Julia Unbound

by Catherine Egan

  The deckhand hauls Dek over the gunwale, and Pia pulls herself after. I don’t even help. My brother choking up water in front of me. I crawl over to him and lay my head on his chest.

  “No,” I weep. “No, no, no.”

  His arms close weakly around me.

  * * *

  Dry and wrapped in blankets in our little cabin below, he no longer seems the least bit drunk.

  “I won’t let you sacrifice yourself for me,” he says, terribly calm.

  “That’s not my plan either!” I sob. I can’t get control of myself. I can’t wipe from my mind the sight of him disappearing over the side of the boat. I hold the cold cloth Pia brought me to the side of my head. I only figured out afterward that she’d hit me to stop me going in after him.

  “Then take that thing out of your wrist.”

  “I’m not going to let it get to my brain. We agreed! We’ll get to Spira City, find Esme and the others, come up with a plan. There might be a way to get this poison out of you or…I don’t know, something else. I swear I’ll take it out before it gets too far. We have ten days.”

  He fixes his good eye on me.

  “How could you?” I choke at him. “How could you almost leave me like that?”

  “Eight days now,” he murmurs. “I don’t want to die. But I don’t want to sit around with a sac of poison next to my heart waiting to die either, and I’m frightened for you.”

  “I haven’t given up yet. Don’t do that again. Not when we still have a chance.”

  “This is what you call a chance?” He almost smiles.

  My panic recedes slowly as he sleeps, but there’s no hope of sleeping myself and the cabin is stuffy, so after a few hours of staring at him, I go up on deck. My breath catches in my throat at the immense, rippling darkness of the sea stretched out all around us, the sky a web of starlight. The silence is vast.

  “Tell me how she died,” he says, making me jump.

  Gennady is hulking by the mainmast, a huge shadow against a huge shadow.

  “You can’t sleep either?” I ask, trying not to sound as if I’d nearly leaped overboard with fright.

  “Tell me,” he says again.

  So I tell him. I try to stay detached from the words I’m speaking. It tears open such a gaping hole of rage and grief in me to think of Bianka disappearing in the canal, how I tried to save her and could not, my brave, beautiful, sharp-tongued friend—if I can call her that. I wanted so badly for her to be my friend, and I think maybe she was, by the end.

  “And where is my son?”

  “Safe.”

  Hounds, I hope it’s true. I left Theo behind in Ragg Rock, the hill between the world and its shadow, with only a very injured Frederick and the made-of-mud woman-creature who guards that place to take care of him.

  “I asked you where.”

  When I say nothing, he grabs the collar of my coat—Pia’s coat—with his big hand and growls at me: “He is my son! Tell me where he is!”

  I am shocked at the anger that comes exploding out of me then. I had not thought I was so angry. I shove him hard—which is basically as pointless as shoving a wall, but he lets go of my coat—and I shout: “He’s in danger because of you. He was nearly killed because of you. You left Bianka behind, and she’s dead because of you. You’ve done nothing for either of them but put them in harm’s way, and it cost Bianka her life and may yet cost Theo his too. You let a stranger put something hugely powerful and dangerous inside your son and then you left. Did you know the pictures he draws come to life? He might draw a monster that will eat him up! So don’t my son at me! I know a thing or two about rotten fathers. Maybe you were there for his conception, but you’ve forfeited any claim you ever had. Bianka asked me to protect him and I’m doing my bleeding best and you’d better just keep out of it.”

  He takes a step back. “I tried,” he mutters.

  “Oh, don’t be pathetic,” I snap.

  We stand there in silence, the stars hanging overhead like a spectacular, uncaring map of the unknown, and I begin to feel a little bad about my outburst.

  “Why did you ask my brother to let me go?” Gennady asks me.

  “I promised you, before. I said I’d come back for you and get you out.”

  “Too late,” he says. “I still had some power then. Shey has taken everything. Now I am nothing.”

  “Well, you’re free, anyway. Isn’t that worth something?”

  “I will never be free.”

  “Oh well, don’t bother thanking me, then.” I have so little energy for pitying Gennady, pitiful though he may be. “It’s not really an altruistic rescue, anyway. I have questions. How did you meet Ko Dan?”

  “He sent me a letter,” says Gennady. “I’d heard of him, of course—his fame was growing. Casimir was hunting me. He had already stolen our sister’s fragment of The Book of Disruption, and he wanted mine as well. My part of the Book had become a shadow that clung to me always—I could not separate it from myself in order to hide it from my brother. Ko Dan told me he could help.”

  Mrs. Och once told me that The Book of Disruption was written by the spirit of fire and then split in three by the other elemental spirits, who were frightened of its power. I’m not altogether clear on this bit, but supposedly breaking the Book in three involved a huge magical explosion that created Kahge—a reflection or echo of the world, made of magic. Kahge is also a kind of giant drain, through which magic is slowly flowing out of the world. When Casimir called Mrs. Och child of the spirits, he meant it literally. The Xianren think they were birthed by the spirits to protect the three fragments of the Book and keep them separate—and for thousands of years, that is exactly what the Xianren did. As a long-term plan, it clearly wasn’t very solid, though, because look where we are now.

  “So Ko Dan told you that if you had a child, he could put the text in the child,” I prompt Gennady. I could tell him what I know—or think I know—about Ko Dan. But I want to hear his story first.

  “Yes,” he says. “The shadow had attached itself to my essence, taken root in it, but a child would carry enough of my essence that the shadow—the text—could be transferred.”

  “Using the Ankh-nu.”

  He looks at me in surprise, but he keeps talking.

  “Yes. I found Bianka—I chose her to be the mother of my child: a witch, a survivor, clever and loving and strong. I kept her secret. When she was pregnant, I sent word to Ko Dan. We met him in Sirillia after Theo was born. I told him Bianka was Sirillian so that he would not think to look for her in Frayne. I gave Bianka a sleeping draught at night, and Ko Dan came to our cabin on the coast to do the magic. It was surprisingly simple and painless, though I felt different without the shadow. Theo seemed unharmed. I knew that Ko Dan intended to cut Theo’s throat right away in order to destroy the Book fragment—bound to his essence, the fragment had also become mortal. I felt guilty harming a monk, but once the magic was complete, I knocked him out, tied him up, and left him down at the quay.”

  “Are you sure Ko Dan meant to kill Theo?” I interrupt. If Ko Dan was actually Marike, and if Marike is actually my mother…I refuse to believe she would take the life of an innocent child.

  “We had spoken of it,” says Gennady. “He believed it had to be done to protect the world—one life for many. I understood the argument, but I thought I could hide Theo for his natural life, which after all is not very long. I thought Bianka could protect him. I was wrong, and now I wonder if it would have been better to let Ko Dan take his life. Think how many have been killed already in Casimir’s search for the text—and how many more will be killed, what hell will come to earth, if he assembles the Book.”

  “You immortals are all alike,” I grind out between my teeth. “Tell me the rest.”

  “I worked a spell on Bianka and Theo to cloud their essences from anyone searchin
g. As soon as Bianka woke in the morning, a little groggy but none the wiser, we went to the train station. Halfway to Frayne, I told her I was going to get something from the dining car. I jumped off the train. I thought…I hoped she would just think I had abandoned her, and she would raise the child and they would be all right. I didn’t reckon on Shey, how she was able to dig things out of my mind.”

  “What a fool you were,” I say, which is cruel, but it’s hard to listen to him talk of how he lied to her and left her, when I know just what he left her with: no choices. She fought to keep Theo safe until the only choice left was to let go of him and sink. She left Theo to me, and here I am on a boat heading to Frayne with Casimir’s contract creeping up my wrist.

  “You are hardly an example of a brilliant strategic thinker yourself,” he says. “What did you think you would achieve, coming back to Nago Island?”

  “I came for Dek.”

  I’d hoped for more. On the sea journey from Yongguo, I stared at the water and sharpened my knife and tried to make plans. Killing Casimir was Plan A, but I knew it was a long shot. I thought that if I could steal and destroy one of the other text fragments, Theo would no longer be any use to Casimir. But where to begin? What would they look like? How would I know? Then I thought: I will murder Shey. Casimir might not be able to change the fragments into text without her. But maybe he would find another way. And how would I kill her? I shot her five times before, and she did not die.

  “Remember that he has your brother,” Pia would sometimes say to me, when she saw me looking too fierce and thoughtful. In the end, it made no difference; Casimir was ready for me, and I am leaving his island defeated. But I’m alive, and so is Dek, and Casimir doesn’t have Theo yet. I’ve got a week to come up with something.

  The stars are beginning to fade, the first hint of a paler gray lightening the sky in the east. A dark hump on the horizon solidifies into the Sirillian coastline, and I go down to check on my brother.

  We reach Nim the following evening. The buildings are seashell pink, spilling down the hillside toward the bright water. People stare at us in the streets, moving out of our way fast, whispering behind their hands. A little boy throws a stone, too frightened to aim properly, so it bounces against Gennady’s shoe. Pia pivots toward him, and everybody scatters, the boy’s heels flying. The innkeeper charges us double and takes Pia’s silver with eyes cast down. In our first-class berth on the train leaving at dawn, the ticket master’s hands shake when he takes our tickets or brings our coffee. The dining car falls silent when we seat ourselves for lunch.

  When he bore the marks of Scourge, Dek was an outcast wherever he went, like all Scourge survivors—feared and shunned. In Spira City, he could not leave the house except by shadow of night, covering his face with a hood. Now he is the most ordinary-looking in our group. Even I am attracting stares—a girl in trousers and boots, my ragged hair practically standing straight up from the sea-salty wind, my face scarred, my nose crooked, broken by Casimir’s boot months ago. I used to wonder how Pia could go anywhere at all, looking as strange as she does, but now I see for myself that it is simply by having lots of money and displaying with her papers a certificate bearing the royal seal and proclaiming her a guest of the Crown in Frayne. People may whisper or throw stones or even report her, but the law will not touch her. A mob could have a go, if they dared, but she’d make short work of them, I reckon.

  The farms, forests, and towns of my country pass by outside the windows of the train. Sometimes I spot a ruined shrine in the woods, some remnant of what used to be before Agoston Horthy became prime minister of Frayne. We reach Spira City after nightfall, passing through the tidy buildings of Forrestal, then the brightly lit bustle of the Scola. Cyrambel Temple looms darkly by the river Syne, where our mother was drowned, and Dek takes my hand.

  When I remember that Cleansing, the first I ever watched, I think Dek must be right—we watched her drown, she’s gone. But when I think of the vision I had of her with the Ankh-nu, I have a million questions, and I wonder if it’s possible that she is still alive. I don’t know if there is more hope or fear in the question. Because what does it mean if she was not who we thought? If she’d lived thousands of years before us, done terrible things, left us behind? If she was only Ammi, then she loved us and she died brutally, unjustly. If she is Marike, she may not be dead, but she may not have loved us at all.

  We get off the train in the Plateau and stand together on the platform.

  “You’re confident your brother will not attempt to take his own life again?” Pia asks me.

  I look at Dek.

  “Not this week,” he says calmly.

  Pia’s goggles swivel at him, and then she turns back to me: “I will be in the same suite you remember at the West Spira Grand Hotel. I’ve taken the whole tenth floor, so you may choose your room. Clothes for you have already been delivered. We need to find a ladies’ maid who can make you look…appropriate.”

  “I know someone who can help,” I say, thinking of Csilla. “If she’s back in Spira City, that is.”

  “You will need help,” Pia says, looking me over.

  “Why do I have to play dress-up? Can’t I just go around vanished?”

  “There will be plenty of that. But you will need to be able to talk to people as well. Tomorrow Sir Victor Penn Ostoway will take you to the opera and introduce you as his niece, visiting from the countryside.”

  “Sir Victor?” I cry.

  “He has been in Casimir’s employ for some months now. I thought you knew.”

  “I did. I suppose I hadn’t expected to see him again.”

  He is a high-up official in the government, a sort of antimagic official. I met him when I was posing as a housemaid in Mrs. Och’s house. He’d been bitten by a Parnese wolf and turned to Mrs. Och for help. In the end, Casimir’s witch Shey cured him, halting his transformation into a wolf—in exchange for his taking on Casimir’s contract.

  “Pretending to be a noble girl is hardly my area of expertise,” I say. “I tried it in Yongguo, and Si Tan saw through me in about three seconds.”

  “Si Tan is very perceptive,” says Pia. “Most people aren’t. Find your friend and ask her to come in the morning to help you dress. Good night.”

  Then, to my amazement, Pia turns and walks away from us. Dek and I gape at each other. For a wild moment I feel like a dog let off the leash, free to bolt. But of course the truth is that Casimir’s leash is working its way under my skin and sitting next to Dek’s heart. There’s no running away.

  “Well,” says Dek. “I wasn’t expecting that.” He looks at Gennady. “What about you?”

  Gennady looks weary and confused, and I feel rather sorry for him after all.

  “There might be a revolution,” I tell him. “I thought you liked those.”

  He makes a sound that might be a chuckle.

  “Come with us,” I say, though I don’t really know why I’m offering. “We’ll find the others. If he’s here, you could tell Professor Baranyi about Mrs. Och. I don’t fancy delivering that news myself.”

  “He was her assistant?” he asks. “Or companion?”

  “Something like that,” I say. I’ve never been sure what he was to her, but I know he loved her.

  We walk from the station into the winding streets of the Twist. Laughter, quarreling, music, and the smell of food drift out from the bars, and tears rise to my eyes unexpectedly. For all that there were terrible losses and hardships, I was happy here once.

  Esme’s building on the east side of Fitch Square is empty, no sign of anyone having been here in months. It says something about what high esteem she is held in that no squatters have set up here.

  Esme took us in when I was seven and Dek was ten. She was always more a boss than a surrogate mother, but she saw us fed and clothed, taught us to read and write and do our sums. She rai
sed us, more or less, from that point on. As the most feared and respected crook in the city, she also trained us and made use of our skills. I think of her stern face by firelight as I struggled to copy out a poem I hated, stolen jewels across the table with our lesson books, a hot supper in my belly. She’d lost her own son to Scourge, and I think that’s why she took Dek in, but she saw something in him too—that flash of brilliance. Tough as we were, we still needed a place to call home, someone strong at our backs. She gave us that.

  “This is where you lived?” Gennady asks, looking curiously into the little room where Dek and I used to sleep. Roaches scuttle out of the way underfoot. The parlor upstairs is cleaned out, Wyn’s attic room abandoned. There is nothing but a bare bedframe and an empty desk left behind in Esme’s room. Dust gathers in the corners, and cobwebs hang in sheets where the ceiling meets the walls.

  “It’s not that they didn’t come back at all,” says Dek. “All my papers are gone, and Esme’s too. Somebody was here and took everything.”

  “But no note for us,” I say.

  “Where else would they go?”

  “Let’s check Mrs. Och’s place.”

  None of the hackneys we try to flag down will stop for us—I don’t know if that’s Gennady’s size, me wearing Pia’s clothes, or how sea-battered we all look, but we end up walking all the way to the Scola. Gennady opens the gate to his dead sister’s house. The windows are bright, so somebody is here. My heart speeds up a little—as if Mrs. Och might be there and answer the door, as if the past few months had not happened at all—but I muster my courage and we bang the brass knocker. Voices sound within, and footsteps. The door swings open, and there is Gregor, Esme’s longtime associate, his face lighting up at the sight of us. I shout and throw myself into his arms. I’m immediately a little embarrassed, but it is so good to have friends in the world, people who are on our side.

  “Hounds, it’s good to see you,” I say. He looks better than I’ve ever seen him—leaner, the pouches under his eyes less prominent, and his gaze clear, not fogged by booze. He’s keeping away from the drink after all. Good old Gregor. Then Esme and Gregor’s lover, Csilla, join him in the entryway, and I am yelling like an idiot, hugging them all. Esme cups my face in her big hands and kisses my forehead. She looks just the same—as tall as Gregor, dressed like a gentleman since ladies’ clothes do not fit her, hair a helmet of white, her chiseled face peculiarly ageless.