Julia Defiant

by Catherine Egan

  “If we find Ko Dan and he can help, might you stay here in Yongguo?” I ask. “Or somewhere else where witchcraft isn’t punished?”

  “No,” she says. “Frayne is home, for all that it’s no place for a witch. I’m a witch only by accident, not by choice. I’ve no true desire to write magic, never mind the way my fingers itch when they get hold of a pen. I want to go back to Nim.”

  “But what will you do?”

  “I don’t know. I’d rather keep myself than go back to being a rich man’s mistress, though there’s always money in that. If I could just get home, I’d find my feet. I have friends that would help us while I sort things out. If I save up enough, I could even open my own music hall by the sea. Oh, I don’t know, I only want to have a life again, be done with this nightmare.”

  I think of all the women I’ve known. Scraping by in the Twist, most of them, hawking their wares at market, scrubbing the privies of the rich, and so on. I used to swear, when I was little, that I would never be like them, nor even like Ma, her hands rough from washing, all those hours of rinsing and hanging and folding. Now I am surrounded by women who have forgone the well-trod path, the ordinary ways of being a woman in the world: Esme, with her criminal empire; Bianka, dancing and going about with rich men; Csilla, in the theater and Nameless knows what else before she left it all for Gregor. But I can’t see among them any path that I might take.

  “What about you?” she asks me, as if she’s heard my thoughts.

  “I want to go home too.”

  “And you’ll have plenty of gold,” she says, without cruelty. “You’ll be all right.”

  It sounds foolish, trite, but I must say it anyway: “I’m not here for the gold.”

  “Oh, I know that,” she says, and she reaches across the narrow gap between our sleeping mats, takes my hand, and draws it over Theo’s chest, rising and falling, so that we are holding hands over him. “I wonder now if I can truly call the people I knew back in Nim my friends. They don’t know what I am, and if they did know, I expect they’d turn me in.”

  “They might surprise you,” I say, just to be kind. We both know how unlikely that is.

  “I’m grateful to Mrs. Och,” she continues. “I owe her my life, and Theo’s. But I also know that, like Casimir and like Gennady, she cares about something in Theo, not Theo himself—that bit of book they’re all obsessed with. To me, he’s not a bit of book, he’s my darling boy.” She squeezes my hand so hard my fingers hurt, the fingers Casimir broke, and her voice lowers a notch. “You took him from me, and I thought I wouldn’t rest until I killed you myself. Even after you got him back, I thought about just ending you for what you did to him.” Her grip tightens, and I bite my lip so as not to cry out. “There are moments, still, when I see you together and I think to myself, If she could do that, who knows what she could do? And yet—Mrs. Och has only ever helped me, but she doesn’t love him. Everybody is here for something else—for money or adventure or their own purposes. You are the only one, besides me, who really loves him. You are the only one who came here for Theo.”

  She loosens her grip on my hand, and I let out a shuddering breath. “I do love him,” I say.

  I mean to go on, to say that I know she will never be able to trust me, to tell her how I despise myself for what I did, but I stop. It’s all been said; there’s no point saying it again. She is silent so long, eyes closed, that I think she has gone to sleep after all, her fingers slowly sliding from mine. When she speaks, her voice is thick and drowsing.

  “I will never forgive you,” she murmurs, slitting one eye open. “But you might be my only real friend. Isn’t that funny?”

  The eye drops closed again. I lie still until her breathing deepens, and then I slowly withdraw my hand. She does not stir, her hand resting alone now over Theo’s heart. I lift myself on one elbow to look at them. The magicked sash is still around her waist, but she’s forgotten to tie it to him. Careful not to wake him, I wind the other end of the sash around his fat little wrist and make it fast, binding him to her.

  Wyn turns up in the morning with bad news in the form of a drawing. Not his. It is a sketch of Mrs. Och, Bianka, and me.

  “This is plastered all over the city,” he says, startling me at the henhouse, where I’m fetching eggs for breakfast. He looks altogether too good in Yongguo-style dress. His hair is getting a little wild, though. He hasn’t had a haircut since the one I gave him months ago, bundled in our coats and perched on the roof outside his attic room—the spiky rooftops of the Twist around us, the autumn sky bright—back when we were happy, and I was just a girl who could vanish, and everything still seemed simple.

  “Word is, you can ask for Shun Yi at the Hundred Lantern Hotel if you’ve seen any of these nefarious characters. Nice reward offered too.”

  I snatch the paper from him. There we are, the three of us in a row on the page.

  “Not a good likeness of you,” he adds. “Whoever did it botched your chin completely. And your expression—you’ve got quite a sappy look there.”

  It’s not a flattering picture in the least, and, indeed, I’m looking uncharacteristically soulful, but it is me, without a doubt.

  “Only the three of us. It’s got to be Casimir. Where did you get it?”

  “Snatched it off a wall. They’re everywhere. But I reckon we don’t need to worry too much. Mrs. Och doesn’t even look Fraynish anymore, Bianka never leaves this courtyard, and you can be invisible. Who’s going to identify any of you?”

  “Si Tan, the grand librarian, saw me just the other day!” I snap at him. “Blast. I’d better show these to Mrs. Och. Are you staying for breakfast?”

  “Of course! You’ve got eggs! Dek and I ought to get a chicken or two.”

  “You’d never remember to feed it,” I say, taking up the basket.

  The picture sets everyone on edge.

  “It is Casimir,” Mrs. Och agrees. “He would guess that we might come looking for Ko Dan. I would not be surprised to find his agents here.”

  “You don’t think he might be behind Ko Dan’s disappearance, do you?” I ask.

  “Possible,” says Mrs. Och. “But I think unlikely. Casimir holds no real sway here.”

  “It could be Agoston Horthy,” I say, a bit desperately. The Fraynish prime minister frightens me less than Casimir does.

  “I think not,” she says. “Horthy does not know you. Besides, he would not pursue Theo so far beyond his borders. He does not know what he is.”

  “What he is?” says Bianka sharply. “He is a little boy. It’s just that he’s got something else stuffed inside him too.”

  Theo is sitting on the floor gnawing on something that looks like a rock but which I hope is a potato. He looks up, curious, aware that he is being discussed. I can’t help feeling we ought to be more careful what we say around him now that he is picking up so many words.

  “Only Casimir would go to the ends of the earth to find him,” says Mrs. Och, ignoring Bianka. “We need to know who he has sent and how extensively he has infiltrated the city. Julia, you will investigate.”

  “I’ll need money,” I say.

  Mrs. Och fetches me a chain of coins on a red string. In Yongguo the coins all have holes at their center and they are carried in clusters like this.

  “Will this be enough?”

  I nod, and slip the coins into my pocket.

  “Come on,” I say to Wyn. “I need your help this time.”

  Wyn finds a boy, aged ten or so, selling bunches of flowers from a little broken-down cart at the edge of the canal. Mrs. Och’s coins are enough to buy the whole lot of flowers and more: an errand. Wyn’s Yongwen is appalling, but he manages to convey the basic idea to the boy, showing him the picture and pointing out Mrs. Och as she used to appear back in Spira City. The boy is to say he saw a woman like her in the West Market. He should push for his reward, but not too hard. We don’t want the fellow getting hurt; I just want a look at Shun Yi.

  The boy does a happy
jig and babbles very quickly, and Wyn says, “All right, all right then,” clapping him on the shoulder. The boy wants to know where to find Wyn afterward, to report back, but Wyn tells him never mind that.

  I am invisible, or all but, in that edge-of-the-world space. The boy darts off, and I am after him. He is a clever dodger, glancing over his shoulder often to check if he’s being followed, taking back ways and crowded lanes. I slam into a woman carrying a basket of radishes, and that’s it, I’m back in the world, everything pulling into focus, but I’m going to lose the kid if I don’t run, so I run, leaving the woman shouting insults after me and collecting her radishes out of the gutter. I slip back to invisibility as we clear the alleyways, struggling to match the boy’s pace while I’m vanished.

  The Hundred Lantern Hotel is a many-storied building of gleaming yellow wood not far from the Imperial Gardens, its rear balconies overlooking the Dongnan Canal. It is easy to spot on the busy road because it really does have a hundred red lanterns hanging outside. I follow the boy into the main dining hall. The beefy barkeep makes to swat our boy away, but the kid dodges his hand, talking fast. The barkeep is halfway to cuffing him on the ear when he freezes at something the boy says. He lowers his hand uncertainly and beckons the boy to follow. He does, and so do I, vanished behind them.

  The private eating rooms are along the side of the dining hall. The boy is bouncing on his toes, wriggling with the thrill of the coins in his pocket, the mystery of his assignment. The barkeep pulls back a curtain. The boy goes bouncing inside, with me close behind him, and then all his bounce and verve are gone.

  I nearly run for it, but I’d have to move the curtain and then I’d be caught. I stay still against the wall, breath frozen in my throat.

  There is Pia, those awful mechanical goggles emerging from her face where eyes should be. I smashed them with the hilt of my knife in Casimir’s fortress, but somebody has repaired them since then. She is unchanged: ghastly pale, a helmet of black hair hanging to her jaw, long leather-clad limbs. I know, though, that underneath she must be different from the first time I laid eyes on her. There must be a scar on her belly where I stuck my knife. Or maybe not. What do I know about her, really? Maybe I left no mark. Maybe I could never really harm her.

  The boy is speechless. We could have warned him, if only we’d known—and we should have known, but I didn’t want to think it.

  She speaks Yongwen, not well but competently, very formally—textbook Yongwen that even I can understand. Fraynish is not her first language either. I don’t know where she’s from. It’s impossible to imagine Pia as a little girl in a foreign country, speaking some language like it belongs to her.

  “Sit down. I won’t hurt you.”

  He is shaking all over. He has never seen anything like Pia, and now I’m sorry we collared him off the street.

  “I will hurt you if you don’t tell me what you’re doing here,” she says in her high, clipped voice, her too-correct Yongwen. “No games. The truth.”

  Wyn gave him money, with no threat of consequences for betrayal, and looked altogether nonthreatening compared to this. What fools we were.

  The boy is speaking dialect and I do not understand him at all, but I know he’s selling us out.

  “Did you see this woman or not?” asks Pia, jabbing the picture of Mrs. Och with her finger.

  “No,” he tells her, head hanging.

  “Describe the man who gave you money.”

  He babbles, presumably about Wyn. I daren’t move, I daren’t breathe.

  “Fraynish?”

  The boy doesn’t know.

  “Only a man?” asks Pia, frowning. “You did not see the girl in this picture? They did not ask you to come back to them afterward?”

  “No,” says the boy. He carries on, and I don’t know what he’s saying, but I know what Pia is thinking. I watch her thinking it, I watch the understanding click into place in her expression, the tension firing through her limbs. She looks around the small, curtained room, goggles whirring. The boy stops talking and stares at her. She stands up, hand on the long, curved knife at her hip. She draws it and the boy screams.

  “Julia!” she calls, and I startle, jostling the curtain. She can’t see me, but she turns sharply, fixing on the place where I am standing. “There you are,” she hisses.

  I run.

  “Well. Blast.”

  It’s not yet noon, but Wyn pours himself a glass of shijiu and offers me one. I shake my head, trying to steady myself. I fled straight back to their place in Dongshui from the Hundred Lantern Hotel and am still catching my breath.

  “At least now we know,” says Dek. “We’re not really in a worse position than before.”

  “She knows we’re here,” I say. “She knows I’m here.”

  I’m thinking about how I knifed her and shut the trapdoor on her in Casimir’s fortress. I’m thinking she’s going to find me and cut me into pieces.

  “She already knew that,” says Dek. “Or she wouldn’t be here. Tianshi is a big city. We can stay out of sight until we wrap things up.”

  “Now she knows what I look like,” says Wyn. He’s never even met her, but he’s as shaken as I am.

  Dek snorts. “What did the boy tell her? Foreign? Dark? Nobody is going to find you.”

  “That narrows it down a good deal,” says Wyn. “I’m sure he mentioned devilishly handsome. That narrows it down even more.”

  “There are hundreds of foreigners in Tianshi,” says Dek. “We’ll keep a low profile.”

  “We haven’t been keeping a low profile. I’m very memorable! A little asking around and she’ll know where we’re holed up. Hounds. We should talk to the girls. Let them know to keep their mouths shut.”

  “I doubt they need to be told,” says Dek. “But we’ll talk to them.”

  So Mei and Ling were not just one-time visitors.

  “Maybe we should move,” mutters Wyn.

  Dek sips at his shijiu, makes a face, puts it down. “Julia—she can’t really get to you, can she? I mean, you can just disappear if she gets close.”

  “Only if I see her coming,” I admit.

  I’ve explained to Dek a little about how I’ve learned to vanish farther, more completely, though I did not go so far as to tell him about Kahge, or whatever that place is. I told him mainly so he’d stop shadowing me so closely while we were traveling.

  “You should take this.”

  He reaches under his sleeve, and I realize he’s unfastening the wristlet filled with capsicum gas that I used to wear. One squirt temporarily blinds an attacker—and hurts like a demon too. I put a hand on his wrist to stop him.

  “No, you keep it. I’ve got my knife, and I can vanish, like you said. Besides, it’s not much use against Pia. Those goggles protect her eyes. If she has eyes.”

  “We could get you a pistol,” says Wyn. “Doesn’t get much more effective than that.”

  I grimace. “I don’t like them. And I don’t want to put a hole in anybody anyway. I just want to make sure Pia doesn’t find us before we find Ko Dan.”

  “Agreed,” says Dek. “But look, I’ve been working on something else that might come in handy.”

  Dek is a wizard at designing weapons and other useful gadgets. He fetches a box full of finger-length darts with hollow ends and shows them to me.

  “I got these from the circus. They use them for sedating animals. A bit of sleeping serum inside the hollow end, fasten the plunger back on, and then jab someone with the point while pressing the plunger. It’ll knock them right out. A little tricky to gauge the right amount, but it should be a good, nonlethal way of dealing with a threat. Also, less noisy than the capsicum gas, which tends to lead to lots of screaming. I haven’t tried it out yet—I wanted to use Wyn for a test run, but he objected, the coward. I’ll give you a few just in case.”

  “Thanks.” I watch him fill them carefully from a vial, one-handed, the open dart in the crook of his thumb, his other fingers managing the acrobatic feat
of pouring without the thumb. I know better than to offer to help. Dek is very clever with the one hand he can use.

  “By the way, we talked to the mail carrier yesterday and made him a very generous offer,” he says as he transfers the serum to the darts. “He was absolutely terrified. Wouldn’t give me one of Gangzi’s letters for love or money.”

  “I don’t remember you offering love,” says Wyn.

  “Well, your Yongwen is terrible. How badly d’you want one, Julia? Now we’ve got this serum, we could knock him out and steal the whole basket.”

  “I don’t even know if it’s important,” I say. “But if you can get one without hurting him, and without too much risk, I’d like to see what Gangzi’s so busy writing.”

  “The mail goes out again the day after tomorrow,” says Wyn. “I’ll nick one for you, easy.” Then, to Dek: “I told you we should have just stolen it, instead of trying to bribe him.”

  “I liked the novelty of bribery,” sighs Dek. “But I suppose theft is where your talents lie.”

  He caps the last of the darts and makes a ta-da gesture with his good hand. Wyn picks one up and looks at it.

  “All right, so if Pia turns up, we might be able to knock her out if we’re tremendously lucky and she doesn’t kill us first,” he says. “But what are we going to tell Mrs. Och? Will she think we botched it, letting Pia know we’re here?”

  “I need to think,” I say.

  But there is nothing to think about. The only thing to do is to find Ko Dan and get out of Tianshi before Pia finds us, and while I know Mrs. Och might not like the way I’m going about it, I’ve got a contact now and I’m going to use it.

  Old Thien has a note for me with an address on it. The note is written in Fraynish—not by Jun, I reckon, as the Fraynish is flawless and the handwriting that of an educated person—and explicitly instructs me to come alone. I can’t say I like the sound of that. Dek and Wyn like it even less.