The Paper Magician (The Paper Magician Trilogy, #1)(46)
The boy doing the jibing had short ebony hair and bright green eyes.
Emery.
He looked different—much younger, and lankier as well. He must have come into his height at an early age, for he stood half a head taller than his comrades and could not have been a day older than seventeen. His face looked thinner, his jaw slacker, and Ceony spotted a distinct lack of maturity around his eyes. Eyes that held no sympathy. Eyes just “having fun,” as adolescent boys were bound to do.
“You deaf?” one of Emery’s friends asked, the one on the left with a square face and broad build. He nudged Prit with his foot. “Don’t you have anything better to do? We need this space for walking.”
Prit frowned, his eyes downcast. He tried to smooth the fortuity box against his book—an astronomy textbook—to make the next fold, but Emery wedged his toe between Prit’s legs and the book’s cover, then flipped the book over. It tumbled off Prit’s knee and onto the floor, closing on top of the fortuity box, ruining it. Not that it would have worked without the bonding, but still.
Emery and his companions laughed as Prit quietly gathered his book and stood. He turned his back on Emery just as the bullied had always been taught to do. Just ignore them, Ceony’s mother had always advised, but Ceony knew from experience that ignoring didn’t make pigs go away. The image of Mickel Philsdon surfaced in her mind, a broad-shouldered and stout boy who had called Ceony a walrus in the seventh grade, before Ceony had grown into her teeth. She had ignored him for two years, but the relentless torture had only gotten worse. It wasn’t until the first day of secondary school when Ceony rounded on Mickel and cut him a steaming piece of her mind that he stopped his torment. As far as Ceony was concerned, the only thing bullies understood was bullying, plain and simple. Mickel had avoided her after that.
“Stick up for yourself,” she found herself saying to Prit, who didn’t respond.
Emery shoved Prit in the shoulder, making the boy stumble. “A little faster, paper boy?”
Prit picked up his pace and disappeared into the crowded hallway.
Frowning, Ceony turned to Emery and said, “You used to be a real jerk, you know that?”
Emery reached down to where Prit had been sitting and snatched up a paper sack—Prit had left his lunch behind. He rifled through it, the friend on his right trying to peer around his arm to see what was inside.
“Dibs on the cookie,” Emery’s flunky said.
Emery grabbed a red apple and tossed the bag to his companion, then slid down to the floor, stretching his skinny legs in front of him. Rubbing the apple on his sleeve, Emery took a bite.
Leaning to one side, Emery reached beneath him and pulled a folded frog out from under his backside—more of Prit’s handiwork. He chuckled around a mouthful of apple and crumpled the frog in his hand. “What a barmpot,” he said, throwing the paper wad at a dark-skinned girl passing by. The girl gave him a sour look, but continued on her way without retaliation.
“Come on, Fennel,” Ceony commanded. As she lost sight of the paper magician, she took a deep breath. This was the past, after all. No use getting upset over it. “Still,” she said aloud, “I’ll have to ask you what changed your mind about Folding. And I hope you apologized to him.”
Students filtered from the halls into their respective classrooms, thinning out the population enough for Ceony to find a set of double doors that appeared to lead outside. She assumed those doors would either reveal to her another shade of Emery Thane’s heart, or warp her back to the third chamber itself, which she had yet to physically see. She hoped for the latter—she needed to escape Lira’s trap quickly, and the only plausible way out seemed to be at the heart’s end—she had to reach it, just as she had to play out each of these stories, one by one, to get there.
She opened the door and found herself in a familiar office—the first she had entered in this chamber, albeit lit with dim evening sunlight filtering through that square window and candles set on the desk and surrounding shelves. Ceony hesitated at the doorway to the office, the too-recent memory of it raking her brain with needles.
Emery sat at his desk, poring over a thin stack of papers, though not the Folding kind. He held a pen in one hand and tangled the other in his hair, worn shorter than in present day.
Fennel sniffed around the mauve rug strewn over floorboards stained with age. Ceony let the door shut behind her.
Everything in the office—smaller than the study at the yellow-brick house on the outskirts of London—spoke of Emery. Shelves, trunks, and furniture pressed against all four walls of the room, each set in an almost symmetrical order without allowing the tiniest bit of space to go unused. A fine-looking shelf of cherrywood held stacks upon stacks of paper in eggshell, chartreuse, and rose, all cut into different-sized rectangles and squares. Another shelf held together with metal clamps bore endless volumes of very old books, some of which Ceony recognized from a different shelf in Emery’s present bedroom. Atop that shelf rested an assortment of glass bottles filled with bright colors of sand layered on top of each other, and beside those, an empty picture frame. Ceony wondered if it had ever held a photo. She didn’t recognize it from the yellow-brick house.
A glass half-filled with some sort of tea sat at the end of Emery’s desk. Ceony touched it—cold. A sniff caught a hint of peppermint. Now that she thought of it, she hadn’t seen any coffee in Emery’s kitchen—perhaps he didn’t like the flavor. Or perhaps it made him jittery, and Ceony imagined “jittery” would not complement the list of Emery’s personality traits.