Julia Unbound

by Catherine Egan

  “No,” says Lady Laroche. “I’m not bringing her here. Nobody must know about this place. Besides, Ammi—well, she was far more secretive than I realized. There is so much she never told me.” For a moment, she looks genuinely sad. Then she brightens again. “The princess may yet be…if not the friend we’d hoped, something of an ally. If the throne is ours to give or take away and we give it to Zara—first, she will see we mean to work with her, but also she will not be able to deny that she is a friend to witches. She will not be able to put off change by arguing that it must happen piecemeal. We must force her hand, force her to acknowledge her alliance with us.”

  “Difficult to do if she is not allied with us,” says one of the weavers.

  “We’ll see,” says Lady Laroche. “Let’s get to work. Our time is almost come, and we have sisters still suffering in Hostorak.”

  “I want to begin on the branches,” says the fair-haired girl, going over to a pile of fir branches stacked against one wall.

  “I’m making progress with our fiery friend,” says Lady Laroche, putting down her tea and approaching a steel door at the opposite end of the room. “I’ll pay another visit now.”

  To my amazement, she unties her dress. The Ishtan comes over to undo the stays and helps her out of all her things—dress, corset, petticoats, stockings, and so on—folding it all neatly and placing it on a chair. None of the other witches seems in the least perturbed by their leader undressing before them. Completely naked, Lady Laroche twists the handle of the steel door and swings it open. I mean to follow her, but the incredible blast of heat that comes out sends me reeling back to the far corners of the room. Then she is inside, slamming the door behind her, and I am left trapped in the room with the other six witches. They go back to their tasks—weaving and writing, the smells of their magic a thick, dizzying mix filling the enclosed air of the cellar.

  I wait and wait for Lady Laroche, growing hungrier and more desperate. The hours pass, but she does not come back out the steel door, which is buckling slightly from the heat behind it. When at last the Ishtan gets up and bids the others goodbye, I make my escape with her, unsure of when I might have another chance. She goes into the back garden and, to my horror and amazement, writes something on her hand and then collapses, shrinking, the folds of her garments falling to the ground. Out slinks a red fox, and my heart gives a lurch. I watch her slip through the gate and head west, to the outskirts of the city. I make my way around the house, wondering what this place is, but it seems an ordinary house, just an elderly couple and their servants, apparently unaware of the witches gathered in their cellar.

  Evening is falling, and I am too worn down and hungry to wait for Lady Laroche or to try to follow the fox. I need a meal, I need a privy, and I need to take more hermia. I go back to the hotel.

  “Where have you been?”

  Pia looks strange. Stranger than usual, I mean. Her white skin is shiny with sweat, and her fingers are trembling.

  “Busy,” I say. “Are you all right?”

  “What am I to tell Casimir?” Her voice rises to a shattering pitch. “You think he will treat you like a cherished pet if you belong to him? You think he will overlook it if you disobey him? He will destroy you, but he will do it cleverly and slowly, and it will all be worse, so much worse than you can imagine. You stupid fool!” She collapses on the sofa, shaking.

  “Do you need a doctor?” I ask anxiously.

  “I must send him a telegram,” she rasps. “You do not know what it costs me…” Then she catapults off the sofa and grabs my hair, slamming me against the wall and pulling my head to the side so she can see the nuyi halfway up my neck.

  “Still…moving…,” she mutters.

  “Barely,” I gasp. “I mean, slowly. I’ll take more.”

  “First find Agoston Horthy and tell me what he is doing. You had better hope that it is something interesting,” Pia hisses. “Tomorrow evening there will be a dance at the palace. All the talk will be about King Zey’s health. Go and report back on how close to death he is.”

  “Does it matter, at this point? Even with the hermia, I’m either his or it’s over in a couple of days! Is he going to take the poison out of Dek?”

  She makes a choking sound like a laugh. “Go. Find something for me to tell him.”

  “Tell him Dafne and Luca are madly in love. Tell him Luca worships Agoston Horthy. Tell him Horthy is closing in on the witches and has the revolution in hand. Tell him Zey is a week from death. Tell him all that.”

  “Is it true?” shrieks Pia. “I cannot lie to him, Julia!”

  “You can tell him that is what I report,” I shout back.

  A knock at the door, and my heart plunges into my dirty satin shoes. We stare at each other, then she draws her knife with a hiss and strides over to the door, swinging it open. I wouldn’t want to be on the other side of that door. Indeed, Gregor’s face turns almost gray as he backs away from it. His eyes snag on mine.

  She jams her knife back into her belt and goes out on the balcony.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask.

  He looks not right. At first I think it’s just the scare Pia gave him. But he is not quite meeting my eyes.

  “It’s Wyn.”

  “No,” I whisper, everything inside me going icy with dread.

  “He’s…it’s not that. He’s alive,” says Gregor. “But he’s been arrested. Esme wants you. Will you come?”

  “Of course,” I say, and I follow him out, without saying goodbye to Pia.

  They are gathered in Mrs. Och’s parlor: Zara, Esme, Csilla, Mr. Faruk, and, to my bewilderment, Arly Winters. I gather Lady Laroche is not back. A map of a building complex is spread out across the floor.

  “How did it happen?” I ask.

  “It was last night, after you left,” says Arly, her pretty face all puffed up from crying. “Wyn and Lorka were hanging another banner. Then Garny came—he said Torne sent him to help—and Wyn tried to send him off. They got in a fight. Soldiers arrived, and I ran.”

  “Who’s Garny?”

  “The fellow with the gray beard,” says Esme.

  Oh, blast it all. Torne knew full well that Wyn wouldn’t work with Graybeard. Why would he send him?

  “They are all three in Arrimer,” says Esme grimly. The prison for political dissidents. “They’re to be hanged at noon tomorrow for treason. I have offered my fortune in bribes, to no avail.”

  “Hanged?” I can barely get the word out, my throat constricting.

  The map on the table is a map of the prison, I realize. If there is one thing Agoston Horthy’s Frayne has excelled at, it is the building of nearly impregnable prisons. You need someone on the inside to have even a chance of getting a body out of the place. Unless you’re me, that is.

  “I’ll get them out,” I say.

  Esme looks at me, her eyes terrible. “Can you do it?”

  “Yes,” I say. I’m reasonably sure of it, anyway. “I can go in vanished.”

  Here at least is something I can do. A fight I can win.

  “How can we help?” asks Esme.

  “You can’t,” I say. “I’ll go now. Where’s Dek?”

  “He is meeting with someone for supplies this morning,” says Esme. “He doesn’t know yet. We haven’t been able to reach him.”

  Zara rises. “A moment, Julia?”

  I follow her onto the veranda, drop into one of the chairs, and let my face fall into my hands. Everything hurts, and I am so tired.

  Zara sits next to me, lowering her voice. “Where did Lady Laroche go today? Did you see?”

  “It’s a house in West Spira, cellar full of witches,” I mutter. “Far as I can tell they’ve cast some kind of spell over the people who live there. But they aren’t plotting against you. They’re worried you won’t support them once you’ve got
the throne.”

  “They want too much too quickly, and they don’t care how they get it.”

  “They’re being hunted and drowned. That would make me a little impatient too.”

  “The Cleansings will stop when I am queen,” she says firmly. “But we have to move slowly, and witches who use magic outside the law will be punished. Even in Yongguo, that is true. I too dream of the day when we pull down Hostorak, but we need to plot our course with care.”

  “Torne is loyal to Lady Laroche,” I add. “He took her to the West Spira house.”

  “Ah,” says Zara thoughtfully. “So he knows where the place is.”

  And Torne sent Garny to stir up trouble with Wyn and Lorka. Why? Did he mean for them to be arrested?

  “I’ll find Dek and let him know what has happened,” she says.

  All my despair comes back like a wave that threatens to pull me right under. Again and again I try to push it down and keep going as the tide rises around me.

  “I’ve got to get the nuyi out of my neck soon. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how I’m going to help him.”

  “Zey is going to die any day, and when he does I will claim the crown,” says Zara fiercely. “Whatever power I have and however I can use it, I am not going to let your brother die. Frayne needs him.”

  “I need him!”

  Without looking at me, she says, “So do I.”

  We just sit with that for a moment, and then she says, “The house Lady Laroche went to—what is the address?”

  I don’t know what the right thing to do here is. I don’t know what side I’m on. But I figure I’d best be on the side of the girl who wants to help my brother. So I give it to her.

  The prison is impossible. I can get over the outer wall, but there are no windows, so I can’t get inside without raising all hell. I spend half the night waiting for someone to come in or out before giving up and leaving a message for Esme at the Marrow. The hanging will be public, outdoors. I’ll make sure that Wyn, at least, doesn’t make it to the noose.

  When I get to Liddy’s in the middle of the night, the bruised young woman with the bandaged arm is there. She looks at me fearfully. Liddy puts a finger to her lips, nodding at the two children curled together by the stove, sleeping. They are terribly thin, such little rags of things, like so many kids around here. Dek and I never looked like that. Too good at thieving to go hungry.

  “Julia, this is Flora. A friend.”

  “Hullo,” I say.

  Flora looks away and murmurs, “I’d better go.”

  “You are welcome to stay as long as you wish,” says Liddy—but in a perfunctory way, as though she’s offered before and been refused.

  Flora kneels down gingerly and rouses the two children. They get up like little puppets, used to uncomplaining obedience.

  “Julia could see you home,” says Liddy. “She’d keep you safe, at least on the way.”

  “Nobody can keep me safe,” says Flora.

  “I can,” I say. I’m not looking for distractions, but nor do I like to see this woman like a broken bird heading out into the night with her kids. This is a dangerous part of the city for a woman alone.

  “Wait in the shop. We won’t be long,” Liddy tells her. “And remember, you will need to make a decision soon about the matter we discussed.”

  Flora nods and goes out.

  “Let me see it,” says Liddy. I show her the nuyi in my neck. She hisses between her teeth. “It is getting too close. Can you take a higher dose of hermia?”

  “I won’t be much good if I do,” I say, sick at the thought. “But I’m not really needed until tomorrow at noon. That would be long enough to get through the worst of it, I reckon.”

  “I will give you some chorintha to take with it,” she says, snipping a few leaves from the packet of hermia and soaking them in boiling water. She rolls the poison into a damp ball and wraps it in paper for me, along with the little capsule of chorintha. “See Flora home. Then get yourself somewhere safe before you take this. The worst will wear off by noon tomorrow. Then take a little more. That should stall it a day. You will only have a day after that, I think.”

  “Thank you, Liddy.”

  “Don’t let him have you, Julia.”

  I shake my head. I won’t, I won’t.

  I walk Flora and her two small children into the Edge. At one point I say, “How d’you know Liddy?” but she just pulls her children closer and says nothing, so I stop trying to talk to her. There is nobody about. When we come to a row of wooden shacks not far from the cemetery, she whispers to me, “Thank you, now please go away.”

  I linger outside as she ushers the children into a shack with boarded-up windows. Silence. I watch the place for a few minutes and then turn and head back down the road. There is a figure coming toward me, staggering a little. A big man, heavyset and losing his hair, his face pouchy and miserable with drink. He reeks of cheap liquor. He barely looks at me, meaty hands dangling at his sides. On a hunch I follow him back the way I’ve come, and indeed, he goes into the same shack. My hands curl into fists. I don’t need to rely on hunches to guess he’s responsible for the bruises and broken bones of Flora and her children. I hope Liddy’s business with Flora involves getting her free of this brute and him getting his just deserts. But whatever that business is, it’s not my business. I wait outside awhile, but there is no sound, so I turn and go back to the hotel.

  At first I think it will be all right—or no worse than what I’ve already endured. But then the hermia twists itself into a snake in my chest, crawls up my throat, and batters itself against my teeth. I’m strangling on it, hands clamped over my mouth, sweating on the bed.

  “It’s not real.”

  Her high, strange voice. I’m burning up, and she washes my forehead to cool me down. Snake after snake uncoils in my chest, each one crawling up my throat so I can’t breathe. They force my teeth apart and slither out of my mouth, and I gasp for air while the next one forms. The snakes writhe on the ground, twisting about her legs. I try to point at them, but she repeats, “It’s not real,” and I have to breathe before vomiting up the next one.

  I fall at last into a fretful sleep. I wake because somebody is putting metal rings all over me, around my ankles, my fingers, my neck. He is a large grayish thing, no features on his face besides a sharp-toothed grin. He twists a knob on the wall, and all the rings tighten, cutting into me. My screams burst out of me like live things.

  Her metal goggles whirr over me. She tries to give me water from a cup, but it turns to gray sludge, like him, and his horrible mouth is laughing at me over her shoulder.

  “There’s nothing there,” she says. He swings a hatchet at her head, and I lunge off the bed. I’m falling so far, dizzy and spinning through nothing.

  He grabs me with a hook, swings me back into the bed, but it is not my bed; it is a pit seething with bugs that bite and suck. There will be nothing left of me by morning.

  “There’s nothing there. Drink this.”

  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 until sleep comes up from under the bed, grabbing me with heavy hands and yanking me down into blessed unconsciousness, punctuated with boiling, painful dreams, my skin cracking, my teeth coming out, my bones splintering. When I wake up, my eyes are crusted, my lips bloody, my throat raw.

  “Here.”

  She offers water. She washes the crust of blood and snot and tears from my face. She feeds me broth from a spoon while the morning light and a summer breeze come through the curtains.

  Telegram to Lord Casimir, Nago Island: HORTHY SECURING BORDERS STOP DUKE AND DAFNE PROSPECT V PROMISING STOP NUYI VERY CLOSE STOP JULIA COOPERATIVE STOP

  Telegram to Pia Kos, West Spira Grand Hotel, 10th floor: I AM COMING TO SPIRA CITY STOP
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  I see the knife in his hand.

  “Can you die like an ordinary girl?” he asks. “Do you know? Have you ever wondered?”

  Arrimer Prison is in the northernmost part of the Plateau. The district gets shabbier the farther north one goes from the train station. Beyond the edges of the city there are pretty villages in the hills, but first you have to pass through a shambling sort of ghost town, empty homes and failing factories. That is where the prison stands, its outer wall looped with barbed wire, guards posted in towers. Just outside the prison is the hanging yard, Deadman’s Square, where people gather to watch criminals die. It is not as popular as watching a Cleansing, but it will still draw a crowd.

  In spite of the short distance from the prison to the hanging yard, they come in an armored hackney. A small crowd has already gathered. I’m wearing another of the dresses Csilla chose, with a shawl around my shoulders and a bonnet on my head. I’ve not taken any hermia this morning—I can’t do something like this through a fog, or in pain—and the nuyi is coming awake, sensing its reprieve, burrowing its way up my neck.

  They come stumbling out of the hackney, hands and feet chained. Lorka and Garny look defiant, but Wyn’s expression of sick terror tugs at my heart. He’s the only one I can be sure of saving—I may not get more than one shot at this—so I vanish right there. A shout behind me—below me—it doesn’t matter. I’m up over the square, scattering out above the crowd, and then right down behind Wyn. I whisper in his ear, “Don’t be frightened.”

  He jumps half a foot as I reappear just long enough to grab him. The guards don’t have time to react—I see their startled faces and then we are gone, a cry from the crowd following us and fading as we soar, vanished, over the rooftops of Spira City, up and out. I aim us for the Scola.