Julia Unbound

by Catherine Egan

  Shey packs her knitting awkwardly into her big leather bag on the floor.

  “Wait!” I shout. “You told me you would help me…break him. I need him dead or he’ll come for Theo.”

  “Dead?” She looks at me. “Easier said than done. Leave him in Kahge.”

  “We can destroy the other fragments,” rumbles Gennady. “When you took me to Kahge, those months ago, I saw the end of things…where magic drains out of the world.”

  “The whirlwind,” I say. Dek comes to my side, wrapping his mechanical arm around me so I can lean against him. He holds his other, broken hand to his chest.

  “I will take the Book and cast it into the whirlwind,” says Gennady. “Along with Casimir and myself. Our time is done. I am broken beyond repair. But my child can live—like a human child, in a human world.”

  “But how…where will we find the Book?” I ask.

  “Ah,” says Shey, sighing.

  “Please,” says Gennady to her. “As a kindness. After all you have done to me.”

  Shey shuffles to where Casimir is twisting on the ground. With one shattered hand, she tears open his shirt. There are two large symbols tattooed on his chest, below the small symbol protecting him from me. She writes on one of these with her finger. It bulges, something moving under the skin, swelling outward. The flesh splits open like overripe fruit. A blackened ball rolls out of his chest and changes shape, flattening into a row of pale strips of bone scratched with writing. She does the same, and the same sickening thing happens, with the other tattoo.

  Shey groans as she gets back up. “Your book. The Book of Disruption. Two thirds of it, anyway.”

  Gennady touches the strips of bone almost reverently.

  I think of what Ragg Rock told me when I first brought Theo there. A part of the Book taken out of the world meant that Kahge and the world were farther apart. If we take these two parts of the Book from the world, how wide will the rift be?

  Will I be able to get back?

  But it would be the end of all this. I don’t have a choice.

  “I’ll take you,” I say quickly, so I don’t have time to dwell on what the cost might be. “What about the nuyi? Is the queen really in his brain?”

  “He claims to have mastered it,” says Shey. “And maybe he did. What do I know of the Xianren? Although I wonder sometimes if it mastered him. He was different once, I’m told.”

  “He was,” says Gennady. “But if he changed, he changed willingly.”

  “Where is the mechanic?” I ask.

  “Nago Island,” says Pia. “I will send for him.” She pauses and then says, “I cannot.”

  She is still bound to Casimir. Her face turns a nasty shade of gray.

  “Do you have any more hermia?” Dek asks me. “We don’t know how far the nuyi’s reach is. We need to make sure it’s dead.”

  I give him the packet, and he sets about boiling the remaining leaves down to sludge, fetching a needle, and filling it with the liquefied hermia. Then he kneels next to Casimir with a knife in his unbroken hand. Gennady holds Casimir down so his body doesn’t buck, and Dek shoves his face into the carpet, exposing the back of his head. My stomach turns.

  “There is one more thing I need from you,” Shey says to me quietly, from the door. “You will hear from me soon, and you will know better than to defy me.”

  She goes down the stairs. From the window I watch her hunched figure limp across the square because I can’t look at what Dek is doing. There are fires all over the neighborhood, smoke in the air. A sudden scream from Dek. I spin around. Something that looks like a blood-soaked pancake goes flying across the room, up the wall, along the ceiling.

  “Great hounds!” roars Gennady.

  Casimir is lying facedown on the floor, still bound in silver, the back of his head bloody, blood all over the carpet. The thing flies from the ceiling straight at me. I put my hands out to try to stop it. It fastens on to my arms, driving stinging tentacles into my skin, scuttling up my arms toward my face. It is pulsing with fury, soft and slithering, like an organ come to life.

  “Get it off!”

  I slam it against the wall to no avail, spinning madly. Dek charges right into me and sticks the needle into the creature, pushing the plunger full of hermia all the way down. The thing shudders and goes limp, still fastened to my arms.

  “Flaming Kahge,” says Dek breathlessly.

  He pulls the thorny bits of tentacle out of my arms with tweezers while Gennady stuffs the squashy remains of the nuyi queen into his coat pocket. Pia has her back against the wall, watching everything. She looks slowly down at the inside of her wrist, and touches a finger to the silvery disk there. Even from across the room, I can see it has gone dull. She flicks at it with a fingernail, and it flakes right off, a bit of dull thread dangling loose from her wrist. She stares at it for a long moment and then looks up at me. I try to smile, but I think it probably looks more like a grimace. Whatever happens next, Pia is free of Casimir. We’ve managed that, at least.

  Gennady heaves Casimir’s bound body over his shoulder and picks up the strips of bone. Casimir’s eyes are wide open. They fix on me with such deep hatred that I tremble, even though he’s bound, undone.

  “Let’s go,” says Gennady.

  We land on the black rock above the smoking city, as close to the whirlwind as I dare to take them. I can feel the pull of it, roaring on the horizon.

  “Good luck,” I say to Gennady. Who knows what he’s going into? I can only hope Casimir never finds a way back. The look on Gennady’s face is something close to elation. Perhaps the unknown is the only thrill left for someone who has lived out every possible life.

  “Take care of my child,” he says.

  “Of course.” I gesture feebly at the great whorl of wind and smoke. “I hope there are lots of pies on the other side of that thing.”

  He actually laughs. “I hope I never see another pie,” he says, but then he adds: “Please thank Mrs. Freeley for me.”

  His brother in his arms, he starts to bound toward the whirlwind, into its tug. I vanish—or I try to—but the whirlwind is growing now, expanding to fill the sky, like a mouth opening wider and wider. It swallows Gennady and Casimir, sucking hard at me as I pull and pull against it. The black rock and the shadowy Spira City fall away, but I can’t find the world, and the whirlwind wants me. It roars and pulls at me while I pull away please let me go please let me go back please let me be Julia again and for good.

  Something snaps. I slam into hard rock.

  “What is happening?”

  Ragg Rock’s mud face is bent over me, etched with fear. The rabbit, George, leaps onto my chest, trembling. We are on top of her hill, but the hill is tilting dangerously toward Kahge on one side, and Kahge is all whirlwind now, still growing and devouring, pulling. Spira City on the other side is spinning away, as if breaking free of its moorings.

  “We have to go!” I shout. “We have to go now!”

  I tuck George into my jacket and take Ragg Rock’s mud hand in mine. We run. The moat is breaking into a cliff, crumbling to nothing; there is no stairway at all, Spira City a revolving speck below us, receding. I drag her to the cliff’s edge and right over it, a desperate dive toward the retreating world.

  We fall through the nothingness, and as we fall, her hand turns soft in mine. A flash of her terrified face as her hand melts to wet mud, as we are caught in a great wind, spinning and tossed about, and then she is simply blown apart, lost in the emptiness between the world and its awful reflection.

  I hit something that feels solid but it is moving, everything is moving, I am sliding hard and fast, and then it all goes still and the only thing I can feel is a soft trembling against my palm.

  I look up, blink. I still have eyes, then, and a body. I am outside the old laundry shop, boarded up for a few years n
ow, below the flat where I used to live with Dek and my mother and father. I smell smoke and magic blowing across the city on a hot wind. Voices shouting. The trembling under my hand, I realize, is the racing heartbeat of the terrified rabbit. The wind passes over me and is gone. It begins to rain.

  Three sets of dirty, scuffed boots run past me. A woman just behind them stops—a roly-poly grandmotherly type.

  “You all right, dear?” She reaches out a hand to help me up.

  The booted men turn and come back, faces soot-smudged and exultant. One of them is bleeding from his leg and another coughing badly, but they are laughing.

  “I’m all right,” I say. Hearing my own voice, I think it might even be true. Not so for Ragg Rock. Frightened as I was of her, I feel a wash of pity. I stagger to my feet and tuck the rabbit back into my jacket to shelter it from the rain, which is coming down harder and harder. “What’s happening?”

  “Roparzh’s daughter has returned and taken the throne!” cries one of the men. “Duke Everard has fled the city!”

  “They’ve tossed Agoston Horthy in prison!” says the other. “Along with the witches who were trying to take the city. She’s saved us all! She has a special gas to fight witches! She stopped them!”

  “She pulled those monsters right out of the sky,” says the other man. “I saw it. I heard she slew that dragon herself with a sword! They’ve got its head on a pike now!”

  “Come, lass, there’s going to be a celebration. Come and see.”

  And they are pulling me along through the rain, which becomes a downpour, the fires in the city going out one by one.

  It seems a dark portent for the new queen to begin her reign with the public drowning of a witch. I have had enough of Cleansings in my lifetime, and I’ve no desire to see Lady Laroche’s execution in the traditional manner, or Zara’s address to the people. She says she wants to show people that this new Frayne will not tolerate harmful magic, that they will still be protected against witches. I’ve voiced my objections and now I have other things to do.

  Waiting outside the room where Casimir’s mechanic performed the surgery on Dek, Zara and I did talk about Mr. Faruk, who was her tutor once. She was skeptical when I said he was Marike.

  “Perhaps only a very convincing con man,” she said. I told her I was convinced—by the Ankh-nu, by Lidari. But she remained unsure.

  “He had secrets piled miles deep, but I could never read him well,” she said. “As someone who stepped into the shoes of another and made a life of pretending to be someone else, I’m inclined to skepticism. The best actors convince themselves.”

  In the end, it doesn’t matter. Marike and Lidari have left the city. The Xianren are gone. Ragg Rock is gone. My mother is gone. But I’m still here. As soon as the mechanic comes out to tell us the surgery was a success, I go to do the thing Shey has asked of me.

  * * *

  There are no windows in Arrimer, but I can’t wait for a hanging this time. Getting Agoston Horthy out of his cell involves sleeping-serum darts and a good deal more time and drama than I’d like. The prison locks down, bells clanging, soldiers running everywhere. But they can’t see us, and so they can’t catch us.

  I haven’t tried vanishing as far as I can. I don’t know if Kahge is still there or if its link to the world has been severed completely by the destruction of the two Book fragments—and if so, where would I go if I kept pulling back? I don’t really want to know. I stay close to myself, no farther than four steps from my body. I keep the precious world in my sights.

  Leaving the prison in chaos behind us, I take Agoston Horthy out over the city, to Limory Cemetery. At the cemetery gates, I tell him, “I have a brother too. I’d do anything for him. I understand that part.”

  The former prime minister looks different. Something lighter around his eyes. He doesn’t answer me.

  “I’m not saving you,” I say. “The queen says you have to stand trial, and you will.”

  “I’m not afraid to die,” he says.

  “My mother was a witch. You had her drowned.”

  I face him finally: the monster of my childhood, the first person I ever wished dead, and, like me, made what he is by a mother meddling in Kahge. We are the children of witches who wanted too much, our very natures disrupted.

  “My mother was a good woman before my brother died,” he says. “But life twists us and breaks us and we must submit. A broken, twisted witch might not submit to life’s random cruelty, its inevitable losses. She might do terrible things with her anger and grief and regret. Those who can disrupt nature eventually will. They are too dangerous to live.”

  There is no shame or pity in his steady gaze. Such calm certainty, even now.

  “You’ve been sleeping,” I say. Those deep hollows under his eyes have receded.

  He almost smiles. “I can sleep, I can taste my food, quench my thirst. I even feel pain. It is good—to rest a little, to feel a little—at the end. But it’s too late to matter.”

  He doesn’t mention love. She robbed him of that too, and then gave it back, and I wonder how it feels to feel again. I wonder if there is anyone for him to love, now that he can.

  At the far end of the cemetery, she is waiting. The body in a casket, the earth already dug up. I walk part of the way with him, until she is in view. She looks up, and their eyes meet. I think I feel him tremble at my side, but it’s hard to say.

  “You have an hour,” I tell him. “Then I have to take you back.”

  He walks slowly up the path toward his mother and the drowned body of his brother.

  When I get back, Dek is awake, and Zara is at his bedside.

  “Don’t you have a country to rule?” I say to her. I confess: I’m upset she was the one there when he woke.

  She presses her lips together. “Indeed, it is a difficult time. I’ve just been told that somebody who can disappear took Agoston Horthy from Arrimer.”

  “He’s back in his cell now,” I say curtly.

  Zara’s mouth drops open.

  “That’s not a very queenly look,” I say. “I just needed to borrow him.”

  “You might have asked me.”

  “You would have said no.”

  “Did you take him back alive?”

  “Yes. And if you hang him, you’re going to have the most powerful witch in the world in a snit. I recommend against it.”

  “We can’t live in fear of witches and their whims,” says Zara. “Horthy must stand trial, and he will be hanged as a traitor.”

  “I hope you’re ready for what might come of that,” I say.

  “We will see.”

  “What about Lord Skaal?”

  “No sign of him. Nor of Duke Everard. His whole family fled Corf. Rumor is they’ve gone to Ingle.”

  She gives me a hard look, which I ignore.

  “I’d like a moment with my brother.”

  “Of course.”

  She leans over and plants a kiss on his forehead. He gives her cheek a caress with his hinged knuckles. I look away.

  Before she goes out, she says to me, “Are you a friend of my country, Julia?”

  “It’s my country too,” I say. “And frankly, I’m not sure.”

  “I should like you to use your powers for good—to serve your country.”

  “You mean to serve you.”

  “I’ve granted Pia a pardon, as you asked, and given her citizenship papers. She has taken up permanent residence in the West Spira Grand Hotel. I made her an offer of employment, and she said she would accept it if you did. This new Frayne will have its enemies, magical and otherwise. You could help keep it safe as it grows into a country ruled by justice. There will be justice for witches, I promise you. They will be judged by their deeds and not their nature, but the laws will be strict.”

  I think of Dorje Tsewang s
tanding up and saying, I will be faster alone.

  “I’ll consider jobs on a case-by-case basis,” I say.

  “Then we will be in touch.”

  She goes out, and I sit awkwardly on the edge of Dek’s bed.

  “So you’re going to be king of Frayne?” I ask him.

  He laughs. “No. She’ll make a political marriage. But I’m going to have a very well-funded laboratory.”

  “Developing fancy weapons for the new queen?”

  “If you’re going to consider jobs of the kind I think you mean, I’m going to make sure you’re well armed. But no—not just weapons. I’d rather like to try my hand at things that make peace easier, not war.”

  “You can be useful and joyful for a good while now,” I say.

  “That’s just what I intend.” He smiles, and then his voice softens. “My poor sister. What a time of it you’ve had.”

  “Oh, I’m all right,” I say. His smile wobbles just a little, and that’s enough—my tears come flooding forth. I wrap my arms around him and bury my face in his shoulder. My brother, who is going to live.

  Roughs and beggars and outlaws crowd the ruins of the palace and its grounds for the coronation party. The gates are open to the people. There are soldiers too—Zara has upped their wages and that seems to have been enough for most of them. She’s gone digging into Frayne’s coffers for this party too, but she’s right that she is winning goodwill. Fireflares explode overhead, and music fills the air.

  “Well, my girl, we did it,” says Esme when I join them in the crown room. Csilla is dressed to the nines and looks as happy as I’ve ever seen her, jewels glinting in her hair. The crown room is still mostly intact, though there are fissures in the marble floor where the dragon’s fire sac leaked.