The Master Magician (18 page)

What if . . .
she wondered, stilling her pen,
What if Emery’s grown tired of me?

Preposterous. Wasn’t it? They got on splendidly, all the time. He
loved her. They’d even discussed marriage! Ceony could laugh at the idea of him growing bored with her.

And yet she didn’t. She blinked rapidly to hide a tear, then glanced at Bennet to see if he’d noticed, but his chain spell demanded all his attention. Taking a deep breath, Ceony finished her doodle.

What if he’s using Magician Bailey as an excuse to distance us?
she wondered.
What if all of this is meant to be some sort of cushion so he can break our relationship cleanly?

Mg. Emery Thane had been married before, and it had ended very, very badly. Ceony had seen firsthand the damage that relationship had done to him, the jagged crack it had left in his heart. Surely that canyon had not yet been filled. And what if it never was? What if Emery couldn’t handle the commitment once Ceony graduated from his tutelage and their romance became public?

What if Ceony was only ever meant to be a secret?

You’ll kill yourself thinking like that
, she chided herself, gripping her pen tighter.
Be reasonable. There must be an explanation
.

She wondered where Emery had gone the day she’d transported to his cottage and left that warning. He hadn’t even replied to
that
.

“Do you remember Magician Whitmill?”

Ceony glanced up at Bennet’s words. He held a completed chain link in his hands, and his blue eyes smiled at her. They made her think of a teddy bear.

Ceony blinked to clear her mind, to pull her thoughts away from Emery for long enough to search her memory for the name. It rang a bell, and her mind zoomed back nearly three years to her first semester at Tagis Praff. She sat in the auditorium of the school on the aisle, beside a classmate she didn’t know, but whose face she recalled with perfect clarity, for all the good it would do her. In her mind’s eye she looked ahead at the stage, at the portly Polymaker with gray-streaked hair and a gray-streaked mustache. She laughed.

Bennet smiled. “So you do?”

“He was recruiting for his textile company in Virginia,” Ceony stated. “He brought in that huge pin board full of product and knocked it over with his hip when he bent down to pick up his handkerchief.”

Bennet chuckled. “I shouldn’t have laughed, but I did. I don’t think anyone took him seriously for the rest of the lecture.”

Letting her ledger close, Ceony asked, “What brought that up?”

He shrugged. “Just thinking, I guess. Folding makes for good thinking. I wanted to be a Polymaker, you know.”

“I didn’t.”

“I only decided the month before graduation,” Bennet admitted. “So much has yet to be discovered in Polymaking, and it would be interesting to find new spells for a new magic. Before that, I had thought rubber would be an interesting trade. Or, rather, my father did. He works facilities at a Siping factory.”

“Is he a magician?”

“No. Just me. But I have a sister-in-law who’s a Smelter.”

He paused, turning his link over in his hand.

You can still be a Polymaker
, Ceony thought. She touched the collar of her blouse, feeling the charm necklace hidden beneath it.

“You wanted to be a Smelter, didn’t you?” Bennet asked.

She met his gaze. “I’m surprised you remember that.”
When did I tell Bennet about Smelting?
Her memory spun.
Back at Tagis Praff, the Christmas dinner.

“Are you . . .” He hesitated. “Are you disappointed? About Folding?”

“I was at first,” she admitted, “but not anymore. I’m glad things worked out the way they did.”

“Me, too, I think,” Bennet replied. “I mean, I guess I can’t really know without having a Polymaking apprenticeship for a comparison, you know?”

She nodded.

“I’m worried about leaving,” he added, resting his chin in his palm.

Ceony wove her fingers together over her ledger. “You’ll make a fine magician.”

“Not that,” he said. “I’m worried about leaving Magician Bailey. He . . . doesn’t have many friends. Hard to believe, I know.”

Ceony snorted.

“I’m sure he’ll get another apprentice quickly, but he takes a long time to . . . acclimate. As you’ve witnessed. But deep down he means well. He’s misunderstood. I think he’s had it hard, you know?”

Ceony thought back to her journey through Emery’s heart, where she’d first seen Mg. Bailey, or Prit. She wondered how many people had bullied him and for how long. Would she behave the same way if she’d suffered his fate?

“I know, a little,” she said. “But you can’t let that hold you back.”

“I won’t. It’s just something I think about.”

Ceony reopened her ledger. A paper slipped out from its back pages and onto her lap—a half-sheet of paper, roughly torn along one of its long edges. The second half of the mimic spell she’d left with Mg. Aviosky. Its face remained blank. She wondered if Mg. Aviosky knew about the anonymous tip on Saraj and suspected her. That was, of course, assuming anyone had bothered to relay the information to the Head of Education. Emery obviously hadn’t fact-checked with Mg. Aviosky, or they’d both be pounding down Mg. Bailey’s door.

Bennet clasped his hands together. “Ceony, I—”

“Could you excuse me?” she asked, standing from the table. “I need some of that ‘thinking’ time.” She held up the ledger. “I have a lot more work to get done.”

Bennet nodded. “Of course,” he said, but he looked disappointed.

She offered the man a smile before exiting the study. It had not been her intent to cut him off—the words had already been in her throat—but she was grateful for it. Bennet was a wonderful friend
and, admittedly, a wonderful specimen of a man, but she worried over his friendliness. At that moment, her name had sounded especially friendly on his lips.

“I’m awful,” she mumbled to herself, letting her feet carry her a ways down the hall before slipping the mimic spell onto the cover of her ledger. Leaning it against her left palm, she wrote,
Have you heard anything?
to Mg. Aviosky. She didn’t need to explain what she meant.

She leaned back against the wall, holding the mimic spell in front of her, waiting for Mg. Aviosky’s scrawl to appear below hers. Seconds passed. A minute, two minutes, but the half page stubbornly remained blank. Of course, the mimic spell had no chimes or lights to alert its holder when writing appeared on it; Ceony would have to wait until Mg. Aviosky looked at her half of the spell. Her only hope for hearing word faster was to use a telegraph. She assumed Mg. Bailey owned one, as he owned a ridiculous number of things, but finding one and asking permission to use it didn’t rank high on the list of things she was eager to accomplish.

She let out a long, slow breath and slipped the mimic spell back into her ledger. Outside, a cloud shifted in the sky, letting a ray of sunlight pierce through the hallway window. Stepping from its sudden brilliance, she blinked spots from her eyes. Before they had cleared, she noticed something perched on the eaves of the house. It stood about a foot high and, though it had no feathers, preened its right wing: a paper hawk.

Ceony gawked for a moment before stepping closer to the glass, making slow movements so as not to startle the lifelike spell. Dozens of papers comprised its body, each Folded so crisply into the next that Ceony could barely spy the seams. Brown paper, though a few off-white pieces formed the hawk’s breast.

The creature couldn’t have been Bennet’s handiwork, which meant it had to be Mg. Bailey’s creation. A cloud passed over the
sun once more, allowing Ceony a better view of the bird. A fierce-looking spell, certainly, complete with tightly rolled paper talons and a sharp, cardstock beak hinged to open and close. Ceony hadn’t seen a single spell adorning Mg. Bailey’s estate besides the ones she and Emery passed back and forth. Had she missed this one, or was it new?

And why a hawk, of all things? Surely Mg. Bailey wasn’t so sour as to want to scare away songbirds.

The hawk’s wings spread, and it took off from the roof, flying out over the yard a ways before arching up and over the mansion, out of Ceony’s line of sight.

“Hmm,” she hummed, pulling away from the window.

Down the hall she spied Mg. Bailey speaking to one of the maids who came by thrice a week to clean the few lived-in portions of the house. Ceony hurried up to her bedroom before he had a chance to spot her.

Ceony drew her thumb across the crease of a dog-ear Fold, careful to ensure its edges lined up perfectly before inserting the newly formed triangle into a notch on the skeletal arm she was constructing on the breakfast table. Another hour or two and she’d have it finished and ready to test. If it didn’t work, she’d have to go over each and every paper and Fold to find the mistake. If she couldn’t find it, she’d have to start over. Fortunately, she was confident that she’d seen Jonto’s arms enough times to get this spell right. The challenge was to make the arm act as its own whole, instead of a piece of a larger body.

#1. Something to open a door
. Once she made the wrist fully functional, this contraption would do just that, and she could cross the first requirement for her magician’s test off the list.

Fennel barked from his perch on the bed, his paper body barely heavy enough to dent the mattress. He hovered over Ceony’s ledger
and growled—which sounded more like a piece of paper flapping in the wind—then bit down on the mimic spell protruding from the ledger’s cover. Two jerks of his head pulled it free.

Ceony bounced onto her feet and rushed over to the pup, tugging the spell from his mouth. As she watched, Mg. Aviosky’s stiff penmanship scrawled across it in black ink, as though it were being written by a ghost:

I don’t want you involving yourself in this, Miss Twill.

Biting her lip, Ceony took the spell to the breakfast table and wrote back, in pencil,
You promised you’d tell me. I need to know.

A dot of black ink appeared below Ceony’s words, growing larger with each passing second. Mg. Aviosky had set her pen down, likely debating her response, and the ink saturated the paper on her end. Finally she wrote,
He was spotted in Reading not long ago. Yes, he’s still in England. Mg. Hughes believes he’s trying to collect funds and false papers in order to escape through Europe unscathed.

Again the pen soaked the paper. Mg. Aviosky’s hesitant hand penned,
Mg. Juliet Cantrell has been murdered.

Blood withdrew from Ceony’s face and hands. Mg. Juliet Cantrell—Ceony knew her, though not personally. Criminal Affairs. A Smelter. She’d been involved in the hunt for Grath Cobalt. According to Emery, she was the one who had arrested Saraj in Saltdean.

Her eyes focused on Mg. Aviosky’s last word:
murdered
.

Images of Delilah’s wide, panicked eyes filled her vision. The way she’d struggled against her restraints in that chair as Grath grabbed her neck . . .

Ceony squeezed her eyes shut for several seconds, waiting out a chill that slid down her spine. Opening her eyes, she wrote,
He killed her?

Ripped out her heart. Mg. Hughes isn’t sure if he’s used it yet.

Ceony pressed her hand to her chest, feeling her own heartbeat speed. Stolen her heart. Just as Lira had stolen Emery’s. Just as Saraj had wanted to steal hers at the dock. Except Juliet didn’t have anyone to steal it back for her. How much time had passed since Saraj . . . But would he have even left Mg. Cantrell’s body whole enough to be revived?

Ceony shuddered. Her stomach twisted and knotted around itself, sending bile climbing up her throat. She swallowed hard.

Saraj had said he still needed a heart in Reading. He’d gone for Mg. Cantrell’s. If Ceony had only stopped him then . . .

She paused, and for a moment her whole self felt empty. Had Saraj stolen Mg. Cantrell’s heart because she had gotten too close to finding him, or had he stolen it because Mg. Cantrell had been one of two magicians responsible for his imprisonment?

Nausea replaced the emptiness. Emery had been the other.

Swallowing, she wrote,
Where?

You are safe, Miss Twill
, the Gaffer replied.
Mg. Hughes is on top of the case. I’ll let you know—

Ceony wrote in the space ahead of Mg. Aviosky’s sentence.
Where?

Several minutes passed before the spell read,
Do not be brash. I will let you know when Saraj is found
.

Ceony tried to goad Mg. Aviosky further, but the Gaffer refused to respond after that. The mimic spell had nearly run out of space in any event.

Crumpling into a chair, Ceony stared at the brief conversation in her hands. Saraj wouldn’t have stayed in Reading, not after his run-in with Ceony, but Criminal Affairs would have started their search there after her anonymous tip. How far had Mg. Cantrell tracked Saraj before?

Ceony tapped her pencil against the tabletop, clenching her teeth to keep from sobbing. Deeper and deeper into England. Still
not arrested. Mg. Cantrell was likely the reason Saraj hadn’t tracked Ceony down yet—he hadn’t had time, being on the run. Would he save the Smelter’s heart for the spell he’d use on Ceony? On Emery? Ceony knew one thing: there was no limit to the number of people Saraj would kill to get his freedom and a little pocket change on the side. Was he headed toward London for her, in pursuit of Grath’s secret, or had he given up that chase for the sake of escape?