The Master Magician

Ceony headed first to Emery’s office, a rectangular room filled with shelves bearing stacks of paper of varying thicknesses, colors, and sizes. The ivy over the window gave the room a dark-aquamarine light, almost as if the cottage were submerged beneath the ocean. Emery’s desk sat across from the door. Heaps of paper, a wire note holder, glue and scissors, half-read books, a jar of pens, and a vial of ink littered the desk’s surface, though littered may not have been the best word to describe it. Every item fit into its neighboring items like pieces of a puzzle, and nothing was askew. Only a fraction of elbow room to work in, but the desk, like everything in the cottage, looked as immaculate as a mess could look. In all her twenty-one years, Ceony had never met a hoarder so tidy. At present, the room was empty.

Behind the desk hung a wood-framed corkboard, upon which Ceony and Emery both pinned work orders, receipts, telegrams, and memos, all neatly spaced from one another, fitting together like brickwork. Emery’s doing, of course. Ceony pulled Mrs. Holloway’s decoration request from its brass tack and took it to the dustbin, but first commanded it, “Shred.”

The work order tore itself into a dozen long pieces and fluttered into the dustbin like snow.

After leaving the office, Ceony closed the door behind her so Fennel wouldn’t make a mess and passed through the kitchen and dining room to the stairs leading to the second floor, where the bedrooms, lavatory, and library were situated. Her room was the first door on the left, and she stepped inside to drop off her tote bag.

The room looked much different now than it had when she arrived two years ago. She’d moved the bed to the far corner near the closet and set her desk by the window, since she spent most of her time in her room there, either Folding or writing the occasional paper when Emery went on an academic whim. She’d stained the floorboards a deep cherry during a bout of boredom last winter, and her own paper creations adorned the walls and ceiling, much the way Emery’s decorated the wainscoting of the kitchen and dining room. Tiny paper dancers dressed in elaborate ballerina skirts seemed to dance down one wall, and an assortment of premade chain spells hung from the other. Paper carnations with spiraling petals, alternating red and blue, framed her window; fringed paper garlands in the same colors bordered her closet door. Paper star ornaments with twelve or eighteen spikes hung on string from the ceiling, varying in size from half a fist to a dinner plate. Paper feathers cut from women’s magazines, a mobile of animated sea horses, and starlights ringed her nightstand, upon which sat a vase of red paper roses Emery had created for her twentieth birthday. A four-foot-tall paper cutout of London occupied the wall space at the head of her bed like a giant snowflake—a gift Emery had made for her two Christmases ago. Paper clouds hovered near the door, and baby-pink paper pom-poms sat upon a two-shelved bookcase where Ceony stored her textbooks.

All of the décor had accumulated over one year and eleven months’ time; it wasn’t until Ceony’s baby sister—Margo—visited in April that Ceony realized she had created something of a wonderland.

A crinkled envelope rested on her pillow. Abandoning the tote bag, Ceony approached it and felt its contents: the rubber buttons she had ordered from the Magicians Today catalog. She stashed the small package in the bottom drawer of her desk, where the book Precise Calculations of Fire Conjuring was hidden, along with certain other materials she preferred to keep out of sight, and trotted to Emery’s room.

She knocked, opened the door, but found the space empty. The library as well.

She heard a thump overhead.

“Working on the big spells again,” she murmured to herself, opening the door to the set of stairs that led to the home’s third story, which made up in height what it lacked in floor space. Emery didn’t work on his “big spells” often, but when he did Ceony could count on him being absent for entire twenty-four-hour periods.

He’d finished his seven-foot-long paper-puff-shooting “elephant” gun in March, which he donated to the boys’ orphanage in Sheffield. She wondered what absurd idea he’d put his hands to now.

In the farthest corner of the third floor, Jonto—Emery’s skeletal paper butler—hung by a noose from a nail in the ceiling, hovering over a mess of rolled paper tubes, tape, and symmetrical cuts of paper. Emery, wearing his newest coat, a maroon-colored one, stood on a stool beside him, affixing a six-foot-long bat wing to Jonto’s spine.

Ceony blinked, taking in the sight. She really shouldn’t be surprised.

“I thought I had a few more years before I saw the angel of death,” she said, folding her arms under her breasts. “Even just half of him.”

Emery teetered on the stool and glanced over his shoulders, both hands holding up the stiff paper that would form the end of Jonto’s left wing. His raven hair danced about his jaw as he did so, and his vivid green eyes gleamed like afternoon sunlight.

Even now, Ceony could lose herself in those eyes.

“Ceony!” he exclaimed, turning back to his project and finishing his work with the wing. “I wasn’t expecting you back for another hour!”

“Her requests weren’t as complicated as we feared,” Ceony said, a smile teasing her lips. “Care to explain why you’re making a dragon of Jonto?”

Emery stepped down from the stool and rolled his shoulders. “I had a peddler today.”

“A peddler?”

“Selling shoe polish,” he said. He rubbed the stubble at the base of his chin. “Decently priced, I must say.”