Julia Unbound

by Catherine Egan

  “Don’t act rashly,” she continues. “You may not like my tactics, but we share the same ultimate goal and should be working together, helping each other.”

  “But it’s a lie,” I say faintly. Something is not right here. Something has happened, but I can’t put my finger on it. “And her name isn’t Zara. What is it?”

  “That is her name now,” says Lady Laroche firmly. “Now, we need to remove the nuyi. It is getting too close. Surely you recognize how dangerous you will be to all of us if Casimir controls you.”

  “No,” I say. “Casimir is coming to Spira City. If I can convince him…there might be a chance he’ll have his mechanic take the poison out of Dek.”

  “Casimir is coming?” She blanches and sits up straighter. “Are you sure?”

  “That’s what Pia told me.”

  She looks suddenly exhausted. “My best hopes are coming to nothing,” she says, and tosses her pen childishly across the room. “Zara might be better than Zey, but by how much? Witches are dying, and we cannot wait for change. You understand, don’t you, Julia? Ammi could not stifle who she was or cease to fulfill her potential. That is itself a sort of death, a slow kind of drowning. I am tired. I have been fighting for so long, and now my friends are dead, murdered by that fanatic…”

  She falls silent. I can’t sit here with the knowledge of what Zara has done weighing on me. And I need to take more hermia if I’m going to hold out until Casimir arrives. I stand up. She looks at me bleakly.

  “Where are you going?”

  I am done with these horrible people. I am done a thousand times over. I am never coming back to this house. I just leave, without saying goodbye.

  The elevator goes clank-clanking up. In the main room of our hotel suite, Pia stands with her head bowed over a metal box on the table.

  “What’s that?” I ask, closing the door behind me.

  The goggles swivel as she looks up.

  “Sir Victor’s head,” she says.

  My knees go loose, and I lean back against the door.

  “Is that a joke?”

  “No. Look.”

  “No,” I say. But I have to look. I have to know.

  I peer into the box and spin away again immediately, but the image is already seared in my mind: blood pooled and congealed along the bottom of the box like a cushion for his head, his whitish-gray face, eyes wide and mouth open. I lurch to the bathroom and throw up in the tub. Sinking to the floor, all I can think through the buzz in my skull is that it’s my fault.

  Pia puts the lid back on the box.

  “Agoston Horthy just had it delivered as a gift for Casimir,” she says. “I am amazed at the gall of him, especially when he is facing a threat to his power.”

  “I don’t know how seriously he takes the threat,” I say hollowly. Oh, Sir Victor. I am so sorry. And then I remember his daughter, Elisha. I promised him I’d help her if anything happened to him. I have a map to her room tucked into my glove.

  “Is it true about Hostorak?” I ask from the floor.

  “Come and see.”

  She helps me to my feet, and we go out onto the balcony. Beyond the palace, there is a flaming hole in Spira City, so bright it leaves spots on the inside of my eyelids. That is no natural fire. The entire prison is gone.

  “The witches inside simply walked out of the fire,” she says. “The guards were burned alive, along with anyone who got close.”

  “How?”

  “Nothing burns stone except dragon flame, according to the old stories, but there have not been dragons in the world for a thousand years or more.”

  I remember the steel door buckling with heat in the cellar in West Spira. Lady Laroche mentioning her fiery friend.

  “She’s got a dragon,” I whisper. I’m not sure if it’s a statement or a question. Pia’s goggles swivel at me.

  “I have to go,” I say, and she follows me back inside.

  “Be careful, Julia.” She raps on the box with Sir Victor’s head inside. “Casimir is on his way, and Agoston Horthy is not playing games.”

  * * *

  “Elisha,” I whisper.

  The girl sits up in her bed. She stares at me, her big eyes filling with alarm.

  “I’m a friend of your father’s,” I say.

  “Why are you in my room?”

  “Your father asked me to help you.” Hounds. How am I going to tell her that he’s dead? “You’re not safe.”

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but I am entirely taken aback when she picks up a bell at her bedside and rings it wildly.

  “Stop it!” I hiss at her, trying to grab the bell, but she leaps off the bed and runs for the door, still clanging the blasted thing. I catch her, and she screams.

  “What are you doing?” I cry, clapping a hand over her mouth.

  “I know what you are!” she shouts into my hand. “I know all about you and my father!”

  “I mean to get you out of here. Somewhere safe.”

  The door opens, and Lord Skaal saunters in. Elisha tears herself out of my grasp, running to his side.

  “You were right,” she says in a trembling voice. “She came.”

  “These people are not your friends!” I cry.

  “They saved me—from the demons within.” Her face goes soft and damp like a balled-up rag, her eyes filling with tears.

  “We are very much her friends,” says Lord Skaal. “Agoston Horthy has been like a father to dear Lisha for years now. A real father, not the kind who’s always running off on peculiar missions and stabbing his friends in the back. And indeed, she’s been taught how to use her curse for good, her soul having been cleansed of its wickedness.”

  “Elisha, your father has been murdered, probably by this man here!”

  “She’s quite right,” he says mildly. “But I told you, didn’t I?”

  Elisha’s expression does not change. Lord Skaal’s one eye narrows at me. “I was hoping to finish our conversation earlier, but I was interrupted by an incident at Hostorak. Where were we? Oh yes, I was about to kill you.”

  And then he is a wolf. There is barely a second for the transformation. He is enormous, silver fur bristling, with one yellow eye and one eye scarred over. He leaps, and I vanish—right out of the window, over the city. Shaking outside Marek and Son in the Twist, I can still feel his hot breath on my face. I bang on the door of the clock shop.

  Theo and Ragg Rock are there to greet me when I emerge from the half-real wood. Theo is brandishing a windup soldier in a fur hat and coat, a sword carved against the side of its leg. When he twists the knob on its back, its wooden arms and legs swing jerkily. Jigging with delight, he sets it walking along the path in front of us until it topples onto its face. Its little arms and legs keep moving after it falls, making it pivot awkwardly on the path. He runs to set it right again, twisting the knob expertly with his fat little fingers.

  “Where did that come from?” I ask Ragg Rock.

  “Serpetszo.”

  “The capital of Rossha? They really went there?”

  She shrugs and says something to Theo in their private pidgin language.

  “Stay wif Lala,” he says firmly, grabbing my hand and hugging the soldier with his other arm. The look Ragg Rock gives me with those almost-real pebble eyes chills me.

  “I can’t stay long,” I say. “I just need to talk to Frederick.”

  We walk up the hill to the hut. Frederick is hunched over his papers, George the rabbit nestled against the warmth of his leg. Theo gives the rabbit a stroke and then sets his soldier walking along the Kahge side of the hut, Ragg Rock shadowing him.

  “What’s the news?” Frederick asks eagerly. It’s still a shock to see him each time—like a ghost of himself, the color and vigor leached out of him.

  “Casimir is coming to Spir
a City,” I say, squatting next to him.

  He sucks in a sharp breath. “That cannot be good.”

  The thought of it fills me with dread, but I am still clinging to my pathetic plan. “It might work in our favor—if I can get him to take the poison out of Dek. If the nuyi is close enough, if we can persuade him my will is bound and that Dek could be useful too…I think his mechanic liked Dek.”

  He nods, but I can tell he’s unconvinced. And he’s right—the odds are against us, and Casimir would not be coming on a mercy mission.

  “How goes the revolution?” he asks.

  I don’t know where to begin, but once I do, I don’t know where to stop. It all comes pouring out of me—Sir Victor’s murder, Elisha’s defection, the Scourge antidote, Zara betraying Lady Laroche, Zara not really being Zara at all, Hostorak reduced to a flaming hole in the ground. Something like panic is tightening in my chest as I tell him everything.

  “Does Professor Baranyi know about Zara?” he asks gently.

  “I don’t think so. We’ve mostly been avoiding each other. I’m not having cozy chats with him about the situation, anyway.”

  Frederick is quiet for a while, thinking, and somehow that calms me down. I know I can trust Frederick’s judgment of what is right, what matters.

  “My feeling at the moment is that if there is an opportunity to oust Agoston Horthy, we must take it,” he says at last. “I don’t know what to say about Zara, but if people believe she is the lawful heir…it’s possible she could unite Frayne and bring about real change.”

  “But she’s just some girl from Ibhara, Frederick! She doesn’t belong on the throne!”

  “Nobody belongs on a throne. When Agoston Horthy came to power and changed the face of Frayne, those who opposed him failed to act soon enough. We make the world with our inaction as much as with our actions. I do not like our choices either, but still I think we cannot let this chance to rid Frayne of Horthy pass us by.”

  “I won’t help Zara. I need to save my brother and get this thing out of my neck.”

  “And if you succeed? Then what?”

  “Then—I figure out how to stop Casimir. Either destroy the other book fragments or kill him. Then you and Theo can come home.” I lower my voice here, so that Ragg Rock and Theo don’t hear me. “I’m not helping the revolution. It’s a fraud, the whole thing. I just want the people I love to make it through this alive.”

  “It’s all very well to try to save the ones you love, but they still have to live in the world, along with all the people you don’t know or love,” he says. “You are going to have to decide where you stand, even if it means choosing the lesser of two evils.”

  “Hounds, Frederick, I can barely think straight. If you think Zara’s the best bet for Frayne, I won’t stand in her way, but I’m not helping her either. Look at this thing!” I show him the nuyi in my neck—an inch below my ear.

  “I’ve found some interesting things about the nuyi and Casimir,” he says, hunting through his stack of books and papers and pulling out a few pages of cramped writing in an unfamiliar script. “Ragg Rock let me and Theo go to the great Rosshan library in Serpetszo. It is incredible, this place as a potential doorway to anywhere in the world! I was able to copy parts of the diary of a witch who worked with the Xianren—and Casimir in particular—to defeat the nuyi a thousand years ago. Look—here is an illustration of the nuyi queen they captured! It is life-sized, so you can see why only the soldiers can enter the brain.”

  He hands me an illustration of a spider-shaped thing about the size of my palm, with hundreds of tentacle-limbs spread out around it, and what appear to be tiny crab-claw pincers at the ends of the tentacles.

  “It is described as translucent and flexible, a sort of jellyfish consistency, but able to move very quickly on land. The Rosshans and Casimir did all kinds of experiments. The nuyi queen seemed able to understand and even manipulate the experiments it was subjected to. It gives off a kind of pulse, and the witches theorized that this was how the queen communicated with her foot soldiers. They are bound to her, however far they or the vessels carrying them travel.”

  “What does the diary say?”

  “I’m struggling with the translation. The dictionary I bought in Serpetszo is not very good and is missing pages! I ought to go demand my money back.” He laughs feebly, and I just stare at him. “Sorry. It used to be that the foot soldiers sought out apex predators, but eventually the nuyi began to focus on humans in particular, the more powerful the better. The will to power, more than survival and reproduction, is what compels them. When I say they are bound to the queen, I mean their very lives. When the queen dies, so does the entire nest.”

  “What about the queens? How long do they live?”

  “Nobody knows. Casimir was particularly interested in the pulse the queen gives off and how she controls her soldiers. This witch complains at length in her diary that the Xianren were supposed to be destroying the nuyi, wiping them from the earth, but that Casimir was mostly intent on understanding them. She claims—though the claim is unsubstantiated anywhere else—that he forced her to put the queen inside his own head.”

  “What?” I shout.

  “We can’t be sure it’s true, but we know he controls the nuyi somehow, and he took with him an entire nest when he left Rossha. He has found a way to replace the queen himself, whether by putting her physically inside him or by some other means. History shows that he broke with his siblings after that, and his pursuit of power became more marked—beginning with his involvement in the Sirillian Empire and the hunting down of Marike. If it is in his head, it may have effected some change in him. Or perhaps the change in him came first, and that is why he decided to put it in his head. There’s no way of knowing.”

  “Hang on—Casimir is being controlled by some power-hungry blob that looks like a cross between a jellyfish and a giant spider?”

  “I think it’s unlikely he would have simply surrendered his will to the nuyi, but it is irrelevant whether he controls the queen or the queen controls him or if there is some sort of mutual cooperation. If it is in his brain, and if you could kill it, that would be the end of his power over you and anyone he has bound with the nuyi.”

  The mechanic. Pia. My freedom and theirs.

  Except I can’t touch him.

  “He’s coming to Spira City,” I say again, slowly.

  Frederick waves the papers unhappily. “None of this tells us how to defeat either Casimir or the nuyi.”

  “It’s something,” I say.

  If Casimir isn’t coming to take the poison out of Dek, I need to find a way into his skull.

  “This would all be different if Mrs. Och had lived,” he says, and I think, Well, that’s my fault—he’ll be singing that same tune forever, and it’s my fault.

  In Agoston Horthy’s room, my hand trembles as I open the packet of poison Lady Laroche gave me five days ago. I think of Sir Victor’s head in the box, my mother on the barge years ago, the Gethin murdering innocents, the way this country has cowered and suffered since before I was born. I think of Elisha. I pour the sand-colored powder into his water jug. It fizzes and dissolves.

  Then I wait. I keep seeing him come in, but these are only visions from the hermia I took this morning—I can tell because he walks straight through the door without opening it, and also by the strange grin on his face. I’ve never seen Agoston Horthy smile. These grinning, half-translucent Horthys come in, drink, and then dissolve into a gray sludge at my feet, reminding me of the gray-sludge monster that tortured me during the worst of my hermia-plagued nights. I squeeze my eyes shut and succumb to feverish half-dreams of witches falling off a barge into the sky, falling and falling, my mother’s white nightgown billowing, the Ankh-nu in her hands, white smoke pouring out of its two spouts.

  I wake to the sound of a key in the door, and for a
disorienting moment I’m not sure if I’m vanished or not. I am not. I pull back only just in time as Agoston Horthy—the real Horthy, not a hallucination—comes into the room. He goes to the corner and kneels, facing the wall and clasping his hands together in prayer.

  I’m going to watch him die. Not because I want to watch, but I refuse to do this thing and be too squeamish to see it happen. This is my third murder. The Gethin. Mrs. Och. Agoston Horthy. If all goes well, it will not be my last—Casimir is coming—but it will not be said that I ever looked away.

  Horthy rises after a long while. He goes to his desk and pours himself a glass of water. My heart stutters, but instead of drinking it he puts it down on the desk. Some part of me is relieved, but mostly I can’t stand the wait, knowing what will happen. He unlocks a drawer and takes out the picture frame I saw him looking at before. As he opens it, a sharp knock at the door makes us both jump. Every human thing he does—like startling at a sound—makes me horribly aware of what I am doing, makes me second-guess it all over again. I’m still not sure I can let him drink the poisoned water. I’m not sure. The Gethin. The Cleansings. The Hangings. My Mother. My Mother. My Mother.

  He shuts the frame and slips it into his pocket before calling out: “Come in!”

  Lord Skaal enters. I pull back farther, out of my body. I can see them from every angle, I can hear Lord Skaal’s panting breath, I can smell the sweat on him, the damp fur odor he carries.

  “What is it, Lord Skaal?”

  “The king…,” says Lord Skaal, and then he stops and sniffs. He grabs the water glass off the desk and smells it. Relief and despair twine together inside me.

  “This is poisoned,” he says. He turns slowly, nostrils flaring, showing the edges of his teeth. He calls to me, a snarl in his throat: “Come out, come out, Casimir’s little pet!”

  “She’s here?” asks Agoston Horthy, his voice blurring into a thousand voices, all of them so far away. “Are you sure?”