The Paper Magician

by Charlie N. Holmberg

  Lira screamed.

  Blood rained over the shore. Lira stumbled back, both hands rushing to her face to stanch the steady flow of red water pouring from a split cheek and gouged eye.

  Ceony dropped the dagger, feeling her stomach flip inside out. Lira cried again and lashed out, backhanding Ceony across the jaw.

  Ceony fell, catching herself on raw palms. Lira dropped to her knees, gasping and cursing, blood pouring between her fingers. She tried to chant her healing spell but choked on every other word. Her blood had spilled everywhere—it dyed the tiny pools and streams of high tidewater, stained the lichen, painted crimson streaks across rocks and paper.

  Paper. Crumpled, damp, and torn paper, wet with blood.

  Numb, Ceony reached for a drier piece singed about the edges. Lira’s blood sluggishly soaked through its fibers.

  Her mind felt detached, her thoughts vacant as she touched the blood—the body’s ink—with an index finger. Her mind didn’t really process the idea; it merely materialized behind her eyes like a thread of nostalgia, as though it had always been there. It and nothing else.

  She wrote nine letters and, with a shaky but strong voice, read them aloud.

  “Lira froze.”

  And she did.

  Ceony stared at the still image of Lira hunched over and cradling her ruined face, tendrils of ice climbing up her legs and hunched back. Her grunts and gasps vanished, her lips parted midbreath. Strands of wild hair hung in the air free from gravity’s hold, as though someone had molded them in place with glue.

  Ceony gaped. She had read the paper like an illusion. Like Pip’s Daring Escape. But this wasn’t a story. Or, rather, it was her story. Not an illusion at all.

  She stared at her bloody finger, but her thoughts—her ability to process—remained far from her. She returned to the page, wrote, and read, “. . . and never moved again.”

  The statue of Lira remained unchanged.

  Ceony stood, letting the bloody paper fall to the rocks. A small whirlpool of hungry saltwater lapped up the words, sucking them back into the ocean. She backed seven steps away from Lira before a spot of brown on the ocean drew her eyes, close enough that she didn’t need to squint to make out its shape.

  A boat. It held two men, their features too distant to be distinct. One rowed, oars flapping in sync on either side of the boat. The other knelt at the boat’s helm, peering toward the coast.

  Ceony thought of the morbid seagull she had seen upon her arrival and tensed. The creature had been sent by someone, why not these two? Only the boat’s nearness pushed her legs to move.

  She turned back for the cave. Her soul yearned to run, but her body refused. It wasn’t broken, only felt broken. Exhausted. Distant.

  She stumbled into the cave, followed its wall with one hand until she reached the bowled shelf that held Emery’s heart, still beating strong.

  She checked her bag, empty save for Fennel. She spoke to the dog silently in thought, thanking him, promising to restore him as soon as she was able. Then she picked a few pieces of him apart, careful not to damage the greater part of his body, and tiredly Folded the links for a vitality chain, just large enough to encircle a grown man’s heart.

  Ceony fled the cave and climbed up the rocks before the boat reached the shore. She didn’t look back.

  She found the enormous glider where she had left it and flew to London, carrying Emery’s heart next to her own.

  CHAPTER 16

  AS WIND RUSHED OVER her aching body and numb hands, Ceony’s mind drifted back to Emery’s home. Her home. What if he had passed on while she had been away? What if she had been too slow? Could an animated heart revive an inanimate body?

  His heart fluttered weakly against hers, having lost much of its lingering strength since she lifted it from the enchanted pool.

  But she still had time. Surely she still had time. Stories like this one weren’t meant to end badly.

  Magicians Aviosky, Hughes, and Katter would have noted her absence by now, but she found herself not caring for whatever repercussions they could offer her. She didn’t regret her decision, even if her clumsy paper heart didn’t pull Emery through this. She prayed her Folding had held up.

  The magicians had, at least, left the giant door in Emery’s roof open. The glider swooped up and landed gracefully, even without her directing it. It knew its master’s house.

  Ceony pulled stiff fingers from its handles, massaging them against her hip to coax movement back into the knuckles. Her head felt full of clouds, but not in the dreamy sense. Just the empty one.

  The floorboards creaked under her feet. Her bag swung at her side like a broken pendulum from a derelict grandfather clock, and she felt as if she were made of paper herself. She leaned on the stairwell wall as she descended down to the second floor, holding Emery’s heart to her breast, its small vitality chain soaked red. She had left her shoe wedged between the rocks of the island shore, not wanting to stay any longer than was absolutely necessary. Her sore, socked foot muffled every other step.

  She passed Emery’s room, the door ajar, the bed empty. They must not have moved him. He was downstairs, still alive. Waiting for her. They wouldn’t have buried him without her. She hadn’t been gone that long.

  Had she?

  Past the library, the lavatory, her bedroom. She leaned on the wall as she took the stairs to the first floor.

  Mg. Aviosky opened the door, eight steps below her.

  “Ceony Twill!” she exclaimed with all the anxiety of a worried mother, the sternness of an academy principal, and the relief of a farmer feeling spring’s first rain on his skin. Her eyes widened round as dinner chargers. Ceony must have been a sight to see.

  Mg. Aviosky’s face paled and she started up the steps, but Ceony’s words made her pause. “I’m not hurt,” she said. And she wasn’t, not really. The blood running down her blouse wasn’t hers.

  She gently pulled Emery’s heart from beneath her collar. Mg. Aviosky pressed a hand to her mouth.

  “That isn’t . . . ,” she whispered through her fingers.

  Ceony took the last eight steps down, pushing past Mg. Aviosky, who didn’t stop her. Ceony didn’t have the energy for an argument, not right now. She saw no trace of Magicians Hughes and Katter.

  Her own heart quickened at the sight of Emery, the real Emery, lying in his makeshift bed on the dining room floor just as she had left him. His skin almost held the pallor of death. His lips were almost violet. His eyes were almost sunken.

  Almost, but not quite. Her paper heart still beat within his chest.

  Mg. Aviosky closed the stairway door and asked the question surfacing in Ceony’s own mind. “Will it work?”

  “I don’t know,” Ceony whispered. It scared her that a magician as experienced as Aviosky would ask that. What if it didn’t?

  She walked around to Emery’s left side and knelt beside him. She held his heart in one hand and reopened his shirt with the other. His flesh felt cool, but not cold.

  “There’s still magic left in it,” she said. She knew only because no heart could beat on its own without its body, not without a spell, and Lira’s magic had been strong. Hopefully it would be enough.

  She placed the heart upon his chest. His skin glimmered with the gold residue of Lira’s spell, and the cavity opened. The sight of an open chest would have terrified Ceony had she not just lived in one, more or less.

  “How long was I gone?” she asked as her paper heart greeted her with a feeble, soggy pulse.

  “One night,” Mg. Aviosky answered, barely audible.

  Ceony nodded. Reaching into Emery’s still-warm chest, she pulled out her paper heart and pressed his own back into place.

  Emery’s back arched and he sucked in a rush of air. The cavity closed so suddenly Ceony barely had time to pull her fingers free. The golden glimmer vanished.r />
  Ceony held her breath. Emery remained still, asleep.

  Pressing her ear to his chest, she listened for the heartbeat. It met her with a drowsy but steady PUM-Pom-poom.

  She smiled. She didn’t have the strength to do anything more.

  “He’ll be all right, but call a doctor,” she said, her voice light and airy. She thought she sounded like a child. She smoothed Emery’s hair back from his forehead and, though Mg. Aviosky watched from the foot of the bed, leaned down to kiss him on the cheek.

  “Miss Twill—” Aviosky began as Ceony stood, but the woman didn’t finish her sentence, whatever it may have been. Perhaps because Ceony looked so terrible. Perhaps because Mg. Aviosky saw this as a good deed. Perhaps it was the way Ceony’s legs shook as though they had aged one hundred years in the space of one night.

  Mg. Aviosky’s gaze prickled Ceony’s back as Ceony stepped away from Magician Emery Thane, pulled herself up the stairs, and collapsed into her own bed.

  Ceony awoke with lead bones and a mild headache in the center of her forehead. Soreness had settled into her muscles—her legs and forearms especially—warning her of further soreness on the morrow. She felt her pulse tickling hot spots on her back where she had skidded across the rock shelf along the Foulness coast. Her stomach, though it felt quite small, chortled in protest for food, and she had hardly enough saliva in her mouth to swallow.

  Someone handed her a glass of water.

  She didn’t recognize the man kneeling at her bedside, but Mg. Aviosky stood behind him and helped Ceony prop herself up on a pillow. Ceony drained the cup in four and a half gulps and thirsted for more.

  She noticed the conical stethoscope around the stranger’s neck—he looked about fifty, with thorough hair loss and round-lensed spectacles—and concluded he was the doctor she had asked Mg. Aviosky to retrieve. She hadn’t intended the doctor for her own use.

  Morning light in the window told her she’d been asleep for some time.

  “Dehydration,” the doctor said, pressing his finger into Ceony’s wrist, then watching to see how long his white print took to recolor. “And quite scratched. And in need of a bath. But you’ll certainly survive, Miss Twill.”

  Ceony cleared her throat. “Emer—Thane—Magician Thane,” she stuttered, feeling her cheeks heat under Mg. Aviosky’s scrutiny. “Is he all right?”

  Mg. Aviosky said, “As you predetermined, Miss Twill, he will be healthy after a few days’ rest. Dr. Newbold has affirmed it.”

  Releasing a long breath of relief, Ceony sunk down into her pillow. Dr. Newbold leaned forward and touched his stethoscope to her chest with no formality, but doctors tended to be quite familiar. Nodding his head once, he said, “Liquids and soft foods for twenty-four hours. If you have to chew it, don’t eat it, unless you want to cramp.”

  He rifled through a short-handled bag on the floor, one that had been patched several times, for Ceony noticed the stitchings along its seams were three distinctly different shades of black. From the bag Dr. Newbold pulled a shallow jar of green gel. It looked like the aloe cream the nurse at Tagis Praff always kept on the third shelf of the medicine cabinet between beds one and two.

  “This will help your abrasions heal more swiftly,” he explained. “Twice a day, or whenever they sting.”

  “And Em—Magician Thane?” she asked.

  “No abrasions on him,” Dr. Newbold answered. “Magic wounds are a strange sort. Tricky. If he acts oddly after he wakes, call me back.” He held up a finger as a warning. “And let him wake on his own. The body often knows what it needs without our meddling.”

  “But how will I know if he’s acting strange?” Ceony asked. “He’s strange already.”

  Mg. Aviosky clucked her tongue, and Ceony felt herself smiling. When Mg. Aviosky clucked again, Ceony wiped the grin from her face and managed to force a flush down into her chest, where the magician wouldn’t see it.

  To the doctor, Mg. Aviosky said, “Will you return tonight to check on his progress?”

  Dr. Newbold shook his head in the negative. “No, no, I don’t believe it’s necessary. He seems stable to me, especially now that he’s in his own bed. I don’t like patients lying on the floor unless they absolutely must.”

  “I can tend to him,” Ceony said, sitting up. Her back ached as she did. “I don’t mind, and it’s just watching to make sure nothing seems amiss, right?” she asked, glancing from the doctor to Mg. Aviosky. “I’m his apprentice and I’m all right. And I know you’re busy, Magician Aviosky.”

  Mg. Aviosky pursed her lips into a thin line, but Ceony wasn’t sure if it was in regard to her statement or not. Mg. Aviosky always looked pursed.

  “Things have gone from very hectic to very calm very quickly,” the magician said. “It disconcerts me. But if you believe it is well, Dr. Newbold, I suppose I’ll be wont to agree with you.”

  “It is well,” the doctor said, closing his bag and standing with a grunt. His right knee popped as he did so. “But telegram if anything does go amiss.”

  “Me as well,” Mg. Aviosky said to Ceony, clasping her hands behind her back. She still wore the same clothes she had donned when first responding to Ceony’s call, and Ceony found herself grateful not only for the woman’s quick response, but also that she had stayed beside Emery when the others had left him for dead.

  Ceony smiled. “Of course. I’ll let you know any and every change, Magician Aviosky. I promise it.”

  Mg. Aviosky smiled as much as her stern countenance would allow. “I am glad to hear it. I apologize for this incident disrupting your learning.” She looked at Ceony with a critical eye. “I admit I’m not a fan of mixed genders in apprenticeships, and our only other Folders are likewise male, but I’m willing to consider reassignment.”

  Ceony bit down on her tongue to keep from blurting an adamant “No!” at the very idea. Instead she calmly, politely, said, “Magician Thane has been a good teacher thus far, and very patient with me. I’d like to continue apprenticing under him as far as the situation allows.”

  Mg. Aviosky nodded, a fraction of skepticism marring her otherwise poised visage, but she said nothing. “Dr. Newbold,” she said, turning to the man who stood at eye level with her. “Thank you for your time. I’ll send your bill through the Cabinet. If you would excuse us.”

  Ceony chewed on her lip as the doctor nodded and left. She had assumed Mg. Aviosky would go with him. What more was there to say?

  Once Dr. Newbold had departed, Mg. Aviosky sat straight-backed on the edge of Ceony’s narrow bed and said, “Tell me precisely what happened.”

  Ceony curled in on herself. “I’m rather hungry, Magician—”

  “Is it so long a story?” Mg. Aviosky interrupted. “You fled the premises against instruction to pursue an Excisioner!” She gasped at the very idea. “And yet you not only survived, but rescued the heart of perhaps the most talented Folder in England. I deserve the details, Miss Twill.”

  “You didn’t ‘instruct’ me to stay,” Ceony countered. “Just to leave the dining room. Which I did.”

  Mg. Aviosky rubbed the bridge of her nose under her glasses. “This feels very much like detention again, Ceony.”

  “It’s just . . . private, I guess,” she replied.

  “Private?” the magician repeated, obviously surprised at Ceony’s choice of adjective. “How so? What is so private that you can’t tell me?” She paled. “You didn’t bargain—”

  “No, no,” Ceony said, glancing down to her hands. To the blood underneath her nails. In her mind’s eye she saw Lira’s frozen form, hands clutching her bleeding eye. Blood magic, Ceony thought. Does that make me an Excisioner, too?

  It was the thought Ceony hadn’t dared consider until now. What would Mg. Aviosky—and the Magicians’ Cabinet—do if they knew how Ceony had defeated Lira?

  Looking away from Mg. Aviosky’s eyes, Ceony
said, “I took Magician Thane’s glider—it’s in the attic—and used a bird scout—a paper bird, that is—to follow Lira. She must have seen the glider and gotten scared and fled. I chased her to the coast, where she had taken camp. I tracked her to the water. I think she escaped. I . . . I saw a boat in the water. It might have been for her.”

  Mg. Aviosky raised one brow. “And she left the heart behind?”

  Ceony nodded.

  “Foolish to come all this way and leave the very objective of her attack in a camp,” Mg. Aviosky said. “I’ll trace your coordinates and send some detectives in.”

  Ceony’s breath caught at that. She hoped Mg. Aviosky didn’t notice.

  “I think I’d like to rest now,” Ceony managed. She was unsure of what anyone would find on that beach—had the men taken Lira or left her? “And eat. I can look at a map and guess where the camp was . . . telegram you the location tonight, perhaps.” Buy some time.

  Mg. Aviosky appeared suspicious, but she receded. Ceony was, after all, one of her best students, detention or no. Another purse of the lips and Mg. Aviosky stood and said, “I want them by tonight, unless you want the Cabinet hounding you. Magician Hughes is a very impatient man and keen on details.” She adjusted her glasses. “I’ll leave the buggy running, just in case,” she said, and took her leave.

  Leaning against the warm glass of the window, Ceony waited until Mg. Aviosky passed through the paper charms disguising the cottage’s appearance before she rose from bed and padded lightly to Emery’s room.

  The door creaked loudly as she opened it. Emery lay still atop his bed, two blankets covering him. Curtains drawn.

  She opened them halfway to give him some sunlight. He looked healthier, ruddier.

  “I’m not sure what to do,” she admitted, watching his chest rise and fall with every steady breath. “I have to tell Magician Aviosky where. I don’t want to talk to the Cabinet. But . . . I left her there on the rocks. I didn’t know if writing it would work, but the blood made some sort of connection, and it did,” she said, rubbing her left arm absently. “But I’m not like her. Please don’t think I’m like her.”