The Paper Magician (The Paper Magician Trilogy, #1)(2)

Mg. Aviosky stepped up beside her, casually pulling off her silk gloves finger by finger. The transformation didn’t jar her one bit, but she didn’t gloat, either.

Ceony half expected Mg. Thane to show up at the door there and then, but the door—now of solid wood and painted such a light brown it looked orange—remained closed and quiet.

Perhaps he’s not evil at all, Ceony thought with a frown. Just mad.

Passing the paper flowers, Ceony stepped up to the door, Mg. Aviosky not a pace behind her, and knocked firmly with her knuckles, trying to stand as tall as her five-foot-three frame would allow. She absently touched her hair, which was the color of uncooked yams and hung over her left shoulder in a loose braid. She had purposely chosen not to do it nicely that morning, just as she didn’t wear her best dress or her student’s uniform. She had nothing to be excited for—why dress up? It was clear Mg. Thane had made no special allowances for her.

The knob turned without the faintest trace of footsteps on the other side, and when the door opened, Ceony screamed and fell back a step.

A skeleton greeted her.

Even Mg. Aviosky seemed surprised, though she only showed it by pursing her lips and adjusting the round-framed glasses that sat atop a rather prominent nose. “Well,” she said.

The eyeless head of the skeleton looked up and down almost mechanically, and Ceony, with a hand over her heart, realized all six feet of it was comprised of paper—its head, its spine, its ribs, its legs. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of pieces of paper, all white, rolled and Folded and pinched together to connect in a variety of joints.

“He’s mad,” Ceony said, aloud this time. Mg. Aviosky sniffed loudly in a subtle attempt to scold her.

The skeleton stepped aside.

“Any more surprises?” Ceony asked no one in particular as she entered the house, staying as far from the skeleton as the narrow doorframe would allow. The house started in a long hallway that smelled of old wood and branched off in three directions, two to the right and one to the left. The first right opened onto a small front room that, despite being filled with clutter, was deftly organized: everything from candlesticks to books shoved in a most orderly fashion onto shelves, with clay ocarinas, marble sets, and more books crammed into straight lines across the mantel. Ceony noticed every detail of the room, as she was prone to do—such as the threadbare cushion on the couch, which told her Mg. Thane preferred to sit on the far-left side and scooted back. A small wind chime hung in the corner—an odd place for a wind chime, as no wind would pass through the front room unless he opened the window, and even then, very little. She surmised that Mg. Thane liked the look of it, but not the sound.

Mad, indeed.

A perfect stack of unread mail sat on a side table in the corner next to what looked like a music box and some sort of blacksmith’s puzzle, which rested in perfect alignment with the stack and the box. Ceony had never known a pack rat to be so . . . tidy. It disturbed her.

The closed door to the left of the hallway hid whatever room lay beyond it, but instead of walking farther into the house to see what the second right revealed, she shouted, “Magician Thane! Your guests are here and would greatly appreciate a real person at the door!”

“Miss Twill!” Mg. Aviosky said in a suppressed sort of hiss as the paper skeleton shut the front door. “Manners!”

“Well, the absence is rude, isn’t it?” Ceony asked, hating how childish the words sounded in her mouth. She cleared her throat and sucked in a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’m a little on edge.”

“No need to remind me,” Mg. Aviosky quipped just as a real person emerged from that second right, some sort of ledger in his hands.

“There are guests at the door,” the man said, closing the ledger. The ensuing burst of air rustled his wavy black hair. In words pitched at a light baritone, he added, “And I would have thought the knock gave it away.”

Ceony gripped her suitcase all the harder to keep herself from starting, or from thinking too hard on the man’s words, for she couldn’t decide if they had been meant in mockery or not.

Mg. Thane looked much younger than Ceony had expected, perhaps about thirty or so, and he hadn’t taken the effort to dress up, either. He didn’t wear his magician’s dress uniform, or anything particularly fancy at all, just plain slacks with an unadorned high-necked shirt, over which hung a lightweight, oversized indigo coat that dropped clear to his ankles, with loose sleeves that fell nearly to his palms. He seemed quite average, his skin neither light nor dark, his height neither short nor tall, and his build neither thin nor broad. His dark hair fell just below his ears in a sort of kempt-but-unkempt way. He had black sideburns down to his jaw, and his nose had a slight bump to it, just above the middle of the bridge. The only thing extraordinary about him was the brightness of his eyes—green as summer leaves and shining as if someone had hid a light behind his forehead.

Mg. Thane glanced at Ceony without the slightest smile, gesture, or draw of the brow, but in those bright eyes Ceony could tell the man was rather amused. Whether with her or with himself, she couldn’t be sure. She ground her teeth together.

“Magician Thane,” Mg. Aviosky said with a nod of her head, and Ceony wondered how well they knew one another, “this is Ceony Twill, whom I telegraphed you about.”

“Yes, yes,” Mg. Thane said, setting down the ledger on the stack of unread mail by the couch, aligning the book’s corners just so. He turned and met Ceony’s stare. “Ceony Twill, eldest of four and top of her graduating class. How many students made it out of that prison this year?”