Julia Unbound

by Catherine Egan

  “If she is not here now, she was here very recently.”

  He strides over to the chair I was sitting in. I come right up to the edge of the visible world, next to Horthy. Focus, focus. Lord Skaal whirls toward me, drawing his pistol. He is so fast, but I am fast too, and this is something I’ve always been good at. I slip my hand into Horthy’s pocket as I reappear. As soon as I feel the frame in my hand—Horthy startling, Lord Skaal aiming his gun—I’m gone, hurtling right out of myself, and the window shatters with Lord Skaal’s gunshot.

  * * *

  Temple bells are tolling all over the city. It takes me a moment to understand: the king is dead. I reappear in Fitch Square. No reason to choose this place in particular, except that it is familiar, and Esme’s building is the last place that felt like home. I dressed myself in Pia’s clothes today, for comfort and for courage—I’m done being Ella Penn Witzel, after all—so I can’t stay visible for long. Even in the Twist, a girl in trousers will attract attention, and the city is crawling with soldiers.

  My fingers feel clumsy, but I open the frame and look at the faded sepia photograph of a young woman in old-fashioned country clothes, posed with two little boys wearing their temple best. I look harder at their faces.

  How could I fail to see him, in that serious little boy’s face? Agoston Horthy, perhaps eight years old, but the ferocity and determination are there already in his expression. This is the face of a child who will grow up to terrorize his country, casting the shadow of his fanaticism across all of New Poria. The brother, smaller than him, though not by much, is a doughy-faced sepia blur, smiling. He looks happy, but who can tell?

  I freeze on the woman. She is younger, much younger, her expression solemn but not yet sad. Still, I recognize her. I recognize her plain, round face, her steady gaze, her shoulders hunched under the shawl that seeks to disguise the curve of her spine. Casimir’s witch: Shey.

  Luca comes back to his room late in the afternoon. He shuts the door behind him, and then he sees me and freezes. I am by the window, just in case. We look at each other across the room for a moment that seems to stretch on forever, and then he says, “What’s your real name?”

  “Julia,” I say, feeling an immense relief as I say it.

  “Your uncle,” he begins, and the first flash of anger crosses his expression. “I suppose he’s not really your uncle.”

  I shake my head.

  “He’s dead.”

  “I know.”

  “He was a spy, they said. And so are you. Is this getup what you wear when you’re not pretending to be a noble girl?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “They told me you tried to poison Agoston Horthy this morning. They told me you would likely try to kill me too. Is that why you’re here? To kill me?”

  “I’d never hurt you,” I say, my voice wobbling a bit. “The rest is true.”

  “Why?” he whispers.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “You’re one of them…the revolutionaries.”

  “I’m not, really,” I say. “But the revolution is coming, and you aren’t safe here. That’s why I came. You have to get out of Frayne. They’ll execute you.”

  He goes pale. “I can’t run away like a coward.”

  “Not like a coward,” I say. “Like a man who wants to live. Do you even want to be king?”

  “Not much,” he admits. “But I can’t go home. That’s all over. It’s exile or fight for the crown, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  He lifts his chin. “I didn’t ask for this, but I’m not going to run away while a bunch of witches take over my country and put their puppet on the throne—some commoner pretending to be Zey’s niece. You can tell your friends that.”

  I wince.

  “You left me that note saying you were sorry. It was you, wasn’t it? I’ve been wondering what you meant. Sorry for what? All the lies?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Sorry for all the lies.”

  He laughs unhappily. “I knew you had secrets, but I really hadn’t considered that you might be a spy. I mean, you’re barely older than my sister. I think you like me, though, don’t you? Or was that all part of the ruse?”

  “I do like you.”

  “Why are you here, really?”

  “I can get you out of Frayne. You and your family.”

  “Can we pretend for a few minutes that none of this is happening? Can we sit down and tell each other the truth?” He locks the door and gestures to a chair by the gleaming mahogany tea table. I sit, and he sits in the next chair. I wish he were sitting closer. I wish I could touch him.

  “They sent Sir Victor’s head to my…colleague…in a box,” I say, in lieu of reaching for his hand.

  He goes a pale greenish color, and I wish I hadn’t said anything. In some strange way, I feel he’s pure and ought not to have to face the horror and madness that the rest of us are mired in. He is just a beautiful, happy boy who loves riding and poetry, who has been lucky all his life, and now his luck has run out. I wish I could protect him from the awful truth—heads in boxes and all the rest.

  “When will they crown you?” I ask.

  “The day after tomorrow,” he says in a strangled voice. “Tomorrow is Zey’s funeral. Are you a witch?”

  “No,” I say, and he looks relieved. “But my mother was. You don’t know anything about witches. They aren’t evil. Well, some of them are, I suppose. Just like ordinary people. They have power, but they don’t choose it, and many of them don’t use it. It’s just…something they can do. Like me disappearing.”

  “Why don’t you start there? I saw you disappear. How?”

  “I just can. The way you can run or jump, I can vanish.”

  I’m not really telling the truth, but we don’t have time for the whole truth. I don’t even know the whole truth, not for sure. Who my mother is. If she’s still alive. What happened to Lidari. If he’s inside me.

  “How is Dafne?” I ask. “Have you seen her?”

  “I visited her this morning. She’s getting better, but she’ll have scars and blots on her face and some nerve damage to her hands, so she won’t be able to play the harp anymore. That lovely face was what she had going for her, and it’s ruined.”

  “She has more going for her than a lovely face,” I say. “Now perhaps she’ll have a chance to figure that out.”

  “That’s cold. You know as well as I do that a girl like that won’t get far without her beauty.”

  “I like her, actually, and I do feel sorry for her. I’m sorry she won’t be able to play the harp, and I know about scars. But there are so many people who live in fear, so many people who won’t be all right….Dafne has money, and she has spirit, and she’s not stupid. I know it’s awful, but she will be all right.”

  I find myself thinking about Flora, the bruised young woman with the starving kids, hanging about Liddy’s shop. I hope she will be all right. She might be, if Liddy has taken an interest in her plight—the way she took an interest in my plight ten years ago, plucked me off the streets, a thieving little orphan, and gave me a shot at something slightly better.

  “You really think witches ought to rule Frayne?” Luca is wearing the unhappy expression of a little boy being unjustly punished.

  “Zara’s not a witch.”

  “I ought to hate you. But from the day we met I’ve just wanted to understand you. Now I think I’m farther from knowing you than ever.”

  “Here is the truth,” I say, and against my better judgment I reach for his hand. He lets me take it, moves quickly to kneel before my chair, looking up into my face. He is so lovely, I think I’ll choke on my own words. “I grew up in the Twist. My mother was a witch and my father was an opium addict. I have a brother, and I love him more than anybody in the world. My mother was kind. She always tried to help peo
ple. But Agoston Horthy signed her death sentence, and she was drowned when I was seven. Our father left us, and we were taken in by the queen of crooks. I earned my keep as a thief and a spy. I’ve done some terrible things, and I can’t claim to be a good person, but I try to take care of the people who need me. I don’t believe witches are evil—no more than anybody else—and I do think it is evil to drown them. I think the world would be better without Agoston Horthy, but I don’t know if that gives me or anyone else the right to end his life. Right now I don’t know what the right thing is. I wish you would leave and go somewhere safe. I don’t want you to be hurt. There is the truth.”

  He is kneeling in front of me, but he’s so tall that his face is nearly level with mine, and he is holding both my hands tightly in his. I feel unsteady, like we are at sea and clinging to each other in a storm.

  “When I went out that night, I wanted to know the city,” he tells me. “I want to understand the country I’m to rule. I wouldn’t be a bad king, Julia. Oh, I like that name. It suits you. Julia. You’ve seen things I can’t imagine, you know things I don’t. You could advise me! If I had Agoston Horthy and you on my side, surely I could understand the whole of Frayne. I’m willing to meet and talk with the revolutionaries…not the witches, but the Lorians and the others…”

  “Why not the witches?” I shoot back. “I’ve been trying to tell you, they needn’t be your enemies.”

  He looks so lost. He pulls my hands to his lips and kisses my knuckles, then rests his rough golden cheek against one of my hands. I feel close to tears.

  “You don’t understand anything,” I whisper. “You have to talk to the witches.”

  “Then set up a meeting for me.”

  “Really?” I ask him. “Do you mean it?”

  He lets go of my hands and, floating free suddenly, they twine around the back of his neck as if of their own accord. I feel his silky curls between my fingers. He slides his hands up my trousered thighs to my waist, pulls me toward him.

  “Yes,” he says. “Stay with me. Advise me. Be my…be with me.”

  I’m not sure if he pulls me or if I push him, but I’m sliding off the chair into his arms and we are in a heap on the floor, legs tangled together, my hands in his hair, my mouth against his. It is impossible to get as near to him as I want to be. He is slow and tender, and his slowness is unbearable, my blood battering against my skin, this desire conquering everything else, every thought and fear. I can’t get out of Pia’s clothes fast enough, and if I could speak clearly I would tell him, here is the truth, here is who I am, but I show him what I can’t put into words, I show him.

  He runs his hands over the red-mud scars on my arm and side, the mark of the nuyi running up my left arm. He traces the scar on my cheek.

  “What…?” he says, and kisses me again, and I’m lost, utterly lost.

  “I just wanted to save him,” I babble.

  “Save who?” he murmurs into my hair, and I don’t know if I mean Dek or Theo or even him.

  He touches the burning disk in my wrist and gasps, pulling his hand away. I take his burnt finger and put it in my mouth. He gasps again, but differently this time.

  “Stories for every scar,” I say.

  “I want you to tell me. I want to know everything.”

  “Later.” I pull him out of his clothes—oh hounds, the great glorious length of him.

  “Do you promise? Will there be a later? You’re not going to disappear and never come back?”

  “I promise.”

  In the moment I believe it, I believe that I can promise such a thing. He lifts me onto the bed, bending over me, and I want him as much as I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. He fumbles in a drawer by the bed for one of the protective sheaths Wyn first introduced me to. “I don’t know how to use this…,” he begins. “I do,” I say.

  I roll over on top of him. He gives a gasping laugh, and I shut out everything else, just for now, just for a while, because there is joy here for the taking and we’re going to take it before the city burns.

  But for all the half-mad frenzy of my desire, the act itself is clumsy and too quick, too quickly over—him gasping into my neck and me drifting away from him already, still aching for him, but somehow this awful sadness has crept in, and I can’t get back the urgency of wanting him. I’m left only with my fading desire and the dismal sense of hunger unsatisfied. He kisses me so sweetly, stroking my arm, and I shut my eyes as if I can hide my feelings that way. His fingers glide over a sore spot on my arm. My eyes fly open, and I sit up, moving his hand to look at the spot. There is a red spot, a bit of bruising around it, on a vein in my inner arm. The right arm, not the arm with the nuyi.

  “Another story?” he murmurs, bending his big tousled head to kiss the spot.

  “I don’t know that story,” I say quietly. And fear comes creeping back in, cold and weary—a snake returning to its lair.

  I leave him, promising I’ll set up a meeting between him and the masters of the revolution. We pretend that we are going to orchestrate peace, as if our kisses can seal something, our bodies demonstrate the possibility of crossing the gulf between natural and unnatural Frayne. Deep down I know it’s a lost cause. Nobody will listen to me. Nobody will listen to him either, even if he’s about to be king. We two cannot reconcile Agoston Horthy’s government and the Sidhar Coven. But I don’t know how else to say goodbye to him, besides promising that I’ll see him again. And maybe I will. I hope I will, looking at his wide-open face, his clear eyes, his lovely mouth. I’ve never known anybody so open, all his vulnerability and wonder right there on his face for me to read.

  “Hang on,” he says, sitting up in the bed as I’m pulling Pia’s trousers on and looking for my boots. “You know, I’ve never actually done that before.”

  “Oh!” I can’t help my exclamation of surprise. I hadn’t meant to claim the virginity of the heir to the Fraynish throne. Frayne’s new king, now that Zey is dead.

  “You have, though,” he says. I do up the buttons on my jacket as quickly as I can. “Was I…I’m sorry if I wasn’t sure…I hope…” He stops and laughs at himself, looking down at his big hands, and I take pity. I am desperate to be gone from this room and all the things I am feeling and all the things I am not feeling, but I remember that fear, after the first time with Wyn—whether it was what he wanted, whether I did it right. I bend and kiss him.

  “You are wonderful,” I tell him, which is true, if not an answer to the question he is asking. “You are good and sweet and wonderful.”

  “I mean, as a lover,” he says, and then laughs awkwardly again. “I could practice. You could teach me…what you like.”

  I kiss him again, a long, slow kiss, taking all the sweetness from it that I can, because I know—I would like to pretend otherwise, I would like to pretend I’ll have a chance to teach him what I like—but I know it will be the last time.

  “Wait to hear from me,” I say.

  And that’s goodbye. I leave him sprawling, huge and lovely, on the bed. I open the window, climb up onto the parapet, and vanish out over the city.

  “What did you do to me?”

  Lady Laroche is at her desk—Mrs. Och’s desk—writing and smoking. Her fingers tighten on her pen when I appear before her.

  “This mark on my arm.” I yank up my sleeve. “Last night, you did something to me.”

  She gives me a puzzled look, but she’s a liar and I know it.

  “Where is Zara?” I ask.

  “In her room.”

  I go banging up the stairs to the third floor, throw open her door—what used to be Frederick’s room, still full of his books.

  “I need you.”

  She tosses whatever message she’s reading quickly into the fire. I laugh—oh, the endless plots and secrets in this house!—and I grab her hand, pulling her after me, back down the
stairs. Lady Laroche is not in the reading room anymore. Her cigarette smolders in the ashtray. I tear down the next flight of stairs, dragging Zara along with me. Lady Laroche is pulling on her coat, leaving in a hurry.

  “Stop!” I shout. I vanish and reappear between her and the front door, slamming it shut with my shoulder. “Tell me what you did to my arm.”

  She looks at me, and at Zara on the stairs.

  “I mean you no harm.”

  “Is it the truth?” I ask Zara.

  “Yes,” says Zara, descending the stairs slowly. “She does not want to harm you or me. But she is full of harm nonetheless.”

  Lady Laroche smiles.

  “Did you take my blood?” I ask.

  She puts on her gloves and says, “No.”

  “Lie,” says Zara.

  Lady Laroche shrugs. “All right. Yes.”

  “Why?”

  She doesn’t answer me.

  “You can’t go stealing my blood,” I shout. “Give it back!”

  “I don’t have it anymore.”

  “Lie,” says Zara again.

  “Oh, shut up,” says Lady Laroche.

  “Did you put a spell on me?”

  “Only so you wouldn’t notice or remember.”

  “What do you want it for?”

  “I am not going to bewitch you with it.”

  “True,” murmurs Zara.

  Lady Laroche and I stare at each other. Her arm is behind her back—moving—she’s got a pen, of course she has, she wouldn’t be unarmed. I grab her arm and try to wrestle the pen from her. She pushes me off, sends me sprawling across the bottom stairs into Zara, flings open the door, and then she’s gone, folding up suddenly into a small, black, winged shape and shooting off into the sky. I scramble back to my feet, bruised and shaky, the heat of her magic scorching my throat.

  “I told Dek,” says Zara, lifting her chin. She looks so young and ordinary. “I told him everything. He agreed we ought not to tell Esme. Are you changing sides, Julia?”