Julia Defiant

by Catherine Egan

  Bianka’s expression darkens. “I might need it myself. I’ve a little boy to take care of.”

  “Teo,” says Theo placidly from Frederick’s lap, and I think again that he understands so much now and we need to watch what we say.

  “Julia and Frederick can tend to Theo,” says Mrs. Och.

  “That’s not what I mean,” says Bianka through gritted teeth.

  “Take mine,” offers Frederick.

  “I need more than that,” says Mrs. Och. “I need Bianka.” She looks at me. “Or perhaps Julia would do.”

  “No,” I say.

  “She’s hurt,” says Bianka. Mrs. Och swings her eyes back to Bianka, and Bianka breaks her gaze first.

  “This is our last attempt to find Ko Dan,” says Mrs. Och. “You have seen what Theo will be capable of. We need to remove the text from him not only to protect him but to protect the world from a child with such terrible power. I do not know what to expect from Si Tan. I need strength.”

  Bianka curses under her breath.

  “I’ll take Theo outside,” says Frederick.

  “Coward,” mutters Bianka, which is unkind, but I think she’s right that he does not want to watch. They both look at me then, as if they are expecting me to leave. I stand my ground and stare at Mrs. Och. If she is not ashamed, let her do it in front of me.

  Her eyes were blue in Spira City and now they are nearly black, but her piercing glare is the same. She takes Bianka’s hands in hers. Bianka’s limbs go loose at once, and she sinks to her knees, the deep brown of her complexion dimming, her eyes rolling back, broken sobs shaking loose from her throat—while Mrs. Och’s back straightens, power flowing into her, making her seem instantly younger and stronger. It lasts only a minute. Mrs. Och releases her and Bianka crumples to the floor, gasping.

  Mrs. Och turns to me, her expression bright and fierce, almost exultant. “Fetch me my cloak,” she says.

  “Fetch it yourself.”

  For a moment, I think she will strike me, and if she does, I don’t know what I might do. But instead she lets out a little bark of laughter.

  “Such children,” she scoffs, and strides to her room.

  Bianka recovers faster than Frederick or I would, that much is true. Her face is grim and faded, but she gets back up again. I try to help her, but she pushes my arm aside. Mrs. Och sweeps past us with her cloak over her shoulders, out into the sunshine, where Frederick is reading to Theo from the book of fairy tales. In the doorway, Bianka plucks my sleeve. I look at her, our eyes locking—like in the Main Hall at Shou-shu, that moment when she handed Theo to me and let me vanish with him. I trust you, her eyes are saying. I trust only you. I know what she is asking me.

  “Shall I come with you?” I call after Mrs. Och. “I could keep an eye out.”

  “No,” says Mrs. Och, already at the gate now, brimming with Bianka’s youth and power. “Wait here.”

  But I go anyway.

  I ignore the sharp twinge deep inside my arm when I vanish. Mrs. Och hails a motor carriage, and my heart sinks. I can’t run behind the carriage vanished, certainly not with my arm throbbing under its bandage, the pain jarring me with every step. I manage to hold on to the back of the carriage with my uninjured arm, and I thank the stars for the smooth, paved roads of Tianshi.

  She gets out, paying the boy at the Huanglong Gate, and announces herself to the Ru. In no time she is being marched along the broad streets within the compound. I follow, vanished two steps back, everything a muffled blur around me. Something still tugs at my stitches, insistent.

  This time we do not go up the steps to the Imperial Residences but stop at one of the sprawling white courtyard houses at the foot of it. We pass through a leafy outer courtyard, through an archway, and into an attractive outdoor pavilion in one of the inner courtyards. A woman dressed in silk, with black hair hanging straight down her back, brings delicate wafers and green tea. She speaks sharply to the Ru, who remove themselves by several feet but do not go away. She seems too young to be Si Tan’s wife but too elegant to be a servant, and who knows which is more plausible—that he should have a very young wife or a very elegant servant.

  Mrs. Och seats herself on a pillowed bench in the pavilion, and I position myself slightly behind her. We do not have to wait long before Si Tan emerges from the main house in a gorgeous embroidered robe. The woman in silk has disappeared. He comes toward Mrs. Och, bowing, his manner quite different from every other time I’ve seen him. There is a tension and an eagerness about him now. He almost seems nervous.

  “Och Farya,” he says in his flawless Fraynish. “It is an honor to meet you.”

  She nods, and gestures for him to sit down, as if this is her place. I want to see her face, but even vanished two steps back, I feel safer out of her line of sight. The stitches in my arm are straining, something pulling at them.

  “You tried to trick me,” she says.

  “I beg your pardon. I did not know for certain whom I was tricking. I met an unusual group of foreigners in my city, lying to my face and seeking Ko Dan, and I wanted to find out why.”

  “You know what the boy is.”

  “Gennady’s son, and vessel to one-third of The Book of Disruption,” he says placidly.

  “What does the grand librarian of Yongguo want with a fragment of The Book of Disruption? Surely you do not intend to put it in your library.”

  “I want what your brother Gennady wanted, but sooner.”

  “The text fragment destroyed,” she says. “The Book of Disruption rendered forever incomplete, unreadable.”

  “Yes. The world belongs to human empires now, and I do not like to think what kind of world Casimir would make. But my understanding was that you were against the idea of the Book’s destruction.”

  “I was,” says Mrs. Och. “But Casimir has lost his senses. I see no other way to keep him from reassembling the Book now.”

  “If the fragment is destroyed, The Book of Disruption will be broken forever. The spirits have faded already. Witches here and there will be all that is left of magic in the world. You are at peace with that?”

  “No,” she says. “Not at peace. But it is inevitable.”

  “I am glad we agree,” says Si Tan, though he looks more wary than relieved.

  “Where is Ko Dan?” asks Mrs. Och.

  “You do not need Ko Dan to destroy the text, Och Farya. If the text is bound to the boy, it will perish with him.”

  “I know that,” she says impatiently. “I want Ko Dan to take the text out of the child. Then we will destroy it.”

  “It cannot be done.”

  “I would like to ask Ko Dan himself whether it can be done.”

  “That is impossible.”

  “Where is he?”

  “It is not your concern. Is that really why you have come all this way? For the child’s sake?”

  “Yes—for the child’s sake,” says Mrs. Och. “But not only for the child.”

  “The princess,” he says.

  “She is gone,” says Mrs. Och. “My people are taking her to Frayne.”

  A long silence stretches between them. “You took her from Shou-shu,” he says slowly.

  She nods once. Si Tan steeples his fingers.

  “Och Farya, you are making things very difficult for me. If you had come to me from the beginning, we could have worked out this business with the princess together with Gangzi. She was still under his protection, and he is not a man who takes lightly his honor being slighted. What am I to tell him?”

  “You may tell him that the princess left the monastery and is returning to Frayne to claim her throne,” says Mrs. Och. “She left of her own accord with her own people. She was never a prisoner, surely.”

  “Were you responsible for the raid on the Shou-shu Treasury?” he asks.

  She inclines her head.

  “But nothing was taken. What were you looking for?”

  “The Ankh-nu.”

  He gives a gruff bark of laughter. “Yo
u come here brazenly, with no respect for Shou-shu, no respect for me, and admit that you are trying to steal one of the world’s great treasures from us? Your lack of grace surprises me, Och Farya.”

  “Does it? But I do not respect you or that ridiculous sect of monks pretending they can live forever. Why should I? I am not interested in the rules you’ve invented or the games you play with ancient objects and people whose power runs deeper than your own. I have my own goals.”

  His expression hardens. “I am sorry to disappoint you, but you will not find the Ankh-nu in the monastery.”

  “You have lost it, then. I am afraid of who might have it. Did you really hope to use it as Marike did?”

  “It’s true, then?” he asks her, something greedy and avid coming into his expression. He leans forward. “Did she really live for hundreds of years, using the Ankh-nu to move her essence from one body to another?”

  “I believe it is true,” says Mrs. Och. “But no one else besides Marike has managed to use the Ankh-nu in that way. Nobody else has been able to coax any magic from it at all…except Ko Dan.”

  Si Tan looks horrified for a moment, like she has struck him. Then he returns to himself and says curtly, “Indeed, Ko Dan was able to use it. If he could transfer the essence of the Book into a living body, I dared hope perhaps he could learn to do more than that.”

  “I suppose it is more likely than your monks learning to live forever by way of asceticism and force of will or some such nonsense.”

  “The human body fails us all,” says Si Tan. “But the essence, our inner selves, our intelligence, the truth of what we are…all of that needs only a vehicle to live on! You cannot understand it. You are not bound as we are to some mortal sack, a frail and aging cage of meat and bone. Surely the spirit of a great man is larger than his fleshly prison and should be able to live beyond it. I will not let all that I am be snuffed out by oblivion. I am bigger than that.”

  “All mortals feel so,” says Mrs. Och dismissively. “But they die all the same. I have no wish to lay claim to the Ankh-nu. I only want Ko Dan to use it once. He may be able to save a child’s life, destroy the text fragment, and thereby keep the world safe from Casimir. Is it not all to the good?”

  “What you ask is impossible.”

  “Then Ko Dan is dead?”

  He lifts his chin, eyes flashing with sudden anger. “You have come to my city without announcing your presence, and every act you have taken has been one of subterfuge or sacrilege. You admit freely that you have no respect for me. What right do you have to demand information, let alone help?”

  “Yongguo is the greatest empire in the world, which makes you one of the most powerful men in the world, if not the most powerful. I use the word power here in the sense of authority, of course. You have no true power, nothing that cannot be taken from you. The balance will shift if Casimir reassembles The Book of Disruption. Kahge was created by the splitting of the Book, but if the fragments are bound together again, Kahge will be pulled back into the world, everything will be changed, and the order you so cherish will be shattered. We have a shared interest in keeping the Book from my brother. If you fear him, you should help me.”

  “How can I trust anything you say? How do I know you do not wish to make use of the Book yourself, or that you are not allied with Casimir, as in the past? You ask so much of me, and you have offered me nothing.”

  “Ah. You want me to offer you something. Do you have any suggestions?”

  “Your vanishing girl,” he says without hesitating, and I go cold all over.

  “No,” says Mrs. Och. “She is mine.”

  I see his lips moving, but I can’t hear him anymore. My ears are full of a distant roar, and my arm is bleeding freely, the stitches split wide. The blood is not running down my arm but seeping through the sleeve and out into the air in crimson threads, then vanishing. The pavilion keeps blurring and then brightening, fading in and out of view, and something is pulling, pulling, pulling at my arm, at my blood, the roaring sound rising and drowning them out, then receding again. I need to get out of here. I need to get back to the house. Esme will fix my arm. No, Esme has left already. I need to tell Bianka.

  Si Tan is on his feet now, his voice barely controlled: “One single life! For the sake of a hundred thousand lives or more, for the sake of a world that, for all its ills, can still be changed for the better, I beg you to destroy the child and with him The Book of Disruption.”

  My heart gives a horrible jolt. I need to see her face. I try to move closer, but the twinge and tug at my arm becomes a yank, the roar drowning out whatever else they are saying. Blood gushing. I see the pavilion from every angle for a single blurred second—Mrs. Och’s face, her lips moving, her yellow teeth—and then I am nowhere, and I can’t get back.

  I land in the steaming courtyard outside Esme’s old building—a gutted wreck here. The statue in the fountain is all tentacles reaching, blood-dark water boiling inside it. From every side of the square, those patchwork creatures are coming.

  Some of them have human faces, some of them have wings and are swooping overhead, and many of them are holding those peculiar hooked stalks to their mouths. Everything is pouring out of my arm—all thought and breath and strength—and he is bounding toward me with something close to grace, the fox-faced beast with his majestic antlers. In his gray rotting hand he has the jagged, glittering blade that sliced my arm open.

  I try to pull away, back to the world, but I can’t feel the edge of things. I can’t find my way out of here. As if this is everywhere. As if the world I know is gone. The antlered beast is closing on me fast, and I jump.

  It is almost like flying. I feel like Pia. I go right over his head, landing on the other side of him, and stagger, amazed at myself. More and more of them are swarming. A jackal-faced thing comes at me, and the hook on his stalk bites my shoulder. I grab the creature by the neck and toss him aside, pull the hook out of me. Oh, I am strong here, strong. Even dizzy and bleeding, I am stronger and faster than they are.

  Still, there are too many of them. Another hook bites at me, and another. Talons rake across my back. I hurl another off me—this one knots of muscle without skin, wielding something that looks like a common garden hoe. A boar-headed monster with a spear charges me. I dodge and grab the spear, yanking it from its owner, and his half-rotten arm comes away with it.

  Then something pulls at my very heart, an awful lurching, like when Mrs. Och took my life force to save us from Casimir—something deep and fundamental being grabbed, stolen. A hook has got me on the arm, and the stalk seems to have come alive, turning a fleshy pink, bending and swirling. A bat-faced thing sucks on the other end of it, poised on several hairy legs. I can barely feel my hands to move them, but I pull the hook out of me with fumbling fingers, and immediately I feel my strength returning.

  They are closing in around me, shuffling, monstrous, and now I know to fear the hooks, to get them out of me before they sap my strength. Shouts of “Lidari! Lidari!” rise up. I feel a sharp burn and push in my side. The antlered fox-beast is looming over me, making to swing his blade again. I tear the hooks out of my skin and bound away from them as fast as I can. Now a bright, hot pain is radiating out from my side, and I can feel blood running out of the wound.

  I flee, and they follow, screeching “Lidari!” Near the river, with a little distance from the mob, I can feel it again, the space around me. I pull away so fast, thinking of nothing but escape, and I land, hard—right between Mrs. Och and Si Tan in the pavilion.

  In seconds, the Ru have closed around the pavilion, bows drawn. Mrs. Och throws off her cloak, wings tearing out of her back, her face blooming into its half-animal self. She stretches out her arms as if to ward off the Ru, and in a voice that echoes like a hundred voices, she cries: “She is mine!”

  Si Tan’s face is truly fearful for the first time. He is shouting at her in Yongwen. I stagger to my feet. My tunic is sticking to me, blood on my arm, on my side, everywhere.
>
  “I’m sorry,” I sob at Mrs. Och. Throwing myself on her mercy. The Ru are waiting for Si Tan’s command. She scoops me into her arms like I’m a child and cries: “Make way!”

  Si Tan makes an angry gesture at the Ru and they fall back. Mrs. Och carries me through the Imperial Gardens to the Huanglong Gate, but I pass out before we reach it.

  A light rain is falling when I wake. My side and arm are clumsily bandaged. I scramble out of the bedroom. Frederick is in the main room, scribbling in his little notebook, but he drops it as soon as he sees me. The front doors are open, and I can see Bianka washing diapers outside, Theo galloping around her on his toy horse.

  “Bianka,” Frederick calls to her in a low voice. She leaves the diapers and comes running up the steps. Theo drops the horse, darts past her, and throws his arms around my leg.

  I cry out with the impact, my side exploding with pain. Bianka pulls him off me.

  “Ouch?” he says in surprise.

  “What happened?” whispers Bianka.

  “Si Tan’s not going to help us,” I gasp, fighting my nausea.

  “I know that. But what happened to you?”

  “It’s complicated. How angry is she?”

  “Difficult to say. She hasn’t come out of her room.”

  I touch the bandage wrapped around my middle. “Who fixed me up?”

  “I did,” says Frederick. “Stitches too. Sorry—I’m not very good at it.”

  “Hounds. Well, thanks. Have I been out long?”

  “Not so very long,” Bianka begins, and then Mrs. Och emerges from her room.

  “Julia.” Her voice would freeze live flame. “Explain yourself.”

  “I followed you.” No point lying now. “I’m sorry. I was…I don’t know what happened. I was pulled into Kahge. I was vanished, just like normal, but they pulled me right through and…they were trying to kill me—but I got out. They can pull me there!”

  “Why did you follow me?”

  Her face is terrible. I’ve never seen her in such a rage, but I realize suddenly that she is afraid. But of what? Of me?