Julia Unbound

by Catherine Egan

  “Little that is not common knowledge.”

  “I think he might be something else too. He can’t taste anything, and he doesn’t seem to…feel anything. Like pain.”

  “There are entirely human disorders that leave their victims with loss of sensation,” she says. “You may be leaping to conclusions.”

  Seems to be the general opinion of every theory I come up with. I pull up my sleeve and show her the silver disk in my wrist, the red line crawling up my arm. The nuyi is nearly at my shoulder now. If this thing with the hermia doesn’t work, I’m going to have to get it out very soon.

  “Do you know what it is?” I ask her, and she nods. Of course she does. Liddy always seems to know everything. “It’s not all the way to my brain yet.”

  “How far?”

  I touch the spot on my upper arm.

  “Take it out now,” she says hoarsely. “I’ll do it for you.”

  “I can’t,” I say. “He’s put a sac of poison inside Dek. It’s disintegrating slowly. He’ll take it out in a week or so, but only if I leave the nuyi be.”

  She absorbs this information, looking at me closely, and then says: “Word is spreading that Mrs. Och is dead.”

  “She’s dead.” I leave it at that. Now is not the moment for my full confession.

  “And this…” She gestures at my dress, finer than anything she’s ever seen me wear. “Oh, Julia, what have you gotten yourself into?”

  “I’ll explain everything…later. Right now I need two things and I don’t have much time. Pia told me that the herb hermia would slow the nuyi down.”

  “Hermia is not an herb,” she says sharply. “It is highly toxic, a poison.”

  “All right—but it’s true, isn’t it, that it would slow down the nuyi?”

  “It would sicken you. Pia has never acted in your interests, Julia. She will never act in anyone’s interests but Casimir’s.”

  “I know. It’s hard to explain…but I think she wants to help me.”

  “Julia, listen to me.” She leans forward, fixing me with her sharp eyes, and she says, very slowly: “You are mistaken about that.”

  “Well, it’s the only idea I’ve got right now. I’ve got to try it, unless you know someone who could safely get this poison out of Dek.”

  “I will ask my friends for advice.”

  Liddy and her mysterious friends.

  “Fine. In the meantime, where can I find hermia?”

  “In the forests of Middle Arrekem,” she says, her eyes nearly disappearing into the pouches and folds around them.

  “So you aren’t going to help me?”

  “I am telling you not to poison yourself with hermia.”

  “I hoped you’d help me with the dosage.”

  “I want no part of it.”

  “Then I’ll find someone else. I wanted help from someone I trust. Someone who cares about me.”

  “And that’s me?”

  “Am I wrong?”

  Her hands are shaking slightly. She says, “If you are determined to poison yourself, come to me, and I will make sure you do not take too much.”

  “Can I get it in Spira City?”

  “Goro, the alchemist, will have some.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like it either,” I say. “One more thing. Have you heard of a witch called Silver Moya?”

  “Julia!” She gapes at me like I’ve sprouted a second head. “You must not go there.”

  “Frederick told me there was a Silver Moya in Spira City. I need to know where.”

  She says nothing.

  “Fine. I’ll ask Lady Laroche,” I say.

  I swear she tenses at that.

  “Marek and Son,” she snaps. “The clock maker. They are all in clock shops. You’ll need to tell them that your clock at home chimes every thirteen minutes. Julia—great stars!—I don’t know what is happening, but you should not tempt powers that can swallow you up.”

  “Too late,” I say. “I’ve been swallowed. Now I’m just trying not to be fully digested. So you know about Lady Laroche, then?”

  She nods and sags in her chair. She looks so old and feeble that my heart flutters a little.

  “You all right, Liddy?”

  “As well as can be expected, at my age.”

  “How old is that?”

  “Cheeky.” She manages a little grin. “This body is a weary sort of scaffolding, that’s all. Things are turning dark in Spira City. I am glad to see you again. I would not have wanted you to come looking and find me gone. But I’m thinking of moving on.”

  “Moving on?” It is impossible to imagine Spira City without Liddy. To me, she is as much a part of it as Mount Heriot or the river Syne. “Where would you go?”

  “The world is full of other places.”

  “Are things here really worse than they used to be?” I ask.

  “Witches have been fleeing Frayne for twenty years. Anyone who could get out got out. Now witches are flocking to Frayne, witches who were safe elsewhere, witches with no previous allegiance to Frayne, coming to a country that crushed the last attempt at revolution and drowned witches by the hundreds. They are coming in boats from Ingle, through the forests of Prasha, across the sea from Sirillia and North Arrekem. Why do you think that is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Perhaps you ought to find out.”

  The door to the Adder’s Switch is unlocked. Goro, the alchemist, is packing things into boxes while a sullen boy covered in blisters carries the full boxes out to a hackney in the street. I appear in the middle of the room, and the boy skitters out of my way, backing up against the wall, gawping at my fine dress. Goro looks up, his eyes milky with cataracts. I can’t resist a dramatic entrance sometimes.

  “I need hermia,” I tell him. “Liddy sent me.”

  That isn’t exactly true, but I know her name will save us the dance of whether I can be trusted.

  He releases a squeaky sigh. “Hermia? There are faster poisons.”

  “That’s the one I need.”

  “It is costly.”

  “How much?”

  “For an ounce…ten silver freyns. An ounce is enough to kill a man. If you want to poison a witch, you might need five or six ounces. Something else…well, it depends.”

  “An ounce will do,” I say.

  He puts on a pair of gloves and goes rummaging through his boxes. He takes a delicate bronze scale from one box, a bag of some curling brown root from another. He shaves a bit off the root, weighs it, and wraps it up for me with brisk professionalism.

  “A lot of witches coming through lately,” he says softly as I count out the money for him.

  “I’m not a witch,” I say, taking the package. “Why all the boxes? You going somewhere?”

  “South, to wait out the storm.”

  “The storm?”

  “Good luck. You should know it is an ugly death by hermia.”

  “Nobody is going to die, I hope. Why are witches coming to Frayne?”

  “Witches flock to trouble,” he says. “And that’s what’s coming. It’s a good time to get out of Spira City. There’s some advice for free.”

  * * *

  I stop at the market for lettuce and apples, and then go straight to the clock shop—Marek and Son. There’s a freckled boy at the desk, about my age.

  “You must be son and not Marek,” I say.

  “Dad passed away last year,” he says, bobbing his head.

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “Can I help you, miss?”

  “I’m looking for Silver Moya,” I say, remembering as I speak that I could be arrested and executed for this. Spira City is not Tianshi.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t
understand,” he says mildly.

  “Liddy sent me,” I say. “Oh, right—I mean my clock at home chimes every thirteen minutes.”

  “Perhaps you should talk to my mother in the back,” he says. “Go on through.”

  He opens a door behind the counter for me, and I pass into a tidy workshop with birdcages hanging from the ceiling. A middle-aged lady in a high-buttoned dress is polishing a grandfather clock.

  “Silver Moya?” I ask.

  She turns and looks me over, folding up her rag.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I need to see Ragg Rock,” I say.

  “Pardon me?” she repeats.

  “Do I have to say it to you as well? My clock at home chimes every thirteen minutes, all right?”

  She looks at me for a long moment and then goes and locks the door behind me. She takes some birdseed from her pocket, tosses it across a desk in the corner, and lets one of the birds out of its cage. The creature flutters over to the desk and starts pecking at the seed. Silver Moya—for I assume this is she—gets out a sheet of paper and a little ink dropper.

  “Am I supposed to…pay you?” I ask. I didn’t pay Silver Moya in Tianshi. I didn’t think of it. But nothing is ever free in Spira City.

  “This is a calling,” she says briskly. “Not a trade.” She hands me a pin. “Would you mind pricking your finger and squeezing a bit of blood into the dropper?”

  I do so, and she pours the ink mixed with a bit of blood into a cartridge, which she affixes to her modern pen. My blood is the request, revealing to Ragg Rock who wishes to enter and why.

  Silver Moya starts writing.

  As her pen glides across the paper, one layer after another seems to slip away from the surface of things, and the room begins to thrum. The ink is wet and very black, and I can feel my blood coursing through me, fast and warm, the nuyi burrowing its way up my arm, my heart beating, thud thud, and then everything goes still except the bird on the desk. A door next to the grandfather clock has opened. It is bright outside the door, a too-still counterfeit of Spira City dangling out there. The bird swoops out the door, and I follow as if a line ran between it and me, pulling me along after it. I dash out into the street, leaving Silver Moya still bent over her paper, immobile, the final drop of ink suspended between pen and paper. Stairs wind up over Cyrambel Temple, the river Syne rippling alongside it, strangely depthless. I climb up over the city, into the sky, after the bird, until it gives a sharp little cry and drops at my feet, feathers singed and smoking.

  There is a broken arch before me, and through it a mist and the outline of trees, black and bare. I step through the archway, and the sky below me is gone. The trees close around me, the ground turning soft under my feet, not quite like ground. Something with wings passes over my head with a whoosh. Something brushes against my arm. Strange lights hang in the fog among the trees, which are moving ever closer. I stumble through the wood and then out onto bare rock. A shadowy thing like a weasel but longer moves past me up the hill, fading to nothing as it goes.

  The black rock with the hut on top is the same. Coming down the winding path, I see Ragg Rock, red against the sky. Frederick limps behind her, pale as dust, and careening past them both, down the hill and into my arms, Theo—bigger, fiercer, filthy, and alive.

  Frederick and I sit on a ledge furred with gray moss, looking down at Ragg Rock and Theo. They are crouched at the edge of the stream below us, spearing fish and shouting with triumph whenever they get one. Beyond the stream lies the shadowed, spiky wood I came through, Spira City just a cloudy jumble of almost-buildings somewhere far below. The sky is a whitish gray over the craggy rock rising up behind us.

  Ragg Rock looks somehow realer than when I saw her last—her stone eyes set deeper in her face, shining with almost human brightness, her red-mud muscles moving in perfect imitation of the human body. Her expression too is more animated, more human and less made-of-mud, in spite of the little thumbprint, one of Theo’s, on her cheek. They are talking in some sort of pidgin they’ve concocted between them, part Fraynish and part who-knows-what.

  At first seeing Theo careening down the hill gave me a terrible fright. He was holding a small spear with flint at the end like a tiny warrior, his tight curls full of twigs and dead leaves, and he was covered with the red mud of the place. I half expected his teeth to be pointed when he smiled at me, his eyes to have gone pebble-hard like hers. But he was still Theo: nearly two years old now, sturdy fat legs, wide laughing mouth, his skin a lovely golden brown under the mud, his cheeks round and his belly sticking out. He pranced around the place naked like a fine little lord, hurling his spear at the half-animals that appeared from the wood, and I thought, I saved him, but also, What have I done? Making a small, motherless child call this place home? Giving him this red-mud creature as his nursemaid? After kissing my face and smearing mud all over me, he pulled back and said, “Whey Mama?”

  “She’s not here.”

  I could barely choke it out, crouched on the rocky shelf before him, his eyes shining with…hope, fear, what? I certainly couldn’t make myself say, “She’s dead, you’ll never see her again, you won’t remember her when you grow up, if you grow up, the odds of which are looking ever slimmer.”

  But as if he could read this, or some of it, in my expression, his face screwed up with sudden fury, he pulled back and punched me in the eye. I nearly fell over backward with the shock of it.

  “Mama!” he roared at me, and ran off in a fury—like I’m the one who tossed her over the side of the boat to drown. I didn’t manage to save her, that much is true, but I tried, oh, I tried. Now he seems to have forgotten it, busy with the task of spearing half-transparent fish with Ragg Rock. They manage to catch the more substantial fish, but most of them disintegrate into fog as soon as they are speared.

  Frederick rubs a pale hand over his face. His beard is long and so fair it looks almost white, his cheeks hollow. I’ve told him everything that’s happened since I saw him last; he listened closely but showed little reaction.

  “Theo looks well,” I say, not sure how to take his silence. “You, less so.”

  My voice sounds light. I feel light, but not lighthearted. Theo is safe. I did that, at least: I’ve kept him alive, where Casimir cannot reach him.

  “We’re managing,” says Frederick, in a low voice so Ragg Rock and Theo cannot hear him. “I’ve been waiting…for you, but we can’t stay here much longer. We need to find someplace else. Someplace in the world.”

  “Not yet,” I say.

  “I do take him to the world, Julia. He wouldn’t survive if I didn’t.”

  “What do you mean?” My heart plunges.

  “He needs proper food. Real food. This stuff we eat here…it tastes like it’s disappearing as you eat it. It’s not just the food either. It’s the air, or the light, I don’t know. There’s no sun. We lasted a week, and I thought we were dying. Theo looked terrible, sort of vacant in the eyes, and his stomach was hurting. It was Ragg Rock’s idea. She could see he wouldn’t survive. She can let us into the world anywhere, so every other day we go to the Silver Moya in Vassali, in Southern Ishti. Ragg Rock trusts her. We stay in the courtyard of her shop. We don’t venture into town. She brings us food to eat and some to take back with us, and he can spend an afternoon playing in the sun. It does us both a world of good. He spends most of the time trying to get out of the courtyard, of course, and he cries and screams like anything when we have to come back. He adores Ragg Rock, but he feels trapped here.”

  “He is trapped,” I say, trying to wrap my head around the idea of them popping into Southern Ishti for visits. “Does he talk about Bianka?”

  “He asks for her, and cries in bursts, and then he seems to forget. I don’t know how much he understands. He sleeps poorly. Ragg Rock likes to comfort him—she doesn’t sleep, and I think she gets lonely when we do. It’s diff
icult, anyway—there’s no night or day here. I seem to need a great deal more sleep than I used to. Hounds, I feel so helpless, Julia.” He drops his face into his hands.

  I was seven when I lost my own mother, far older than Theo. Old enough to understand that she was gone for good, and how, and why. But I remember how sometimes, in the weeks and months and even years that followed, I would almost forget—busy with my life and the things I was doing, laughing and having a good time with Dek or my friends—and it would seem that she was still at home, waiting for me. I would remember, or be reminded, and each time I was winded by the truth that came snatching my joy away all over again, the same breathless horror and twisting grief, as fresh and vivid as ever.

  I don’t know how a child as young as Theo is supposed to grieve if he can’t even understand why she’s gone, where she’s gone. Does he know she did everything she could to save him? That she untied him from her as the water pulled her down, let me take him, thinking in her last moments only of him? She gave him to me, and I’ve left him here with a man too weakened to protect him. There were no good choices, but was this the best one? Could I have done better? What would she say to me, if she saw how I am trying to save him? Oh, Bianka. She trusted me with her child, but I’ve never wronged anybody so much as her and Theo.

  “Ragg Rock is getting very attached to Theo,” says Frederick. “It frightens me a bit, watching her rocking him and singing to him when he can’t sleep. I don’t think it’s…he shouldn’t bond so closely with whatever she is, nor she with him. But I can’t intervene. She sees me mainly as competition for his affection and as the person who might take him away from her. Though even she can see he needs the sunlight and food we get in Vassali, and she cannot take him there herself. I can’t tell what she’s thinking.”

  Indeed, where once she helped me, she is wary of me this time and stays close to Theo. She asked me if I’d come to take him back and was visibly relieved when I said no. I wonder what she would have done if I’d said yes. If she might not let me in, another time.