Julia Defiant

by Catherine Egan

  “All right,” I say. “You haven’t told her anything, have you? About Mrs. Och or Theo?”

  “Of course not,” he says, shocked, and then adds: “Not because I don’t trust her. But I don’t want her to know anything that could be dangerous to her.”

  “And she hasn’t asked any questions?”

  “Julia, stop it,” he says, irritated. “Of course she’s asked questions. About you, mostly, because you come banging in and out in a foul mood all the time, and she wonders why we’re here. But they are normal, curious sorts of questions, and I’ve put her off. She doesn’t push.”

  “She doesn’t know about the house in Nanmu?”

  “No!” He gives me an exasperated look.

  And then—I can’t help it—I blurt out: “Since when do you go to gambling dens?”

  His face changes, and he laughs at my expression. He is handsome, my brother—even with the Scourge scars and blots, his right eyelid stitched shut over the missing eye. I am so used to him keeping his hair over his face, but when he ties it back, and when he looks happy, the disfigurement barely matters.

  “I’m trying new things, Julia. Don’t worry, I won’t make a habit of it.”

  “It’s just…it’s not like you. I never know where you are anymore.”

  “What’s not like me?” he says lightly. “Not like me, I suppose, to have a girl, to have a good time, to go anywhere or do anything. Does it really bother you?”

  “That’s not what I mean,” I say, but I’m not sure, maybe it is.

  “I never know where you are,” he says. “But I had to get used to that a long time ago. Tianshi is a city of wonders, and I want to see all of it, try everything!”

  I am afraid of his answer, but I ask him, “Will you be sorry to go back home?”

  The silence stretches on so long my stomach drops.

  “What if we didn’t go back?” he says at last. “Once we get paid, we’ll have plenty to live on here—for years, even, if we live modestly.”

  “I barely speak Yongwen,” I manage to say.

  “You’d learn if we stayed,” he says. “Esme’s already said she’s going to retire, and I know you don’t want to take over from her. I can’t go back to living in a dark room, people spitting at me or running away whenever I show my face. We’ve seen a bit of the world now. I want more.”

  “But what by the holies would we do here?”

  “What are we going to do back in Spira City?”

  “I just…I don’t know…it’s home.”

  “Not to me. Oh, don’t look that way. If you want to go back, we’ll go back.” He says this so lightly, but I feel as if my heart is breaking. The idea of living in Tianshi feels impossible, but who am I to drag him back to a city where he can never have this kind of freedom? No more drinking sand, we said.

  “I’d have to get used to the idea,” I say, hating how broken my voice sounds. What a spoiled child I’ve always been with my brother.

  “Never mind it, Julia. I’m not going to insist on staying if it makes you unhappy.”

  But how long have we both put my happiness ahead of his?

  “Are you in love with Ling?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says, suddenly vague. “She makes me happy.”

  “She looks at me funny.”

  “You’re an unusual girl—always running around on secret errands—you’re about her age, and you’re my sister. She’s curious about you.” He sighs. “When I mention Frayne to her, she talks about it like it’s this terrible, backward place. She says she’s heard it’s dirty and full of sickness and rats, not to mention the indiscriminate drowning of witches.”

  “Maybe things will be different. Esme and Gregor seem pretty fixed that there’s going to be a revolution. We’re meeting with Count Fournier in the morning to see about getting the princess out.”

  “The last revolution was a bloodbath. Half the revolutionaries were slaughtered before the thing even began. I wouldn’t bet on another one going any better. I hope Esme and Gregor come to their senses before getting involved.”

  “Gregor’s still not drinking,” I say. “I think…I mean, Esme says he’s really trying.”

  “Good luck to him.” He sounds unconvinced, and I can hardly blame him. Then he puts his arm around me and says, “Don’t worry, Julia. If you’re really fixed on going back to Spira City, we’ll set up again, just like old times. Maybe you’ll meet some handsome fellow and settle down.”

  I roll my eyes at him.

  “Go on—wouldn’t that be grand? Little dark-haired tots running around calling me Uncle Dek? And it turns out you like children more than you thought, isn’t that right?”

  “I like one child,” I say. “Not children.”

  He’s laughing, but I can’t laugh along.

  “Oh, come on,” he says. “What’s the matter?”

  My heart twists itself into a dark, painful knot. I take out the picture of the Ankh-nu and show it to him. “Mrs. Och thinks this thing is in the monastery Treasury. She wants me to steal it.”

  “What is it?”

  “She says it’s what Ko Dan used to put Gennady’s bit of The Book of Disruption inside Theo. The story is that Marike made it, and it’s for separating a person’s essence—or the essence of anything alive—from the physical parts and putting it into…well, into another body.”

  “And The Book of Disruption has an essence?”

  “Apparently. So Ko Dan used this to bind the Book fragment’s essence to Theo. And apparently, Marike used it to stay alive by switching bodies whenever the body she’d been using got too old.”

  Dek makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a cry of horror. “And what happened to whoever’s body it was she was hopping into?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose they got stuffed into the previous body and died of old age or whatever she was about to die of before she switched with them.”

  “How revolting!” He shakes his head, and I can tell he doesn’t believe it.

  I take a deep breath and tell him: “When I was in the Imperial Library and the witch there was looking through my memories, there was one memory…I saw our ma. She had the Ankh-nu, and she was talking to somebody, telling them she had it and that she was ready or something.”

  “You remember this from when you were little?” he asks carefully.

  “No…it was somebody else’s memory, or that’s what it felt like. I’m not sure. But there’s more.” I can’t look at him while I say this. I stare at my hands and get it out in a rush. “When I disappear…if I pull back as far as possible, I end up…somewhere else. It’s like Spira City, but burning and made of shadows. I pulled Gennady there by accident when we were in Casimir’s fortress, and he said it was Kahge. Now Mrs. Och has got Frederick researching me. And in the memory I saw, there was Ma, making some kind of deal with…I think it might have been a creature from Kahge. It wanted to go to the world. I felt that—how much it wanted to go to the world. What if she used the Ankh-nu and put the creature in me and that’s why I can disappear?”

  I don’t know if I feel better or worse now that I’ve said it out loud. My heart is thundering in my ears.

  “Hounds, Julia—don’t go jumping to wild conclusions!” he cries.

  I make myself keep going: “Frederick says Kahge isn’t like Rainists make it out to be, under the earth and the Dark Ones. He says it’s like a…a shadow of the world, but made of magic.”

  “And how does Frederick know that?”

  “Well, that’s the old idea of Kahge. It doesn’t really matter what it’s called, the point is that I go somewhere, and it’s not of this earth, I can tell you that.”

  “Then stop,” he says firmly. “Whatever magic you’ve got…if it takes you somewhere else, don’t go there. Stay close. Stay here.”

  “But why can I…what does it mean?”

  “I’ve no idea. But look, this memory you’re talking about could just as well have been planted by the witch at the Im
perial Library. You don’t know that it’s real at all. I don’t know why you can vanish, and Nameless knows I don’t know a thing about Kahge, but it doesn’t mean Ma did something to you. Maybe it’s good to have Mrs. Och looking into it. Wouldn’t it be better to find out the truth?”

  I nod, though honestly, I think that depends on what the truth is.

  “Just don’t leap to conclusions yet,” he says. “All right?”

  I nod again, because I can’t say anything around the lump in my throat. He pulls me to him, and we hold each other there on the edge of the wall, the dark city below us, for a while.

  “I feel like I can never quite forgive her,” I admit at last. He doesn’t ask who. He knows.

  “Forgive her for what?”

  “Oh, for…I don’t know, going after Casimir, being part of the Sidhar Coven, getting involved. Sometimes I think that if she’d loved us more, she wouldn’t have risked her life that way. She wouldn’t have risked leaving us behind.”

  “It wasn’t lack of love, Julia. She tried to be a mother and a revolutionary both, and she died trying.”

  “I know.”

  “What about our pa, then?”

  “What about him?”

  “Do you forgive him?”

  That gives me pause. “I don’t think about him much,” I say at last. “I reckon I loved him when I was very little, because he was there, and Ma loved him and you loved him. But mostly I remember him like a stranger who stumbled around and took up space and upset everybody, and then he was gone, and I never missed him.”

  “I was hard on him when he was around.”

  “Well, somebody had to be.”

  “It didn’t help,” he says. “Being hard on him didn’t help, and being soft on him didn’t help. There was nothing any of us could ever do for him. But the thing is, I remember him before. You were too little. By the time you were three or four, he was an opium eater through and through. But before that, he and I would go to the track together. I remember his pipe smoke back when he just smoked tobacco. I remember sitting in his lap, and he’d pretend I was riding a horse, his knees galloping along. Before you were born, Ma would go away a lot—hounds, I don’t remember, for days, sometimes longer, seemed like weeks—and it would just be me and Pa. We’d do everything together, eat from the same plate, I’d sleep right next to him. After you were born, she was around more, and he had that fall and broke his hip. When he started to disappear, bit by bit, I hated him for it. Hounds, I hated him. He left us years and years before he walked out.”

  “I know.” I’d never thought how much harder it must have been for Dek, who remembered him as something else.

  “He was an athlete, very physical, like you. He didn’t know how to be a cripple. He didn’t know how to be a man with a bad leg looking for work, or a father who couldn’t chase after his kids. I still wonder why Ma didn’t do something for him. You know, help him with his hip or the pain somehow.”

  “With magic?”

  “Yes. If she could save my life…”

  “But it took so much from her. She was never the same after that. And people would have suspected.”

  He looks miserable, and I stop. It’s unkind to remind him how she destroyed herself saving him. That last year of her life, she was a shadow of who she’d been before. “Why are we talking about Pa anyway?”

  “Because we’re talking about forgiveness. Isn’t it always our parents we have to forgive? Either for not being there, or for what they did when they were there?”

  I laugh at the way he puts it, but I reckon he’s probably right. “You’re the one I couldn’t have lived without,” I say. “You still are.”

  “Well, you won’t have to,” he says, mussing my hair.

  “We’ll stay together,” I say. “Wherever we go.”

  “Of course. Hounds, Julia. Of course.”

  “If you don’t want to go home, we’ll stay here.”

  I make myself say it, and I make myself mean it. I can’t imagine a life for myself outside of Spira City, being a foreigner forever in this strange city—but it’s my turn to think about Dek’s happiness now.

  He kisses the top of my head. “Let’s get this job done first,” he says. “Then we’ll talk about what’s next.”

  I fold up the picture of the Ankh-nu and put it back in my pocket. I’d like to stay here with Dek, looking over the city and feeling like I am myself, just a girl, just his sister. But I’ve got some thieving to do.

  There are two guards outside the Treasury, as always. The squat, steel-doored building is separated from the Temple of Atonement by a row of bushes. Jun crouches behind the bushes, a silent shadow, while I stand next to one of the guards, vanished, and count in my head. When I reach twenty, Jun tosses a handful of gravel at the roof of the Treasury. It skitters along the tiles; both guards startle and look up. Jun aims the little handheld crossbow I got from Dek and shoots one guard with a dart while I stab a dart into the neck of the fellow next to me. They sway and fall together. Neither has time to raise the alarm. I reappear, grinning like crazy.

  “That is easy part,” says Jun, but he’s smiling too, his dimples showing. How he can go from looking so fierce to looking so sweet in less than half a second astounds me. I could watch the change all day. “How we can open this door?”

  “That’s the easy part,” I tell him, producing Dek’s magnetic pick with a flourish. I am showing off, I admit, and while either one of us could have managed this job alone, doing it together is more fun. I was touched by how relieved he was to see me when I turned up at Count Fournier’s. When I described the job to him, assuring him that it was not common thieving but necessary to save Theo’s life, his eyes lit up. He is a boy after my own heart, all right.

  Dek’s pick gets the door open in a jiff, and once we are inside, I take out the lantern and light it. Jun gives a low whistle, carrying the lantern along the shelves. I have never seen such a sight myself. Paintings, ancient scrolls, crowns, weaponry, pottery, jade sculpture, gem-studded goblets, a diamond the size of my fist, and chest after chest filled with bricks of gold—the Shou-shu Monastery is wealthy beyond anything I’ve ever imagined.

  “Why they have all this?” says Jun. “They are monks! What they need gold for?”

  “Everybody likes gold,” I say. “I don’t see it, though. How often does the guard change?”

  “Three hours,” says Jun.

  “All right. We should be able to check every inch of this place in three hours.”

  And we do. We empty every chest, feel every stone and beam for hidden panels. Jun climbs along the rafters of the ceiling with the lantern, then comes swinging down, landing in front of me. The lantern flickers, making his face go dark and then light as he holds it up and looks around the room again.

  “Your treasure is not here,” he says. “I think they guard ordinary treasure in ordinary way—locks and guards. But if they have magical treasure, they would guard in a magical way. We cannot find it like this.”

  “I reckon you’re right,” I agree. I’d hoped at least something might come easily.

  “Guard will change before too long,” he says.

  So we leave, locking the door behind us and giggling at the idea of the guards waking up and how confused they will be, with nothing missing from the Treasury. Still, going back to Mrs. Och empty-handed when she has made it clear that we are out of time leaves me with a pit in my stomach.

  We walk slowly through the Xishui Triangle. I’m trying to think of something to say that will make him smile at me again when he grabs my hand and pulls me up a quiet road toward an ancient-looking tree, gnarled and twisted, its branches a darker black against the night sky. Only when we are right under its branches do I see the twists of paper, as numerous as the leaves.

  “Look,” says Jun, squatting by the thick trunk. I kneel on the ground to see what he is showing me. It is a little wooden box nestled between the tree roots, and inside it there is a pot of ink, a brush, and hundred
s of blank strips of paper.

  “Do you ever write wish?” he asks me.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t understand why people do it. If you’re not a witch, writing something down isn’t going to do anything.”

  “The magic does not come from witch,” says Jun. “You don’t know that? The magic come from writing. From words. Some people—witches—they can bring that magic out. But there is power in any writing. If I write, I cannot make magic happen, but still the writing has some magic in it. Maybe it can change some small thing. Give me some luck, or some chance.”

  From what I’ve seen of witches and magic and luck, I’m not sure I believe this. But Jun is already unscrewing the cap of the inkpot, dipping the brush. He writes something in swift characters on a slip of paper, then gives me a mischievous look and goes scampering up the tree, looking for a good spot.

  “I like to put my wish near top,” he says from above. I cannot even make out the shape of him among the dark leaves.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Feels more lucky.”

  I pick up the brush, dip it, and pause. I have the overwhelming urge to write Forgive me on the paper and tie it to the tree. I think it, brush poised: Forgive me. Forgive me. But who am I asking for forgiveness? Frederick would say that in the eyes of the Nameless I am already forgiven, that we are all forgiven for our mortal errors, and that every moment of our lives is a clean slate, starting over. And what does it matter if I am forgiven by those I’ve wronged? If I forgive myself? What does it change? Not what I did, nor what I mean to do.

  And so I write, Keep Theo safe, and I climb up the tree after Jun, twisting my wish onto a twig with no other wishes.

  “Come here!” he calls, and I climb higher, to where he sits astride a branch, his head poking above the leaves at the top of the tree. The branches are thick and sturdy even this high up. He reaches for me and pulls me onto the branch next to him, so we are facing each other. My back is against the trunk, and he is balanced out on the branch, seeming entirely at ease way up here. It is a clear night, and the moon is just a sliver, the sky strung with stars. I look straight up, thinking of the map of the planets Frederick showed me once, how tiny the world looked in the endless sea of space, and I try to hope that what I’ve written has some power.