Julia Unbound

by Catherine Egan

  Mr. Faruk passes a hand over his brow. “I don’t like to revisit that. I was so young then—so ruthless.”

  “The witches were pregnant,” says Lidari. “Using the Ankh-nu to transfer an essence is no simple matter, and bringing a half-life from Kahge into the world had always proved impossible. But when a witch is pregnant, her power is magnified. She is nearly indestructible, and also, of course, the pregnant woman is designed to hold another life within herself—the essence as well as the body makes room for this. Magic and nature work together for a short time. Marike gathered her army of witches and required them to find mates and become pregnant. When they were still in the earliest stages of their pregnancies, she brought them to Ragg Rock one by one. Using the Ankh-nu, she put the essence of the shadow-beings into the small, still-forming lives inside the witches. The witches returned to the world and gave birth to creatures not of this world—part human, yes, but infused with the essence and magic of the shadows from Kahge. These grew into the Gethin—an army that could hardly be killed, they were so full of magic, and the longer they lived the less human they became. Yet still they were bound to their bodies and the world.”

  “That’s revolting,” I say. My chest has gone cold. “What does it have to do with me?”

  “Ragg Rock was appalled at the result. After that, Marike was never able to return to Ragg Rock,” says Lidari with a nod at Mr. Faruk. “But we had the Gethin army, and we had the Ankh-nu, and for a time the world belonged to us…or that is how it felt, in any case. We used the Ankh-nu for centuries to occupy new bodies. We lived on and on. Eventually, with the help of the Sirillian Empire, Casimir tracked me down, drove me to the cliffs of Ingle, defeated me. I had no choice but to abandon my body and return to Kahge. Marike could not come for me. Perhaps she did not try so very hard.”

  “I thought I had to let you go,” says Mr. Faruk. “But then I met Ammi, who had gained favor with Ragg Rock. Unusual for a witch like her to be granted entry, but she wooed Ragg Rock carefully and well. She had been seeking different, stronger magic there. She was beginning to separate herself from Lady Laroche and the Sidhar Coven. I told her about Lidari, cast back into Kahge, and a plan by which we could all take revenge on Casimir.”

  “She meant to try to carry me out of Kahge in her empty womb,” says Lidari. “Marike let her bring the Ankh-nu to Ragg Rock, and Ragg Rock let her meet with me. With my essence inside Ammi, she would destroy Casimir, and then I would be given a place in the world. We tried and failed a number of times. When it finally worked—well, I knew why, but I didn’t tell her. I was afraid she’d refuse to do it if she knew. She had become pregnant—with you, Julia. Using the Ankh-nu, she took me into her, into you—the very beginnings of you.”

  I can feel Luca and the duchess and Flora all staring at me. I am numb with horror, my feelings far-off, frozen things.

  “With me in her womb, my essence a part of you and so a part of her, she could use my power and essence as well as her own,” continues Lidari. “She belonged to both worlds and could cross over to Kahge. The witches pregnant with the Gethin had the same power but were forbidden to use it—Marike wanted the Gethin bound to the world. But Ammi, while she was pregnant, did a great deal of vanishing. She was able to enter Casimir’s fortress undetected. She was full of the magic of Kahge, her powers at a tremendous peak. She couldn’t kill him, but she bound him in stone and cast him into the sea. Then she returned to Spira City and found the body I’ve worn for nearly eighteen years.” With an utter lack of attachment, he nods toward the room where Liddy’s body lies under the blanket. “When she discovered that she was pregnant, Ammi was furious with me, terrified there would be some damage done to you by all of this, but it seemed that you were fine. You were born without difficulty, a strong and healthy baby girl. A few years later, she came to tell me about your vanishing. We did not know how far it went. It seemed perhaps just a small gift left to you from your formation with my essence as part of yours and all the vanishing she had done during her pregnancy. Or so we hoped. Clearly Kahge and my essence imprinted on you more deeply than we’d realized.”

  “That’s why the things in Kahge thought I was you,” I say.

  “Yes. But you are not me, Julia. I promise you that. You are only yourself, a human girl. It’s just that as you were forming in the womb, we shared space for a while. Everything that I am left its trace on you.”

  I stare at the fine shoes displayed around the room, dazed. I am a girl. I am Julia. My mother is dead. I’ll never see her again. I don’t know if it’s a comfort that she really was the woman I remember after all. Not if what I remember is all I have and all I’ll ever have. It’s not enough. But she loved us. Dek was right—she would never have left us. I hold that certainty close.

  An explosion sounds very nearby, and we all jump. One of the children upstairs begins to cry.

  Mr. Faruk peers out the broken window. “The hackney is here.”

  “You could come with us, Julia, if you like,” says Lidari.

  “No,” I say. “But I reckon you owe me a favor or two.” I point at the duchess and Luca. “I need you to take them to Ingle. See them safely out of Frayne.”

  “Your princess will not like that,” says Mr. Faruk. “And we were not planning on going to Ingle.”

  “Why not?” says Lidari. “We’re hardly short on time.” To me, he adds: “Have I not spent this lifetime helping those in need? Helping you? I am glad to see the fall of Agoston Horthy, and I am happy to help the innocent to freedom and safety. I will always be ready to help you, if you need it.”

  I shake my head. “You’re not who I thought. You’re a murderer.”

  “So are you,” says Lidari. “I have struggled with it, but I have only ever taken the bodies of evil men and women who did such damage in the world that they forfeited their right to live in it, or the body of the mindless woman that I’ve occupied recently. And I have tried to do whatever good I could do, to balance the scales.”

  “There’s no balancing those scales,” I tell him in disgust. “You’ve stood by Marike. You know what she’s done, what she’s capable of. She was going to kill Theo.”

  “To save the world, mind you,” says Mr. Faruk irritably. “I suppose you consider that a minor detail.”

  Lidari says: “Love outweighs everything. You know that.”

  And I do know—because I’ve been inside his memories—how Marike loomed larger and mattered more than anything else. But I don’t know what to think about such a love, when the loved one is a force of plunder and destruction.

  “Come with us,” says Luca, grabbing my hand.

  I shake my head. Fear hollows my chest again. “There’s something I need to do here.”

  “Your revolution is already won,” says Mr. Faruk.

  “It wasn’t my revolution,” I say.

  * * *

  It is a horse-drawn hackney, the old-fashioned kind, with a wizened little fellow as driver. There is something odd about the horse, something a little too intelligent about the eyes.

  Mr. Faruk helps Flora and the sleepy children into the hackney and then turns to me and says, in a newly friendly voice, “If you change your mind, come and find us. The world is larger than these little revolutions, this swapping of crowns and thrones. You have, by luck, a tremendous gift. You might find it easier to be with those who understand.”

  “And the two of you—you’ll just go on living forever, stealing bodies and taking them over?”

  “A harsh way of putting it.”

  I’m thinking of the brute they murdered, even if he was a nasty piece of work, and the old woman they convinced themselves had no more use for or claim to her own body. My mother was part of that too.

  “If I come looking for you,” I say coldly, “it’s going to be to stop you.”

  “Thank you for the warning,” says Mr. Faruk. “I susp
ect there will come a time when we have had enough of life, but I don’t fancy oblivion yet. The human story is still, no matter what, an entertaining spectacle.”

  The duchess and Luca are in the doorway, waiting. The Crown, and then nothing. They look fairly calm, all things considered.

  “Come to Ingle when you’re done with whatever you have to do here,” says Luca. “Come find me. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  “Don’t wait for me.”

  He pulls me into his arms.

  “I’ll still be waiting.”

  I let myself think it’s true for the moment that he’s holding me. His arms are sturdy and feel safe, though the truth of the matter is that his arms are one of the least safe places I could be.

  “We owe you our lives,” says the duchess, pressing my hand between hers as we say goodbye.

  “Good luck,” I manage to say. Then they get into the hackney, and it pulls away.

  They are not at the university. I stand there in the empty room—no sign of a struggle—heart pounding. Where could they be? Mrs. Och’s house is a ruin. On a hunch, I go to Esme’s. The door is unlocked, so I go up to the parlor.

  And there:

  Gennady, his face bloodied, is lying in front of the hearth like a creature dragged back from the hunt, bound fast with silver ropes that cut into his flesh. Dek is at the table with a look of pale misery on the half of his face that is really his. Casimir is sitting across from Dek, the bejeweled length of him making the parlor seem smaller and drabber than usual. Pia stands behind Casimir—apparently brought to heel, her arms behind her back, her goggles fixed on me as I come through the door.

  And:

  Shey. She is sitting by the window in the chair Esme favored, knitting. The room smells of damp earth.

  “Julia, go!” Dek shouts as soon as I appear.

  I could. I could get Dek out of here, vanish us away somewhere safe. But the poison is still attached to his heart. He has less than a week—unless I can crush Casimir, here, now.

  “We’ve been waiting for you,” says Casimir.

  Dek’s head sags on his neck.

  “It looks as if your friends will take the day in Frayne,” says Casimir. “I could weigh in, but I think we are close to a larger victory. Let’s make this quick. Your brother’s life, right now. Where is Gennady’s son?”

  Quick as a snake, Dek has a blade out of his boot, and quicker than he can reach his own neck, Pia grabs his wrist and snaps it. There is the crack of bone breaking and an awful sound escaping Dek’s mouth.

  “Shey!” I shout. “I can—”

  Casimir is out of his chair, speaking before I’m partway through. His words don’t come out of his mouth—they come out of mine, not as sound but as a swarm of thread exploding out of my face, crawling up my throat and choking me, my lips stitching closed. His eyes are thunderclouds over me. Dek scrambles out of his chair and is thrown back against the wall with a sickening thud.

  Shey stops knitting.

  I’m on the floor, twisting, grabbing at my mouth, even my nose stopped up by the threads coming from inside, I can’t breathe, my vision is closing. As if from very far away I hear Pia’s voice, strangled with effort: “She can take you to Kahge.”

  Casimir wheels toward Pia, his face white with shock. Shey’s fingers move quickly—quicker than him. The threads unravel, and the dark thing in my throat recedes. I sit up, gasping, clawing and wiping at my mouth and nose, but there is nothing there anymore.

  Casimir is stopped, still poised to strike Pia with whatever might have come out of his mouth next. Dek is crumpled by the wall, Pia bent over his chair as if in pain, her face contorted, Gennady by the hearth. None of them are even breathing. Shey has frozen them, like she did to my friends in Casimir’s fortress half a year ago. Her sad eyes meet mine.

  “You were saying?”

  “I know Agoston Horthy is your son.” My voice is raw from whatever Casimir did to me. “And the other one, the one who drowned…Horthy keeps him locked under the parliament.”

  She points a knitting needle at Pia. “Is it true, what she said about Kahge?”

  “Yes. You made a deal with the shadows there, didn’t you? To bring your son back to life when he drowned. But it went wrong. And you took so much…from Agoston.”

  I could tell her she’s mad if she’s prepared to tear down the world to bring—what?—some imagined measure of peace to her children, lost already. What good would it do? But I can give her what she wants, and as dangerous and foolish as it may be, I’ve run out of other options. I need her help.

  “I can cross over to Kahge,” I say. “And I can take you with me.”

  “How?”

  And so I tell her about my mother, and Lidari, and my gift. That Casimir knew all along. Her eyes go deeper and deeper as I talk, a small line appearing in her brow. She stands up, putting her knitting down on the chair.

  “Take me.”

  “You have to promise you won’t harm anybody else after this.”

  “I promise nothing. Casimir will help me or you will help me. If he helps me, I will break you for him. If you help me, I will break him for you. That is all.”

  I know I might be unleashing something terrible here. I want to ask Frederick, I want to ask Dek, I want to ask somebody if I am doing the right thing. But there is nobody to ask, and Spira City is on fire, and I am out of time.

  “You have to hold on to me,” I say.

  “You tried to kill me once. You shot me in the neck.”

  “I was aiming for the head, and anyway, it didn’t work. Can you blame me? We’re all just trying to save the ones we love.”

  “When my boys were small, the love I bore them dwarfed every other feeling that I had ever had,” she says. “It was a force I could never have imagined—and with it came fears beyond what I could endure. That is what it means to be a mother—that fear, as much as the love. He was playing by the river. A simple fall and he was gone, quick as that, just gone. No mother could accept that. No, no. My beautiful boy. To have it all turn so wrong—but still, what could I have done differently?”

  “You could have grieved, and taken care of your surviving son.”

  “You are too young, and you have no children. All my worst fears have come to pass, and still love yokes me to my purpose. Still love—but changed, emptied of fear, robbed of joy, and become a pitiless master.”

  Not love, then, I could say, but it doesn’t matter.

  “Hold on to me.”

  She gives me her hands, and I see for a moment that even she is afraid of me, a little. I yank back, so we are spinning through nothingness, through and through, until we land on the shore of the boiling river Syne.

  Shey rises from a crouch and surveys the smoking world around her: the shadowy ruins of Spira City. Hollow-eyed half-creatures peer at us from flaming windows. I stand beside her with no certainty of what she will do, of what she can do, of whether she might bring all the world to ruination. Is that what I’m willing to risk, for Dek and for Theo? The answer would have been yes not long ago, but standing here, I think how wrong I was, how wrong I am. How that makes me no different from her.

  Her fingers work, moving in the steaming air, beckoning. Slowly they come to us, the ones I remember, the ones who called me Lidari and tried to kill me, limping and dragging their patched-together bodies. Here is antlered Solanze, handless and hulking. They come to her unwilling, struggling and groaning, but drawn inexorably by her magic.

  Sweat stands out on Shey’s brow. Her knees buckle under her. The whirlwind on the horizon roars louder and louder. She falls to the road and rakes her fingers along the ground, digging symbols out of the stone. The patchwork monsters twist and howl with outrage, unable to resist, drawing still closer, forming a ring around us. I cower next to Shey—her fingers gouging stone, blood beading on
her lips, blood pouring from her nose, her eyes turning crimson and black, her body bowing, bending, sweating. The ground itself emits a groan as she tears symbols into it, out of it.

  One of her hands seizes up. She gives a wretched shriek. The hand looks like a twisted claw, immovable, but she keeps raking at the road with it. I hear her fingers breaking, her raw gasps of pain with each snap of bone. The symbols on the road are multiplying by themselves now, riving the riverbank. Mist swirls around us, making shapes and changing quickly as if the mist itself were trying to illustrate her intent. She is blowing out symbols with her steaming breath, her broken hands still scratching open the rock, and the whole nebulous, smoking city is groaning now, a sorrowful sound coming up from its depths.

  A sharp crack explodes into the air; a ripple goes through the half-alive creatures around us. They sag together limply. Something has gone out of them.

  Shey rises, slow and terrible.

  She reaches for me with her broken hands, and I recoil instinctively. Her body is swollen, misshapen, her fingers gnarled like twigs, her face bloody and mottled.

  “Back,” she croaks at me.

  The beasts start lurching unsteadily closer. I don’t want to touch her but I do. They close around us, snarling, and we vanish out of this place, returning within minutes to Esme’s parlor.

  Shey crumples to the floor.

  “What happened?” I’m shaking so hard I have to kneel on the floor next to her. “What was that?”

  “I broke my agreement with them,” she whispers. “Took back…what I gave…and returned…what I took.”

  She looks at me with whirling eyes. A smile forms on her bleeding lips.

  “Get me a pen,” she says.

  I can’t believe she can hold a pen in that broken claw of a hand, but somehow she does. She writes on the clean sheaf of paper I bring her, and the smell of freshly turned earth fills the room again. Pia comes loose from the wall, tumbling to the floor. Gennady stirs and groans. Dek stumbles forward. The silver bindings loosen from Gennady. Like live things, they uncoil and snake across the floor to wind themselves around Casimir, binding his legs and arms, sealing themselves tightly around his mouth. Then Shey flicks a broken finger, and he falls forward too, toppling to the floor, straining against the silver bindings, his eyes blackening with rage.