Julia Unbound

by Catherine Egan

  “I don’t know what to do,” I say. “Maybe the hermia will buy me a little time, but even then…”

  “If you can get Zara on the throne, you’ll have an ally in a position of real power,” he says. “With an army of witches too. It might be enough to take on Casimir.” He pauses. “What is Lady Laroche like?”

  “A bit mad, I think,” I tell him. “Quite glamorous.”

  “Mrs. Och held her in high regard,” says Frederick. “She considered her an impressive person, but unpredictable. Be careful with her.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “Good. Perhaps I can even help you from here. Frayne has destroyed most of its old texts that reference magic and folklore, but Vassali has an impressive library. I’ll see if I can find out anything about the nuyi.”

  Ragg Rock and Theo head up the hill with their shadowy fish.

  “Come,” says Ragg Rock, gesturing at us imperiously.

  I help Frederick to his feet. He stumbles a few times walking up the hill, holding on to my shoulder and leaning heavily on me. He is thinner than I’ve ever seen him, his back stooped. By the time we reach the top, he is gasping for breath.

  “Is it being in Ragg Rock that’s doing this to you?” I ask anxiously.

  “I don’t think so. Mrs. Och took too much of my life-force that last time. She left me enough to survive, but only just. Not enough to fully recover.”

  Ragg Rock and Theo light a fire outside the hut now, fastening their fish to a spit. Most of them crumble instantly to ash, but a few of them sizzle, like real fish.

  “How is Professor Baranyi?” asks Frederick.

  “I haven’t spoken to him,” I confess. “He was very upset when I told them about Mrs. Och.”

  “I imagine he was.”

  His voice is gentle and there is no accusation in his eyes. I tell myself that if Frederick believes I did only what I had to do, surely it must be true.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he says, and then laughs a little, a glimmer of defiance coming into his expression. “I have a lot of time to think these days. I can’t take part in the revolution, but when this is over, I hope to be part of building the new Frayne. I’d like to collaborate on a book with Professor Baranyi—give a thorough account of the history of magic in Frayne, lay out some of my ideas for a just world. If you do speak to him, tell him I am sustained by the things we talked about, and that I look forward to working with him again.”

  A just world. Oh, Frederick. I’ve missed him.

  “Of course,” I say.

  Apparently forgetting that he punched me on arrival, Theo comes into the hut, grabs the dog-eared book of Yongwen fairy tales we brought here with him, and throws himself into my lap.

  “My stoy!” he says, opening it and pointing at the first page.

  “I can’t read Yongwen,” I say, kissing the top of his curly head.

  “Make it stoy!” he says, as if I’m very stupid, and then begins to tell the story himself, turning the pages and nestling comfortably against me.

  Ragg Rock stands in the entrance, watching us.

  “He hasn’t tried to draw anything, then?” I ask. Theo is not a witch, but he has a fragment of The Book of Disruption inside him. We can’t know all of its effects, but one of them seems to be that he can will the things he draws into being.

  Frederick and Ragg Rock exchange a look.

  “We try to keep a close eye, but there have been…some small incidents,” says Frederick uneasily. “There’s a three-headed rabbit-like creature about Theo’s size loping around here somewhere. Sometimes it sings in Bianka’s voice, which is distressing for all of us.”

  “Holy Nameless,” I say in a strangled voice.

  “Indeed. A few other odd little creatures that fit in fine here. Nothing big, thank the Nameless. It does seem that whatever he draws comes to life, but fortunately it is restricted to drawing. So far, anyway. I hope as he gets older he will be able to control it.”

  “No modeling clay for him, then,” I mutter.

  “Dwaw is bad,” says Theo placidly, as if by rote. And then he says something in his made-up language to Ragg Rock. She laughs and looks away from us.

  “I wanted to ask you something,” I say to Ragg Rock.

  “Not surprised,” she snaps back, in my own accent and tone.

  “You let my mother, Ammi, take Lidari into the world using the Ankh-nu,” I say. “There are some who think that she…my mother, I mean…was actually Marike. In a new body.”

  Ragg Rock recoils at that, making a muddy hissing sound in her throat. Theo looks up from his book, startled.

  “No,” she says. “I would not let Marike come back here. No.”

  “I wondered if she might have found a way to…trick you. But maybe it’s not true.”

  “Not true!” she shouts.

  “I just can’t figure how my mother came to have the Ankh-nu in the first place.”

  She shakes her head, still hissing.

  “You’re sure?” I ask, and she turns her back on me, goes out to check on the fish. I listen to Theo’s half-Fraynish babble, telling me the stories from his book. I’d like to stay, holding on to him, but it’s clear I’m not going to get any more answers from Ragg Rock, and I can feel the nuyi in my arm. I have so little time.

  Ragg Rock brings in a cooked fish. “This is because of him,” she says proudly.

  “My fish!” cries Theo.

  “What do you mean, because of him?” I ask, but she clams up again, looking at me with something disconcertingly close to hatred in those pebble eyes.

  I promise to return as soon as I can. When he realizes I’m leaving, Theo howls and clings to my leg. Ragg Rock has to peel him off me. I can hear him screaming Lala! Lala! as I go down the hill and into the strange wood. Emerging from the wood onto the stairs that wind down toward Cyrambel Temple and the city, I look back, but Ragg Rock is gone. With each step the stairs suspended in the sky melt to nothing behind me, the city a disjointed puzzle below, like a badly made model of a city. When I step off the last stair into the street, it vanishes behind me and there is a shift: the false city comes to life again, everything so real it hurts, the air bursting with sound, and I am home.

  Telegram to Lord Casimir, Nago Island: HORTHY IN OFFICE ALL DAY STOP BITTEN BY RAT STOP FEELS NO PAIN TASTES NOTHING STOP WILL VISIT KING TOMORROW STOP JULIA COOPERATIVE STOP

  “Innocent people!” snorts Lady Laroche. “That is a fantasy! You might as well talk to me of unicorns.”

  There is no place bleaker than the Edge at dawn. It is gray and damp, an unpleasant chill in the air, the shabby buildings and narrow lanes holding close the violence, the terrible choices and terrible luck, the dead ends and lost hopes, the hundreds of commonplace tragedies that have made up its night. At this hour, you can feel the despair of it, wrung out and weary.

  I’d imagined everyone at the Marrow would be asleep, but when I go down I find the scarred old woman in the bar gathering up filthy plates. One of the tables has been knocked over, and she rights it with a grunt.

  “Hello,” I say, and she swivels her ruined face to look at me.

  I remember how she cheered them on when they had a go at me. In fairness I ought to hate her too, but a single look at her is enough to know what kind of muck her life has dragged her through. I can’t help but pity any woman who has wound up in the Edge with men like these. Perhaps I ought to pity the men too, but I’ve only so much pity to spare and it doesn’t go to those who once tried to rip my clothes off.

  “Oho, you,” she says, a glint in her eye. “All these fine dresses you’ve got now! Must be nice.”

  I slept only a few hours at the hotel and put on a new dress in a hurry this morning, making another poor attempt to powder my face in the half-light, but I still look terribly grand for the Edge.

>   “Is Dek asleep?”

  “Oughtn’t to tell you, but I s’pose it don’t matter if I do or if I don’t, given you can slip around invisible,” she says, and cackles. “They’re all upstairs. Far left door is Torne’s.”

  I go up and knock. Esme opens the door, shirtsleeves rolled up over her powerful forearms, pistol at her hip. She pulls me inside, relief breaking across her face.

  Torne, Dek, Princess Zara, and Dorje Tsewang, the woman I delivered the letter to at the Pear Tree Inn, are sitting around a table together. I won’t deny I’m surprised at this particular grouping.

  “Julia!” cries Dek cheerfully.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask Zara. “I mean, aren’t you supposed to be…in hiding?”

  “I took a hackney,” she says. “I ought to be getting back, though.”

  She is wearing a plain dress and a hooded cloak, damp from the light drizzle. She looks like a merchant’s daughter. I suppose it would not occur to anybody, least of all a hackney driver, that this stout girl with an overlong nose intends to overthrow the Crown and rule Frayne.

  Torne sees me glancing at the chart full of figures spread across the table, and he hastily rolls it up.

  “I’m not here to pry into your revolutionary secrets,” I scoff at him, though in fact I’m wildly curious.

  “She works for Casimir,” says Torne quietly, to the tabletop, but I know this is meant for Esme.

  “I understand the situation,” Esme tells him sharply. “We are finished here, are we not?”

  “I will send a message this evening,” says Dorje Tsewang, rising smoothly. I see a curved blade at her belt as she pulls on her coat. She gives me the briefest smile and goes out, with Torne close behind her.

  “Lady Laroche is eager to see you again,” Zara says to me, pulling her hood over her head and making to follow the other two.

  “I’ll stop by later,” I reply.

  When it is just Esme and Dek and me, Dek reaches over and tousles my hair.

  “Stop it!” I say. “Do you know how long it took Csilla to get these bleeding hair extensions on? I came looking for you, actually. I’m going to visit Liddy. She said she was going to ask around about your poison problem. What happened with the magical photographs yesterday?”

  “It’s not magic,” he says. “But I did get to see some odd gray pictures that they claim are of my heart. There is something there—other than my heart, I mean. Presumably the poison. The surgeon said he couldn’t see how it was attached or what the nature of the sac was. He was awfully jittery when we asked if it would be possible to remove it without rupture, so it looks like that’s out, which we’d rather suspected, anyway.”

  I’d let myself hope too hard. For a moment, it’s a struggle to take a breath. But I do, and then another. Despair is a strong current, but I need to keep swimming against it as long as I’ve got strength to do so.

  “We need to get our hands on this mechanic,” says Esme.

  “No good. It’s Casimir we’ve got to persuade,” I say.

  Esme’s jaw works briefly and then she says, “Dek, I’d like to speak with Julia privately.”

  Dek nods and goes out, and Esme closes the door behind him.

  “Early meeting,” I say, suddenly nervous. “Does Lady Laroche know the princess is meeting you here? I know she doesn’t know about Dorje Tsewang. Who is she, anyway? Why is the princess dealing with Xanuhans?”

  I’m babbling. Esme doesn’t answer me, her gaze unwavering.

  “Hounds, you don’t have to tell me anything. I know you’re all worried Casimir will get it out of me.”

  “Tell me how to help you,” says Esme.

  That nearly brings me to tears all of a sudden. “Well, Liddy’s going to help,” I say. “There’s this herb that will slow the nuyi down a bit. If I can keep it from reaching my brain long enough but fool Casimir into thinking it’s attached, we reckon he’ll have his mechanic take the poison out of Dek. Then I can take the nuyi out too.”

  When I say it out loud, it sounds ludicrous, hopeless.

  “We? Who is we?”

  “Well, me. And Liddy.”

  Nameless knows I’m not going to tell her this was Pia’s idea.

  “And Liddy thinks it will work?”

  Blast, if she talks to Liddy, she’ll know how opposed Liddy is to the whole thing. I nod. Esme’s busy. I hope she won’t be visiting Liddy anytime soon.

  “Julia,” she sighs. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “About…what?”

  There’s so much I didn’t tell her.

  “Kahge,” she says, and I shrivel inside.

  “I just…couldn’t.” I stare at my hands. “It’s too strange and horrible. I didn’t want you to see me differently.”

  “Sit, please,” she says, gesturing at a chair.

  I sit, because when Esme tells you to do something, generally you do it. She has that way about her.

  “I do not like your plan,” she says. “You risk everything in allowing Casimir’s thing inside you. We’ll take it out today and find another way to help Dek.”

  “No,” I say. “No. You heard what he said—they can’t operate on him. This is the only way.”

  “Julia!” She crashes her fist onto the table, and I jump out of the chair. I’ve never been on the receiving end of one of Esme’s short, brutal explosions of violence, but I know enough to fear her anger. “Casimir is trying to take possession of you. Under no circumstances must you give him that chance. We will take the nuyi out now. I have a doctor in the Twist who can do it. I will not accept refusal.”

  There’s no point arguing with her, so I dash for the door. She takes one long step toward me, grabs my arm. I shake her loose and vanish.

  “Esme’s very upset.”

  Thank the Nameless: Dek is waiting for me outside Liddy’s, and Esme isn’t.

  “Does she know you’re here?” I ask.

  “No—she had to leave. There’s a lot going on. Anyway, she knows she can’t actually make you do anything.”

  “Good.”

  “She’s not wrong, though, Julia. You do need to get that thing out of your arm. We’re all agreed on that.”

  “I will,” I say. “Please trust me. Come on. You haven’t seen Liddy in an age.”

  Liddy is very interested to see Dek’s new arm and leg. She examines the hinges at his knuckles and a big one at his elbow I hadn’t seen yet, then holds his face in her liver-spotted hands and peers at his glass eye. His Scourge scars and the stitched-shut empty socket never bothered me, but that staring glass eyeball makes me shiver.

  “What do you think of all this?” she asks him.

  He hesitates for a long moment, and I wonder why I hadn’t thought to ask him that myself. Why I assumed he’d be glad to have a more functional arm and leg than before. But in fact, I can see for myself that trying to use his new limbs slows him down.

  “It’s easier to go out,” he says at last. “I don’t look like a Scourge survivor anymore.”

  “Ah,” she says, and waits for the rest. It comes in a rush.

  “The mechanic said it would get easier to use the limbs as I got used to them. I reckon he’s right. But my problem was never that I couldn’t use my arm and leg. Everything is designed for two hands, two legs, two eyes—that’s how it is, but I learned to get around well enough. The problem was that people could see the Scourge on me, and the world didn’t want me. Now I go where I like, but if I could have chosen, I’d have wanted the world to change rather than me. I feel as if I’m in disguise. Every time a shopkeeper takes my money or a barkeep brings me a drink, I think that if they knew the truth, if they saw my face as it was before, they’d turn me out. I’m getting angry about how I was treated. I couldn’t afford to be angry before. It might have eaten me up. But now that I can
go where I like, do as I like, be treated like anyone else, I am angry that they ever dared to stop me, spit at me.” He stops abruptly, flushed and a little breathless. “It tires me out, honestly, feeling so angry. And then there’s knowing that something next to my heart is going to kill me in a week or two.”

  “Thirteen days,” I say.

  “I have asked my friends about your problem,” says Liddy. “But Casimir’s mechanic is renowned for being…thorough. Have you had breakfast?”

  We haven’t. She fetches us fresh rolls and sliced ham and jarred pears from the larder.

  “Tell me about the princess,” she says, setting the table.

  “She’s remarkable,” says Dek. I’m a little taken aback by his enthusiasm. “She has a real vision for Frayne, but she’s very detail-oriented too. It’s rare to find people who can think big and also understand all the small moving parts. It’s the kind of talent inventors need, of course, but listening to her, I think more leaders ought to have it too. You know the result you want, but you also have to understand the minute steps to make it happen, all the things that need to be working together properly to achieve that result. Honestly, I think she’s one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met.”

  “I am glad to hear it,” says Liddy. “It gives me something to hope for. There are no doubts as to her identity?”

  “Esme thinks she has proof enough to put any doubts to rest,” says Dek. “She came to see me after my meeting with the doctor who photographed my heart.”

  “That was nice of her,” I say.

  “She is nice,” he laughs. “But it was to ask me for help. Esme told her a bit about the sort of thing I’m good at. She wanted to hear about the cannons and sleeping-gas canisters I made for our getaway from Casimir that first time on Nago Island. She wants something on a larger scale.” His real eye is shining. “If I’m going to die in a week, at least I’ll be useful in the meantime.”

  “Thirteen days,” I repeat crossly. “And you’re not going to.”

  When we’ve finished eating, I take out the packet I got from Goro. Liddy’s wrinkled face takes on a masklike expression. She puts a kettle on to boil and ties a handkerchief around her face. Then she leans over the packet, snipping at the curled brown shavings. She puts a minuscule amount in a mug with some tea leaves, wrapping up the rest and giving it back to me, and pours the steaming water into the mug.