The Paper Magician

Ceony inhaled, but the command hadn’t been for her.

The paper bird shook its head, and though it had no legs, it hopped once on Mg. Thane’s hand before flapping its orange wings and taking to the air. It flitted around the library, bobbing through the air almost like a real bird. Ceony watched it with wide eyes. It circled the room twice before perching upon a high shelf holding an assortment of calligraphy books.

She had heard of animation, of course, and seen Jonto for herself, but actually watching the magic unfold was, well, magical. She had never seen this sort of spell before. No paper magicians taught at Tagis Praff. And, as Mg. Aviosky had said, England had only twelve registered. Thirteen, once she completed her apprenticeship. But that was two to six years away, and Ceony still had difficulty imaging herself as a true Folder.

But she dearly wanted magic, even magic as simple as this.

“And you can do that with anything?” Ceony asked.

“You may use your imagination,” Mg. Thane replied, “but creating something completely new is time-consuming. You must discover which Folds work and which don’t.”

“How many do you know?”

Mg. Thane only chuckled quietly to himself, as though the question were absurd. In his hands he had already created another creature, a tiny frog of green paper. He commanded it, “Breathe,” and it bounded away, pausing every so often to look about and choose a new direction. Ceony half expected a long tongue to shoot from its mouth to taste for flies, but of course the simple creature hadn’t been created with one.

“Jonto,” Mg. Thane said, now Folding a sheet of white parchment, “was particularly tricky. He took me months to get right, especially with the spinal column and the jaw. Human anatomy is a mite bit complicated, especially when it comes to figuring out what sort of Folds something like a shoulder joint prefers. But though he is made of one thousand, six hundred and nine pieces of paper, he animates as a whole. Make it whole, and it will rise whole. That’s your first lesson of the day.”

His hands stilled, revealing a stout fish between them, puffed out in the middle to form a three-dimensional body. Folds similar to the orange bird’s wings formed its pectoral fins. Mg. Thane picked it up, whispered to it, and released it. The fish soared upward through the air as a real fish would in water, its tail fin paddling back and forth until it hit the ceiling—which Ceony noticed had been covered with long pieces of white paper tied together with a simple string. The white fish used its puckering mouth to bite down on the string and untie its looping knot.

To her amazement, snow began to fall. Paper snowflakes cascaded through the air, some as small as Ceony’s thumbnail, some as large as her hand. Hundreds of them poured down as the paper ceiling gave way, all somehow timed just right so that they fell like real snow. Ceony stood from her chair, laughing, and held out her hand to catch one. To her astonishment it felt cold, but didn’t melt against her palm. Only tingled.

“When did you do this?” she asked, her breath fogging in the library’s air as more snowflakes fell like crisp confetti from the ceiling. “This would take . . . ages to make.”

“Not ages,” Mg. Thane said. “You’ll get quicker as you learn.” He still sat on the floor, completely unfazed by the magic around him. But of course he would be—it was his creation. “Magician Aviosky mentioned you hadn’t exactly jumped at the news of your assignment, and I can’t blame you. But casting through paper has its own whimsy.”

Ceony let her captured snowflake fall from her hand and turned to Mg. Thane, wondering at him. He did all of this for me?

Perhaps the man wasn’t so mad after all. Or maybe it’s a madness that I can learn to appreciate.

As the last snowflakes fell, Mg. Thane rose and pulled a thin hardcover book from the shelf behind him. He gestured for Ceony to once again sit in the chair. She complied.

He handed her the volume. The cover had a silver-embossed mouse on it and the words Pip’s Daring Escape. Her mind quietly registered that subtle prickling beneath her skin as she accepted the book; she wondered if she would ever get used to it.

“A children’s book?” she asked. At least the snowflakes had had some majesty to them.

“I’m not one to waste time, Ceony,” he said. As though reading her thoughts, he eyed the scattered snowflakes with a frown, one that showed more in the tilt of his eyes than the curve of his lips. Ceony imagined he would have preferred them to fall in neat rows all perfectly aligned with one another, but real snow never fell that way. “I’m going to teach you something. Consider it homework.”

Ceony slumped in the chair. “Homework? But I’m not even settled—”