and Ceony scooped him into her arms, trying not to look as terrified as she felt. The muscles in her legs had turned to icicles.

Lira smiled. “Emery surrounds himself with fools. The heart trap was only a backup. Someplace I could put you where you wouldn’t run away.”

She stilled the pistol and clasped it in her right hand, looking as if she could crush it. “Did you really think you could beat me with this?”

Ceony gaped. She trembled. She had to get away. She couldn’t face Lira, not like this. She wasn’t prepared. She knew nothing of the dark arts, what to expect or how to combat them. She hadn’t thought this through at all!

She took a step back, and Lira took two steps forward. Sweat beaded on Ceony’s back, gluing her shirt to her skin. Ceony stepped back once more—

—and the entire chamber shifted around her.

She nearly dropped Fennel as the red, fleshy walls morphed into a blue sky speckled with wispy clouds, the bloody streams transformed into carpets of lush, green grass. The distant beat of Mg. Thane’s heart dulled to a quiet echo. Ceony smelled clover and sun-heated leaves, felt a warm summer breeze on her face. A few thick-boughed, leafy trees sprang up some ways away from her, one dangling an umber birdhouse from its second-lowest branch. Numerous gray boxes occupied the space between the trees and herself. Each stood about four or five feet high and seemed to be made of shorter weathered boxes.

Ceony’s gaze shifted back and forth, fear and confusion coating each other in her thoughts. She wiped her hands on her skirt.

Laughter touched her ears.

She whirled around and saw four children before her, their heads donning broad-brimmed canvas hats with tightly woven nets draping over their faces and necks, and long gloves pulled up past their elbows. Their ages looked to range from three to twelve, or so Ceony guessed.

Fennel wriggled from under her arm and jumped down on the grass, running about to join the children. He ran quickly for having legs made of cardstock.

A round honeybee buzzed by her, and by instinct Ceony swatted it away. It wasn’t until that moment that she noticed the buzzing speckles surrounding each of the gray boxes, swarming and churning like humming clouds.

Ceony’s lip parted in surprise. Was this a honey farm?

In the middle of Thane’s heart?

A tall, thickly built man approached a buzzing box behind the children. He wore sturdy canvas over his entire body, tucked into his shoes and drawn with a string under his chin. Ceony had a difficult time seeing his face through the netted veil hanging from his hat, especially when honeybees began crawling over it.

Rubbing her eyes to ensure what she saw was real, Ceony stepped forward and called out to the canvas-clad man.

“Excuse me!” she shouted, but the man didn’t turn, even when she repeated herself. The eldest boy ran an uneven circle around her, but his eyes never saw her, only peered through her. He didn’t notice her presence at all. None of them did.

And Lira . . . where was Lira? Ceony moved around the bee boxes searching for her, the insects ignoring her as readily as the people did. She scanned beyond the trees to shallow, rolling hills, but saw no sign of the Excisioner.

She pulled a white sheet of paper from her bag and held it between both hands. It made her feel safer.

“You’re it!” shouted a girl of about eight, two auburn pigtails peeking out from beneath her face net. She ran away from the eldest boy, laughing even as bees swarmed from half a dozen boxes.

“Don’t touch the hives!” the adult shouted as he pawed at his bee box. He had a low, brawny voice, deep and rugged. He pulled a tray from the box’s top, and Ceony marveled at the thick, amber honeycomb clinging to it. The man brought it to a wheelbarrow, bees crawling all over his protected arms, and scraped honey into a tall bucket. Ceony’s mouth watered, but still she wondered, How did I get here?

More importantly: Where is here?

Surely Lira’s spell hadn’t whisked her away. Why would a practitioner of the forbidden arts ship Ceony to a remote—and rather jolly—honey farm?

Fennel stood on his hind legs as he tried to get a better look at a particularly fat bee flying about his head. Another bee buzzed about Ceony but never landed, never tried to sting her. At least, if it did, she didn’t feel it.

“Emery, get me that spoon, will you?” the man shouted, pointing to a long metal spoon in the grass.

The name made Ceony’s eyes dart to the second-youngest child, perhaps six years old, running between hives to the spoon. Still clutching the paper, Ceony ran to him and peered through the pale netting over his face. The child didn’t notice her at all, even as she crouched in front of him. She saw uneven patches of black hair sticking out from under his hat and bright, green eyes.

“Magician Thane,” she whispered. The eyes gave him away. The child phased through her like a ghost and handed the spoon to the man whom Ceony could only assume was his father. The man patted Mg. Thane’s head—Emery’s head—and the boy grinned a wide grin before returning to play with his siblings, darting between boxes with a precision that told Ceony he could do so blindfolded.

Mg. Thane’s family . . . , Ceony thought. But why did she see this . . . memory? Dream?

Didn’t he say he was an only child?

“Magician Thane!” she called out to him, but as she did she spied a shadow beyond the hives, where the grassy ground dipped down into a hill and a tire swing hung from a tall tree. Dark locks of hair caught on the breeze.

Lira.

Ceony’s breath caught in her throat. Her fingers turned cold, but she managed to snap them and call Fennel. The dog followed her as she ran in the other direction, away from the Excisioner and the bees, and away from the young Emery Thane. All she could do now was run . . . and figure out how to defeat an Excisioner who couldn’t be killed.
     



The view warped, darkened, and Ceony found herself assaulted by thunderous applause that nearly made her jump from her skin.

Fennel yapped at her heels as rows and rows of men and women Ceony didn’t know clapped around her in the auditorium of what looked to be the Royal Albert Hall in West London. Scarlet carpet lined the tilted aisles, and chandeliers filled with candles—not electric bulbs—hung unlit overhead. Ceony spun, her eyes landing on a heavyset woman in a fur coat clapping in a nearby chair. Approaching the woman, Ceony asked “What’s happening?” over the applause, but the woman didn’t answer. Didn’t look at her. Ceony found herself once more a ghost, though the vision unfolding around her seemed far more ghostly than she herself did.

Ceony glanced behind her, but didn’t see Lira anywhere. She sucked in a deep breath of relief. The applause died down, and Ceony crouched in the aisle between seats to Fold a paper bird.

“And Magician Emery Thane, Folder, District Fourteen,” boomed a voice from behind her. Ceony blinked at the brightly lit stage lined with velvet curtains. A man who looked like a younger Tagis Praff with a mustache stood stage left behind a broad podium with the Magicians’ seal painted on its front. He clapped his hands loudly together, and the audience followed suit.

A row of eleven chairs lined the stage opposite the podium, all empty save for one with a young man in a white magician’s dress uniform, complete with high collar and golden buttons. Ceony’s hands froze mid-Fold as Magician Emery Thane, barely older than herself, crossed the stage to accept his magician’s plaque—the same one that hung in his study.

She felt herself blush. He did look excellent in that uniform—it fit much more snugly about his shoulders than that awful indigo coat. It narrowed at his waist, and the sharp creases in the legs made him appear taller. Taller than Tagis Praff, anyway. Ceony hardly recognized Mg. Thane, especially with his hair cropped short enough to hide its wave. It was enough to make her forget Lira. For a moment, anyway.

Fennel sniffed at the half-formed bird beneath Ceony’s fingers, and Ceony sat in the aisle, watching the newly appointed Mg. Thane shake gloved hands with Tagis Praff.

“I’m in his heart,” she said to Fennel. “I never left it, so this must be part of it. I’m seeing his heart, but . . . how do I get out of it? I can’t help him from in here!”

But saving the paper magician’s life wasn’t her only predicament. She peered over her shoulder again, but Lira hadn’t followed her here. The fact didn’t make her feel safer. If I don’t get out, I’ll die, too.

Tagis Praff began bellowing a speech over the podium, but Ceony forced herself to focus on her bird and finish Folding its head, tail, and wings. What she would use it for, she didn’t know, but birds were one of the few things she knew how to make. What she wouldn’t give to be a Smelter right now, to have a gun with enchanted bullets that never missed their mark. She might have a chance against Lira if she only had one of those.

Shoving the white bird into her bag, Ceony ran down the rest of the aisle to the stage. Mg. Thane began walking down the stairs beside the podium. Ceony hurried in front of the unaware spectators toward him. She had to try.

“Magician Thane!” she called, but he didn’t turn. She ran up to him and grabbed his arm, but it merely passed through her, a phantom. He took a seat in the second row, alongside other materials magicians in their designated uniforms.

Ceony tried once more to grab him—his shoulder—but it did no good. “Magician Thane, can’t you hear me?” she asked, waving a hand in front of his face. “How do I get out?”

The young paper magician leaned his cheek on his fist, suddenly bored with the procession in his honor.

Ceony pursed her lips somewhat in imitation of Mg. Aviosky. Then she ran up the scarlet aisle toward the doors leading out of the auditorium, Fennel at her heels.

A woman screamed at her as soon as she stepped through them.

The noise startled Ceony so much that she fell back, but no doors or auditorium walls caught her. Instead she hit old, wooden floorboards rump first, not the marble tiles of the Royal Albert Hall. A dull, boney feeling shot up her back.

“Breathe, Letta: in and out,” a midwife in uniform instructed a young woman lying on the floor of a sparsely furnished room—the one who had screamed. The woman, her belly bulging with pregnancy, puffed through pursed lips. She held herself upright on her elbows. Towels surrounded her. A tin bowl of bloody water sat near her ankles. Blond hair stuck to her forehead with sweat. Outside, rain hammered onto the windows, and a flash of lightning boasted before the nearly spent candles. Thunder shook the house three seconds later, and the staccato report of raindrops hitting the roof drowned out the distant sound of the paper magician’s heartbeat.

“Thane!” Ceony shouted, spying her teacher kneeling at the pregnant woman’s legs, his sleeves rolled up nearly to his shoulders. He looked older, more himself. His forehead wrinkled in determination. His bright eyes shined with hope.

“That’s it,” he said. “Bear down. Push again!”

The woman cried out, her nails raking against the floor.

Ceony paused, ogling the woman in her labor. Was she related to Mg. Thane?

Ceony crawled to Mg. Thane’s side and waved a hand in front of his face, but he too didn’t see her. Even if this vision had been real, he wouldn’t have seen her. His attention focused solely on the delivery at hand.

But time was ticking away.

“You have to help me!” Ceony shouted over the rain. “I’m trapped inside your heart! How do I get out?”

Like the previous two visions, he didn’t hear, and neither did the woman nor the midwife.

The woman rested back on her shoulder blades for a moment, sucking in air as the midwife dabbed her forehead with a wet cloth. That’s when Ceony noticed a chain around the woman’s stomach identical to the one the real, present Emery Thane wore about his chest—a spell for good health. What had he called it? A vitality chain.

Fennel sat on his haunches and whined.

Crouching, Ceony pet the back of the dog’s neck. Where was the doctor? Why was Mg. Thane here, delivering this baby? Folders had no expertise in childbirth! Ceony finally noticed the wetness of Thane’s shirt—not from sweat, but from rain. It dripped from his hair. The storm—Mg. Thane must have been the only one close by, save for the midwife. A doctor wouldn’t be able to travel in this weather, not with rain gushing over the roads. Mg. Thane must have been the closest aid . . . and the midwife seemed to trust him.
     



The birthing woman gasped, and Ceony gaped as Mg. Thane pulled a tiny infant from between her legs, purple skinned and bloody. A boy, bald and writhing with deep blue eyes. The babe cried a healthy cry and kicked weakly at the umbilical cord that still connected him to his mother.

Mg. Thane laughed, cradling the babe in his arms as the midwife hurried over with scissors and a wet sponge. “It’s a boy, Mrs. Tork. It’s a boy. Congratulations.”

The woman, face streaked with tears and sweat, laughed and held out her arms. The midwife cut and tied the babe’s umbilical cord, then carefully laid the infant onto its mother’s breast.

Mg. Thane’s shoulders slumped, and he pressed his soiled hands onto the floor to hold himself upright. He looked tired and weathered, but he laughed, his eyes gleaming with happiness. Ceony marveled at him.

“Are these your achievements?” Ceony asked the deaf magician, who was nothing more than a replaying memory. “Your happy moments? Your good deeds?”

Ceony backed away from him and shook herself to the present—her present, at least—and pressed her palm to her own heart, feeling its quickened rhythm. She wanted to know—wanted to connect the little pieces that created the mosaic of the man she knew—but she had to focus on getting out. But where did the visions end?

Lightning flashed, and Ceony spied Lira’s silhouette outside the window. Fear like a cold lance pierced through her middle. Had Lira followed her through the graduation ceremony after all?

Forcing her rigid muscles to move, she and Fennel ran to the closest door. Ceony grabbed the worn brass handle and turned it hard.

She stumbled through, a tornado of charcoal and navy swirling through her vision. Fennel barked. Ceony tottered with the dizzying effect of the whirling colors, which darkened and settled onto a new vision of Thane in an office that did not match the study in his cottage on the outskirts of London. He sat at a desk with a stack of papers in his hand. He looked similar to the Emery Thane who had delivered a baby just moments before. Evening sun and the light from a single kerosene lamp highlighted his features.

“It’s finished,” he said with a sigh. Not to Ceony, of course, but to himself. Ceony had heard the paper magician mumble to himself before, usually behind the closed door of his office.

She spied over his shoulder to see A Reverse Perception of Paper Animation scrawled across the front sheet of paper. A book. Mg. Thane had written a book! And an absurdly thick one as well . . . She wondered why he hadn’t assigned her to read it yet.

“All of these are the same,” she said to him, though she knew the image of her teacher wouldn’t turn at her voice. “They’re all good things, good memories, happy times. I’m in the warmest part of your heart, aren’t I?”

Ceony’s mind shot back to her secondary school’s biology class taught under Mr. Cooper, the same class where she had dissected that poor frog. The homework assignment she had turned in on the eleventh of February surfaced in her mind as fresh as if she had completed it yesterday.

“Four chambers,” she whispered. Hadn’t the anatomy book said something similar? “The heart has four chambers. Could it be that I’m in your first?”

Mg. Thane stretched in his chair with his arms over his head, his back popping twice and his neck popping thrice. Standing, he hefted his manuscript and phased through her on his way to the door.

“Is that it?” Ceony shouted after him, pulling out another piece of paper and Folding a yellow fish. A fish had fewer Folds than a bird, and she completed it in half the time. Fennel pressed his paws against the side of the desk and sniffed at it. “Is that the answer? If I get to the end of your heart, will I find the way out?”

She added the fish to her arsenal and followed Thane’s footsteps through the door.

She found herself on a knoll covered in golden grass and wildflowers—the same blossoms Ceony had found pressed in Thane’s room. A warm wind rustled through them, carrying in it the taste of honeysuckle and sweet pea. The smells of summer. A large, molten sun sunk slowly into its bed in the west over a horizon speckled with dark trees. It cast a magenta and violet light through the sky and over a woodland canopy at the base of a ridge ahead of her—the North Downs, almost a day’s journey south of London. She had hiked the area with her father a few years ago, but had never seen this hill before. She would have remembered a place so . . . reverent. So beautiful.

She turned, taking the view in, and found Thane just above her. He rested beneath an old plum tree with wide boughs and deep-maroon leaves. He lay on his side on a blue and yellow patchwork quilt, talking quietly to a woman beside him.

Ceony yelped at the sight of Lira, but something looked different about her. She was younger—they both were—and her hair looked lighter, not as long. She wore part of it pinned back in a silver clip, and the rest curled freely about her shoulders. Instead of black pants, she wore a modest white sundress that fell to her ankles and had no sleeves. A long golden locket hung about her neck. Its chain appeared so delicate Ceony feared the very breeze would snap its links.

Like Thane before, this Lira didn’t seem to notice her.

Ceony stared at them, something cold and itchy pricking her heart. She reminded herself that this was another memory, another piece of goodness nestled in the first chamber of Thane’s heart.

“Lira,” she whispered. She treaded up the hill until she could get a clear shot of Thane’s face, his bright eyes that looked almost hazel in the plum tree’s shade. Those eyes—Ceony saw love in those eyes. Adoration. Bliss. Serenity.

He loved her.

Fennel pawed at Ceony’s leg, but Ceony didn’t move.

Mg. Thane . . . in love with Lira?

Her stomach soured, and she rubbed it with the palm of her hand. Visions or no, it was too stuffy between this heart’s walls. She was starting to feel ill.

Ceony studied the magician, trying to guess his age. Perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five. Several years ago, at least. That made her feel somewhat better, but the longer she watched the happy couple, the sicker she felt. Like her body wilted on her bones.

Shaking her head, Ceony tore her eyes away and rubbed her temples, trying to get some sense into her brain. She needed to focus. Be objective.

She let out a long breath. “All right. Why would a woman Thane loves leave him to die?” she wondered aloud. “If she already has Thane’s heart, why would she need to steal it?”

As she stepped away from the happy couple, her footsteps turned from grass-muted to hollow. Backtracking, she spied hinges among the wildflowers, as well as an old brass handle tarnished in the middle. Reaching for the handle, Ceony pulled the small door open.
     



The colors of the sunset, the wildflowers, and the plum tree swirled around her as the old office had, making her woozy. The sensation subsided quickly, and Ceony found herself looking straight up into Thane’s eyes. They bore that same, adoring expression, and he wore his white magician’s uniform, newly pressed, with a pink rose pinned to his left breast.

Ceony flushed deeply enough that her cheeks stung. She blinked and found herself standing elsewhere in the same vision, to the side of the chairs set up near a stream and a bridge in a park filled with cherry trees, their ruddy blossoms catching on the wind and filling the air like blushing snow. Crickets chirped softly in patches of long grass the groundskeeper had missed shearing. Swathes of white and yellow gossamer lined the aisles between chairs and a broad, wooden arch shading Mg. Thane, a man in a tawny robe, and Lira.

Lira now stood where Ceony had been, garbed in a white beaded dress with a long train, a short veil pinned into her lovely hair with a golden comb studded with pearls. The wedding dress had short, sheer sleeves and a neckline that revealed an ample chest—much larger than Ceony’s own, she noted with some chagrin.

Ceony’s heart thudded almost painfully against her ribs as a minister read from a leather-bound text to perform the ceremony. So Lira had been his wife.

Had been. That hymnal in his room made sense now.

Ceony rubbed the back of her neck, trying to stifle the heat creeping along it. The way Thane had looked at her in that moment before the switch . . .

Ceony’s pulse drummed in her ears.

But it hadn’t been her. It had been Lira. A younger Lira. A different Lira.

Ceony whirled around, half-expecting the Excisioner—Thane’s wife—to appear behind her at any moment, but she saw only happy wedding guests, including that same beekeeper and his wife. Men and women Ceony didn’t know. The memories moved so quickly—perhaps Lira wasn’t able to keep up. Perhaps she didn’t want to be here. Ceony didn’t, either.

Ceony pinched herself. She needed to stay alert. Mg. Hughes had said an Excisioner could pull magic through another’s body with just one touch, which meant it wouldn’t take much time for Lira to destroy her, should the crazed woman catch up to Ceony. Touch was one advantage Ceony didn’t want to give the psychotic woman chasing her through a stolen heart.

She had to find the next chamber.

She ran from the wedding with Fennel at her side, not bothering to give the ceremony a second glance. Something about it . . . bothered her. Pink cherry blossoms blew across her path, lacing the air with their subtle, lustful scent. The song of crickets muted to her ears.

The cherry trees grew thicker until Ceony found herself facing a copse of them, too thick to pass through save for a wrought-iron fence wedged between two of the smaller ones. She pushed open its narrow gate and ran until the sod turned firm and a book-lined wall stopped her from running any farther. A dead end.

Ceony found herself in the midst of a library.

It was similar to the one Mg. Thane had now, albeit smaller and with more windows and a second table, over which stooped a younger Emery Thane than the one who had been getting married. He wore his dark hair short and had rolled his white shirtsleeves up to his elbows.

Paper covered the tabletop in neat piles, all white and off-white, all varying thicknesses. A pile of half-Folded, half-crumpled papers formed a sizeable pile on the floor, and beside them stood a secondhand dressmaker’s dummy tacked about with dozens of papers rolled and Folded to form a rib cage around the torso, a collar across the shoulders, and a spine along the back. Ceony recognized the structure as Jonto’s—this must have been his creation, or part of it.

“Here’s the paperboard,” said an unfamiliar voice from the hallway. “That was just the carrier dropping it off.”

Ceony shifted her attention from Thane and his skeletal project to the man entering the library. He carried two giant cardboard totes of paper that looked heavy enough that Ceony doubted she could even lift one without pulling a muscle.

Yet the totes seemed almost tiny in this man’s arms, a man whose boyish face put him only a few years Ceony’s senior. He had to be six and a half feet tall and looked wide enough that Ceony felt sure she could fit inside him at least three times. Everything about the man was simply . . . big. Big shoulders, big stomach, big hands. Each of his calves looked like a feast day ham.

“Excellent, Langston,” Thane said, glancing up from his work for only half a second. Ceony couldn’t tell what he was working on—it looked almost like a bent-up crescent roll roughly the length of his hand. Fortunately, Thane’s next words answered the unspoken question: “I want to try integrating thick and thin together for this one—thick at the jaw’s joints and at the chin, thin in between. Maybe that will work.”

“Maybe,” Langston replied with a slowness and drawl that had Ceony suspecting he hadn’t grown up in England. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out soon, Magician Thane. My ma always said the word damn came from beavers who gave up on their houses one stick short.”

“Your mother says many things,” Thane replied offhandedly. “See if you can’t duplicate that hip, hm?”

Ceony marveled as Langston pulled out a chair nearly too small for him and took a seat across the table from Thane. He hardly had space to set down his giant elbows.

“Is this your apprentice?” Ceony asked, not expecting an answer. Judging by Thane’s age, Langston had to be the first . . . though he could have been the “half.” Ceony could understand firing an apprentice like Langston. Those monstrous hands could never form the minute and intricate Folds required by intermediate and advanced Folding.

Yet Ceony found her own jaw dropping as Langston picked up Jonto’s right hip with a fairylike touch and turned it over in his hands, examining its components. Setting it down, he picked up a square parchment of medium thickness and, with his tongue pinched in the corner of his mouth, began carefully Folding it to reflect the hip’s smallest part.

“Astonishing,” Ceony commented as the two worked. “I wouldn’t mind having a fellow his size with me right now.”

Rubbing a chill from her arms, she murmured, “I wouldn’t mind either fellow with me right now.”

Fennel pawed at her leg. Ceony absently reached down to pet his head.

Surely Langston had been certified as a Folder by now. She wondered how long his apprenticeship had taken. She wondered if he had been happy to arrive at Mg. Thane’s abode. If he had been polite upon meeting his teacher. If he had been grateful, as she should have been.
     



“We need to go,” she said to Fennel, tearing herself from her ruminations. She gave a last fleeting look to Jonto—and to Thane—and hurried for the library’s unpainted door. She had to throw her shoulder into it to nudge past a half-rusted lock—

Ceony found herself stumbling over lush beige carpeting. The sun had vanished, replaced by the lights of hundreds of electric bulbs centered between violet-painted alcoves studded with thick gold tiles, enchanted by Gaffers—glass magicians—to spread light outward in nearly prismatic rays. Soft music from multiple instruments touched her ears, alongside the clinking of wine glasses and unintelligible murmurs of too many people idly chatting.

Ceony paused, taking in her new surroundings. Fennel ran a few yards more before skidding to a halt.

Ceony knew this place—she had catered multiple dinners here with her old employer. This was Drapers’ Hall on Throgmorton Avenue, the finest hall in London, if not in all of England. At least, the finest Ceony had ever visited.

She stood on the balcony between wide gold-leafed pillars, their chapiters carved in tiers. Beyond them a great mural of wingless angels surrounded by flora painted the ceiling. She ran a hand over the balcony’s gold-leaf railing. Though this was only a vision, little more than a dream, this one felt as though it were real.

She peered to the floor below. Round, white-clothed tables filled it in neat rows, while men and women in black carried silver trays and glass pitchers to and from the kitchen tucked away in the northeast corner. A string quartet played soft melodies in the southwest corner. Ceony recognized all of it, though her memory had a more up-front view. She had donned that same black dress and frilly apron before.

No . . . she had catered this event.

Pulling away from the railing, she looked about the balcony. Small tables, none large enough to fit more than four people, lined either edge of the mezzanine where it followed the curve of the wall. About a quarter of the tables were unoccupied, but Ceony walked briskly and searched them first, for if the heart had spit her out here, she knew Thane couldn’t be far.

And she was right. She spied Thane looking no different than she knew him now—save for the lack of that indigo coat—sitting at a small, square table with a balding man Ceony had never before met.

Thane leaned his chin into his palm, much the same way he had at his titling ceremony when he became a magician, looking every bit the part of bored. His companion must not have noticed, for the balding man prattled without the slightest hitch or hesitation, gesturing every now and then with a flick of his butter knife or a tip of his head.

“. . . and she insisted that all proper ladies needed satin scarves, and said that Mary Belle had three satin scarves all in shades of blue, so of course I had to allot her the money,” the stranger said, pausing only to take a sip of his drink—mulberry wine, and from a very expensive year, if Ceony remembered correctly. Yes, she remembered the wine served at this event very well. “With her coming-out party in May, I certainly can’t have her go without a satin scarf. I try very hard to keep in tune with women’s fashion, what with her mother away to Crafton and all.”

Mg. Thane tapped the nail of his middle finger against the edge of his plate, his food only half-eaten. He’d already drained his wine glass, and with most of the servers on the main floor, no one had come by to refill it. His eyes looked glazed—not from alcohol, but from tedium. Couldn’t this bald man see that?

“What do you think, Emery?”

Thane blinked, and Ceony caught the brief reigniting of his irises. “Oh yes. The neck, of course, is crucial for a proper coming out. The irony in covering it, of course, clashes with the event, but you can’t have your youngest colder than the other girls at the party.”

Ceony smiled at that, though the balding man only nodded and said, “Exactly. She’ll stand apart in all the wrong ways.”

Ceony laughed. Were Thane and this man even having the same conversation?

Thane’s gaze drifted back to the ballroom floor. Stepping beside him, Ceony tried to follow his line of sight, knowing it wasn’t worth trying to get his attention. She guessed he peered at the grandfather clock against the north wall, likely hoping for an escape of some sort.

Escape . . .

Stepping around her teacher, Ceony leaned over the balcony in search of Lira—if she could find the Excisioner first, perhaps she could form some sort of upper hand—but instead spied a familiar braid of orange hair waiting tables below. That was her!

She remembered this event, though she didn’t recall Mg. Thane being at it. She would have remembered his face. Then again, at this event—a fund-raiser for some school board—she had only served on the floor, not in the balconies. The date was July 29, 1901. Just a week before the school year began at Tagis Praff.

It also happened to be her last day of work.

She squinted, watching herself fill wine glasses. She looked awful in that dress. It accentuated all the wrong places. Thank goodness she hadn’t known Thane then. Her ears burned at the thought.

Ceony recognized one man in particular at the table her younger self served. Though he was a few years short of middle-aged, he had gray hair with a receding hairline and a long gray mustache that framed the sides of his mouth. He boasted broad shoulders and a well-tailored suit—perhaps the best-tailored in the entire ballroom, with three real-gold buttons and a red-pleated cummerbund. Oh yes, she remembered him. Him and his foul talk about the Mill Squats where she had grown up, blathering nonsense about its education and a nonexistent prostitute program just because the district was a poor one. Ceony remembered this night distinctly. She had hated that man, and she had done a good job of keeping her temper controlled, until—

She held her breath and watched, waiting for that moment. Waiting . . .

There it was. Ceony—younger Ceony—reached over to fill the man’s wine glass, and his ungloved hand swooped right under her skirt. She still remembered his clammy fingers against her thigh.

Younger Ceony jumped back, scowled, and dumped the rest of that expensive mulberry wine right onto the man’s lap. The man yelped and leapt up so quickly his chair fell backward and clamored against the marble floor. The sound—both the chair and the man’s curse—echoed through the entire ballroom.

Beside her, Thane burst into laughter.

It startled Ceony. She glanced to Thane, ogling him, then realized he had been watching as well. He had seen Ceony dump half a pitcher of vintage wine onto the best-dressed man in the establishment, embarrassing the both of them in front of England’s finest.
     



And Thane laughed.

“What’s gotten into you?” the balding man across from Thane asked, oblivious.

“One of the waitresses just dumped a pitcher onto Sinad Mueller’s lap,” he chortled, picking up a sage-green cloth napkin to dab at his eyes.

Ceony paled. Had he said . . . Sinad Mueller?

Time seemed to freeze as that name processed in Ceony’s mind. Sinad Mueller. The Mueller Academic scholarship. The scholarship Ceony should have been first pick for, but had lost last minute, crushing her dreams of pursuing magic. The scholarship that—once lost—resigned her to a life of housework just to earn enough for school to become a half-decent chef. It all made sense now.

Ceony stared as she watched her younger self storm back into the kitchen—where she would promptly be fired—as Sinad Mueller continued shouting expletives. Two of his colleagues darted from their chairs with napkins ready to make a futile attempt at cleaning the man up.

She released the rail and took a step back. All her muscles went lax.

That was why Ceony had lost the scholarship. She had dumped a pitcher of wine onto the very man who would have awarded it to her.

“He deserved it.”

Ceony turned to see a second Mg. Thane standing over the one sitting down. This one wore a long indigo coat and his arms folded across his chest.

Ceony’s eyes darted between the two Thanes, nearly identical, and gasped. “Thane?”

But the second Thane didn’t look at her, only at the scene unfolding below. He appeared almost as unaware as his counterpart. And yet, when he spoke, it seemed as if he spoke to her.

“Sinad Mueller is a vile man behind closed doors,” he said. “You can hear it in his voice, the way he talks, the way he looks at women—even young men. He hoards his money and doles it out publicly to only the best specimens, and he makes sure half the country knows of his ‘generosity.’ He plays the school board like a fiddle, and I for one believe he cheated on his exit exams. He enchants rubber about as well as a tire salesman.”

Ceony clutched the strap of her bag and felt Fennel circle her legs. “He knew who I was.”

“I found out who you were,” Thane said, and Ceony wasn’t sure if it was in response to her statement or merely the next line of his monologue. “He revoked your scholarship, so I stepped in.” He chuckled to himself and rubbed his chin with his thumb. “I wanted to see the look on his face when that ‘petulant, fiery girl,’ as he put it, waltzed into Tagis Praff and stuffed his manner and his foul money right back into his coat pocket.”

Ceony glimpsed the ballroom floor, but Sinad Mueller had already left the room. “You gave it to me to spite him?” she asked. “Fifteen thousand pounds just to spite someone you didn’t like . . . not that I’m ungrateful. You have no idea how much it means to me—”

She turned back only to see the second Thane vanish. She darted from the railing, searching for him, but he had disappeared as easily as the moon on a cloudy night. If only she could put into words how much that scholarship meant to her, regardless of why she received it. The thank-you letter in Mg. Thane’s office couldn’t even come close to covering it. One more reason she couldn’t let him die.

Ceony’s gaze dropped to the ballroom and locked onto Lira, who appeared to be searching for her as well, near the string quartet. She held a small pool of blood in her palm and shook it slightly. A divining spell?

Ceony backed away from Lira’s view, slipping her hand into her bag and counting her thin arsenal. She had something, at least, but what real good would paper animals do against a practiced Excisioner? Folding had never been meant for combat! “I have to get out of here,” she whispered, picking Fennel up beneath his front legs. “I have to get out. Thane, where are you?”

But he didn’t answer. Whatever method he had used to speak to her earlier had been lost.

Swallowing and clutching Fennel to her chest, Ceony hurried across the balcony. Where could she hide? What sort of damage could she do with a mere stack of paper? There was a reason she never wanted to be a Folder!

I need to get out! her mind screamed.

She slowed at the end of the balcony, then stopped altogether. Before her stood a door that she knew wasn’t part of the ballroom—a white door rimmed with scarlet, without knob or handle. Glancing behind her, she saw Lira’s head crowning the top of the stairs that led to the balcony.

Ceony pushed her way through the door and staggered through a puddle of blood.

She gasped and bit her lip to stifle a scream as the door behind her vanished. She had reentered the fleshy chamber of Thane’s heart and stepped right into a river of blood that flowed steadily past her ankles. The loud pulsing of Thane’s heartbeat reverberated through the chamber’s walls: PUM-Pom-poom.

Trying to steady her breathing, Ceony followed the river’s current, her knuckles straining with the closed fists at her sides. The blood flowed higher and higher up her leg until she waded with it above her knees. Almost too deep. She gritted her teeth and tried not to think of being pulled beneath its surface.

She saw another door, but this one made of flesh and veins, pulsing in rhythm with the rest of the room. One with no windows or knobs, no locks or hinges. Just flesh pressed tightly against flesh, like a long, swollen cut that wasn’t meant to heal.

Somehow, Ceony knew she needed to get through it.

Lira’s voice sounded softly above her, no doubt carried on the particles of a spell, for the woman lingered nowhere in sight. Caught up in a vision, somewhere, Ceony hoped. “Not that I’m discontented to leave you trapped in here, dearie,” the voice said, “but I don’t want you stinking up the place. Let’s get this over with, shall we? Swift and quick. I’ll even leave your body in one piece. Maybe two.”

Despite the wet heat of the chamber, gooseflesh pimpled Ceony’s arms. She clutched the strap of her bag and forced air into her lungs, though a flutter broke her breath here and there. She couldn’t fight Lira, not yet. Her best option was to keep going—find the end of Thane’s heart and, hopefully, its exit.

“I need you to fold up, Fennel,” she told the dog, her words nearly inaudible. “Fold yourself up and get into my bag, where it’s safe. Just for a little while.”

The dog quirked its head to one side.

“Go on,” she said, and the dog tucked its head down and its legs in. Ceony pressed against Fennel’s sides gently with her hands until he formed a thick, lopsided pentagon. She carefully wedged the creature into her bag, between sheets of paper.
     



Taking a deep breath and holding it in her throat, Ceony pushed herself between the fleshy walls of Emery Thane’s heart into the second chamber.