Julia Defiant

by Catherine Egan

  “I passed him along to my contact as soon as he gave us this address and Ling was on her way here. She was awfully fond of your brother. I had to swear up and down no harm would come to him. Of course, my word is worth less than nothing, and I do not know where they have gone now.”

  “Did you hurt him?”

  “No more than was necessary to subdue him. He will be taken to Casimir, and Casimir will decide what to do with him. It won’t be pretty. Unless, of course, you have something to offer in exchange. A little boy, for example.”

  I feel as if my veins are full of sand, everything slowing down, everything inside me grinding to a halt, my heart struggling to beat against the terrible pressure of so much weight.

  “I can’t,” I whisper. “I told you, I don’t know where he is.”

  “Casimir might accept another trade,” says Pia. “After all, he is very keen on you, as well. Then your brother could go home with a nice bag of gold for good measure.”

  I think of that tentacled little blob Ling pulled out of her. Something starts to beat inside me, something deeper and stronger than my stuttering heartbeat. Like a drum calling forth a different kind of strength. Like the pulse of some other, terrible Julia.

  “Give me the day to look for Theo,” I say. “If I can’t find him, I’ll turn myself over to Casimir in exchange for Dek’s life. Wait for me at the Hundred Lantern Hotel.”

  “Wait for you?” Pia’s goggles whir. “I don’t think I ought to let you out of my sight.”

  “I’ll come,” I say. “You know I will, for Dek.”

  She nods, once. “Very well.”

  I go and kneel next to Frederick.

  “I have to go.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  “You don’t…have to come back,” he says.

  His face is pinched and tight, his eyes faded, all the color drained out of him. How much did she take?

  “Will you be all right?”

  He says, “She wouldn’t…she wouldn’t…” But who knows what she would do. His eyes slide toward me, find mine. “I can’t move.”

  “You don’t need to move right now. But don’t die. Please.”

  “I’ll try…not to,” he says, almost smiling.

  Pia stands on the steps, looking out at the dawn.

  “If you hurt him, I will kill you,” I say. It sounds so hollow.

  “I have no interest in him,” she tells me. “Not yet. But do not make me wait too long, Julia. Nightfall, or I will work my way through everyone you care for and leave you a trail of corpses by which to find me.”

  I run out into the lane with Solanze’s sword. They can’t have gone far, but I can’t risk going in the wrong direction. I vanish and pull back—four steps—hanging over the courtyard, where Pia is sheathing her knife and heading for the gate. I pull myself back a little farther, the city spinning beneath me—too far. I focus again on the area around the house. The streets are quiet. I feel the new core of me beating, beating, beating. Over the rooftops my vanished gaze skims, over the courtyards, the alleys, the main roads.

  I find them on the canal. A boy of no more than thirteen or fourteen is punting them along. Theo is sitting in the bottom of the boat at Bianka’s feet, and Bianka is slumped over like she has barely the strength to hold herself upright. My heart contracts. Mrs. Och doesn’t mean to take them out of the city. She wants them on the water. She’s made Bianka weak, and she has taken her—a witch!—out on the water.

  I pulled my perspective too far out and I come out of it too fast, forgetting to focus on a destination point. I am plunging through the sky.

  Mrs. Och looks up.

  For a moment, my heart stalls with panic. I am falling fast. I pull back, vanishing again. Then I am everywhere, nowhere, I can feel myself scattering, the city spreading wide beneath me. I narrow my focus, hurl myself toward the boat.

  I miss by a few inches and hit the water. I emerge gasping at the front of the boat, clutching the gunwale. The boy has dropped his pole, is screaming and pointing at me. Mrs. Och moves quickly. She grabs Bianka by the arm—Bianka, still tied to Theo by the magicked sash—and heaves her like a rag doll over the side of the boat into the canal, Theo pulled along after.

  Oh, I remember it, it lives inside me—the low path by the river Syne, my screams like those of an animal in a trap, and how my mother fell and the water closed over her and she was gone and I did nothing, I did nothing. But I am not that powerless girl, not anymore. This time, I go after her.

  Letting go of the sword, I grab Theo, I grab Bianka’s hand, and now I know why witches cannot swim or float. She pulls us both under, fast, like something beneath is sucking her down—something stronger than me, stronger than her, stronger than anything. Trying to pull her toward the surface is utterly futile. I try to pull them out of the world, but something in the water has her and will not release her. We rush downward, my lungs bursting, the seconds drawn out to eternity. I can barely make out her face, but she is yanking her hand from mine. She is tearing at the sash, Theo’s body struggling against me. The sash comes free and she is gone so quickly, disappearing into the darkness below, and I am holding Theo and kicking madly for the surface, bright and wavering above us.

  I break through it, surging out of the water and nearly capsizing the boat, gasping in a desperate lungful of air. Theo is flailing, making horrible choking sounds, and then he vomits water all over my neck. Mrs. Och is standing in the boat with a long knife in her hand—not Mrs. Och but Och Farya now, winged and terrible. She does not hesitate—her eyes fixed on Theo, still retching in my arms, she dives straight for him with the knife. I let go of the boat and swing my arm for her wrist. As soon as I’ve got a hand on her, I yank hard, hurling myself back, pulling all three of us out of the world and straight through to Kahge.

  We land in another boat, a charred boat with ragged sails moving fast through a river of lava. Both sides of the river are lined with her Spira City house, over and over again, windows ablaze like eyes, and giant white spiderish things are crawling out the doors toward the fiery river.

  I shove her away from me, away from Theo. He lets loose a howl that at least means he’s able to breathe, followed by more choking and retching.

  “I did everything I could for them!” cries Mrs. Och. Her voice sounds strange and thin here. And then she lunges at us with the knife.

  I let Theo slide to the bottom of the boat, and I grab her arm, twisting it with both hands. I can see she is taken aback by my strength here, but she is no patchwork half creature coming apart at the seams. She hurls me off, and the knife flashes toward me. I roll aside and then throw myself at her again, grabbing her around the waist, bringing her down with me. For a surreal moment, it is like the grappling sort of fights I had as a kid in the streets of the Twist. The kind of fight Dek had to pull me out of, dragging me home with a busted lip and raw knuckles, blood humming, defiant. But this is not the Twist, I am not a child, and nobody is getting me out of this. She chucks me against the gunwale and staggers back to her feet, making for Theo, who is screaming on the deck. I dive after her. I snap her wrist back, and this time I manage to wrench the knife out of her grasp. I position myself in front of Theo again. She pauses for half a second.

  “Lidari—if you are Lidari—”

  “I’m Julia!” I howl at her. “I’m Julia!”

  And then she comes at me. I thrust with the knife, my mind full of Bianka disappearing into the canal, tearing off the enchanted sash—handing me Theo once more and for the last time. Oh, Bianka, Bianka. The knife goes into Och Farya, right up to the hilt, and she doubles over it, her face livid.

  My only thought is to stop her. I know a knife wound is not enough to stop her. I keep driving her back with the knife in her gut. I push her right over the gunwale, and she topples into the lava. A high and terrible sound comes from her throat, fading to a hiss. Hanging over the gunwale and holding her under with the knife, I can feel the heat from the riv
er going to the very core of me, the way I felt the ice in me when we crossed the Kastahor Mountains, back when I still hoped I might be a girl with a monster inside her, instead of a monster with a girl on the outside. The fire rolls over her and over her. My throat hurts, and my ears are full of an awful sound, and then I realize I’m screaming. I pull the knife out of her and drop it there on the boat. I pick up Theo, who is shuddering and gasping, canal water seeping out of his eyes and nose and ears, while a terrible form hauls itself out of the lava and back over the gunwale.

  I mean to leave her there, leave her behind. I leap up, up into the hot sky, out of this place, feeling too late the hand that clamps around my ankle. When I land back in the boat on the canal in Tianshi, what is left of Mrs. Och has come with us: bones and blackened flesh, a smoking, hissing carcass. Still some noise comes from between her teeth. It sounds like “Lidariii.”

  The punters on their approaching vessels scream when we appear. I see a boat full of the Ru, armed with crossbows, bearing down on us. Arrows fly. I kick loose of Mrs. Och’s grip and pull Theo away from it all—into the air, the nothingness, where I can’t even feel his arms around my neck, his breath in my ear, his hot tears against my cheek. I leave Bianka and Solanze’s sword at the bottom of the canal. I leave Mrs. Och for dead, or as close as she can come to that, her burnt corpse floating down the canal on the boat.

  I am so far from pity, so far from mercy—I have forgotten how to feel such things.

  Frederick hasn’t moved, but he opens his eyes. I grab Bianka’s bag, the one she told me about, hanging from a hook in the wall in what was our room—If something happens to me, you take Theo and you take that bag. I add the book of Yongwen fairy tales, sling the bag over my shoulder. Then I crouch next to Frederick.

  “Hold on to me,” I say. Theo between us, I take them to Silver Moya’s, coasting over the city, and though I am carrying them in and out of the world and themselves, they hold on to me like I can save them, and they are not afraid of me. Trusting me. Not asking me why, not even when I stop to steal apples and lettuce from the market.

  It is so hard to tell Frederick. I’m afraid that he won’t believe me, that he will doubt what I saw or what I say, that he will tell me I did not have to do what I did. He weeps silently, his face in his hands. I hold him, Theo still between us. Neither of us can stop holding on to Theo. As if we can keep him safe from what has already happened, what he has already lost, motherless now and unprotected, except by us.

  She mixes my blood and Frederick’s and Theo’s into the little bowl with some ink. Theo roars with outrage when we slice his finger, and I can’t bear it, can’t bear to hurt him even this tiny bit. But I don’t know what else to do. Silver Moya’s brush flattens the world and makes way for the hill to Ragg Rock. The paper city is full of paper people who do not see us, and we follow the bird, bright and so alive, so terribly alive, but not for long, everything peeling away as we climb.

  From Ragg Rock, the city looks farther away than it did before, faded. The same is true of Kahge, the far-off storm steaming and swirling through a thick haze. I squint, trying to take my gaze to the city gates, the roads beyond, but it all remains a distant blur.

  “I can’t see anything.”

  “You’ve taken a part of The Book of Disruption out of the world,” says Ragg Rock. “Everything is farther apart now.”

  I remember what Mrs. Och said—that reassembling The Book of Disruption would pull Kahge into the world. The world and Kahge were close, I suppose, when Theo was in Casimir’s fortress with the other two text fragments—which might explain why it was so easy for me to pass from one place to the other then. Now both seem impossibly distant.

  Ragg Rock’s pebble eyes are fixed on Theo. Head-to-toe muddy, he is exploring the mossy crags between the world and the nonworld, as if he has forgotten what he saw—his mother disappearing into the dark of the canal.

  I try to scour the city for Dek, but from this distance it has become impossible.

  Ragg Rock uses a flint knife to slice off strips of apple, and Theo feeds them to the rabbit, fascinated. Frederick is lying in the corner of the hut. I try to explain to him about the stone dial, so he knows there will be food and water for them, in spite of how barren it looks.

  “Wabbit,” Theo tells Frederick urgently, tugging at his sleeve. “Dat wabbit, Feyda!”

  I don’t know that he’s ever made such a perfect sentence before. I press the heels of my palms against my eyes, inhaling, pushing down my grief and fear, down, down, down, out of my way.

  “How long can they stay?” I ask Ragg Rock when I can speak again.

  “Forever, if they are nice,” she says. “But it will change a person.” And she grins at us with her stone teeth and muddy gums.

  “I’ll bring more food for the rabbit when I can,” I say. “But you can’t let anybody else come…not if they are coming for Theo. Not even me.”

  “You won’t come back?”

  “I will. I’ll try. But I mean…you said you can tell why somebody is coming, didn’t you? What they want? I’ll come to see them. But if I’m coming to take Theo, you can’t let me in.” I’m choking on my own words. “Only Frederick can take Theo from here. Not me, nor anyone else. That’s important. Only Frederick.”

  She nods slowly.

  “Do you promise?” I plead. “You won’t let me…if I try?”

  “I promise,” she says. But she says it flatly, and I don’t know how I can trust her. I don’t really know what she is, how she feels—this bunny-loving mud woman, old as time. And Frederick is still so weak.

  Theo tires of the rabbit and wanders out onto the hill, past the stone dial, chasing after one of the giant skeletal butterflies that came out of the now vanished woods. I want to tell her, Don’t let him get too near the mud moat; he could drown. I want to tell her, You will need to watch him; he is still so little, he is not as resilient as a rabbit, even. He runs down the hill, his little legs so much steadier than when I first met him. He is so much more like a boy than a baby already, but Bianka won’t see this, won’t hear him learning to speak, watch him learning to run. Ragg Rock watches him with no expression on her clay face, and I know I am being ridiculous—she is no child’s nursemaid—but I have no choice anyway, can only hope Frederick finds his strength returning soon. This is the only place that is out of Casimir’s reach.

  “You mustn’t let him draw anything,” I say. “He can make things real if he imagines them and draws them.”

  Ragg Rock smiles, like I’ve told her something charming about him.

  “Mama!” barks Theo, running back into the hut, commanding us.

  “Mama’s not here. You need to stay with Frederick,” I tell him, my voice strangled.

  “Mama!” he roars, and then he throws his arms around my leg. “Lala umma beppo stoy.”

  “Frederick will read you a story when he’s a little better. Something with a happy ending.”

  I try to kiss him, but he pulls away from me, cross, and goes back to the rabbit.

  “What will you do?” asks Frederick.

  “I’m going to kill Casimir.”

  He doesn’t say, Don’t be a fool. Or Stay. Or Let’s go, we’ll hide, together we’ll hide—there’s another way, there must be another way.

  “I’ll be praying for you,” he says. “Every minute.”

  And for all that I don’t know if I believe in the power of prayer, I find some comfort in that.

  I leave them with Ragg Rock and return to the world, the bright and lovely springtime day in Tianshi. I’m not holding out much hope, but I soar over the city in vanishing leaps, pulling back and in again, searching for Dek. I don’t find him. When the bells of Shou-shu chime for the setting sun, I make my way, defeated, to the Hundred Lantern Hotel, and there I offer myself up to Pia.

  It takes two days to reach the coast. Pia secures us a first-class cabin on a luxury steamer. She is not concerned about the notorious pirates off the coast of Yongguo—most
of whom belong to Casimir, if Princess Zara was right. Nor does she appear worried that I might try to cut her throat in the night, though I lie in my comfortable berth and think of little else. I suppose she knows I won’t risk it, not with Dek in Casimir’s hands. Or perhaps she doesn’t care if I do. I am beginning to understand her.

  She takes me up on deck at sunset one evening. I am dressed like her, because the only clothes she has for me are her own and I could not get the stink of blood out of mine. The other passengers avoid us, and who can blame them? I see islands on the horizon. Dolphins are leaping near the prow, the pink sky full of seabirds wheeling, rainbow-colored fish flying. We stand side by side at the railing, looking at the sea.

  It’s beautiful, but I don’t care about beauty. The drumbeat at my center has summoned a storm, a howling wind within. It is spinning higher and higher, whipping itself into a frenzy, a terrible force gathering. The sun dips to touch the horizon and spills bloody across the water, like a murder.

  All right, Dek: I forgive myself. It’s past time, isn’t it, now that I am barely who I was? I forgive myself for being such a stupid child, for being callow and cowardly when I took Theo from Mrs. Och’s house, a lifetime and many selves ago. I was afraid, and I was a fool, and I can forgive myself for that.

  I can even forgive myself for the rest. For failing Bianka—just moments too slow. For failing to save Ko Dan or Count Fournier, for the murder of Mrs. Och, for the many blunders that have led us to this pass. I’m putting it all behind me. You are the only one with whom there was never any need for explanations or forgiveness.

  And perhaps it doesn’t matter—what I’ve done, what I am. We choose each moment, Frederick says. I’ve seen Casimir’s contract skittering on its little legs, but in the grip of this fury, I don’t believe he has any magic strong enough to put a leash around me. At this moment, I believe that I could gather Kahge in my fist like the edge of a tablecloth and hurl all the might of hell at my enemies. I believe I could tear down the world to save you, level cities and leave empires in ruins behind me—and I’ll do it, if that’s what it takes.