CHAPTER 2
AFTER FRYING SOME CREPES with strawberries and cream for breakfast, Ceony returned upstairs and opened her bedroom door and window to keep the space from getting too hot. She played fetch with Fennel using a balled stocking for a few minutes, then returned to the spell Emery had assigned her before he left for the conference—a paper doll of herself.
The paper doll had proved tricky, not because of the abstract concept, but because the initial step required the assistance of another person. Ceony couldn’t very well trace her own silhouette onto paper, after all. With Emery gone and Jonto unable to hold a pencil steady, Ceony had telegrammed Mg. Aviosky to request the assistance of her apprentice, Delilah Berget. Delilah, a year Ceony’s senior, had taken two years to graduate from Tagis Praff instead of Ceony’s one, so they’d overlapped. Since Mg. Aviosky kept Delilah frightfully busy, the tracing hadn’t commenced until the evening before Ceony’s birthday.
Now Ceony sat on her bedroom floor with a pair of scissors she had purchased from a Smelter two years ago. The twin blades could cut through anything, and would never dull. Ceony studied them for a moment before taking them to the long sheet of paper etched with her front-facing silhouette. Had she become the Smelter she’d once dreamed of being, she would likely know how the spell worked by now. Not that she regretted the decision to apprentice under Emery, whether or not it had been hers to make.
Cutting out the silhouette was a slow process; Emery had warned her that one wrong cut would ruin the spell, and she didn’t want to start over again. Ceony had managed to cut out the left foot and up to the left knee before Emery appeared in the doorway, his indigo coat sweeping about his calves.
Ceony carefully pulled back the scissors before giving him her attention. Emery’s eyes sparkled with amusement. Had she done something funny?
“I’ve determined that I will teach you to cheat at cards for the day’s first lesson,” Emery announced.
Ceony dropped her scissors. “I knew you were cheating!”
“Astute, but not astute enough,” the paper magician replied, tapping his index finger against the side of his head. “Unless you can tell me how I did it.”
“A Location spell of sorts?”
He smiled. “Of sorts. Come.” He motioned with his hand.
Grabbing Fennel by his belly so he wouldn’t trample the paper doll, Ceony followed Emery into the hallway, shut her door firmly, and set the dog down. Fennel sniffed the floorboards before discovering something interesting in the bathroom, and vanished from sight.
In the library, Emery sat on the floor by the table littered with neat stacks of paper, each a different color and thickness. He set his Folding board down in front of him, then pulled an ordinary stack of playing cards from an inner pocket of his coat.
Ceony sat across from him—the position she took for most of their lessons. Emery shuffled the cards rather expertly, which made her wonder what sort of employment he had taken before becoming a Folder. Her journey through his heart hadn’t revealed those secrets, and so she decided it best not to ask.
“You remember the File-location spell I taught you, yes?” he asked.
Ceony did, as she remembered nearly everything that occurred in her life, whether she wanted to or not. For the most part, her photographic memory was a gift. Emery had taught her that spell the day after his recovery from losing his heart—the same day Ceony had begun calling him by his first name.
She recited the lesson. “So long as I have made physical contact with the papers in question, I can use a ‘sort’ command and then recite, verbatim, the written terms I am looking for.”
It would have been a useful spell to know while studying for midterms at the Tagis Praff School for the Magically Inclined.
“Precisely,” Emery said with a nod. “With playing cards—unless they’re from a tampered deck—you can do the exact same thing. And you can assign a card a gesture instead of a name, so that the gesture will call it forward in a game. Allow me to demonstrate.”
He fanned out the cards, perhaps to ensure he had, indeed, touched each of them, and then said, “Sort: King of Diamonds.” One of the topmost cards pulled out of the deck toward him. He plucked it up with his other hand and turned it so Ceony could see that it was the King of Diamonds.
He then turned the card away from Ceony and, as though talking to the king himself, said, “Re-sort: Gesture,” and tapped the right side of his nose once. Emery slipped the King of Diamonds back into the deck and shuffled it, dealing Ceony and himself five cards as though they were playing poker, which they had gotten into the habit of doing most Tuesday nights at a quarter past seven.
“Now,” Emery said, holding up his cards. “So long as I mumble ‘sort’ under my breath, or somewhere where the cards can hear me, I can signal the King of Diamonds by tapping my nose. I usually find it best to say the word before I enter the room where the game is being held. But mind that you must repeat the ‘sort’ command for each card you intend to steal.”
He coughed—Ceony thought she heard the word “sort” in the act—and tapped the side of his nose. The King of Diamonds flew out of the deck and right into Emery’s waiting hand.
“How deceitful of you,” Ceony said, though she couldn’t help but smirk. How angry Zina would be if Ceony used this trick against her the next time they played Hearts!
“It’s easiest to disguise what you’re doing when you’re shuffling or dealing,” Emery explained, “or when your opponent is distracted by something that’s cooking in the kitchen.”
Ceony opened her mouth to protest, but instead closed it and shot him a disapproving look. He had won the game last Tuesday when Ceony had cinnamon rolls in the oven. She had been worried they would burn. Perhaps that’s why Emery never kept the money she lost, regardless of the amount. The cheater.
“And how do I tamper with the deck?” she asked.
That amusement rekindled in his eyes. “A lesson for another day. I can’t give away all my secrets at once,” he said. He handed the deck to her, and Ceony tried the spell herself, only with the Queen of Spades. To her relief, a quick tug on her braid summoned the card on her first try.
“Now we shall see who wins at cards,” Emery said, chuckling to himself. He gathered the deck and returned it to the recesses of his coat. For the next spell, he stood and retrieved two white, 8?" by 11" sheets of medium-thickness paper and set them down on the Folding board. His eyes met Ceony’s for a long moment as he settled back into his seat, but Ceony couldn’t read his thoughts. Emery had gotten better at hiding them these days.
“I’m going to teach you the Ripple spell, but this is one that can’t be rushed,” he explained, dropping his gaze to the rectangular paper in his hands. “The thickness of the paper does affect the spell—the thicker the parchment, the stronger the ripple.”
“What ripple?” Ceony asked, brows drawn together. “I haven’t read anything about Ripple spells.”
Emery smirked and did a square Fold—a triangular Fold that formed a square when opened, after cutting off the excess paper. He sheared the excess strip off with a rotary cutter and performed a full-point Fold to turn the Folded triangle into a smaller, symmetrical triangle.
“Cutting off the excess is necessary,” he explained. “Don’t start with a square piece of paper. Would you hand me the ruler?”
Ceony snatched the ruler from the top drawer of the table. She heard a few pencils roll around inside the drawer as she closed it, and Emery frowned. He would probably reorganize that drawer before he left the library today. For a man who was more or less a pack rat, Emery preferred his belongings to be in perfect order. Perfect to him, at least.
Emery set the ruler down on the paper to measure the width, then laid it out across the length. “Five-eighths of an inch is the magic number. Remember that,” he said. He dragged the rotary cutter across the line, but stopped short of shearing off the base of the triangle entirely. He then flipped the paper over and measured again, cutting from the other side, five-eighths of an inch up.
“Like in sewing,” Ceony said, watching his hands work. Even though she would remember all the cuts, this spell would take her far longer to prepare. How did he make his measurements so quickly?
“Is it?” he asked, glancing up at her before making a third cut, flipping the triangle once more. Two more cuts, and he had an evenly sliced triangle in his hands.
He carefully unfolded it until it became a single-layered flayed square. Pinching its center, he lifted the paper up. Ceony ogled—it looked like a multi-tiered, geometric jellyfish. She didn’t know any other way to describe it.
Emery stood, and Ceony followed suit.
“This is something I kept in my back pocket when I . . . aided law enforcement,” he said. Ceony, of course, knew about his work hunting Excisioners, the practitioners of forbidden blood magic, but there were some things Emery just didn’t like to discuss. “It’s good for a distraction, or to give someone you don’t like a headache.”
Emery extended his arm in front of him and commanded, “Ripple,” then bobbed the paper creation up and down, making it look even more like a jellyfish.
The spell blurred, but so did the rest of the library. Ceony blinked, trying to clear her vision, but the very air seemed to undulate out from the paper jellyfish, like a rock thrown into the center of a pond. The floor rolled; the bookshelves waved. The ceiling twisted and the furniture appeared to be swimming. Even Ceony’s own body rippled back and forth, back and forth—
Her mind spun as vertigo assaulted her. She reached for the chair, for the table, but her hand missed and she teetered.
Emery sidestepped and caught her, one arm wrapped firmly around her shoulders. He dropped the spell, and the library reoriented itself, straight and sturdy once again.
“I should have insisted you stay seated,” he said apologetically.
She shook her head, finding her feet. “No . . . it’s very, uh, useful.”
As her vision returned to normal, she became hyperaware of Emery’s hand on her shoulder, and despite her every urge for it not to happen, her cheeks burned with a flush.
Emery’s arm lingered a moment after she had steadied herself, and he seemed hesitant to remove it. Was he worried she’d fall?
Clearing his throat, Emery rubbed the back of his head. “You should practice this when you get a chance, perhaps with thinner paper to start, hmm?” He glanced toward the door, then at the table drawer containing the loose pencils. He stepped around Ceony and began reorganizing the errant drawer. “And the paper doll, of course. That should keep you busy until the tour tomorrow.”
Ceony took a deep breath, hoping he didn’t notice her blazing skin. “I think it will. I’ll finish my work on the doll first. It’s a little less jarring.”
Emery nodded, and Ceony excused herself.
She settled back down on the floor of her room, leaving the door cracked open. However, as she picked up her enchanted scissors and held them to the paper doll, she found she had an especially hard time holding her hand still.