CHAPTER 15
A LIGHT SPRINKLING OF rain and soft gray light woke Ceony early in the morning, just as the cry of some wild bird and the skittering of an unseen animal had twice during the night. Her right leg tingled below the knee, and her sore back creaked as she straightened against the tree trunk. A large brown spider crept down her shoulder; Ceony shrieked, slapped it off, and jumped to her feet, stumbling on her dead leg. Her left ankle, at least, seemed much better, and the swelling had gone down while she slept.
She looked about the tree, trying to organize her scattered thoughts. Mist clung to her clothes and dripped from heavy leaves overhead.
Pulling out Lira’s switchblade, Ceony scanned the forest, searching for a flash of ginger hair, or for any sign of human life. She saw none. Still, if Grath had transported to wherever Ceony was and tracked back to the shed yesterday, it wouldn’t take him long to find her.
She put the switchblade back into her camisole and examined her mirror shard, but the glass remained smooth and unenchanted. Hopefully carrying it with her wouldn’t be a two-edged sword, but even if Grath’s image appeared in the glass, he wouldn’t know how to find her. At least Ceony hoped he wouldn’t. This was a shard from his mirror, after all.
She climbed back to the road, thinking that if she could find another inhabitant, she could get help. Or at least a piece of paper. Though in this rain, a paper bird wouldn’t make it very far.
And Ceony had no idea just how many miles stretched between her and London, or how many bodies of water. Still, she could only go onward.
She followed the road.
The gray sky brightened as she walked, yet the sun refused to break its cloud cover. It rained long enough to make Ceony’s clothes feel uncomfortable, then stopped, leaving the world awfully cold for late summer. She unbraided her hair and combed her fingers through it, rebraided it. Checked the mirror. Glanced over her shoulder.
After some time, perhaps two hours, she heard the rattling of carriage wheels on the dirt road ahead of her. A stout, unpainted carriage pulled by two spotted horses came into view. Relieved, Ceony ran toward it, waving her arms to stop the driver, but he ignored her and continued on, quickening the horses’ trot as he passed. The carriage windows had their shutters drawn.
Ceony paused in the road, staring after them. A young woman in distress, and they hadn’t even slowed? Curse the French! Who did they think she was, and what errand could they possibly have in the middle of nowhere that they couldn’t so much as stop to give her directions?
Shoulders slumping, Ceony turned back to the road. She didn’t need directions, and wouldn’t understand them anyhow. She had only two options: go forward, or return to the shed.
Ceony moved forward at a quicker clip, rubbing a hunger cramp from her stomach as she went. The carriage must have come from somewhere, and the horses didn’t look too exhausted. Only a few more hours, she thought, hopeful.
The trees thinned even more, and the rain picked up again, sprinkling on and off, defying the warmth of the hidden sun. Ceony rubbed a chill from her fingers as she walked, searching for any hint of life. She spied a wild rabbit and for a moment wished she knew how to hunt the animal, not just how to cook it.
She tried holding her mouth open to the rain for a drink, but the droplets were so fine and temperamental that it did nothing to quench her thirst. She continued walking, her muscles sore, clutching the mirror in her hands. Find me Delilah, Magician Aviosky. Find me before Grath does.
She tried not to think of her family, but walking in silence down the never-ending road, the feat proved difficult. She imagined Marshall on the floor in the storage room of the meatpacking warehouse, imagined Zina hanging by one of the hooks, Emery and the constable standing over them. Only this time, all the blame lay on Ceony’s shoulders.
Shaking the thoughts away, Ceony peered behind her, thinking for a moment that she heard heavy footsteps, or saw a flash of ginger hair, paler than her own. But no—she was alone. She didn’t feel that same uneasy, hair-raising feeling that came upon her whenever Saraj was close.
More time passed and she found another sign, this one reading, “Zuydcoote un kilometre au sud-est.” She imagined “kilometre” meant kilometer, but she couldn’t piece together the rest. Still, a sign meant civilization had to be nearby. She hoped.
She picked up her pace, her stomach growling audibly now, and to her relief, she saw a cultivated hill covered in trimmed crabgrass and a small redbrick house atop it, off the road a ways. Finding a new ball of energy inside her, Ceony ran across the road and up the hill, not bothering to look for a pathway. She reached the narrow porch, breathless, and knocked on the door that bore a faded sign reading “Claes.”
She heard creaking footsteps beyond the door, and then a balding man who looked to be in his late forties answered the door.
“Hello, I’m so sorry,” Ceony blurted, “but I’m lost and I need help. Do you have a telegraph?”
The man crossed his brows. “Et, qui êtes-vous? Je ne parle pas l’anglais.”
Oh, how she wished Delilah were here to translate! Ceony’s grip tightened on the mirror, but with her free hand she pointed to herself and said, “Ceony. Lost. From England.”
She pointed in what she assumed was the direction of England. Then an idea struck her.
She tucked the mirror shard into her waistband and pretended to write on her hand. “Paper?” she asked. “Uh . . . papel? Papier? See-voo play?”
She thought that sounded French.
He paused, then nodded and opened the door, motioning with one hand for Ceony to enter. A slightly older man who resembled the first sat on a short, apricot-colored couch with a newspaper on his lap. He eyed Ceony with curiosity.
The first man moved to a desk in the corner of the room and pulled out a small pad of paper and a pencil. “Papier?” he asked, holding out the supplies.
“Yes, yes! Uh, oui,” Ceony said, grasping the pad. The familiar tingle of the paper beneath her fingers gave her some comfort. She quickly scribbled a sentence on the first page, receiving strange looks from both men. When she had finished, she read, with strong inflection, “After losing her way through mirror transportation, Ceony found herself in an unfamiliar place and unsure of how to get home.”
She pictured what images would best illustrate her point, and they danced before her in the air—ghostly, translucent pictures of what happened to get her to this house. The two men jumped a little when the images first appeared, but then they watched in fascination.
She lowered the pad and wrote some more, then read, “Ceony wondered where she was.”
The image of a map of Europe floated before her, with a question mark hovering above it and a thumbtack wavering between England and France.
“Belgique,” the first man said. He hesitated, glancing at the man who Ceony assumed was his brother. In a poor English accent, he said, “Belgium.”
“Belgium?” Ceony repeated, and the story illusion dripped away like wet paint. And I smelled the ocean . . . That must have been the English Channel. I crossed it through the mirror.
How on earth would she get back?
“Gaffer?” she asked, drawing a stick figure below her words and sketching a hand mirror in its hands. “Do you have a Gaffer here?” She lowered the pad and stepped over to the window, tapping on the glass.
The first man turned to his brother and said, “Je pense qu’elle est celle qu’il veut. Elle est rousse. Elle enchante papier.”
“Papier,” Ceony repeated, nodding. At least she knew that word. “Oui, papier.”
The brother nodded, and the first man gestured for Ceony to follow him farther into the house. He held out his hands, and she reluctantly handed over the pad. Perhaps the generosity of these men would extend to offering her a quick meal, too. Her stomach growled. She hoped the man heard it.
If he did, he didn’t show it.
Ceony followed him through a small but immaculate kitchen, then down a steep set of stairs that required her guide to hunch over to keep his head from hitting the ceiling. In the basement she passed a closed door; then the man led her into an empty, rectangular room with a few crates stacked in the corner. Near the crates, an old mirror with a broken frame leaned against the wall.
Ceony froze just inside the door. Behind the mirror, arms folded across his broad chest, stood Grath Cobalt.
“Est-ce que c’est la fille? On a le douxieme parti?” the man asked, barring the door with his arm when Ceony tried to back away.
“Bien s?r, vous avez bien fait,” Grath answered in a flawless French accent, his gray eyes focusing on Ceony, whose heart had begun to beat so high in her throat she could almost taste it. “S’il vous pla?t, donnez-moi un instant.”
The man nodded and stepped out of the room, shutting the door behind him.
Ceony reached for the handle.
“Nuh-uh,” Grath said, unfolding his arms. “I’m used to wild goose chases, love, but I’m much better when I play the goose.” He took a step forward. “For us, this ends now.”
Ceony trembled. “P-Please, I don’t have what you want,” she murmured. “Just let me go.”
“And risk more scars?” he asked, rubbing his side where Delilah had shot him. His shirt still bore a hole from the bullet, but the skin underneath looked unscathed. Had Grath visited Saraj before tracking her down? Did that mean the Excisioner still lurked in the city, or did Grath just know how to find him using the mirrors?
Ceony seized the door handle, only to find it locked. She hadn’t even heard the metal click.
Her stomach sank, no longer hungry. Tears sprang to her eyes. “I’ll d-do whatever you want,” she whispered. “Her blood spilled on my paper. It was an Illusion spell, but I wrote the words in her blood, and it took. That’s all I did. Please don’t hurt my family.”
Grath took another step forward, and another, his face a mask that her words didn’t alter. Ceony focused so intently on him—on the vein throbbing in his forehead and the shadows dancing in his eyes—that she didn’t notice the swirling mirror behind him. One moment, Grath was sauntering toward her, and the next a familiar voice called out to him from behind, freezing him in his tracks.
“We really should stop meeting like this.”
A surge of relief rushed through Ceony with such force she nearly lost her balance. Grath scowled and turned, one shoulder still pointed toward Ceony.
There, on the right side of the mirror, stood Emery without his indigo coat. His features looked sharper, darker. His voice lacked its usual mirth. On the left side of the mirror stood Mg. Hughes, who looked rather calm given the situation.
The mirror still swirled, but Ceony didn’t need to see through it to know who had enchanted it, who had found her. Magician Aviosky. Thank God.
Mg. Hughes said, “Sorry for the delay, Miss Twill, but bad glass is incredibly hard to pass through, once it’s found.”
Two tears traced the curve of Ceony’s cheeks. “Thank you,” she breathed.
Emery’s eyes focused on Grath. He held his left hand in his pocket, perhaps holding a spell there. Mg. Hughes conspicuously kneaded three small rubber balls in his right hand.
Grath straightened, his confidence boosted. “Such annoying timing, Thane,” he said. “I was almost done here.”
Mg. Hughes lifted his hand, drawing Grath’s attention. The man tensed, ready for a spell, but instead Emery’s hand whipped out of his slacks and tossed blue confetti into the air, so many tiny shreds of paper that, for a moment, it concealed him completely.
And then he vanished.
A moment later, Ceony felt a hand on her waist as Emery pushed her behind him. He too tried the door, but of course found it locked.
“We need another mirror, Patrice!” Emery shouted.
Grath laughed, taking two steps back so he could see both magicians clearly. He even clapped his hands twice. “What a show, what a show,” he laughed. “Three against one, and yet for some reason I still feel I have the upper hand.”
“Grath—” Ceony began, but Emery shushed her.
“We don’t negotiate with criminals, Miss Twill,” Mg. Hughes said, still kneading those balls. “I’ll hang you by the rubber in your shoes, Cobalt.”
“Hmm,” Grath said, rubbing his chin. “But what do you want, old man? Me, or the girl? I don’t see how you’ll get out of here with both, plus your life.”
From the swirling mirror, Aviosky’s disjointed voice said, “There’s a decent-sized mirror in a lavatory upstairs.”
Grath frowned. “It just takes one touch, Alfred.”
Mg. Hughes laughed. “We know what you are. Don’t play us for fools.”
Grath scowled, and Ceony knew that the expression was meant for her.
After a moment, Grath did turn, slowly, to face Emery. He pulled one of his glass knives from his belt and thumbed the blade, looking the paper magician up and down. “You won’t win, in the end,” Grath said, one of his long canines popping over his lip as he smirked. “You never do. Not with me, not with Saraj. Not with Lira. She was my finest acquisition.”
Emery said nothing.
Grath’s eyes slid over Emery’s shoulder for a second, and he leered at Ceony. “So protective. I should have had my way with her, too.”
Emery tensed. “I’ll see they cut your tongue out before you get the noose, Grath.”
Grath lifted his blade, but Mg. Hughes moved faster.
He threw the rubber balls, which bounced off the floor and soared in three different directions at an alarming speed, catapulting off walls and ceiling, blurring into bullets of black. They orbited around Mg. Hughes, Emery, and Ceony, but not Grath. One skinned his shoulder, leaving a wide streak of red in its wake. They forced Grath to dance and dodge to avoid being shot through.
Ceony didn’t have a chance to witness Grath’s counterattack. Emery pulled her away from the door and slammed his foot into the wood, just beside the knob. The weak lock gave and the door flew open, slamming into the wall beside it. With an almost painful grip on Ceony’s forearm, Emery yanked her from the room and up the stairs, into the kitchen. The man who had answered the door started from near the sink. Emery elbowed him out of the way and ran through the kitchen and into the hallway. He opened one door to a bedroom, then another to the lavatory, where a mirror about three feet by two rested lopsided on a white cabinet with chipped paint. Its silvery face swirled with a Transport spell.
After releasing Ceony, Emery wrenched the mirror from the wall and set it on the floor, then grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her into it. Ceony’s stomach lurched as a cold weightlessness overtook her, but she didn’t reemerge in the Parliament building. She didn’t pass through the mirror at all.
She stood inside of it, surrounded by swirling silver walls that warped in shape between concave and convex. Before her hovered a floating silver rock, darker than the walls, and to her right a few stalagmites jutted up from the silvery ground like teeth. A solid-looking cloud hovered a ways ahead, and Ceony realized it was the physical form of a scratch on the mirror.
Delilah had warned her about passing through bad mirrors. This must have been what she meant.
Emery appeared beside her a moment later. He cursed softly, then once more took Ceony’s arm. “Stay close,” he said.
He led her along the stalagmites toward the hovering boulder—a chip, perhaps, or a tarnish. They ducked under it, careful not to lift their heads until they’d passed it completely. When they reached the vertical cloud, which resembled a spiderweb of glass, menacing and sharp, Emery pulled Ceony to the right. They sidestepped until they had circled the farthest stretches of its web.
Another wall faced them, swirling and bright. Emery nudged Ceony forward, and she passed through its cold embrace.