Julia Defiant

by Catherine Egan

  At the center of the courtyard sits a modest house. Bamboo runs around the inside of the wall, thick and green. I see no sign of the shadow I followed here, but two figures are seated at a table in the candlelit garden. They are playing Zhengfu, a strategy game with tiles, similar to the Fraynish game of Conquest. The larger of the two figures is singing softly as she plays. So much for no women in the monastery. The tune is familiar—and then I catch a snatch of it and am shocked to realize she is singing in Fraynish. I know the song from my own childhood. It’s a depressing ditty about the weeping moon following the sun round and round, pulling her dark cape of stars behind her and longing for day. Why so sad, Mistress Moon, why d’you cry?

  The other figure is so small I’d have guessed it was a child, except that she is smoking a pipe. She smacks down a tile, then scoops the singer’s tiles off the board with a little bark of triumph. The singer laughs and they rise to their feet. By her voice and posture, I reckon the pipe smoker to be an old woman.

  The singer blows out the candles, and they head toward the house, the old woman carrying something long and bulky I can’t make out in the dark. I climb down the wall as fast as I dare, using the bamboo to steady myself, but the feathery tops of the stalks shake and rustle as I descend, and the singer looks back, calling out in Yongwen: “Is someone there?”

  The old woman makes a beeline for me, and I realize she’s holding an old-fashioned blunderbuss. She pries between the bamboo stalks with it, the tip of the muzzle just skimming my shoulder. Her face is only a foot from mine, peering this way and that. It is a stern face, if slightly blurred from my perspective, with great scraggly eyebrows. She looks right at me, but she doesn’t see me, of course.

  After checking the wall and the garden, she returns to the girl at the threshold of the house, and together they go inside, the girl casting a last look my way over her shoulder. I ease myself through the bamboo stalks and dash across the courtyard. They leave the door open to the chirping night insects, and so I slip in after them.

  They pass through the main room to a smaller room sparsely furnished with a bed, a wardrobe, a dresser. There is a large wooden barrel to one side. The old woman takes the lid off, and steam pours upward from the hot water within. The girl is still humming her Fraynish tune, and by the lamplight, I can see her New Porian features, her fair skin and light-colored eyes. She cannot be much older than I am—eighteen or nineteen at most, I’d guess. She is thick-shouldered and plump, rather matronly in figure, but with a face ill suited for plumpness—too severe, with a small, pinched mouth and a long nose made comical by her round cheeks. She is dressed in a wide-sleeved robe of embroidered silk, like the upper-class ladies of Tianshi wear, her mousy brown hair held back with jade clasps.

  The old woman says something I don’t understand, and the girl laughs again, breaking off her song. In spite of my weeks of immersive study with Professor Baranyi, now that I am here, I find everybody speaking far too quickly and not following the linguistic rules of Yongwen as I’ve learned them at all. It is difficult to catch more than a snippet here and there.

  The girl begins to undress. I’ve seen enough of the place, and it offends even my admittedly dinged sense of propriety to watch her take a bath, so I slip out to look for the shadow I followed here.

  I find him outside, crouched on the roof, still as the night. I watch him for a few minutes but he doesn’t move, and so I go over the wall, more slowly and quietly this time, and run back to the swallow coop. I reenter the visible world, so that everything pulls sharply into focus around me, and search for the flagstone the shadow came out from under. At first I’m just breaking my fingernails on stones that won’t budge, but then I find the right cracks in the ground and pull it up.

  Looking down the hole, I see nothing but darkness. I reach in and feel steel rungs—a ladder. I’m not going down there without knowing more, but I am curious to see what my spy will do if he thinks he’s been discovered. So I leave the tunnel open, the flagstone lying there on the path, and I step back against the wall of the swallow coop, where the birds chirrup softly in their nests.

  I vanish and wait.

  I don’t hear the shadow coming—that’s how good he is—but I see him standing there, looking down at the open tunnel, his face hidden by a hood. Then he bends quickly to replace the flagstone and makes for the east wall of the monastery.

  My shadow-spy goes up the wall and over it, and the first whisper of fear ghosts through me, cold in my veins. I’ve only known one person who can go up a wall like that, and I don’t fancy meeting her like again. Me, I need my hook and rope for this wall, and so I wait a minute or two, hoping he’ll be out of earshot but not yet out of sight. When I get to the top of the wall, I scan the streets for a panicky second or two before I spot the shadow heading toward the Xuanwu Road. I drop down to the street and hurry after him, into the Dongshui Triangle, still vanished in case the shadow looks over his shoulder, which he doesn’t.

  This part of the city has a reputation for robbery, assault, opium, and illegal magic. The streets are mostly empty, but in an abandoned lot ahead, next to a collapsed wall, several figures are crouched around a bonfire. My spy keeps going, looking neither to the right nor to the left. A couple of the figures rise to watch him. One of them speaks, but my spy says nothing in return, does not even glance their way. I speed up, closing the gap between us somewhat. The rest of the men around the fire rise now, and there are more of them than I’d realized—eight or nine. They are climbing over the broken wall, streaming after my spy, shouting jeers. One of them smashes a bottle on the road. One of them draws a knife.

  I can’t decide if I should call out a warning about the knife, try to help. But it becomes clear very quickly that my spy, whoever he is, needs no warning, nor any other kind of help from me.

  He tosses something casually over his shoulder and then bolts. It looks like a small pottery jar. It shatters on the road, and a buzzing swarm explodes up out of it. I fling myself up on the wall at the side of the road, and the men scatter, shouting and fleeing, a cloud of angry wasps in pursuit. I dash along the wall to the corner and see the shadow running south. Stars, but he’s fast. I jump off the wall and go after him.

  He slows down when he reaches the first tier of the Dongshui Triangle, the section closest to the Imperial Gardens. Iron tracks for electric trolleys run along the three tier roads, dividing the city’s elegant neighborhoods from the shabbier ones, which are farther from the Imperial Gardens. I hang back but keep him in sight. This part of the city was burned sixty years ago when a group of old, wealthy families revolted against the meritocracy, and it has a haunted feel. The once great courtyard houses are collapsed, their walls broken, the charred buildings open to the night sky. A few homes survived the fire intact, but those are somehow the saddest of all, standing lonely and empty among their ruined neighbors.

  My spy heads toward one of the undamaged houses. His hand on the door, he looks over his shoulder for the first time. The moon is out and I can see the shadow’s face clear enough. He is just a boy, no older than me, with sharp cheekbones and a rather fierce expression. His eyes cut across the street, passing over me. Then he opens the door and disappears inside.

  I stand in the road a minute, looking at the closed door. I’d hoped that the monastery’s secret spaces would turn up Ko Dan, but I know from experience that sometimes the thing you hope to find does not look the way you expect it to at first. In any case, I have two things to report to Mrs. Och tonight. First, a Fraynish girl who stays up late playing Zhengfu. And second, that I am not the only spy with an interest in the Shou-shu Monastery.

  Since I’m in the neighborhood, I decide to drop in on Dek before going back to Mrs. Och’s house. When we arrived in Tianshi, Mrs. Och split our group into three and sent us to different parts of the city. Her insistence that I live with her, Bianka, and Frederick came as a surprise—I’m not sure if I should take her wanting me close as a sign of how much she needs me or how lit
tle she trusts me. Perhaps a bit of both. Either way, I’m stuck living with the people who have the most reason to hate me.

  Esme, my boss since I was a little pickpocket in Spira City, and her colleagues, Gregor and Csilla, are renting an elegant house in the first tier of the Xihuo Triangle, overlooking the canal. Gregor is posing as Lord Heriday, a visiting scholar, which is laughable. Professor Baranyi, our Yongguo expert, is acting as his official translator and, behind the scenes, his coach. I don’t envy him the job of trying to teach a drunken ex-aristocrat con man how to fake an intellect, but the professor has been remarkably patient. Esme is acting as their manservant. We tried her out as a lady’s maid, but in all her six-foot-tall fierce-browed splendor, she was predictably unconvincing. Gregor-as-Lord-Heriday is requesting permission to visit the Imperial Library. If Ko Dan does not turn up in the monastery, Mrs. Och reckons there will be records in the library to give us an idea of where he’s gone.

  Dek and Wyn, in the meantime, are meant to be digging up rumors—and, just in case, weapons—from the rogues and hustlers in the seedy Dongshui Triangle, but as far as I can tell, they are just going to lots of shady bars to get drunk and calling it reconnaissance. If I’m lucky, they’ll have found some real coffee. I know Wyn has set finding coffee beans in this city of tea at a high priority.

  The front door is ajar, and I go in without knocking. A lantern hangs from a hook on the wall, and the two of them are sitting at the table in their shirtsleeves—but not just the two of them. I freeze in the doorway, wondering if I should turn around and slip out before they see me.

  There are two girls with them. One of the girls is playing cards with Wyn. She has cynical, low-lidded eyes, and her face paint has seen too many weary hours. Dek is practicing calligraphy, bent over a sheet of rice paper with a girl in an ancient-looking silk tunic a few sizes too big for her. Her gleaming blue-black hair is in an untidy knot on top of her head, and I can’t see her face at first.

  “Hullo, it’s Julia,” says Wyn, looking up at me. So much for slipping away unseen. I step inside. I can smell bitter green tea, so I guess I am out of luck on the coffee.

  Dek turns and breaks into a smile. His dark, curly hair is tied back. Usually he only does that when he’s working, the rest of the time letting his hair fall over his face to hide the Scourge scars and blots around his missing eye. I’m a little surprised to see it tied back in the company of two girls.

  “Working late?” he asks, nodding at my bag with the hook and rope inside. I shrug it off and put it down by the door. The girl next to him turns to face me now, looks me up and down. I can see right away that the two girls must be sisters, but this one is younger and prettier than the girl playing cards with Wyn.

  “I didn’t know you’d have visitors,” I say.

  “We’re making friends in the neighborhood,” says Wyn. He jerks a thumb at the older girl, who is resting her chin in her hand now, looking vaguely relieved to be abandoning the card game. “This one is Mia. Or Minnie. Or something.”

  “Mei,” says Dek. “And her sister, Ling.”

  “It’s hard to keep the names straight,” says Wyn. “D’you want some tea, Julia? It’s good to see you. Why can’t you come live with us? We’re lonely out here.”

  I refrain from saying that they don’t look lonely.

  “Mrs. Och wants me close,” I say. “You haven’t found coffee, then?”

  “No such luck,” Wyn sighs. “People just laugh at me when I ask for it.”

  One of Mrs. Och’s tree pipits comes hopping across the table and gives his knuckles a peck. We use them to send messages, birds being easier to enchant than most animals, according to Mrs. Och. Wyn was skeptical, muttering about how messenger birds are not uncommon and that instructing a bird by magic seemed simply lazy. The magic makes him uneasy, but he quite likes the birds themselves, which are only really tame with him, having fallen victim to his charms, as so many of us do.

  The younger girl, Ling, brings me tea in a chipped cup, still staring at me with naked curiosity. The sleeves of her overlarge tunic nearly cover her hands, but when I take the cup from her, I notice her left hand is bandaged up to the knuckles. Her fingers are chapped and ink-stained, the nails bitten to the quick.

  “We met them at a bar and brought them back here for their scintillating conversation and funny stories,” says Wyn. He nods at glowering Mei. “This one has had us in stitches for hours.”

  “So you’ve been out this evening,” I say, sitting down and looking at Dek’s calligraphy. “What is the dark underbelly of Tianshi like?”

  “Dark and underbellyish,” says Dek, tousling my hair so some of the pins come loose. I swat his hand away.

  Wyn adds: “Turns out these two lovelies have got an uncle who has some dealings with the monastery. Nice fellow.”

  I make myself meet his eyes, mainly so it’s not obvious that I am always trying not to look at him. His eyes are a grayish green, the color of the sea after a storm. We’ve always guessed that his people were from North Arrekem or somewhere thereabouts, because of his dark skin, but who knows where he got those eyes. He doesn’t know either, since his earliest memories are of the awful orphanage he ran away from. Csilla says his beauty is wasted on a man, and indeed there is something almost too pretty about his perfect lips and cheekbones, the arc of those dark eyebrows. It’s not his beauty that slays me, though. It’s the humor of his face I’ve always loved, the way he seems to be laughing at himself and the world, like he’s in on a big joke, the big joke of human existence. Wyn radiates joy at being alive, and the feeling is contagious. Being with him was a joyful thing. Until I found him in bed with another girl, that is.

  “He smuggles in tobacco and liquor for naughty monks,” explains Wyn when I don’t reply. Too busy getting lost in those eyes. Honestly, pull yourself together, Julia.

  “Oh, so this is actually work, then, is it?” I ask.

  Dek laughs.

  “No harm in mixing business with pleasure,” says Wyn. “What have you been up to?”

  “The usual mischief,” I say lightly. “Listen, can you find out who delivers mail to the monastery and who takes letters out? There ought to be a lot of letters going out every day.”

  “We’ll look into it,” says Dek.

  Mei is rubbing her face like a sleepy cat, leaving black smudges around her eyes. Ling takes the brush from Dek, dips it in the inkpot, and writes something on his rice paper. I don’t know anything about calligraphy, but even I can see she’s good at it. There is an easy flair to her characters that Dek’s painstaking calligraphy lacks.

  “What is that?” he asks in Yongwen. “A saying, a name?”

  Ling tilts her head to one side, smiling as she answers him. No Fraynish girl has ever looked at Dek like that. In Spira City, Dek was an outcast, marked by Scourge. His scars, his missing eye, his withered arm and leg, were all sure signs of the illness that had terrorized Frayne. But Scourge never had such a strong foothold in Yongguo. There are cripples here, as there are cripples everywhere, and Dek is only one of them. His foreignness is more remarkable than the crutch he walks with or the puckered map of blots and scars on the right side of his face.

  “It’s a saying,” says Dek, translating for Wyn and me: “Destiny must be hunted.”

  Mei, smudge-eyed and stifling a yawn, says, “Ling is very clever,” and adds something about the Imperial Gardens that I can’t understand.

  “What did she say?” I ask Dek, annoyed that the conversation seems to be switching over to Yongwen.

  “Ling has a tutor,” says Dek. “She works as a dishwasher, but in her free time she studies literature and philosophy. Her family thinks she might pass the examinations and get them a place in the Imperial Gardens.”

  Ling stares at her own calligraphy, the expression on her face almost angry now, and I study her again. The system in Tianshi is peculiar in that the ruling class is not hereditary. Power and prestige are not passed from one generation to the next but rath
er earned through a system of examinations. Anyone, even a peasant, may apply to take the Imperial Examinations. If they pass—showing a breadth of knowledge and also demonstrating excellence in at least one area of specialty—then both they and their entire family may live within the Imperial Gardens, that walled enclave of privilege at the center of the city. A family with a gifted child might pour all their resources into educating and preparing that child for the examinations. It is a huge gamble for a poor family, and naturally the wealthy have the significant advantage of money and time for tutors and study. But if Ling is truly exceptional, then even though she’s a dishwasher from Dongshui and her uncle is a smuggler, her family might rise to the very top of Yongguo’s society.

  The most extraordinary contrast to Frayne here in Yongguo is that witchcraft is viewed simply as another kind of talent and can also earn you a place in the Imperial Gardens. While witchcraft is governed by strict laws, witches are highly respected, and a licensed witch may use her power in service of the empire. If my mother had been born here instead of in Frayne, she might have been a member of the Imperial Court. She would not have been drowned in the river like a rat.

  Ling and Dek are leaning over the sheet of rice paper, heads almost touching, speaking Yongwen rapidly together. I understand the story of her hands now—the chapped skin and the ink and the close-bitten nails, hidden in her sleeves again. Mei has moved closer to Wyn and is resting her head on his shoulder. All at once, I feel very awkward.

  “I should get back,” I say, rising.

  “You just got here,” says Wyn.

  “Mrs. Och will be wanting a report. Thanks for the tea.”

  “We’ll find coffee in this blasted city, Brown Eyes. I swear it on my life!” he says dramatically. He doesn’t call me Brown Eyes so often anymore.