Free The Master Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg

with her charm necklace. She broke her bond with paper and became a glass magician once more.
    Staring at her tinted reflection, she said, “Reflect, past.”
    Her image contorted left, then right, then swirled. Her face vanished from the shard, and instead she saw strands of grass and a peep of sky laced with a single, stretched-out cloud.
    Pressing her lips together, Ceony searched her memory of the Gaffer books she had read for pertinent manipulations to this spell. “Backward reflect,” she commanded it.
    The reflection of the cloud slowly crawled off the glass.
    “Tenth increase,” she said, and the reflection on the brown bottle reversed itself ten times as fast. The light darkened. A star appeared. Sunrise. The grass wavered in the wind.
    “Tenth increase, tenth increase,” Ceony instructed, and the shard’s memories rewound faster and faster. This spell, something a Gaffer apprentice would likely learn in his or her first year, already felt far more complicated than nearly all the Folding spells Ceony knew. Perhaps another reason why paper magic had become so unpopular in England.
    Day, night, day, night. Rain. The broken piece of bottle sped through its memories beneath Ceony’s scrutiny. It likely wouldn’t reveal anything useful—
    “Hold,” Ceony instructed, catching sight of shadows, but they proved to be the silhouettes of two little boys, their indecipherable banter playing on the glass in tandem with their images.
    She commanded the glass to continue back through its memories. A larger shadow appeared after another two days. “Hold,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.
    The image played at normal speed. The mirror was masked by shadow at first; then something shifted and the sun highlighted tight curls on a head of hair. The head looked back, and in the distance, Ceony heard a whistle, someone yelling. Police officers.
    The shadowy man disappeared from the reflection a moment later. The police officers never entered it.
    “Saraj,” Ceony whispered, lowering her spyglass as it shifted back to a view of the swaying grass and summer sky. It had to be him. She had seen his darkened silhouette before and could summon the memory as easily as she could recall what she ate for breakfast. And in this location, with those sounds . . . she felt almost positive.
    Her gaze fell back to the shard in her palm. One thing she knew for certain—the shadowy figure that grazed its surface had headed
north
, toward town. Not south, east, or west, all of which would eventually lead him to the ocean. To potential escape.
    If her calculations were correct, Saraj had bunkered down in England, not fled it.
    She let a curse roll off her tongue and savored the sharpness of it. Her heart palpitated inside a rib cage made of needles. She fisted the glass shard until its edges threatened to split her skin.
    He’s not coming for you; he’s not coming for you. Something else. Perhaps he went that way because the police were in pursuit from the south . . . or he wanted to avoid the naval base, that’s all. And just because he headed north doesn’t mean he
continued
north.
    Why couldn’t the logic soothe her? But the answer to that question was apparent enough. She knew neither where Saraj Prendi wasnor his intentions. He’d left her—and the rest of Criminal Affairs—in the dark, again.
    Ceony stood, brushing dirt off her knees, and slid the shard into her purse.
    A yellow paper songbird glided overhead.
    Pinching her necklace and uttering the words, Ceony returned to paper magic and beckoned the bird down. It swayed on the breeze and almost missed her hand. Its crinkled body looked weary. Ceony smoothed a bent wing.
    This one had traveled far.
    “What did you find?” she asked it, wishing the spell could talk. Would the paper bird be strong enough to make the trip back? Would Ceony be able to follow if the distance was as great as she feared?
    She pressed her lips together and hummed. Scanning the sky, she