Julia Defiant

by Catherine Egan

  “Good night,” says Dek. “Be careful.”

  I give him a wave, shouldering my bag, and try to be happy for him that he’s got a pretty girl to pass the evening with.

  Halfway home, I am sure I’m being followed. I can’t see anybody; it’s just a feeling. It may be no more than jitters, but I go the rest of the way vanished anyway.

  Even the animals are quiet when I return to the modest courtyard house in the Nanmu Triangle that serves, for now, as home to Mrs. Och, Bianka, Baby Theo, Frederick, and me. Spira City would be brilliant with gas lamps at this hour, but Tianshi is nearly pitch black. There is the odd flicker of a lantern here and there, the dim glow of a candle in a window; the rest is darkness. I think of home: the winding streets of the Twist, raucous laughter spilling out of the brothels, half-starved cats stalking rats, the smell of spice and snow and smoke. The sounds and smells are all different here: wet stone from the afternoon rain, which came down in a torrent while the bells of Shou-shu chimed their magic for it; lamp oil and chicken shit; the click of dice and low voices behind courtyard walls. Where Spira City comes alive at night, Tianshi nestles down close to the earth, the people withdraw, the lights go out.

  A slight rustling and whispering greets my arrival, a hint of smoke from the small folds of paper tucked into the cracks in the wall. Spells. If it were someone other than me coming through the door, the whole household would be woken by now. Ours is a simple three-sided courtyard house, though the front wall facing onto the street is thick enough to disguise it as a proper courtyard house with living quarters on all four sides. I pass through the gate and straight into the yard, where the cantankerous goat we bought for milk looks up at me curiously. The chickens are sleeping in their enclosures, the messenger tree pipit chirruping in its cage. The servants’ quarters, kitchen, and washrooms along the sides of the courtyard are dark, but a lamp glimmers inside the main house.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  He looks up, startled. Frederick always has a look about him like you’ve just jumped around a corner and shouted something obscene, but right now he is genuinely surprised. He was too deep in his book to hear me come in.

  “I don’t sleep much, to be honest,” he says. “It always feels like such a colossal waste of time. Anything interesting?”

  “Very,” I say, leaving my bag in a corner and throwing myself into the chair next to him. “What do you make of a Fraynish girl, about my age, living in the monastery?”

  He frowns. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m bleeding sure. It’s not an easy mistake. I saw her, and I heard her singing a Fraynish song. There was somebody else spying on her too. He came up through a tunnel under the monastery. Lives in Dongshui.”

  Frederick raises his eyebrows and puts his book down on the table, a sign I’ve really got his attention. It’s very irritating when he keeps hanging on to his book while you talk and you know he’s just waiting for a chance to get back to it without seeming rude. Poor Frederick has been very book-deprived since we left Frayne. He bought a book he couldn’t even read at a shop in Ishti, just because he wanted one to hold, I suspect, though he claims it was because he wanted to study classical Ishtan.

  “Odd sort of coincidence. I wonder what Mrs. Och will make of it,” he says. He hesitates a fraction of a second before adding: “You’re sure the spy was a man?”

  “A boy, I reckon. My height.”

  “But male.”

  “He was wearing trousers.”

  “So are you,” he points out.

  In Yongguo the peasant women often wear trousers, and I must say I’ve rather taken to it. I’d never given much thought to the impracticality of women’s clothing until I started dressing like a boy. I am wearing black for nighttime creeping: a pair of cotton trousers that button at the waist and ankles, a loose tunic of the sort women in the countryside wear, and peasant boots, a shoe with a length of tough fabric that wraps to midway up the calf. I’ve got my knife tucked into the bindings, and I leave the bottoms of my trousers unbuttoned so I can reach it easily. My hair is pinned up on my head, but the pins pinch, so I loosen them now, letting my hair fall over my shoulders.

  “Got a pen?” I say. “I should sketch the layout while it’s fresh in my mind.”

  Frederick fetches me a cartridge pen from his box of writing supplies, and I lay out the wrinkled map next to a blank piece of paper. I draw a more complete map, marking the Fraynish girl’s secret courtyard and the spy’s tunnel by the swallow coop. I hand it to Frederick when I’m done.

  “Impressive,” he says.

  “Gangzi, if it’s him, is still writing loads of letters,” I say, looking at my map over his shoulder. “I’ve asked Wyn and Dek to find out who takes out the mail. We might be able to nab a few and see what he’s writing about. I’d like to get into the Treasury too. It’s got a steel door and two guards on duty right through the night.”

  “We’re here for a man, not Gangzi’s correspondence or treasure,” says Frederick.

  “You never know where a clue might turn up. What sort of thing do magic-using monks stash in a treasury, anyway?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  I stretch my legs and get up. “Well, enjoy your book. I’m going to get some sleep. Unlike you, I find sleeping to be one of the absolute best uses of my time.”

  I am leaving the room when he says: “Julia.”

  Frederick met me as Ella—a compliant, illiterate housemaid. I was a spy in Mrs. Och’s house, digging up secrets, and he was rather taken with that fictitious person. I know he will never be as fond of Julia as he was of Ella, but the way he says my name tells me he no longer sees her when he looks at me. If we are not exactly friends, crossing half the world together has afforded us a kind of ease with one another. He looks different now than he did back in Spira City. He was a gangly youth when I met him, all arms and legs, but the months of hard travel have added a layer of muscle that suits him well. His fair beard has grown long, and his face is sunburnt, which has the effect of making his eyes look even bluer behind his spectacles. I lean against the doorframe, waiting for him to say what I know he is going to say.

  “You’re sure…you aren’t worried, then, about this spy?”

  He doesn’t say her name, but I know he’s thinking of Pia. I know because I think about her all the time as well. The last time I saw her, she was broken on the ground, bleeding from the knife I’d stuck in her gut, but I know better than to believe that was the end of her. We all know that Casimir, her employer, isn’t going to let us go with his prize. He’ll be searching for us here.

  “It wasn’t her,” I tell him.

  He nods, looking relieved. “Good night, Julia,” he says. “Well done.”

  I leave him to his book and tiptoe into the dark of the room I share with Bianka and Theo. I feel blindly for my nightgown hanging from a nail in the wall and change as quietly as I can. Little Theo stirs, and my eyes adjust to the darkness enough to see him lying on a mat, curled against Bianka. A sash around his waist is tied to her wrist. She has stitched a spell into the sash, writing with thread that it shall not be undone except by her hand, and she checks the needle she sewed it with every night to make sure it is unbroken and that the spell will hold. It is the only way she can let herself sleep; she will not risk having him stolen from her a second time. And yet she agreed to have me, who stole him first, share their room. If she hadn’t, I would have had to bunk down with Mrs. Och, so I am doubly indebted.

  I lie down gently on my own sleeping mat, barely two feet from Bianka, who once counted me her direst enemy, and Theo, who has never understood enough to blame me. He looks an ordinary boy, not even two years old yet, with corkscrewing dark curls and a smile to melt lead. But woven into his being is such magic as could undo or remake the world, if put to proper use. Marvel at that when he’s spilling his milk or pulling your hair.

  “Lala,” he murmurs when I lie down, his eyelids fluttering.

  “Shh,” I whisper, r
eaching across the gap between our sleeping mats and giving him my finger to hold. He wraps his little fist around it and is back asleep in seconds.

  Sleep takes longer for me. I stare at the softness, the absolute peace of his face at rest—no fear at all, tucked against his mother, no idea of how he is hunted across the world, no awareness of the magical fragment Ko Dan hid inside him, bound to his essence, and which we only hope Ko Dan can take back out. I watch him breathing in the dark, and I swear by all the holies, as I do every night, that I will keep him safe. I’ll make it right.

  “Good morning, Julia. You had an eventful night, I hear.”

  Mrs. Och is next to the hearth, a stone-lined pit in the center of the room, wearing a black Tianshi-style robe embroidered with golden birds. She is examining the map I drew last night. Her back is straight, her eyes bright and alert. There is an unusual vigor about her. I know what that means, even before I look at Frederick slumped over the table, his face a sickly gray. He raises one hand in greeting and lets it drop again.

  “And you’ve had a busy morning already,” I reply, unable to keep the bite out of my voice.

  I know he agrees to this, but still it makes me angry—perhaps at myself, as much as at her, for refusing to give her any of my own life force. She is dying, though very slowly, her power waning—and Frederick, Professor Baranyi, and Bianka all volunteer their own strength when she needs it. Bianka weathers it best, of course, being a witch, but Frederick has no unnatural powers. It is horrible to see her vivid and sprightly while he slouches there so diminished, without even the strength to read. He speaks of it very rationally, how we need Mrs. Och and she needs strength. But I remember what it felt like when she took mine by force—albeit to save our lives—and I cannot bring myself to give it to her willingly.

  Either she doesn’t notice my tone or she ignores it deliberately. She looks up at me, and I feel a sick little jolt at her still-unfamiliar face. For two weeks now she has appeared to be an elderly lady from Yongguo, her white hair knotted on top of her head, her accent matching whatever region we were passing through. Still, I can’t get used to this changeability of hers.

  “Describe to me the girl you saw in the monastery.”

  “My age. Brown hair. Fancy clothes.” I fold my arms across my chest. “Do you know why she’s there?”

  I am good enough at reading faces, but I have never been able to read Mrs. Och’s, no matter what she looks like.

  “No,” she says. “But you had better keep an eye on her.”

  “D’you think she has anything to do with Ko Dan?” I ask.

  “I doubt it.”

  “Then why should we care about her?”

  “I care about a great many things,” she says mildly.

  I bite back a sarcastic retort as Bianka comes in with an apron full of eggs and Theo at her heels. He is tugging at her skirt and begging, “Egg? Egg?”

  “No, you may not hold one,” she snaps, maintaining her stride and half dragging him along with her. “Last time you broke them, d’you remember? And then you had to go without your breakfast.”

  He gives me a sly look and murmurs, “Lala umma egg.”

  I glare back warningly and am glad he can’t really talk yet. In fact, I slipped him most of my breakfast that time. For such a little thing, he certainly has an appetite.

  “Egg,” he sighs again, in a very world-weary manner. Bianka kneels by the hearth and begins to crack them carelessly into a pan, not bothering about the bits of shell. I’ve had months to get used to Bianka’s cooking.

  Giving up all hope of holding and probably smashing an egg, Theo comes to me. I scoop him up and plant a kiss on his soft, golden cheek. Bianka shoots us a wary glance. I can’t blame her, but I can’t resist him either.

  “We need more bread” is all she says.

  “Julia will go to the market today,” says Mrs. Och. She’s quite fond of that construction, Julia will, and employs it freely. I give Theo another squeeze and pretend to take a bite of his fat neck while he chortles.

  “At nightfall you will go back to the monastery. Enough mapping. I want Ko Dan.”

  “So do I!” I half shout, startling Theo, who wriggles free of my embrace, affronted. “What d’you think I’m doing there every night? There are three hundred of them, and I don’t even know what he looks like! You told me not to be seen. What am I meant to do, go up to them one after another and say, Hullo, which of you is Ko Dan?”

  “Do not be insolent.”

  She turns her cool gaze on me, and I quake. Most of the time she just looks like an old woman, even if her features vary. But I’ve seen her look like something else altogether, well beyond human, and there are moments when she looks at me and I feel the full force of her centuries upon centuries, her potential for transformation, the ancient, fading power hovering just behind the kindly face and still eyes.

  “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” I mutter.

  “You are a resourceful girl, Julia. Find him. How is entirely up to you. I ask only that you remain unseen, particularly if there is another spy about.”

  Bianka stirs the eggs, not looking at me. Frederick’s eyes are closed.

  “I’ll go get bread,” I say curtly, and then, because I am angry and because I can do it, I vanish right in front of her. It wouldn’t have worked, once—but I’ve learned a thing or two about what I can do since then.

  Nothing changes in her expression—or nothing that I can see—but I hear Theo cry out, a muffled sound, and I feel a stab of regret. Bianka reaches for him, and I walk out, banging the door shut so they know I’ve gone.

  We entered Tianshi on false papers, and we are all trying to stay out of sight as much as possible—easier for me than for the others. I follow the narrow road outside our gate to the Dongnan Canal and walk along it, toward the market.

  To reach Tianshi from anywhere, you must cross either the desert or the sea, and its forbidding walls, famous the world round, are visible for miles, forming a rectangle around the great city. They call it the Heavenly City, and it is indeed a marvelous place. The bells of Shou-shu are chiming, a merry sound for fine weather. The sky is a distant, impossible blue, the sun pouring down on the brightly colored tile rooftops and the green leaves of the persimmon trees. The incantations on the bells were inscribed by long-ago witches; struck in a particular way, in a particular order, they can change the weather. That is why drought and other natural disasters so seldom strike Tianshi. The city and the forests and farmland surrounding it sit lush and green at the edge of the vast desert. The bells call and the rain comes. The bells warn, and the dust storm withdraws. So they say, in any case.

  The smaller branches of the trees are wrapped in twists of paper, and some of these little slips are blowing along the street, having come loose from whatever branches they were fastened to, bearing somebody’s dearest wish written out in elegant Yongwen characters. It’s still odd to me, seeing customs long banned in Frayne flourishing out in the open in Yongguo—like the little shrines to the elements along the roads, or men walking about with tattoos visible on their hands, necks, even faces. I continue along the canal, which is full of narrow, painted boats, their gunwales hung with charms, everything slightly blurred by the haze of my vanishing, while the slender trees loose swirls of petals as well as wishes onto the breeze.

  Not so long ago, my vanishing seemed a simple thing, a trick, a gift, and I never sought a reason for it. I thought of it like a pocket in the world, available only to me. A single step back into that space and I was hidden in plain view—from ordinary eyes, at least. There were exceptions: My friend Liddy, in Spira City, could still see me. Then Mrs. Och, and Theo too. But I’ve learned that the space I used to vanish into is merely the edge of somewhere else. And I’ve been practicing.

  Another step back—my surroundings growing hazier, sound coming a bit muffled and distant—and not even the likes of Mrs. Och can see me. I tried it out on her on the steamer from Nim. “Tell me when y
ou can’t see me anymore,” I said, and pulled away—carefully—one step, two steps. She didn’t say anything, but I saw fear in her eyes when I returned to the world, and while I’m not exactly proud of it, I confess I felt a ripple of triumph. This power is all I’ve got, and with her I was always powerless. Not anymore.

  Three steps back: My perspective begins to scramble, lose focus, and I feel a tingling, a loss of sensation that starts in my extremities. Four steps: I disappear into a dizzying vantage point from which my senses take in everything, from every direction, but I can’t find or feel my own body—I don’t have a body there. I’ve been practicing this too, because it’s one way to get over a wall. From that unsettling nowhere, if I can focus in on a particular spot, I can return to my body there instead of where I started out. For example, on the other side of a wall. Still, I prefer the more traditional means of breaking and entering. Disappearing so completely leaves me feeling shaky and a bit sick. Always, I’m terrified I might not find my way back to my body.

  And there is another place even beyond that. I have not dared return to it since I was in Casimir’s fortress, where he broke my wrist and all the fingers on my left hand, told me how he watched my mother drown, threatened to cut me open and murder my friends before my eyes. Then, fueled by terror and pain and despair, I wanted only to escape my surroundings and my self entirely. And I did.

  I still dream of those burning streets. I see my own hands, which were not human hands, and I remember how it felt, and I know that there is something in me I do not understand. The gift I’ve always taken pride in, reveled in, turns out to be the tip of something dark and vast and terrifying. I know it is there, at my back—that I must be something other than what I have believed, if I can enter there.

  My desire to know what I can do—what I am—and my fear of knowing the same have been pressed up against each other for months. Now I have an idea—something that might lead me to Ko Dan. I’ve pretended to be many things I’m not. I try to tell myself this will be the same—a pretense—but my heart tightens in my chest just thinking about it. There’s fear, yes, but something else too, something I can’t quite name—a sort of quivering thrill, like that feeling when you stand at the edge of a high ledge and you almost think you might step off it just to see what it’s like to fall.