Julia Unbound

by Catherine Egan

  “So Casimir will have you remove it when I let him put his contract in me,” I say.

  The mechanic inclines his head. “Has Pia explained the contract to you?”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “The contract takes ten to fourteen days to grow toward the brain,” says the mechanic. “Once it embeds in your brain, it is fully functional. In the interim, the poison inside your brother is Casimir’s insurance policy. The sac of poison will take longer to degrade than the contract takes to reach your brain, I promise you. As soon as the contract is complete, binding you to Casimir, I will remove the poison and your brother will be fine. Better than fine. I must recommend against seeking somebody else to perform the surgery. It would be all too easy for an ordinary surgeon to puncture the sac and kill your brother. Likewise, poison fixed inside the body is too delicate and dangerous for a tool as clumsy as witchcraft to safely extract.”

  “Are you so sure I can’t compel you?” I ask, low.

  He looks frightened—clever man—but he says: “I am not brave, but my contract will prevent me. If you harm me, I will be unable to perform the surgery when Casimir permits it.”

  “It’s true,” says Pia behind me. “His instructions were explicit. He cannot do it without Casimir’s consent.”

  Casimir has found a way to protect himself from me and a way to compel me. For now I’m at his mercy.

  “Don’t do it, Julia,” says Dek wearily. “There’s no way for this to end well. It’s all right. I mean—I’m all right.”

  I turn to Pia again. “So Casimir puts his contract in me and then what? Tells me to go fetch Theo for him?”

  “Yes,” says Pia. “If he doesn’t find Theo himself. First he wants you back in Spira City. Frayne is still an important piece in Casimir’s game. The king is dying, power is shifting, and Casimir is too careful a man to let his influence there lapse. The coming weeks will be key in determining the future of Frayne.”

  Dek shakes his head at me, one sad doomed-man eye, one glass-nothing eye, but I’ll find a way, I will.

  “He won’t keep his word,” says Dek. “You know that.”

  “I killed his sister,” I say to Pia. “He wants revenge.”

  “Casimir wants to control you more than he wants to punish you,” says Pia. “He wants Frayne in his power and he wants you in his power. He wants The Book of Disruption above all, but that is an uncertain venture, and he will try to get it without risking any of the power he has already accumulated. Casimir always plays the long game. Make yourself useful—better yet, indispensable—and your brother will reap the reward.”

  “Julia, I’m done for.” Dek is so calm when he says this, holding my hand in his good hand, his Dek hand. “I’ve made my peace with this. I won’t let you throw your life away.”

  But I think Pia is right about Casimir, and whatever Dek says, I’ve just watched him practice buttoning a shirt with his new hand—what is that, if not hope for a future? I’ll find a way, but I need time. Ten days is time.

  “I have conditions,” I say to Pia.

  Dek is so determined not to let me go with the mechanic that, in the end, Savio has to knock him out with sleeping serum while Pia holds him. I slam my heart shut like an empty box as they take him down. It’s something I’ve gotten better at—like the vanishing.

  The light overhead is an electric light, the mechanic tells me. It is blazing white, too bright to look at. My arm is strapped to the arm of the chair, my body bound. Ridiculous, of course—as if these bindings are what will keep me in the chair.

  I say as much: “It’s no use tying me up. Hasn’t anyone told you that?”

  “It’s so that you don’t jump or twitch,” says the mechanic. “But it shouldn’t hurt. I’ve numbed your arm.”

  Indeed, I feel nothing at all below the elbow. He unscrews the lid of a jar on the table, and with long tweezers, he pulls something out of the jelly: a little amber bead, the size of a pinhead, its waving tentacles thin as thread. My throat clenches as he places it on my wrist.

  “What is it?” I make myself ask. “How does it bind me to him?”

  I watch with fast-rising horror as the thing crawls across my wrist and then burrows into the skin, disappearing. I feel a faraway burning sensation. The amber bead is gone, a tiny bulge under my skin, and behind it a glint of silver appears in the little hole it has left behind it, edged with blood.

  “They are called the nuyi,” murmurs the mechanic, leaning over my arm. The drop of silver is spreading, and I can smell my skin burning around it. “A sort of parasite. It attaches to the brain and conquers the will. They secrete this substance to seal themselves inside. We used to put them directly into the brain via the ear, but we found that all too often the body rejected them and they died, or the patient went mad and died. They attach most effectively if inserted when smaller and given a chance to grow inside the body as they move through it. It will strengthen, feeding on your blood, and your body will not fight it by the time it reaches the brain.”

  That doesn’t answer my question as to how it works, but I suppose I didn’t expect a real answer.

  “So I can pull it out before it reaches my brain?”

  I know the answer to this, because I’ve seen it, but I’d still like his assurance.

  “Before it attaches to the brain, it can be surgically removed,” he says carefully. “But then your brother’s death would be assured. I hope you will not be so rash. Your brother is a remarkable young man. I would like the opportunity to save his life. There are worse fates than serving Casimir.”

  The silvery disk is hardening. The mechanic cleans the area and wraps a bandage around it. I think of Ling in Tianshi, the girl my brother loved, the fraying bandage on her wrist. The girl who pulled the nuyi out.

  “What about you?” I ask him. “When he put the contract in you, were you willing?”

  He raises his wet eyes to mine and says tonelessly, “I regret nothing.”

  A shudder seizes me, and I close my eyes against the blaze of electric light. I’ll cut my own throat before serving Casimir. But it won’t come to that. I just need to get home, get Dek away from these people. I hang on to that thought: home. I have ten days to figure this out. This is Day One.

  “Tell me how she died,” he says.

  Though he’d expressed his desire not to see me again, Casimir walks down to the jetty with Gennady. Gennady’s freedom was one of my conditions. There are things I need to ask him. I hadn’t expected Casimir to so readily agree to let Dek and Gennady leave with me. He holds all the cards; he doesn’t have to make concessions. Maybe he’s glad to be rid of them. Maybe he believes I’d make good my threat to pull his contract right out of my wrist if he didn’t let me take them. Maybe he doesn’t think it makes a difference.

  Dek, Pia, and I watch their approach from the deck of the boat. They don’t look a bit like brothers. Casimir is spindly, spiderish in his gleaming boots and bulky fur cape. His doublet, wrists, fingers, and neck glint with jewels, and his skin looks as if it is stretched too tight over his sharp bones. Gennady is the youngest of the Xianren—the adventurer, the seducer. While Casimir is tall for a man, Gennady is a giant. Now he looks like an injured bear. Pia tells me that all his power has been cut out of him, his ability to transform or speak any magic stripped away by Shey, his veins full of her writing, shot through with silver and ink.

  With what appears to be some effort, Casimir looks at me. I am still wearing Pia’s things—her tall boots, her leather trousers and jacket adjusted for me on our long sea voyage. She is surprisingly good with a needle and thread. My hair has grown out a bit, but it is still too short to pin up, so it just hangs in my face, a ragged mop.

  “You’ll have to prettify her somehow,” he calls to Pia. “She can’t turn up at the Fraynish court looking like that.”

  “I’ll see to
it,” says Pia.

  “If she fails to convince, you might as well cut her throat,” he adds carelessly, and Pia gives a brief nod of assent. It’s a petty threat, as Casimir’s threats go, and I ignore it.

  Gennady lumbers up the gangplank onto the boat, shouldering his way past Pia. I wonder if he’s remembering how she snapped his leg like a twig. Pia goes down to speak with Casimir. He bends close to her, murmuring into her ear, and then she returns to us on deck. The crew raises the gangplank; they let the sails unfurl and catch the wind. Casimir does not stay to watch us sail away but turns and walks back to his fortress, a gray rock squatting on a gray rock.

  Dek and I huddle together by the starboard gunwale, faces pointed into the salty wind. The question of what we are going to do next has fizzled to the agreement that we will try to find Esme—Spira City’s most renowned crook and our longtime employer. She’ll help us, if she can. Now he is telling me about his journey from Yongguo.

  “It was like a big metal cylinder. We climbed through a hatch in the top, and then the hatch closed and it traveled under the water. It took less than two weeks to reach Nago Island, so it traveled tremendously fast, whatever it was.”

  “And they had Mrs. Och’s body too?” I ask.

  “I suppose they must have, but I never saw her. I was locked up. I didn’t try to escape, obviously. How could I, underwater, in the middle of the ocean?” He flexes the new hand, staring at it like it is a species of animal he’s never seen before. “I wouldn’t have let them take me—but Pia had Ling. She said she’d let her go if I came quietly. I couldn’t just let them kill her.”

  My throat constricts as I remember slamming Ling against the wall, the way she pulled the nuyi, bloody and gleaming, out of her arm. He doesn’t need to know that she was in Casimir’s employ, and I don’t tell him. We watch the gray water rocking on either side of the boat, the horizon tilting back and forth. The unsteady world.

  “I found Ko Dan,” I tell him at last. “But it wasn’t him who put the Book of Disruption fragment in Theo at all. Somebody had stolen his body using the Ankh-nu—that little double-spouted pot I told you about. Si Tan said only Marike could use the Ankh-nu. He said she’d been using it to live forever, switching from body to body, and when he saw that memory of mine, the one where Ma had the Ankh-nu, he thought—”

  “Julia, stop,” he says.

  “I’m just telling you what Si Tan said,” I continue in a rush, pushing past his resistance. Because who can I say this to if not Dek? How do I face any of it if he doesn’t know? “He thought our ma was Marike. And Mrs. Och thought Ma hid Lidari inside me, and that’s why I can vanish, cross over to Kahge. I’m not saying I believe it, but if it is true, Dek, then…” I break off. Then she’s still alive. But somehow I can’t say it. Not with the way he’s looking at me.

  “What are you saying? That Ma was the first Eshriki Phar, leader of the greatest witch empire the world has ever known, a witch who found a way to live forever? Do you realize how completely mad that sounds?”

  I shake my head.

  “Don’t you remember her?” he says more gently, and there’s something like pity in his good eye now. “On the barge, at the Cleansing?”

  “It might not have been…I mean, if she could change bodies.”

  “But then who was it on the barge? The look on her face, Julia. We saw her drown.”

  “But she was so calm. Didn’t you find that strange? How she never seemed afraid?”

  “She looked terrified,” he says, and then we just stare at each other.

  It was ten years ago and easily the worst moment of our lives. Does either of us really remember her expression from a distance, through our own terror and helplessness? Why the difference?

  “I stand by what I said before,” he says. “We don’t know if the vision you had of Ma with the Ankh-nu was real. You’re making a huge leap based on stories from people you’ve no reason to trust and a sort of dream.”

  I can’t explain it—how real the vision was, how sure I am. If I say more I’ll burst into tears like a child. So I just say, “You’re right.” And I tuck it away in a corner of my heart to think about later, because thinking on it too much is like handling broken glass or burning twigs—a few moments only and I need to put it aside.

  “Here’s what I know,” he says. “Our mother is dead, and you are my sister, Julia. You have to believe that.”

  I shrink back from the look on his face. “All right,” I whisper.

  He turns back to the water. There is something awful in his expression that I don’t know how to interpret. I feel like he’s gone a million miles away. I tuck myself against him for comfort. The sea is so deep, the sky is so high, and whatever lies beyond it all goes on perhaps forever. All I want is some hope that we will survive this. I don’t know how to think about Ma, or what I am. I just want to be Julia and Dek in the city again.

  The four of us sit together in the cramped galley for supper. The cook has worked wonders in a kitchen the size of a cupboard. We are served honeyed duck cooked with apples, black spiced rice, miraculous little soufflés, and Sirillian wine from Casimir’s own wine cellar.

  “Good wine,” says Dek. He raises his glass, with the slightest glimmer of Dek-like humor—a toast to the absurdity of our dinner party.

  I raise my glass as well. Pia stares at us, mechanical goggles whirring, as if this is some foreign custom she doesn’t understand. Her normally sleek helmet of black hair is rough and tangled with wind and salt, making her look even more lunatic than usual. Gennady empties his plate in approximately two bites and slugs back his wine. The glass looks like a thimble in his big hand.

  “So how does this contract work?” I ask Pia. “Can Casimir see me or hear me?”

  “It does not work at all yet,” she says. “Not until it reaches the brain. And then it is simply a matter of will—his over your own. You’ll see. It is an interesting experience.”

  Gennady gives a grunt of disgust, pours himself another glass of wine, empties it.

  “Four of us,” says Pia. She takes out a deck of cards, letting them fly from one hand to the other. “We could play Salto Mortale.”

  “What would the stakes be?” asks Dek.

  “I have nothing,” says Gennady.

  “One of your pretty blue eyes, perhaps?” suggests Pia. “A finger? Not bad. The finger of an immortal. I’m sure witches would pay a fortune for it. An ear?”

  This is the sort of conversation I’ve gotten used to. Pia can be quite disgusting.

  “I could bet my glass eye,” says Dek, laughing along. He is drinking too much, too fast.

  Pia deals out. “If you’d rather not shed blood, we could bet our secrets. What else do we have of value, after all?”

  “I don’t have any of those left either,” says Gennady.

  “Then whoever loses the hand tells what they love most or what they fear most,” says Pia.

  I lose first. What I love most: Dek. What I fear most: losing Dek.

  When Dek loses, he looks at his hinged hand and says, “I fear…that my sister, who is worth a thousand of me, will try to sacrifice herself for me, which would be a tremendous waste. I fear…” His face twists suddenly. “Oh, stars, I could go on and on. I have an awful lot of fears, now that I stop to think about it.”

  He says nothing of love. He pours himself another glass of wine. He’s keeping up with Gennady, who is twice his size and immortal besides. Pia gathers the cards, letting them dance between her hands in a whirling shuffle. The little room sways, the gas lamp sputters.

  I lose again, drawing all spades but none that are any good to me. My answers have not changed. Gennady loses next, the queen of hearts hobbled by twos and threes of the wrong color.

  “What I feared most has come to pass already,” he answers. “Irrelevance, and nothing left to love. Or not en
ough left of me to feel love. There is nothing to fear without love. Fear is love’s shadow, the other side of its coin.”

  Pia does not lose. Not once.

  “She’s probably cheating,” says Dek. “Let me deal.”

  It’s hard work for him, with his clumsy new hand. He gives up and does it one-handed. Still Pia wins.

  “Pity we’re not playing for gold,” she says.

  Dek rises unsteadily.

  “I’m going out for some air.” He kisses me on top of my head. “I love you, Julia.”

  I look up at him in surprise. Pia’s goggles whir. Dek disappears up the narrow steps, and the three of us sit in silence for a moment. Then Gennady says, “He’s probably going to throw himself into the sea.”

  The truth of that lands like a blow—the way Dek was staring at the waves earlier, the way he’s been drinking so resolutely all evening. I rocket out of my seat and up the steps after him. Pia is right behind me.

  It is dark, the sky and the water barely distinguishable. I hear a shout from a deckhand and then I see Dek, a shadow by the gunwale. He raises a hand in a little half-wave and tips himself over the side. A blow to the side of my head sends me reeling face-first into the deck. I can’t see, can’t breathe, scrambling in what might be the wrong direction, trying to get to my feet. I can hear the water, and I lurch toward it, try to call him, but it comes out a pitiful, airless squeak: “Dek.” I find the gunwale with my hands.

  “Easy, girly. She’s got him.”

  That’s the deckhand, helping me up. I blink and blink until I can see the moving darkness of the water, Pia’s white hand on the rope, the shape in her arms, my brother, my brother. Air pours into my lungs and then I can scream.