The Paper Magician (The Paper Magician Trilogy, #1)(54)

The office around her flashed red and peach. A laborious PUM-Pom-poom filled the air, which became hotter, moister. Ceony blinked and found herself once more in the literal chamber of Emery’s heart, silent save for its waning beat. Empty, save for herself and the broken pieces of Fennel at her feet.

Dropping to her knees, Ceony collected the pieces of her paper companion with reverence, smoothing crumpled corners and folding them carefully along their original creases.

“You’re a good boy,” she whispered as she stacked the pieces one on top of another, filling her lungs to their limit with every breath to keep from crying. She was tired of crying, and like her mother had always said, crying solved nothing.

After setting Fennel into her bag, she pulled free a piece of bread and swallowed it half-chewed, enough to alleviate the hunger cramping her belly.

She eyed the valve across the carpet of skin and veins.

“One more,” she promised herself. “One more until the end. And even if there’s no door to freedom, at least you know you tried. One more, Ceony.”





CHAPTER 14



SHE PASSED THROUGH BLINDLY, pushing her tired limbs through the tunnel that constricted around her like the big snakes at the London Zoo. But as Ceony had decided with Shadow-Emery, she would not be the mouse. With a grunt and an extra shove with her left leg, she reached the other side of the valve.

Just like chamber three, the fourth chamber opened up already playing a vision, though this vision seemed . . . different. Ceony did not find herself in a room, garden, or city. She had a feeling that this place was not a memory, either. She had never seen this landscape before, and she had a distinct feeling that, outside of Emery’s heart, it didn’t exist.

Before her stretched miles and miles of dry ground—not quite desert, but not quite anything else, either. Just tired, bronze ground stretching in all directions, unbroken by mountains or rivers or forests. Not a single weed or mound marred its surface. It stretched forever until it met a gray-blue sky lined with pale cerise, a sky perpetually caught in the moments before sunrise. Nothing broke the sky, not a single cloud or strip of color, no birds or seedlings caught upon the wind. There was no wind.

Ceony smelled nothing, not even the scent of dust and earth, and she heard nothing outside of herself—no crawling creatures, no whistles, thunder, moans, threats. No weeping, no rain. No heartbeat. Silence surrounded her. Endless silence on an endless plane.

Only one thing disturbed the endlessness of the place. One thing, one very large thing that no heart-traveler could ever miss in her adventure.

A canyon. A giant crack zigzagged over the dry, bland ground far to her left. The . . . north, she supposed. It was as good a direction as any. No bridges spanned it; no rivers filled it.

Ceony approached the canyon carefully, testing the solidity of the ground around it as she neared. Bronze sand, the same color as the earth, filled its deepness. A deepness that Ceony could tell had once been much deeper than it was. As she thought it, she saw a handful of sand drop from midair and rain onto the canyon floor.

Crouching, Ceony felt the edge of the giant crack. None of it came away in her fingers, even when she scratched it with her nails. The rock stayed hard and firm. Another handful of sand dropped to the canyon floor, seeming to make no difference in the canyon’s depth whatsoever. But Ceony knew that enough handfuls would fill it, eventually. After all, it took time to mend one’s heart. Enough time could heal a heart as broken as this one. It was half-healed already.

“I’m dying, aren’t I?”

Ceony turned around to see Emery Thane standing before her in his indigo coat, looking just as he had at the banquet and the church, though more . . . tired. His shoulders slouched, and dark circles lined his eyes. He was a tad translucent, but Ceony didn’t point it out to him.

A sliver of the real Emery Thane. One she could interact with.

She answered, “Yes.”

He nodded once, solemn.

“But if you help me get out, I think I can save you,” she added, standing. “I’ve come all this way hoping there’d be a way out, at the end.”

Emery’s eyes scanned the expanse. “She’s too strong. I’ll never be able to stop her, or the others.”

“We can stop her if we work together,” Ceony assured him, and as she did, a realization struck her. Doubts, she thought. This chamber must be his doubts and regrets, just as the second chamber was his hopes. The heart had the dark to balance out the light, the uncertainty to balance the dreams. All carefully balanced, but with her caught in the middle. “But I need your help, Emery. I’m only an apprentice, and I haven’t been an apprentice for very long.”

“Hmmm,” he hummed, neither in agreement nor disagreement. His gaze fell to her bag. “May I see him?”

It took a moment of processing before Ceony understood the request. She carefully lifted Fennel from her bag and handed his broken body to Emery.

Emery examined the pieces, a slight frown touching his lips. He held out a hand. It took her a moment to understand what he wanted. Ceony reached into her bag and handed him paper, relishing the tingle it sent through her fingers.

He worked deftly, unsnapping the turquoise collar from about the crushed Folds and re-Folding, reconnecting pieces of paper. Ceony handed him a second and third piece of paper, watching with her hands clasped to her breast as Emery remade Fennel’s head, a perfect replica of what it had been before.