Julia Defiant

by Catherine Egan

  “I just let them come here to meet. Lidari had always been interesting. He’d been in the world before, and it made him more…human than the rest of them. After so long in the world, his essence had changed. He had a sort of body of his own even in Kahge—he didn’t want the animal parts. And I liked the witch too. I thought she was my friend. I got muddled.”

  “I think that witch was my mother,” I say. I feel as if the pieces are all there before me, but I can’t quite assemble them into a picture that makes sense. Not yet. “Her name was Ammi.”

  “Yes,” says Ragg Rock, even more wary. “Ammi. That’s right.”

  “Could my mother and Lidari have…had me? I mean, could I be Lidari’s child?”

  I’ve never longed to claim my father, but I would rather have a pathetic opium eater as a father than some otherworldly half-alive monster.

  “No,” says Ragg Rock, laughing—an eerie echo of my own laugh. “Shadows from Kahge can’t procreate any more than they can die—they aren’t alive enough for either. Only the living can make life, and even among the living it is complicated. If a woman mates with a dog or a horse, she doesn’t give birth to a little half-dog or half-horse baby. A baby comes from two living humans. I know that much.”

  The hollow fear that has been crawling through me for days now is spreading, widening, opening up like a dark, poisonous flower. I think of Theo, the text that was woven into him as a baby—and my mother with the Ankh-nu, which is for transferring an essence from one being to another. The memory I had that was not mine. Perhaps Lidari’s memory.

  “Then could Lidari’s essence have been put inside me somehow?” I force myself to ask. I don’t want to believe that I might be carrying around something else, someone else, inside me, but I can’t shake the idea either.

  “I’ve no idea,” she says. “I mean, I think you would know. He’s not the sort to sit silent.”

  “I’m different in Kahge,” I say. “I look like something else.”

  “What do you look like?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Monstrous.”

  “Well, it would be a distorted reflection,” she says, shrugging, just the way I shrug.

  “One of them cut me with a sword, and now it seems like they can pull me to them, right out of the world. Like my blood is a rope crossing the world to Kahge.” I don’t know how to express it. “They had these hooks and tubes, they were trying to take something from me.”

  “Solanze’s sword?” she says.

  “I don’t know. Is that the fox-faced one with the antlers?”

  “Yes. He’s been leading the rest of them since Lidari disappeared,” she says. “That was another present from the witch who gave them bodies. It was forged partly in the world and partly in Kahge. It can steal your blood, and blood is important for magic. I’m not surprised he can call you if he got some of your blood with that sword. If that’s their bridge to you, you could take it from him, take it out of Kahge. Then they couldn’t call you there.”

  “How would I do that?” The last thing I want is to ever go back there.

  She shifts a bit, and suddenly her ankle crumbles, the leg angling down and hitting the ground, separating completely from the dried-out foot. “Blasted hounds!” she curses, falling. Horrified, I don’t move fast enough to catch her, and she lands hard, her arm breaking off at the elbow.

  “Oh, oh, oh!” she sobs, though it’s all sound and a contorted face—no tears from her black pebble eyes.

  “What can I do?” I ask desperately. It is horrible watching somebody go literally to pieces before you.

  “Get my foot,” she whimpers. She grabs her broken-off arm in her other hand and pulls herself up the path to the little hut. I pick up the clay foot—it is surprisingly heavy—and follow her.

  Inside the hut, she shifts herself to a sitting position and scoots over to the pot of mud boiling on the hearth. I help her fit the broken foot back to the stump of her leg. With her one hand, she reaches into the mud and scoops out a bubbling handful.

  “I hadn’t noticed I was getting so dry,” she mutters. She slathers the hot, wet mud over her ankle and foot, working it into the cracks. Soon her leg is red and moist and supple and she does not need me to hold it in place. She twists and flexes it, wiggles her toes as she moistens the mud between them, giving them a bit of extra length. She does her arm next, sealing it back together at the elbow and covering the whole thing with another layer of mud. More relaxed now, she keeps steadily wiping the mud over her shoulders, her breasts and belly, between her thighs and then up her neck and cheeks, with gentle dabs.

  “Do my back?” she asks lazily.

  “It’s too hot,” I say, looking at the bubbling pot.

  “Oh, it cools fast.” She scoops up some mud and holds it out to me. It is hot, but it doesn’t burn me. I take some in my hands and spread it over her back. She rolls her shoulders so the shoulder blades flex as I work.

  “I just thought of something better than getting Solanze’s sword!” she cries. “We’ll stop your wounds up with my mud! Then they won’t be able to reach your blood. Not even with the sword—not with this stuff in the way.”

  I want to say no, but then I think of that tug, tug, tug, and I think I’m willing to do anything to stop those things from pulling me out of the world. If I don’t have to go back to Kahge and try to make off with a magical sword, all the better. So I take off my tunic and let her unwind the bandage on my arm. She pulls a pointed tooth right out of her gum and uses it to slice open Jun’s stitches.

  “Ow!” I shout, tears springing to my eyes.

  “Don’t be a baby. This will work.” She scoops some mud out of the pot and fills the wound in my arm. The pain is blinding for an instant, the scalding mud inside me, and I let loose a scream, but almost as quickly as it comes, the pain is replaced by an odd, thick numbness. She goes to work on my side next. I clench my teeth and let her do it, looking at the hardening clay-red streak in my arm where the wound was just moments ago. She dabs a blob of mud on each of the scratches the hooks made.

  “They won’t be able to get at your blood through that!” she says cheerfully.

  “I’m not Lidari,” I say, pleading. “Am I? I don’t want to be.”

  “You don’t seem like him,” she says. “Too jumpy and anxious, for one thing. Lidari always knew what he was about. Your blood when it called me was ordinary, human. Just stay away from Kahge. Those animal bodies are coming apart, and when they do, they won’t be able to wield that sword anymore. They’ll just be what they were. And they won’t be able to call your blood through this mud.”

  That is a relief to hear but doesn’t explain away my thousand questions.

  “Who was Lidari, exactly?”

  She looks cross at first, and I think she isn’t going to answer, but then she says: “I reckon he was always a little more alive than the others. A little more gumption, a little more wanting. Marike saw something in him, anyway. She brought him over—that whole business with the Gethin.” Her mouth points down suddenly.

  “So the Eshriki Phars really brought the Gethin from Kahge?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “How?”

  “It was Marike.” She looks angry now. “She and Lidari made that little pot of hers. They used some of her essence, some of his, some of my clay, and the blood of a hundred witches. I don’t know how they made the Gethin bodies. I should have paid more attention. It seemed like it hadn’t worked—like her pot just swallowed the essences. But then later there was this army. It’s my fault. I didn’t know what she meant to do. Marike…”

  She breaks off and rocks back on her heels, a faraway look on her face. I bend and flex my arm. The wound is entirely sealed up by the strip of red mud. It doesn’t even hurt anymore.

  “Marike what?” I prompt her.

  “The whole of the Arrekem continent was hers, and the Parnese armies were all that stood between her and conquest of the kingdoms to the north. Old Poria didn’t even exist then
, it was just clusters of warring tribes, some witch-led and some not. I admired Marike. Is that stupid? The Xianren were always trying to get at me, and I was scared of them, and I liked watching her defy them. Anyway, Lidari was Gethin first, but then she put his essence in the Parnese emperor’s body. She switched them and killed the Gethin body with the emperor inside it. So Lidari pretended to be the emperor, wearing his body, and married Marike, and then half the world was hers. For a while, anyway. The two of them…they planned to live forever, jumping from one body to another. It worked for centuries, until Lan Camshe captured Lidari and executed the body he was in. His essence came back to Kahge—I don’t know how. It didn’t happen to the rest of them.”

  “What happened to Marike?” I whisper.

  “She was captured and drowned when the Sirillian Empire rose. Well, there are some who said she switched bodies and lived on.”

  “She never came back for Lidari?”

  “I didn’t let her back, nor any of her underlings. Not after what she did with the Gethin. I was afraid of her.”

  I look down the hill at Tianshi, tumbling below.

  “How do I get back?”

  “I’ve been very nice to you,” says Ragg Rock, her voice caught now between anger and wheedling. “I’ve told you all kinds of things, and I’ve helped you. You said you’d bring me some food for George. Something from the world that he’ll like. I don’t want him to be unhappy here.”

  “Yes,” I promise. “I’ll come back. I’ll bring apples and lettuce.”

  “Good.” She smiles again. “Then just swim back across the moat and go down the hill. Go to Silver Moya when you want to come back. I’ll recognize your blood. Come back soon.”

  “I’ll come as soon as I can. But first I have to help a little boy. He’s got part of The Book of Disruption stuck in him. Do you know about that?”

  “Oh yes. Zor Gen’s son. That’s the Xianren’s business. You should stay out of it.”

  “I can’t,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  “I love him.”

  “Oh,” she says, nodding. “Love. Yes. I hear about that all the time. But don’t forget what you promised me.”

  The little house in Dongshui is dark, but I knock anyway, knowing better by now than to go barging in. Quite right too. A moment or two, and the door opens, a candle flickering in Wyn’s hand. With his other hand, he’s tucking his shirt into his trousers.

  “Holy stars, what’s happened to you?” he cries when he sees me. “Your clothes! Your hair.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Of course.” He pulls the door wide and steps back. Mei comes out of the bedroom, tying a robe loosely around her waist. She gives me a startled glare as she lights the lamp. I must look a fright.

  “Is Dek here?”

  “No. Oh, don’t look at me that way. What am I supposed to do, give him a curfew? Mrs. Och sent a pipit. We’re supposed to be leaving the city in the morning. Why are you covered in mud?”

  “Things have gotten complicated.”

  “Complicated how?”

  “I’ve been sacked.”

  “And then Mrs. Och tried to drown you in a mud puddle?”

  “Not exactly. Have you got anything to eat?”

  He has some cold dumplings left in the larder. I fill him in on what happened with Mrs. Och and Si Tan while I eat, every bite making me feel more rooted in my body and the world. I don’t talk about Kahge or Ragg Rock, because I’ve never told him the whole truth about vanishing to Kahge and I don’t know how to tell him now. So I tell him I got muddy going through the tunnels, and he just raises his eyebrows, like he knows I’m lying but isn’t going to push it. Mei slouches in a chair for a bit while I talk and then goes back to bed without saying anything to either of us.

  “I don’t think she likes me,” I say.

  “You aren’t very friendly to her,” he remarks. I consider this. I suppose I’m not.

  “Does she know you’re leaving?” I ask.

  “Yes. I doubt she’ll miss me. I’m not leading her on, Julia. It’s not like Ling and Dek—some great connection. Look, I’ve got something to cheer you up. It might even get you back in Mrs. Och’s good graces.”

  He goes into the bedroom and returns with a bamboo basket full of letters, all closed with Gangzi’s wax seal. I rifle through them. “How did you get these?”

  “I had to pull a pistol on the mail carrier. I’ll be a wanted man now, so good thing we’re leaving.”

  “You shot him?” I ask faintly.

  “No, of course I didn’t shoot him! Hounds, Julia. I just threatened to. Anyway, here are your letters.”

  A soft tap-tap at the door. I start up, thinking it must be Dek. Wyn opens the door and manages to look relieved and annoyed at the same time. It’s Frederick.

  “I’d hoped to find you here,” he says, rushing past Wyn. “Holies, what’s happened? Are you all right?”

  I hesitate. I want to tell him, but I don’t want Wyn to hear. I can’t bear for Wyn to think me less than human, but Frederick knows so much already, and I need to tell somebody.

  “Can we take a walk?” I ask.

  “Of course,” says Frederick.

  I can see the hurt on Wyn’s face. “It’s not safe around here,” he says.

  “We won’t go far.”

  I feel more able to speak freely out in the dark street. I don’t look at Frederick as I tell him everything. I roll up my filthy sleeve to show him the scar of red mud on my arm. It gives me a chill to see it there, this strip of mud flesh, like a part of Ragg Rock. He touches it lightly with his fingertips, but I feel nothing there at all. A blank spot on my arm, nerveless.

  “You mustn’t vanish again until we know more,” he says to me. “It’s terrifying to think that they can reach you now that they’ve shed your blood.”

  “I won’t,” I say. “What’s happening back at the house?”

  “I’m to get supplies first thing in the morning. We’re leaving the city and meeting the others at the farm.”

  “So Mrs. Och has given up on Ko Dan?”

  “He is either dead or locked up, and Si Tan is set against us. The Ru are out searching the city. I shouldn’t even have come here, but I had to see you. Bianka and I have both tried to persuade Mrs. Och to reconsider, but she insists she can’t trust you.”

  “I don’t trust her,” I say.

  “Do you trust anyone?”

  It stings to be asked that. Is that really what he thinks? That I trust nobody?

  “Yes,” I say. “Quite a few people. Including you. I trust you completely, as a matter of fact.”

  Silence at that. I don’t dare look at him. I carry on in a rush, the words coming out of my mouth before I’ve thought them through.

  “I’ve just found out that before I was born…I mean, just before I was born, my mother went to Ragg Rock and made some kind of deal, or I think she did, with Lidari. To bring him into the world using the Ankh-nu. And since she went to try to kill Casimir right after, I suppose she got some power or magic from him in return. I think…I’m afraid that is what I am—just some monster from Kahge. What if that’s true, and everything I think I am is false, and being Julia is a…a disguise?” He tries to stop me, but I can’t stop now, my worst nightmares fully taking shape in words for the first time and pouring out of me. “What if the thing inside me decides to shrug off this disguise, and everything I think I am is gone, just sloughed off, and I’m something else, something horrible? Maybe that would explain it—why I kidnapped Theo, why I have to try so hard—I mean, it feels like such hard work just to be decent and to do what is right, and perhaps I’m wrong anyway, about what is right….”

  “All of that sounds very human indeed,” says Frederick, gripping my hands. “I don’t know the truth of it, Julia. But suppose you discovered for certain that your origins were not what you thought? That, in fact, you are somehow from Kahge?” Seeing my face, he holds up a hand. “I don’t believe that is
true. But I am asking you, if it were—what would change? Would you stop caring about Theo? Abandon your attempt to help him?”

  “You don’t understand,” I cry. “I’m afraid I might not be in control of my feelings. That they could change, if I’m so changeable. That I could be…I don’t know, overthrown from within.”

  “You have crossed over to somewhere—whether it is Kahge or not, I can’t say. You have been something else and yet still who you are, unchanged within, and you have returned. Whatever your powers, whatever else may be inside you, you are and have been Julia, with Julia’s feelings and hopes and tremendous courage, with Julia’s goodness, all along.”

  “My goodness and a couple of pennies would buy you a cup of coffee,” I say—a feeble old joke of my father’s. Funny I remember it now.

  Frederick shakes his head. “That’s not true. You need to forgive yourself.”

  “I’m trying to earn it.”

  “Saving Theo won’t change what you did,” he says. “You have earned Bianka’s friendship, and mine, in spite of what you did, by being the brave and selfless person you’ve chosen to be, minute after minute and day after day.”

  I feel something collapse inside me, and I practically fall into his arms. He holds me close against his chest, so I can hear his steady heartbeat against my ear. Standing here in the dark road, terrified and exhausted and caked with dried mud, I want so badly to believe that he’s right. How could I feel so much, if I am not Julia? Then it occurs to me that I’m getting him very muddy, and I pull away, suddenly awkward.

  “I should get back,” I say. “I need to speak to Dek when he comes home.”

  “I’ll take up your case again with Mrs. Och,” he says. “But she is not easy to sway once she’s made up her mind.”

  We go back to the house, where Wyn is dozing in his chair, and I give Frederick the basket of letters.

  “Take these to Mrs. Och,” I say. “Maybe there will be a clue about the Ankh-nu, if we’re lucky.”

  “I’ll go through them all tonight,” he promises.

  We say our goodbyes, and I close the door behind him.