Julia Defiant

by Catherine Egan

  I look at Bianka. She says nothing, holding on to Theo and staring at the ground. I suppose that’s only fair. She depends on Mrs. Och far more than I do. She can’t come out and say, after everything, that she doesn’t trust her. So it’s on me.

  “I wanted to know what passed between you,” I say, lifting my chin.

  Her face twists. She grabs my shoulders and pulls me close to her, peering into my eyes, searching for something. I gasp with pain, my arm and my side crying out.

  “Lidari?” she whispers, so close to me I can taste her stale breath. I shake free of her, staggering back.

  “No!” I yelp. “It’s me, Julia!”

  She straightens and says stiffly: “Yesterday I made you an offer of permanent employment. I withdraw that offer now. You no longer work for me. Not in the future and not now. I gave you a second chance after you betrayed me, and you have betrayed me again. I am done with you. Leave my house now and do not return.”

  All the air goes out of me.

  Bianka’s hand flies to her heart. Theo has wriggled out of her arms, and now he is hanging on to my leg, staring up at us with big, frightened eyes. He knows something important is happening.

  “Promise me you won’t do what he said,” I say. “You won’t harm Theo. Promise me that. Promise Bianka.”

  Bianka picks Theo up and takes a step back.

  “I did not cross the world in the evening of my life to do him harm,” says Mrs. Och evenly. She has recovered and is quite in control of herself again. “I shall do everything within my power to protect him, as I have done since I knew of his existence. But it is no business of yours any longer. Now go.”

  “I need help!” I beg her. “Those creatures pulled me into Kahge and tried to kill me!”

  “You’ll have no help from me.”

  Frederick’s head is bowed. If he won’t speak up for me, I really am done here. I force my voice to be steady. “I reckon you owe me some of that gold, then.”

  “I owe you nothing,” says Mrs. Och, her voice rising again. “You will leave now, or I will destroy you where you stand.”

  “You can’t!” cries Bianka. “This is Julia!”

  “Julia, who was a spy and our enemy, who kidnapped your son, who has proved herself untrustworthy yet again, and who may not be who she claims to be at all,” says Mrs. Och. “She is lucky I am willing to let her go.”

  I am trying to think of some response—may not be who she claims to be?—but she cuts me off before I can find words: “Your brother will be paid in full and dismissed. You may return to Frayne or wherever you like with him, but do not let me see you again.”

  “Lala!” says Theo urgently, reaching for me. I look at Bianka, who has pressed a hand to her mouth, her eyes filling.

  “You’ll be all right,” I say to her, which is completely senseless, of course. I ought to say something more, but I can’t bear to say goodbye to them, and I can’t bear Mrs. Och’s eyes on me anymore. So I just go.

  Even without vanishing, I can feel it—the tug at my stitches, under my bandages. Suddenly it is like a hook to the wound in my side. The street blurs and slides sideways, and I am hanging above it all, my perspective widening, wheeling outward. I fling myself back into my body in the road, and as I do so, I feel the stitches tearing again. Panic pours through me, fast and cold. They can reach me here where I stand, here in my body, in the world. The wounds are straining under the bandages, blood seeping out of the lesser scratches on my shoulders, neck, and forearm. I break into a run. At first I think I am going to Dek’s, but I change my mind halfway. I go to Count Fournier’s house and bang on the outer door. Nobody answers.

  “Jun!” I shout. I go down on one knee and pick the lock, go through the outer courtyard, and bang on the next door, then pick that lock as well. When I get the door open, there he is, pointing his gun at me.

  “Get out,” he says.

  “I need your help,” I beg. “Please. I’m hurt.”

  The gun doesn’t scare me as much as it should. I am as sure as I can be that Jun isn’t going to shoot me. I lift my tunic so he can see the blood-drenched bandage around my middle. “Look,” I say.

  He stares at the bandage and then at my face, bouncing lightly on his toes. It breaks my heart a little. How quickly I’ve come to love that coiled restlessness in him, the way he looks like he might, at any moment, break into a sprint or start turning cartwheels. Just the other night he kissed me in the tree until I didn’t know up from down anymore, and now here we are.

  I grope for words to persuade him. “It’s just me. Julia.” Is that the truth? Oh Nameless, please let it be the truth! “What happened before—it was an accident. I need help or I’m going to bleed out.”

  I feel faint, but I can’t tell if it’s from blood loss or if I am being pulled out of the world again. I grab the doorframe like I’m clinging to this place, this moment, gripping so hard that the wood digs into my hand. That brings me back to myself a little. “Please.” I’m weeping openly now. “It’s me, it’s just me.”

  He tucks the gun into his belt.

  “Come.”

  I follow him through the inner courtyard to a narrow room at the back of the house, the roof collapsed. It is all boxes and clutter and bits of broken tile everywhere, half open to the sky. He picks his way through the wreckage, never turning his back on me for more than an instant, and finds somewhere a metal box with antiseptic, bandages, and such.

  “Hullo.”

  I hadn’t seen Count Fournier, and I jump at his voice. He is sprawled in a corner, an empty bottle of brandy next to him. As I turn toward him, everything blurs again, that dizzying pull at my wounds coming from nowhere. I fall to my knees, press my hands to the floor, breathing hard. I need to concentrate just to stay here, in this place, in this body.

  I try to focus on him leaning against the wall, legs loose on the floor, head bobbing, a silly grin on his face. It’s so oddly familiar. I used to come home to find my father like this.

  “Jun says you are some kind of monster,” he says, sounding entirely happy.

  “I’m not.” But maybe I am. I don’t know what I am.

  “Sit here,” says Jun, finding an unbroken chair. I pull myself into it. He removes my tunic—an unhappy echo of the other night—and unwraps the bandage. I hoped then that he thought I was pretty, that he liked my body. Now I only hope not to terrify or disgust him. With my unhurt arm, I hold my bloody, torn tunic over my chest, because even in this state I feel self-conscious sitting half naked in front of Count Fournier, drunk as he is.

  “What happen?” asks Jun, touching my side with such soft fingers. “These stiches are rip right open.”

  “Something’s after me,” I say between clenched teeth. There it is again—pulling, pulling. Jun backs away, eyes widening in horror. The blood does not run down my side. It flows outward, away from me, into the air, and disappears. Wisps of blood are escaping from the lesser scratches and floating away from me too.

  “Make it stop,” I whisper. I’m so afraid he’s going to run away and leave me. I watch him get a handle on himself, make a decision.

  “I give you some whiskey.”

  “I may have drunk it all,” drawls the count.

  “I’ll manage without,” I say.

  Jun stares at me a second and then gives a short nod. He kneels next to me, setting straight to work. He is not as fast or as steady as Esme, but he stitches my side back up. Maybe it’s pointless—they will just rip me open again. But the hot, sharp pain of the needle focuses me. I try not to jerk away, to hang on to the pain that keeps me in my body. The blurring and the sense of slipping out of myself stops.

  “You’re not a monster,” says Count Fournier, watching me. “I’ve known a few. Believe me.”

  “Thanks,” I manage to grind out between my teeth.

  “How is the princess?” he asks.

  “Gone. They left last night.”

  “Good.”

  Jun breaks off the thread
and sets about stitching up my arm. I squeeze my eyes shut, but that’s worse. I need to see the world and feel the pain as much as possible. I stare at the sky through the gaps in the roof and grind my teeth.

  “I get you clean bandages,” he says when he’s done. I turn toward him, and a deep tremor goes through me, looking at his face up close—close enough to kiss. The slant of his cheekbones, the line of his jaw, those full lips and black eyes—I think of his mouth against mine, his hands moving over me. How I can still want him in this condition, I don’t know, but I do.

  “Can I have the needle?” I ask.

  He looks at me, his eyebrows going down.

  “It helps,” I say. “Pain helps…keep me here.”

  He hands me the blood-slicked needle wordlessly and goes rooting around for bandages.

  “What will you do?” I ask the count, trying to ignore my blood battering against the new stitches. My arm and my side are burning, but I’ll take the pain gladly over the otherworldly pull. “Don’t you want to go home?”

  “This is home, as much as anywhere, by now,” he says, waving a hand around the broken, cluttered room. “But as for what I will do—who knows? I worry about Jun. He’ll have to find other employment.”

  “I like his prospects better than yours,” I say frankly.

  He chuckles at that. “Well, I’m an old toad now. I’ve stopped caring much what becomes of me. Oh, I would like to see Princess Zara on the throne in Frayne. To see my childhood home again. To feel I had something to give. But the distance from here to there is…” He holds up the empty bottle and examines it. “Unmanageable,” he says at last. His eyes fall closed for a long moment, and I think he might be asleep, but then they flick open again and he smiles at me.

  Because I think I have to, I tell him: “I heard that Lady Laroche, your aunt, has been executed. I’m sorry.”

  “I feared it might be so,” he says. “You know, when I was little—hounds, I was afraid of her.” He laughs. “But she won me over. She wins everyone over, given a chance. I can’t quite imagine…I’ve never known anybody so alive. It is hard to imagine her dead.”

  Jun wraps my side and my arm firmly with the clean bandages and helps me pull the bloody tunic back on. Whenever I feel the edges of things starting to blur, that tug, I stab myself in the thigh with the needle, which jolts me right back to myself. That is something, at least. Jun backs away, watching me, and the wariness in his gaze hurts almost as much as my stitched-up wounds.

  “What you will do now?” he asks me.

  “Have you heard of a witch called Silver Moya?”

  “Everybody know Silver Moya,” he says.

  “Silver Moya!” cries Count Fournier. “The plot thickens!” He begins to giggle.

  “She is unlicensed witch,” says Jun. “But she never get arrested. Just small things. Luck charms, bone casting, illegal potion.”

  “I need to go see her,” I say. “Later…I’ll explain everything. Or I’ll try, anyway.”

  “Explain,” he says, his voice hardening.

  “I will.”

  “Now.”

  The pull, the drift, the slide. I see his eyes widen, and I think I must be fading. I drive the needle into my leg a bit too hard and yell with pain. He flinches as I return to myself.

  “Explain now,” he says. “Or do not come back here.”

  I roll the needle between my fingers. I can get through this, I tell myself. Deep breaths and needle jabs. I can confess the whole bewildering, ugly thing to the only person I’ve known who seems so much like me, except for one enormous difference—that I might not be a person at all.

  So I tell him.

  When I was a child, my parents never talked about witches or magic or the Lorian Uprising. We saw the wreckage of the old ways around us for a few years, and then even those last hints of the way things once were disappeared as well. I remember the smashed shrines in the woods outside Forrestal, the old folks sitting on their stoops and muttering to one another, many of them with scars and burn marks, and, of course, the Cleansings, where women, young and old, quaked on the big government barge and were tossed into the river Syne to drown.

  One of the stories my mother told us was about a bear and a girl who switched bodies. They woke up one morning, each in their own home, but in the wrong body. They had to flee their families and homes, for the bear-in-girl’s-body would have been eaten, and the girl-in-bear’s-body would have been shot and killed. They were not safe anymore among their own kind, having ceased to be their own kind. The bear-in-girl’s-body ended up begging in the city. She did not speak any human language, and she was friendless and alone and confused. The girl-in-bear’s-body had to learn to hunt in the forest, and she was shunned by other bears, who sensed that something was amiss. But as the years went by, they learned how to be what they had become. The bear-in-girl’s-body learned language and how to use it, she learned the rules of the human world, and she even fell in love. Likewise, the girl-in-bear’s-body learned how to be a bear—how to catch fish in the river, gather berries, and be with other bears. Still, they both thought often of their old lives, their true families.

  One evening, when the moon was full, the bear-turned-girl crept into the forest. She wanted to wade in the stream, dig in the earth, feel her old world around her. That same night, the girl-turned-bear crept into the city. She wanted so badly to see a human face, to smell bread baking, to hear speech and laughter and song.

  Well, this being one of my mother’s stories, you can imagine how it ended. The bear-turned-girl romped through the woods, happy as can be, until a pack of wolves set upon her and tore her to pieces. When she died, her body turned back into the body of a bear. The girl-turned-bear was spotted in the city and shot. The bullet did not kill her, but the moment the bear-turned-girl in the woods was killed by wolves, the spell lifted. The girl-bear turned back into a young woman, bleeding from the gunshot wound in her side. The people thought she must be a witch, and they threw her into the river. She was bleeding heavily, and they would not let her swim to shore, and so she drowned.

  My mother stroked my hair as I wept and said, “Oh, come now, it’s only a story,” but I know she didn’t believe that, and she would not have told me such a terrible story only for my entertainment. Now I wonder what she thought the story meant. Wonder if it means that magic is random and brutal, that we cannot choose it, and it can change us, take us from ourselves and from the lives we might have wished for if we had not been somehow chosen. Or if the point is that you can never stop being who you are and loving what you love, no matter how you change on the outside.

  Or perhaps it means that you will never stop longing for who you thought you were before you became something else.

  I think of that old story again as I am telling Jun about who I used to be—a pleasure-loving girl with a skill that set her apart and with no moral compass to speak of—and who I am now, the big question mark. I tell him about the Xianren, and Kahge, and The Book of Disruption. I tell him about Pia and Si Tan. I tell him how afraid I am of what I might be, of why I can vanish. I tell him about Theo, and I tell him the awful thing I did. I tell him everything.

  When I’m done, he meets my eyes for a long moment, and he looks more thoughtful than afraid. I want so much to touch his face, but I don’t dare.

  “I forgive you what you did to me,” he says gravely. “Do not do that again.”

  “I promise.”

  “Good. I go with you to Silver Moya.”

  We enter the clock shop Professor Baranyi and Frederick went to the other night. The benign-looking old man who opened the door to them is at the counter. When Jun asks him for Silver Moya, he waves a hand at the curtain behind him. In the workshop behind the curtain, the same woman, dressed in simple peasant garb, is sitting cross-legged on the dirty floor, tinkering with a clock. She has a wide, sweet face—the kind of face you trust instinctively. She puts down the clock and the screwdriver when we come in and pushes back her dirty hair.


  “You talk,” says Jun to me.

  “I want see…,” I start in hesitant Yongwen, but then I don’t know how to say it, and so I finish in Fraynish: “Ragg Rock.”

  The woman rises and puts away her clock, clearing the worktable behind her. She climbs up on a stepladder at the back of the room and takes a little bird from one of the cages onto her crooked finger, brings it over to the table, and gestures at me to sit. The tabletop is sticky, and the stool is so high that it leaves my legs dangling like a child’s.

  In a very businesslike manner, as if she’s about to take an order for a custom-made clock, Silver Moya scatters a bit of seed on the table, then unrolls a piece of rice paper, opens her inkpot, pours a little ink into a bowl, and takes out her brush with the sharp blade on one end. The sparrow hops around, pecking at the seed. Silver Moya reaches for my hand, her face smiling and kind.

  “I need a little blood,” she says in careful Yongwen. “May I?”

  I offer my hand, still holding the needle Jun gave me in the hand of my hurt arm. She slices the soft pad of my thumb and then holds it over the inky bowl, squeezing out a few thick, scarlet drops. I’m relieved that this blood, at least, does not float away and disappear. She releases my hand, then bunches her mouth up and dips the brush.

  I see everything up close for a moment—the bristles of the brush emerging from the bowl, heavy and dripping with darkness. The brush comes down on the page, and I feel the jolt of it, the potency of this magic, all natural law crushed between the ink-black brush and the empty page. Dark, wet lines move across the paper, and everything shifts. I smell rain. Lightheaded, I fumble the needle and it slips between my fingers. Sound is amplified—the needle hits the floor with an awful crash—and then the final stroke of the brush sweeps everything aside, leaves the world changed.

  The sparrow hops around on the table, chirping. The room has gone shadowy and still. The little bird is the only thing properly in focus. It is bright and moving, every feather twitching with life and color. It cocks its head and chirps at me. Silver Moya is still as a statue—Jun, likewise, motionless, a silhouette. The bird takes off from the table, flying out an open door I had not seen, a bright door leading into the world. The bird’s movement is like a hook inside me, and I twist after it, nearly falling off the stool in my hurry to follow. I want to say something to Jun, but words are far-off, sticky things, and I am light as air, flowing after the bird.