Julia Unbound

by Catherine Egan

  “I’m so glad we’ll be friends for real now,” she says. “We’ll tell each other everything!”

  Speak for yourself, my girl. I squeeze her hand and finally she leaves me alone. I desperately want to sleep, but I can feel the push and crawl in my neck again, so I take a few leaves of hermia from the paper in my pocket and roll them into a ball. Deep breath and I eat it.

  * * *

  Shadows with long arms and legs come from the corners of the room and crowd around my bed. They are made of darkness—only their teeth are glittering and bright. They bend over me and begin to eat my skin with those shining teeth, and I can’t move or make a sound. I see my mother and father by the door, whispering together. “I thought as much,” says Dek, hovering over my bed, smoke pouring out of his empty eye socket. The shadows peel back my skin, pull open my rib cage. There is something curled up inside the hollow space of my chest—something white and damp and hairless. It unfurls, climbs out of my body, its horrible face grinning. My face on the pillow is cracked like a mask, my body split open like a shell. I wake and lunge out of the bed, screaming, my joints on fire, thunder beating against the inside of my skull, and I throw up violently all over the carpet.

  Telegram to Pia Kos, West Spira Grand Hotel, 10th floor: SEND REPORT STOP

  Telegram to Lord Casimir, Nago Island: JULIA HAS NOT RETURNED STOP WILL REPORT ONCE SHE IS BACK STOP

  Telegram to Pia Kos, West Spira Grand Hotel, 10th floor: FIND HER STOP CHECK HER BODY STOP HOW CLOSE IS SHE STOP

  Telegram to Pia Kos, West Spira Grand Hotel, 10th floor: ANSWER ME STOP

  I can’t say if comfort is the right word for her voice or her hands holding mine. But she is there, she stays with me all night.

  Agoston Horthy’s speech will surely be printed in newspapers across Frayne tomorrow, but the crowd that gathers along the river to hear it this morning is formidable. I push my way through the mob and bribe my way onto a riverboat. The wardrobe in my room at the palace was full of dresses that did not fit, so I’m wearing the same grubby dress I wore yesterday. Light and shadow flicker together at the periphery of my vision, and the pain behind my eyes is terrible. Last night’s dose of hermia has me wrung out like a rag, aching and dazed, but even so the nuyi has climbed another inch up my neck. Wretched, determined little thing.

  It’s bold of Horthy to appear in person when he knows the city is full of witches and a revolution is brewing. It makes me wonder if assassination might be harder than one would think. I think of him drinking the vinegar tea, the rat savaging his leg while he wrote on, oblivious, and the strange, bloated creature in the woods with him. There is much more to Agoston Horthy than a landowner’s son risen to terrible power, that’s certain.

  “My brothers and sisters,” he begins. He doesn’t need a bullhorn for his powerful voice to carry over the hushed crowds. “You have seen the death and destruction that witches have wrought in our city. You are afraid, and you are right to be afraid, but I am here to ask you to be brave. I have kept you safe for twenty years, and I will stop at nothing to make this country safe again. The witches that threaten us will be routed from this city, they will be plucked from their hiding places, and you will see them drowned in this very river while I watch.”

  Applause and shouting. Horthy raises his voice, and the crowd quiets.

  “You have heard that Scourge has touched our city again, spread by bewitched rats. Since the last outbreak a decade ago, our scientists have been working night and day to find a cure, and they have developed a new medicine that shows great promise. Rest assured that anyone in the city who develops Scourge, rich or poor, young or old, will have access to this new medicine. For now, we are holding the spread of the sickness at bay, though our enemies hoped it would ravage the city as it did before.”

  A rumbling of rage and he holds up his hand. This is not what Lady Laroche hoped for, but I think she should have predicted how easy it would be for him to manipulate the public.

  “Let these dark days serve as a reminder of the threat that magic poses. I do not mean only this particular group of witches, who seek to put a puppet on the throne and raise up a magical elite. I am talking about magic itself. There are some in this city arguing that magic might be used for good, that it might be used to cure sickness or end drought. Do not be deceived. Witches will never seek to help us—it is not in their nature—but beyond even that, consider the consequences of disruption. We all live with losses we think unbearable. The consequences of altering nature carry far into the future, setting off chains of events and unimaginable further disruptions. We must submit to the perfect pattern the Nameless One has created for us. With grace and humility we must accept both the bounty and the losses that life brings us, embrace the mystery and the order that we cannot conceive. If we allow witches to meddle with the perfection of nature, to disrupt the threads of a larger pattern, we risk everything. We cannot allow beings with no souls, no moral compass, to lead our world over a precipice into a madness where anything is possible, where nothing is certain or inevitable, where the destiny the Nameless One has chosen for us is fractured and a thousand dangerous paths all open before us without guidance. We must hold firm in our faith, hold steady our hearts. We will make a new world, a world without magic, where we live and die by the light of the Nameless, accepting our fates and enlarging our souls. Who stands with me?”

  The applause is deafening. I should have had the courage to kill him after all. Sweat is pouring down my sides and, for a moment, I wonder if the hermia has made me feverish, but amid the applause, troubled cries are rising up. The fellow whose boat I’m on is rowing furiously for the edge of the river.

  “The water!” someone cries out.

  Steam thickens the air. A splash scalds my thigh. Arms pull me out of the boat onto the low path, everybody backing away from the river, surging up the narrow steps. The river is boiling, and the terrible smells on the breeze are the smells of magic, not my own sickness.

  “Do not fear them!” shouts Agoston Horthy. The river surges and froths, and something lands next to me with a thunk. It is a bone, vividly white. Another one strikes my ankle, hot as coal, and I jump away with a cry. People on the low path are cramming onto the narrow steps, desperate to get away.

  “I am not afraid!” roars Agoston Horthy, while his guards cower around him. “Hear me, you witches, you demons and fiends! The Nameless One will shine His light on your perversion, the disruptions of your bodies and souls, and we will tear you from the earth, that she might be pure again!”

  There is some cheering, mingling with the shouts of terror, as the river spits out the bones of witches. They land clattering and steaming in piles along the sides of the water, landing on the barge around Agoston Horthy like so much debris, and he stands there with his arms outstretched, his face alight with something almost like ecstasy, shouting over and over: “I am not afraid!”

  “Try this,” says Gennady when I appear on the terrace in Mrs. Och’s back garden. He hands me a slice of pie on a porcelain plate.

  “Why are you giving me pie?” I ask suspiciously. “Is it poisoned?”

  “No,” he says, almost regretfully. “I made it under Mrs. Freeley’s tutelage. I had not realized the art that goes into making the crust.”

  “So this is your new calling? You’re going to be an immortal chef?” I take a bite. My hermia-wracked stomach rebels immediately, and I hand the plate back to him.

  “I am passing the time,” he says. “Nobody has asked for my help, except Mrs. Freeley.”

  “If you want to fight Casimir, do that,” I say impatiently. “Go find one of the other fragments of The Book of Disruption and destroy it! Or look for his queen of the nuyi and destroy that.”

  “If I go back, they will tear me apart.”

  “Then don’t go,” I say. “Make pie. I don’t care. Where is Lady Laroche?”

  “I don’t kno
w.”

  My elbow flares and throbs. Then my knee. I leave him with his pie and go inside. Gregor and Csilla are in the parlor, holding hands and glancing nervously at the ceiling.

  “Hullo, Julia!” says Csilla. “Stars, your dress is filthy!”

  Before I can reply, I hear shouting from above. Lady Laroche’s voice.

  “What’s going on?” I point at the ceiling.

  “Lady Laroche and Princess Zara,” says Gregor. “They’re having an awful row.”

  “About the twister that tore up West Spira last night?”

  “Among other things.”

  I flop down in a chair opposite them. Gregor grins at me and, as rotten as I feel, I can’t help smiling back. Revolution suits him.

  “You look awfully well, Gregor.”

  “I feel well,” he says. “You’re not looking your best, though, if you don’t mind my saying so. You all right?”

  “For now,” I say.

  More shouting from upstairs. A door slams, and Gregor jumps a little. Csilla pats his arm. “I’ll put on coffee,” she says.

  She glides out, and he watches her go. When he turns back to me, the anguish on his face gives me a start.

  “How is Dek?” he asks.

  “I don’t know.” I think again of the two wineglasses in the cellar of the Marrow, the way he looked like he was dressed for a night out, and then he and Zara dancing in the Twist, slipping out hand in hand. I really don’t know how my brother is. I mean to be useful, and I mean to be joyful, he said. What I want him to say is that he means to live, that he will fight to live.

  “Csilla never wanted children,” says Gregor quietly. “Or rather…she couldn’t. Her own childhood was a kind of hell you can’t imagine. And what sort of father would I have been? No better than yours, but still, I think of you and Dek and Wyn as…well, not my children exactly, but…”

  I’ve never thought of Gregor as any kind of a father figure, but he’s been family of some kind for more than half my life now, so I say, “I know what you mean.”

  He looks relieved. “Well. If there’s anything I can do…for you, or for Dek…I’ve been wracking my brain, but I’m such a bleeding useless sod. I couldn’t bear it if—”

  I cut him off: “I know.”

  I don’t want to hear him say out loud what he can’t bear, what I can hardly allow myself to think.

  Csilla comes back with a coffeepot and three cups on a tray. I sip at the coffee, but I can barely taste anything, my stomach gurgling its protest. Strig comes leaping into the room with a yowwwww like he’s shouting “Surprise!” and Zara follows. She looks almost as bad as I feel—hair limp around her pale face, dark circles under her eyes.

  “Julia. Hello.”

  “Can we talk outside?” I ask her.

  Gregor and Csilla exchange a look, but Zara just nods wearily, and we go out onto the veranda.

  “What’s between you and Dek?” I ask bluntly.

  “Your brother is a brilliant man,” she says. “I value his counsel.”

  “Are you shagging him?”

  Her face turns prim, and a little pink. “I don’t see that that’s any of your business.”

  Oh hounds, she is shagging him.

  “Fine, it’s none of my business. Why are Xanuhans coming to Frayne?”

  She glances anxiously back at the parlor. “Keep your voice down.”

  “Lady Laroche doesn’t know about it?”

  She looks impatient. “I need allies I can trust,” she says. I don’t know if this is a dig at Lady Laroche, or at me. “Why don’t you go up to her room—knock on her door—and ask her about it?”

  “About the Xanuhans?” I ask, confused.

  “About whatever you like,” she says. “Go on. Knock on her door.”

  I’m not sure what point Zara is trying to make, but I came here to tell Lady Laroche about Horthy’s speech and to make sure she got my message about the war council. Since Zara doesn’t look set to tell me anything else, I go upstairs and knock on the door of Mrs. Och’s old reading room. There is no reply. I try the knob, but it’s locked. I bang on the door and call “Lady Laroche?”

  Mr. Faruk comes out of the library, holding a book. “Why are you pounding on the door?”

  “Is she even in there?”

  “It would appear not.”

  He watches me, smiling, as I take a pin out of my fake hair and jig the lock open. The room is empty, the window wide open.

  I go back downstairs, where Zara is sitting in the parlor with Gregor and Csilla now.

  “She’s not there.”

  I am trying to think how to say that she might have gone out the window, but Zara just nods and says, “She goes out often, in secret, pretending to be working in her room. She does not want me—or any of us—to know she is going out. It makes me uneasy. I know you agree with me, Julia—the rats, Scourge, the hornets, the twister. She is reckless, and there is no talking to her.” She pauses, looking at me carefully, and then says, “She can’t have gone far yet. She was upstairs a few minutes ago, shouting at me.”

  I almost laugh. “You want me to follow her?”

  Ridiculous—the people in this house supposedly working together but asking me to tail each other. Still, I’d quite like to know where Lady Laroche sneaks off to as well.

  “If you want to follow her, you should hurry,” says Zara.

  And she claims she can’t bleeding read minds.

  Vanishing is a relief now—anything to give myself a little distance from my poisoned body. Lady Laroche, in a sleek dress and a jaunty hat, is boarding a hackney at the corner of Lirabon Avenue. When the driver shuts her door and turns to climb into his own seat, I recognize Torne. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. He has worked for the Sidhar Coven for a long time. I’d forgotten that, or failed to consider its significance. I climb onto the luggage rack and hang on as the hackney takes off through the Scola.

  Torne drives out to West Spira and stops in front of a grand house near the river. Lady Laroche climbs out, murmuring something to him that I don’t catch, and then she strides up the path, letting herself in through a side door.

  A housemaid is stoking the oven in the scullery. She looks up when Lady Laroche comes in. For half a second, she looks startled; then her eyes glaze over and she goes back to her work. Lady Laroche passes swiftly through the kitchen and goes down into the cellar. Before a heavy door, she takes a notepad and cartridge pen from her purse and writes something down. Even vanished, I feel a wave of heat from her magic washing over me. The door swings open.

  Six women are gathered inside a comfortably furnished room. I take them in quickly. A tall, fair girl is bent over a book next to a white-haired old woman, possibly from Yongguo. There is an enormous Ishtan woman wrapped in silks and writing in a notebook, her eyes rolled back in her head so only the whites are visible. Another young woman, dark as Mr. Faruk, hair wrapped in a kind of turban, is feeding papers into the fire. Two middle-aged New Porian women are weaving something together in a corner of the room, and one of them calls out “Ariane!” when Lady Laroche comes in, causing the others to pause and look up. The Ishtan in her odd trance comes back to herself, her eyes focusing. The young turbaned woman stops burning paper, straightening up and smiling.

  “Hello, my dears!” cries Lady Laroche.

  “Some tea, love,” says the weaver who first called out, getting up and going to a little stove at one end of the room. She has a foreign accent, but I can’t place it. This is a truly international assemblage.

  “Thank you,” says Lady Laroche, taking off her hat and gloves. “Well done, all of you. That was absolutely beautiful.”

  The blond girl looses an odd, horsey laugh. “I wish I could’ve seen it.” She has a lower-class accent. The sort of girl I might run into in the Twist, though I’
ve never seen her before. “Bet we gave Horthy a scare.”

  “You gave the whole city a scare,” says Lady Laroche. She is different here. Warm, relaxed, not posturing. The mask is gone. I recognize this kind of ease. These are her people, her real crew. “You must be tired.”

  “We’re getting better at working together,” says the Ishtan in fluent Fraynish.

  “I think so too,” says Lady Laroche. “We shall be ready when Zey is dead.”

  “And the princess?”

  Lady Laroche sighs. “She does not trust me. I’m not sure how far she will support us.”

  “Then why should we support her?” demands the girl in the turban.

  The weaver brings Lady Laroche her tea. Lady Laroche squeezes her hand and takes the cup, thanking her before continuing to speak.

  “She is still our best chance. She can only be better than Horthy. I’d hoped she would be a true advocate, but she seems to think she can do this without us. She is cutting me out, keeping secrets.”

  “Let them fight each other,” says the Ishtan. “Let them weaken each other. And then we can topple both.”

  “No, that would be chaos,” says the old woman. “Frayne hates witches too much for our kind to rule outright. This princess is our only chance at change. You really think she would betray us?”

  “All I know is that she favors a cautious, conciliatory approach, she does not like the spells we work, and she goes out at night to meet with the other revolutionaries. I intercepted a message she sent to someone in the Twist—written in Xanuhan! It was in code, I could not make sense of it, but why is she sending coded messages in Xanuhan? The Xanuhans have ways of combating spells, it is said.”

  “What about the vanishing girl, Ammi’s daughter?”

  “I’m not sure where her loyalties lie,” says Lady Laroche.

  “She is Ammi’s daughter,” the Ishtan says in an urgent voice. “She would help us! Bring her here and we will talk to her! She could find out what the princess intends.”