The Paper Magician (The Paper Magician Trilogy, #1)(45)
Mg. Hughes rested a hand on Emery’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. On my third, myself. It’s a hard thing, but surely given a bit of time—”
“I think she’s an Excisioner,” Emery interjected.
The words were barely audible, but they rang like cymbals in the empty corridor.
Mg. Hughes mumbled something on a dry tongue before sputtering, “You . . . you can’t be serious.”
“I prefer not to be, in most cases,” he replied, “but I’ve seen the signs.” He hesitated. “Then again, I haven’t even seen her in four months.”
The two men quieted for a long minute. As Ceony turned to leave, Mg. Hughes said, “What you do know, Emery, could be of use. I know some people—not the police, per se—who work tirelessly to extinguish the dark magics from her ladyship’s domain. If you’re willing, I could introduce you . . .”
Mg. Hughes’s lips continued to move, but no voice filled the words, leaving him little more than a mime. Ceony’s eyes darted between him and Thane, waiting for more information to pass between them . . . but they had become two marionettes, and Ceony was a poor lip-reader. Groaning, she resisted the urge to stamp her foot.
Fennel huffed behind her, and Ceony blinked, eyes burning from staring. As she moved away from Thane and Hughes and under a granite archway, however, she found not Parliament, but crowded hallways and stairs beneath a pebbled ceiling. A shrill bell rang over her head.
She stood at the end of the main hallway of Granger Academy, her secondary school.
The hallways were filled with young people chatting, walking, and eating lunch. One particularly frisky couple kissed by the tennis trophy case—which had far fewer trophies than Ceony recalled it holding—until a man in a sweater vest smacked a ruler along the boy’s backside and told the couple to get moving. Behind her a trio of girls with high hairstyles and brightly painted lips whispered to each other with hands shielding their mouths. The shortest of the group laughed so hard she snorted, which caused her companions to snicker in turn. The trio shifted as a narrow-bodied woman holding a clipboard walked down the staircase behind them, a pair of spectacles balanced on the edge of her nose. The woman didn’t look up at anyone as she passed by, including Ceony.
Ceony pulled her eyes from the people and refocused her attention on the building itself. She recognized Granger Academy, though the school looked a little different than she remembered it—some sort of linoleum tiles comprised the floor instead of the stiff maroon carpet she had tramped between classes for four years. The stair railings were pine with faded stain instead of oak. Other than that, the building looked the same. Granger Academy had been Emery’s secondary school as well—perhaps this was what it looked like when he attended.
Thoughts of Anise Hatter surfaced in her mind. She pushed them away. Today she walked Emery’s heart, not her own.
A flicker of black hair made Ceony jump, but it was only another girl not much younger than herself, a young woman who looked similar to Lira but with a broader face and stronger nose. Still, Ceony grit her teeth and said, “Who knows what we’ll encounter here, Fennel.”
She had to admit that the casual nostalgia of the school didn’t quite match the mood the previous visions of the chamber had born. Still, she would stay on alert, and hopefully Fennel would catch anything unusual that she missed.
Ceony touched the shield chain around her chest. If the water and blood had damaged it, the shift to Parliament, and now the school, had restored it. Good. She thought to take the time to Fold more birds against the hard school floor, but decided against it. The feeble paper heart she’d given Thane only allocated her so much time. She would have to trust her shielding spell and the fan to protect her.
She picked her way through the hallway lined with coat hooks and cubbies stuffed with books, crumpled homework, and lunch boxes. Class—or perhaps lunch—must have recently ended, for the hall filled with bodies. Ceony tried to evade them at first, but there were too many. They simply phased through her when she held her ground, reminding Ceony once more that she was the anomaly in this place. She and Fennel both.
The bulk of the students passed, followed by Mrs. Goodweather, Ceony’s algebra teacher, looking plumper and a bit younger than Ceony’s memory of her. Mrs. Goodweather swished by quickly in her tight purple skirt, and in her wake Ceony spied a group of boys, three standing and one on the floor with a book in his lap. He held a folded paper in his hands. The sight of his black hair made Ceony run to him.
“Em—” she began, but the chap on the floor was not Emery Thane in the slightest. He had shaggy black hair, yes, but his acne-pocked skin was too pale, his nose too pointed, and he wore a pair of finely wired glasses. Freckles like Ceony’s own speckled his hands, and his eyes were a light brown, not green.
Still, she recognized the half-folded item in his hands—a fortuity box. Or the beginning of one.
“Guess paper’s the only thing that’ll let you put your hands on it, eh?” asked one of the standing boys, and his companions sniggered. “Don’t you have anything better to do than take up space, Prit?”
Ceony rounded on the boys—she couldn’t stand bullies—ready to give them a piece of her mind in hopes that the vision would allow her to interact with them. As she opened her mouth for a retort, however, her words caught somewhere between palate and tongue and dribbled over her lips incoherently.