Julia Vanishes (24 page)

“Since coming to work for the professor, I've seen things I never would have believed in once. I've met people who are often called evil—people like Bianka or Mr. Darius. They are gifted or cursed in ways that set them apart, but they are not evil. They are simply people, with good and bad, like all of us, struggling like all of us. Evil, to me, has always been rather an abstract thing. I never felt myself touched by it before now. But I look at you, wearing the face of my friend Ella, and I think of what you have done, and I wonder, is this girl evil? You do not look it, and yet I think the answer can only be yes.”

I stare at my new boots, the soft toes already scuffed from tramping around in the snow. I can think of no reply, and when I look up, he has gone back inside. I stay outside until I am too cold. His words have opened up something dark and horrible inside me. My limbs are heavy as I go back in too. Frederick has not joined the others—he is standing by himself, moodily examining a woman's lambskin boot on display.

“That would suit you well,” I say.

He looks up warily.

“So what about this tree of Mrs. Och's?” I ask.

“I know no more than you,” he says. “There was a beautiful old cherry tree in the garden, and then one day it was gone, torn up by the roots.”

“And she says Casimir stole it. Why would he want a tree?”

“Why would he want a baby boy?”

Silence falls between us. He makes to walk away and I stop him, catching him by his sleeve.

“I'm not evil,” I say. I don't know why it matters. Why I should care what he thinks. What else
could
he think, after all?

“I was thinking aloud,” he replies coolly. “I know you are capable of doing evil. I do not know what that says about the state of your soul, whether or not you have a conscience and feel things as other people do.”

“I don't know how other people feel.”

He gives me a look of vague interest, like I am a specimen in a jar. The conversation is making me feel queasy.

“Do you feel remorse?” he asks. “Do you see Bianka's suffering, and feel pity?”

“Of course I feel…pity,” I say. “Look, I didn't know what this job was going to be like. I do what I'm paid to do.”

“There are other kinds of work. As you know.”

“Bleeding housemaid.” I shake my head. “Not a chance in Kahge. I figured I was just snooping, or maybe stealing something. I didn't know what they wanted until after the Gethin, and Pia would have killed me if I hadn't done as she said.”

“So you are not evil but a coward, perhaps?” he suggests, unsmilingly, and I have no reply. I don't know how to begin to explain to him every moment that led me to this one, how I needed Dek to be safe too and the home we found with Esme, how the job spiraled out of control and I was so confused and so afraid all the time, squashed in a cabinet staring at the man who ordered my mother's death, Pia's knife against my throat, her grotesque threats, all of it. I don't know what to say to him, but somehow I can't bear for him to think me evil. Or perhaps I can't bear the possibility that he's right. What kind of person hands Theo over to Pia?

“I'm going to get Theo back,” I say.

“For fifteen gold freyns,” says Frederick, and he walks away from me again.

“You want some?”

I shake my head, and Wyn puts the expensive brandy back on the table, staring into his own half-full glass.

“Julia,” he says sadly. “Always such a paragon of strength and self-control. You make fellows like Gregor and me look like such dismal weaklings.”

“Speak for yourself,” says Gregor, who is stoking the already blazing fire—probably not a safe thing to do if you're as drunk as he is, but we don't stop him. The flames rise up and he lies down right there and starts snoring.

We are back home now, thank the Nameless One, after that awful meeting. I say awful, but I suppose technically it was a success, as we are to go ahead with the job and meet Mrs. Och and the others in Nim tomorrow. Esme has gone straight to bed, and Dek has spent the evening at a workshop in the Edge belonging to an associate of Esme's, an illicit gunsmith with an innovative flair.

“I miss you,” says Wyn. “Are you ever going to stop hating me? Even if I can't have you back, won't you at least smile at me now and then?”

I miss him too, but I don't say so. Frederick's words are still buzzing in my head, and so instead I say, “That boy could be dead already, for all I know. Do you think…am I evil, Wyn?”

“Evil?” He gives a bark of laughter. “Hounds, Julia, you did a job. It wasn't a nice one, and I feel bad for you; I'll bet it was awful. But we're crooks for hire—that's our business—and what else were you to do? Back out and get your throat cut? You're not evil, Brown Eyes.”

“Esme won't look at me,” I say.

“Esme just asked a bleeding fortune for this job. I'd say you've brought her the best business she's ever had.”

Csilla comes in then, bundled in a fur coat and hat.

“You two had better get some sleep,” she chides us. She kneels next to Gregor, strokes his face, and whispers, “Come home with me, love.”

By the firelight I can see the faint lines around her eyes, strands of silver among the gold of her hair.

“We can help carry him down,” I offer, but Gregor rouses, mumbling something about a horse.

“Lean on me, darling,” she says, helping him to his feet, and he lurches out on her arm, stinking and stumbling.

Wyn shakes his head. “He made a real go of it this time. Poor old Csilla.”

I don't say anything to that. This is the story I grew up on, and I know it by heart.

“Look, it was a rotten job,” he says to me. “We've both done plenty of rotten things, but that doesn't make us rotten people. Or maybe it does, I don't know. I'm no philosopher. Are you going to walk out on me if I tell you I'm sorry?”

I shake my head, try to force a smile.

“I know I'm no good at saying it….I don't know why not—the holies know I feel it—but the words stick in my throat when I think them. But I do love you, Julia. You're everything to me. We're so alike, the two of us. We love the world, but the world doesn't love us back. The truth is just that I was bored and I was lonely and Arly Winters is pretty and I didn't think you'd find out.”

“You need to work on that little speech,” I say dryly. “The first bit is better than the last bit.”

Laughter plays across his beautiful mouth before he turns serious again. I've always loved that, how close he seems to laughter, even at the worst of times.

“If I thought it would make a difference, I'd spew remorse and beg and make promises,” he says. “But I want to be straight with you. I'm sorry because it hurt you, but I don't think what I did was anything so terrible. We aren't betrothed. It was just a good time, and it's over. She means nothing to me.”

I know he wants to make me feel better by saying this. It doesn't matter now, and so I don't tell him that there was no joy as great as his nearness, never has been, for me, and to have him treat it so lightly, give the very same of himself to stupid Arly Winters like it was nothing at all, that is what hurt. I look out the dark window, snow drifting past it. I am not even sure myself what thing has been broken between us by his dalliance. It's just that the beauty of what we had, the rarity and wonder I believed in, seems a lie now, and though I want to go back to him, I know it won't be the same.

“Well, you've said your piece,” I say, rising, and I kiss him on the cheek to show him I'm not angry anymore.

“Don't go,” he says, but I shake my head, pulling away.

“Csilla's right, we need to get some sleep. Big day tomorrow.”

Still, it hurts to walk away from him. It would be a comfort, tonight, to hold him close, to lose myself in him, to hear him tell me that he loves me, that we are alike. Instead I go downstairs holding Frederick's words close to my heart:
I think of what you have done, and I wonder, is this girl evil?

Dek is back from the gunsmith's workshop. He is sitting at his desk and scribbling figures on a sheet of paper, his hair pulled back so the dark Scourge blots stand out starkly, a crescent around his missing eye. Before him there is a metal cannon no bigger than my forearm, and seven small canisters lined up next to it.

I
have always wanted to see the sea. Now I cannot see anything else. Mrs. Och says our boat is a sturdy vessel, but it seems to me a poor sort of thing, pitching this way and that on the great gray swells, lost between the sky above and the water below. The horizon is a dark line where the sea meets the sky, encircling us. It is foolhardy, I think now, to leave behind the solid earth. This is a place for fish and for birds, not for us.

When Frederick shows me on a map the small distance we have traveled, I can hardly believe the world is so large. The first night, I lie on the rocking deck looking up at the stars, and I fear my own smallness will simply be snuffed out, extinguished by the vastness surrounding me. I feel it then, unexpectedly: that thin membrane through which I can disappear. I feel it all around me, tugging strangely at me, and a part of me wants to push through it and disappear farther than I have ever disappeared before. I can feel another infinity there, another eternity, but anything seems safer than these stars that don't care and the cold depths we ride our boat across. The following night is clouded, and though the sky seems less vast, it is darker.

It is a strange journey, very busy at times but with great long stretches with nothing to do at all but watch the sea pass by and listen to the surprising conversations that spring up between Mrs. Och's crew and my own. Here on the boat, the quarters are too close and the work required of us too immediate to keep a chilly distance. Frederick teaches me how to use the compass and sextant; we learn to read the sails and adjust them as needed; Dek and I compete over the telescope, marveling at how it brings things at a great distance up so close it seems you could reach out and touch them. My own gang steers clear of Bianka, clearly wary of her, but she keeps to herself and does not join in any of the conversations. Mrs. Och herself stays in a cabin below, resting, and we do not see her.

The coast of Sirillia comes into view, a reddish hump in the distance, and we sail alongside it. Even at sea, the air is warmer here than in Spira City, and we all shed our coats. Frederick talks about the fall of the Sirillian Empire. Gregor rhapsodizes about Sirillian wine. Csilla tells a story about visiting the ancient monasteries carved into the cliffs above Fiatza, the capital. Gulls wheel overhead, and it feels as if we are returned to the world, almost.

I slip belowdecks and find Mrs. Och lying very still in her cabin, eyes wide. For a horrible moment, I think she is dead, and I gasp. Her eyes flit toward me.

“Julia,” she says.

“What are you doing?” I ask. “Are you all right?”

“I'm preparing,” she says, almost in a whisper.

“Oh.” I linger in the doorway a moment; then the boat hits a wave and lurches and I stumble into the room, coming to an awkward stop right by her little bunk. “Do you think Theo is still alive?” I ask her, because I can't ask anyone else, and because I can't keep the question locked inside me anymore, burning its way through everything that used to matter to me.

“I don't know,” she says. “If he is still alive, I do not think he will be for much longer.”

The room sways, and I don't know if it's the boat or my own horror robbing me of solid footing. I clutch the side of the bunk.

“Then Casimir means to hurt him.”

“Casimir means to take him apart and rip out the thing that is woven into his being,” says Mrs. Och. “I can only guess the result will not leave much of Theo behind.”

“What is it?” I whisper. “Why Theo?”

She props herself up on her pillows, and I think, I have never seen a person look so tired.

“Memory can only hold so much, and mine is not what it used to be,” she says. “When I recall the beginning, I have only flashes now. The smell of the soil, how the waves of the ocean were as tall as mountains, how the mountains were full of fire. I remember riding the wing of a great dragon, and always, I remember my brothers with me. Everything had a will back then—even the elements. The story goes that Feo, spirit of fire, wrote the first magic, becoming lord of the other spirits, but I do not know the truth of it. What I do know is that the Book shaped everything that followed, and shapes it still.”

“The Book of Disruption,”
I say, remembering what I read in Professor Baranyi's study.

Her eyebrows go up. “You know about it.”

“Not really. I read that the Eshriki Phars tried to take this book from you, but they couldn't read it.”

“The Book can only be read by the Xianren, and we knew better than to read it. At least, back then we did. My brothers and I were each charged with a fragment of the Book to keep safe and separate.”

“Charged by who?” I ask.

“Some have called them the gods of the elements. I do not know what to call them, but they have long since faded, passed into the earth, as the Xianren are doing now, and as the Book has tried to do. According to legend, the other spirits rebelled against Feo and broke the Book in three, releasing magic into the world. They birthed the Xianren to protect the fragments and keep them separate. After the Eshriki Phars tried and failed to read it, the fragments seemed more alive than ever and began to change, becoming unreadable even by us. Casimir's part, I remember, became a glorious green lake in the foothills of the Parnese mountains. Mine, a great tree. Kingdoms rose up and fell around it, and I stayed in what much later became Spira City, next to my tree. Gennady's was the strangest: a shadow that attached itself to him, a small winged thing, dark, and moving wherever the light struck it, like a mischievous child.”

“He put it in Theo?” I whisper.

“I do not know how, or if it is even possible, but Casimir seems to believe so,” she says. “If he can truly reassemble the Book, make it text again and read it, he will be master of the very magic that binds and balances the world as we know it. I know Casimir. I love Casimir. But now I fear Casimir.”

“Does Bianka know?” I ask.

“I told her,” says Mrs. Och. “For her, this is only about her son, but I am telling you so that you understand there is more at stake than a boy's life. There is a hunchback in the castle, a witch named Shey. You must be careful of her. She is more dangerous than Casimir. The lake is no longer a lake, my tree is no longer a tree, and I do not know if Theo will still be Theo, but you must make sure to obtain at least one fragment, if not all of them. I do not know what you should look for. Perhaps text. Something written. The castle will have many books, for Casimir is a great collector.”

“Pia told me I was looking for a shadow that might look like anything, and it turned out to be Theo,” I say. “Hard job for a thief, when the thing you're meant to steal doesn't keep on being the same thing.”

“I suppose that is the spy's job, then, to find what the thief must steal,” says Mrs. Och.

“I'm going to look for Theo,” I tell her. “If I see a book that looks as though it might have been a tree or something, I'll grab it, but I'm not going looking. I won't risk it. I'm looking for Theo and getting him out of there.”

She looks at me for a long time then.

“You aren't doing this for gold,” she says.

I try to answer but can't. I sink to my knees before her. A bubble rises up through my chest and bursts. My body shakes with awful, gulping sobs; tears wet my face and hands, but I feel oddly as if I've stepped out of myself and this is not really me—and thank the Nameless for that. I can't bear to be Julia anymore—Julia, who is a fool and a coward, Julia, who understands nothing, Julia, who sold a boy for silver and who will get him back for gold if he's not dead yet, if he's not dead yet, if he's not dead yet.

I feel her hands in my hair, and I go still. She strokes through the sea-tossed tangles with gentle fingers. Nobody has combed my hair for me since I was seven years old. I feel like I'm falling, my heart plunging toward the water. I can hear the crowd roaring as the water closes over her; I can see Theo reaching for me as Pia shuts the door, and the weight of silver and gold pulling me down, down. I think I sleep a little, there in the dark cabin, half on the floor, with my head on Mrs. Och's pillow as she strokes my hair.

I wake when she whispers in my ear: “It's time.”

The coast of Sirillia is gone, but through the telescope I see a gray hump in the gray water, which the professor tells us is the Isle of Nago, and several smaller islands surrounding it. Dek, Bianka, Frederick, and the professor go belowdecks. Beneath the rug in the main cabin, there is a trapdoor to a storage room, and the four of them squeeze into it together with a small gas lamp, the spare sails, and the weapons. The others have their parts to play. Esme is cook and crew, Wyn the boat's captain. Gregor and Csilla, of course, are the rich newlyweds. As for me, I will not be there at all. The sea gets rougher; soon we find ourselves staggering, sometimes unexpectedly sprawling, as we are tucking away all evidence of those hiding below.

When I go back up on deck the sky is almost black, even though it is early morning, and the waves are rising higher and higher around us. Gregor, relatively sober for the first time on the journey, is bundled up against the wind, trying to control the wheel.

“Great hounds!” I hear Esme cry out somewhere to the side of me. Gregor lets the wheel go and the boat tilts madly. Mrs. Och stands middeck, arms wide, great gray-white wings spread out behind her. Her face is more animal than human, catlike, her own features surprisingly distinctive in spite of it. She is looking up at the sky as if she were looking into somebody's face, and she is speaking. I don't understand the words, but her voice is like some unearthly music, entreating and commanding all at once. The air seems to ripple and crackle and move in great circles around her. She is speaking magic.

The clouds come rushing to her, and the waves rise up to meet them. Rain pours down upon her. Lightning forks white and terrible onto the black sea around us. I cling to the doorframe while our poor vessel is lifted up high on a wave like a cliff, and then we go crashing down to the water below. Another wave rises up over us, a mountain ready to tumble. I hear myself scream, and the wave falls. Water pours down the stairs, cold and dark, sending me sprawling and soaked into the narrow black hall below. I struggle up the steps, still sloshing seawater as the boat tilts so far to the side I think we are capsizing. I will drown like her, I think, and I will know if Liddy was telling the truth that it is a peaceful death. I will never see Spira City again. I will never atone for my crime. I will never set it right.

I reach the deck on all fours. Another wave is rising over us. Mrs. Och is gone. A tearing sound, and the mainsail is suddenly flapping across the deck. I cannot see the others anymore. I hang on to the ropes binding the lifeboat in place, cleave there as our poor vessel rides the storm, helpless. The world is all black water and sudden flashes of white light that illuminate the waves towering around us. I hear somebody shouting my name, but I don't know who it is. I think of Dek shut away in the belly of the boat with strangers, and I weep because I am too afraid to leave my spot and find him, to help him or to die with him. I can only hang here, waiting to know what it is to be taken by the water, to swallow the sea and be swallowed by it, to die. I think to myself, the fear is the worst part. Let go; let it be over. But my arms cling fast—they cannot be reasoned with. Something strikes me on the shoulder and I cry out but do not loosen my grip. I vanish without thinking, pull away from it all, as if I can hide from the storm, but the storm did not see me to begin with and does not care. I taste salt, the sky heaves and roars, and the terrible sea mocks our folly in venturing out upon it.

And then it is over. I think it must have been more gradual than that, but it feels sudden. Eyes pressed closed, arms worked through the ropes, I realize: It is quiet. And then: It is still. I open my eyes. The sky is no longer so close, but high and gray. The waves are long swells that do not threaten to topple us. And there before us sits an island, gray stone and shrub rising up out of the water, a walled castle perched upon its jagged shelf.