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.”
The Paper Magician (The Paper Magician Series, Book 1) Page 10
