Julia Vanishes (25 page)

The waves carry us to shore, kind and helpful now. By the time the prow of the boat touches the rocky beach, there are three men in gray furs and tall boots waiting for us. They wear swords at their hips, rifles slung over their shoulders.

There is no time to check if the others belowdecks are all right. Gregor is bleeding from a cut on his forehead, Wyn pale and cradling his arm as if it might be broken. Blast him, I think unreasonably, what good is he with a broken arm? Mrs. Och is still nowhere to be seen, and I wonder if she's flown off to one of the nearby islands on those big wings of hers—I wonder if she
can
fly. We climb out of the boat, clamoring and terrified—I must credit Mrs. Och for the realism, I suppose. In spite of the panic of the storm, everyone is now in character.

“Good sirs, thank you!” Csilla is crying, practically falling into the arms of one of the guards. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't seem to mind one bit.

“Boat is done for,” laments Wyn.

“We'll have it repaired here,” says Gregor. “We can pay. Sirs, can you tell me where we are?”

“You are nowhere. An unlucky place to come ashore,” says the shortest and, I'd guess, the eldest among the three. “Where are your papers?”

His Fraynish is heavily accented. They are all three very dark-skinned, perhaps from Eshrik or North Arrekem.

“I'll fetch them, sir,” says Esme, still on the deck of the boat. Gregor looks proud and affronted. Esme returns with the forged papers. Her expert hand and false seal are unrecognizable as fakes. The guard goes through each one, reading the document and then looking up at the owner.

“Congratulations,” he says to Gregor and Csilla. There is a kind of menace in his voice that I do not like at all. “You are recently married.”

“This is our
honeymoon,
” says Csilla indignantly. “Please, I don't care where we are—may we come inside? We are soaked; it is cold; our boat is a wreck.”

“It will sail again, I think,” says the guard, looking it over with vague disinterest.

“Sir,” says Csilla, growing shriller. “We have been shipwrecked! How long must we stand here? We will freeze to death!” And then she faints, most convincingly. Gregor catches her and cries, “Please! My wife is not well!”

“It is odd that you came ashore here,” the guard says to him. “Nobody comes ashore here.”

“I can see why not,” says Gregor, every inch the insulted aristocrat. “Is there a doctor here?”

“We'll light a fire in the Terra Room,” says the guard. He turns abruptly and walks back toward the castle, saying something to the other two in another language. They lead our frightened, sopping little group up the hill. I go right behind Esme, whose movement seems to open up the widest swath of margin-of-the-world space. Walking, she parts the air like the Lorian prophets parted water, so they say. I can follow her and remain hidden, a blurred membrane on either side of me, like I am walking through an invisible tunnel. Still, I am not used to moving this fast while vanished, and it requires fairly intense concentration.

The stone wall around the castle is high, and spiked with vicious-looking iron blades along the top. Heavy chains draw up a thick wooden door, which then lowers behind us. I can't immediately see who has opened it or how. This is unsettling, as it will be my job to get back out and then back in again if we need weapons or Bianka's witchcraft. Then I spot a guard by the door we are heading toward, an unassuming side door, with his hand on a lever between two stones in the wall. We pass through the door into the castle itself.

The guards take us through chilly, lamplit corridors to a room with tall beveled-glass windows all along one wall, which let in the light but allow no view. There are divans to sit on over by the windows. A middle-aged woman in white muslin comes in to light the fire. She looks unwell, skeletal. As she turns away I think I see a flash of something on her wrist, almost like a hinge, but then she is gone. The fire blazes up. We cluster near it and look around us. I do not know what kind of room this is supposed to be, what use it could possibly have. Paintings depicting hunting parties and sailboats and giant birds hang on the walls, along with scenes from folklore stories. A huge jade urn sits in one corner, a marble statue of a wicked-looking imp in another. Perched on pedestals around the room, a stuffed wolf with horns, a giant lizard twice the size of a man, and a small tiger-like creature with long fangs watch us with their shining dead eyes.

“How long must we wait here?” demands Gregor angrily. “We need dry things, something to eat. What kind of hospitality is this? Do you not know who I am?”

The guards say nothing.

“How about a privy?” says Wyn. “I've got to go.”

The guards glance at each other. One of them shakes his head.

“I've been drinking the wine stores all morning—I'm desperate for a piss, come on,” he begs. The guards are unbudging, so he shrugs and heads over to the large urn, opening his trousers.

One of the guards actually laughs, but another grabs Wyn roughly by the arm, saying something in their language, which I do not recognize. I move with them quickly, staying close to Wyn, like his shadow. His other arm dangles at a bad angle, and I can see it hurts him with every step. We hurry down the hall, where I come an inch from crashing straight into a shoulder-high urn painted with war scenes in reds and blacks, down some carpeted stairs, and then along another narrower hall to an indoor privy. I go in with him, and he shuts the door. The guard gives a warning rap, as if to say, be quick.

Wyn looks for me, and I come back with a sigh of relief, so he can see me again. I mouth
Well done,
and he puts his unhurt arm around me, buries his face in my hair.

“Be careful,” he whispers in my ear.

“Is your arm broken?”

“Yes. It's all right.”

“Stick together, and I'll be back for you.”

I don't want to let go of him, but the guard bangs on the door again. I step back against the privy wall. Wyn runs his thumb along my jaw, mouths
I love you,
and swings open the door. The guard drags him back down the hallway. I wait until I cannot hear their footsteps anymore. Then I slip out.

I keep to the walls, move slowly and listen well, but I meet nobody. The walls and rooms are rich with tapestries, marble and bronze statuary, strange animal heads, old maps, bright pre-Lorian paintings, star charts, and Yongguo-style ink paintings. I suppose if you live for thousands of years, you accumulate a few things. Most of the doors are locked, and so I pick them one after another, finding more corridors, more wide rooms packed full of art and books and antiques, more winding stairways. I have a good sense of direction, but the twists and turns are so numerous that I begin to shift things to act as reminders, my own trail of breadcrumbs to follow back: an ivory table's corner pointing toward the door I came through, the dry dead nose of a stuffed jackal directing me back down the corridor, a gold statuette of a dancer with her leg kicking out in the direction I must return by.

I am in a hallway lined with suits of armor, great iron things with dramatic feathers on the tops of their helmets—how anyone could ever move in them is quite beyond me—when I hear footsteps. I slip behind a suit of armor just as she rounds the corner. She is past me before I have a chance to disappear, her eyes fixed on the floor: a diminutive woman with fair, graying hair. A hunchback. My breath catches, remembering what Mrs. Och told me. She shuffles by, carrying a black leather bag. I wait until there is a good distance between us and then I follow as softly as I can. The floors are thickly carpeted here, and it is easy to move without much sound, which is how she caught me nearly unawares.

She does not look up or to the side. She goes up, up, up one stairway after another. We are climbing to the top of the castle, it seems. Her breathing is labored, and I feel confident following a little more closely, for she surely can't hear me over her own gasping breaths. We come out into a bright corridor full of windows, high above the sea. I catch a glimpse of the turrets below, the beach, and our own little boat tilting on the shore, but I don't venture after her into the hall. There are four guards at the end of it, heavily armed before a bolted steel door. They step aside for the woman, heads bowed. Something in the way they move, the swiftness of it, the tension, makes me think they are afraid of her. She removes a chain of keys from her waist belt and opens three different locks on the door. Then she stands still, head bowed, muttering. She raises one hand to cover her face, and with the other she traces something on the door with her finger. The pungent smell of damp, freshly turned earth wafts down the hallway, and the door swings open. I can't see beyond it. She enters and it clangs shut behind her. The guards exchange uneasy looks but say nothing.

A guarded room with so many locks on the door—and enchantment too, by the looks of it—any thief knows that's the door you want to get through. I will need Bianka after all. I can do nothing by myself, and I do not know how long the woman may be inside. I have to find my way back—easier said than done. I run down the stairs, back to the suits of armor where I first spotted the woman. I follow my landmarks and pointers back the way I came: great head of elk, twisting staircase, jade urn, large clock, alarmingly lifelike lion, small jeweled crown in case, star map hallway, and so on and so on.

I pause in a hallway lined with calligraphy in various languages. I don't know if it is a shadow of movement or some other sense that alerts me. I look up. And there she is, all in black, hanging from the ceiling like some kind of giant, awful spider.

“You see, I can be invisible too,” Pia says.

And before I can run, she drops straight down onto me.

S
he drags me by the hair down the hall. I am wearing Dek's wristlet of capsicum gas but I don't know that it would truly incapacitate Pia, with her mechanical goggles, and I daren't risk revealing it. I unhitch it from my hand and slide it farther up my arm, under my wet sleeve.

She bangs on a door with her fist. A sonorous voice calls out some reply that I don't catch, blood rushing in my ears. Then we are through the door, and she sends me sprawling to the floor before a pair of tall, shining black boots.

I look up. A great fur cape, gold buttons on his jacket, a black beard and black brows framing a pale face with full red lips, eyes of the deadest, flattest gray imaginable.

“Is this the girl you were telling me about?” he asks.

“This is Julia.”

Pia walks around me to his side, and they watch me stagger to my feet, dizzy from the hair-pulling run, my clothes still soaked through. Casimir, for I assume that is who I am facing, is very tall, and slender as a dancer. He might even be handsome, in a severe sort of way, if his coloring were not quite so stark and bloodless.

“The girl who can vanish,” he says. “The one who brought us the little boy.”

I don't bother to answer. He knows who I am. I scan the room. There are windows, and the door behind me is unlocked, but Pia is watching me with a tiny smile, and I don't think much of my chances if I try to make a break for it.

“And now you are here to steal him back again,” says Casimir. “Pangs of remorse?”

“Pangs of liking money,” I say, for it seems a safer answer, and he laughs.

“My sister is paying you,” he says, not a question. “How much?”

“Fifteen gold freyns,” I answer. There is no reason to lie.

He raises his eyebrows. “That is a fine price indeed,” he says.

“More than you paid me,” I say.

“The risk is greater,” he says. “Our job was easy by comparison, was it not?”

I shrug. That remains to be seen.

“I hate to see wasted talent,” says Casimir. “Now that you are here, I can't decide if I should cut your throat or hire you.”

My heart skips a beat. I don't trust myself to say anything to that.

“She would be useful,” says Pia.

“Trustworthy?” says Casimir.

“The contract would hold her,” says Pia.

“I do what I'm paid to do,” I say. “You paid me, and I got you Theo. Now Mrs. Och is paying me, so I work for her.”

“And if I doubled her price, would you work for me again? What would you say to thirty gold freyns?”

I lick my lips and keep my voice steady. “It would depend on what you were hiring me to do,” I say.

“There are limits to what you'll do for thirty gold freyns?” he asks, raising one black eyebrow.

“I don't like to accept a job without knowing what it is,” I say, although of course I did just that for him before, and for far less.

“I am not talking about a job,” he says. “I am talking about a retainer fee. After accepting my contract, you would then be paid by the job. Do you speak any languages besides Fraynish?”

I shake my head.

“You would have to learn a few; no great matter, you are young and intelligent, I can see that. I have a pet in a position of power, but he is unpredictable and strong-willed. He needs to be kept on a tighter leash, and a vanishing girl would be an asset indeed.”

“This pet of yours…you're talking about Agoston Horthy, aren't you?” I say, mainly to keep him talking while I try to think of a way out of this.

He smiles at me. It is not a nice smile, and I get the uncomfortable feeling he knows exactly what I'm thinking.

“Doesn't it bother you that he spends all his spare time drowning witches?” I ask.

“A harmless hobby,” says Casimir. “Witches and I have not been on good terms since the rise of the Eshriki Empire. My sister thinks she can work with them, steer history alongside them, but she has never been very pragmatic. If Agoston Horthy wants to drown them like vermin, let him.” Then he raises an eyebrow and says, “But perhaps you don't feel the same way? You may have personal reasons for thinking the drowning of witches an unsavory practice.”

I feel a little chill around my heart and wonder how much Pia has told him about me.

“So, for thirty gold freyns, you want me to go spy on Agoston Horthy for you?”

“Thirty gold freyns would be, as I said, the sum paid for you to abandon your current job and agree to a contract with me. There would be more gold for every job. You would also be under my protection”—he pauses very slightly here—“should you have enemies.”

He promises wealth, relative safety, and adventure. I know a girl who would have said yes to that in a heartbeat and considered it a dream come true, but I've buried that girl in her ill-gotten finery and barely remember what it felt like to be her.

“The world hates magic,” continues Casimir. “Frayne is leading the march to stamp it out. People like you need to find a safe harbor. At my side will be the safest, luckiest place to be.”

I don't like the way Pia is looking at me. That gleam in her electrical goggles. Did young Pia stand here once, reeling at the thought of so much gold? Pia, who calls herself a slave. Pia, who prefers ignorance beyond her particular instructions.

“What if I refuse?”

“I'll let you go,” he says, looking affronted by the question. Then he adds, “Not your friends, though. I'll feed them to the birds.”

“I'll need to see this contract,” I say, keeping my cool.

“Of course,” says Casimir. “Pia remembers what it entails, don't you, my dear?”

Pia says nothing.

“I'm famished too,” I add. I can't do much on an empty stomach, after all.

Casimir laughs. “I like her,” he says to Pia. “Fearless little pup, isn't she?”

Pia's goggles whir. Pia knows I am not fearless.

“I will ask my man to prepare a contract for you.” Then to Pia, he says, “Take her upstairs. Put a guard on the door and have the girl send some lunch up.”

She grabs me by the hair again, unnecessarily rough, and drags me out of the room.

“Let go of me; I'll walk!” I cry, twisting in her grasp. She hurls me to the floor and stands waiting, hands on her hips. I stagger to my feet and face her.

“You stupid girl,” she spits.

Whatever glimmers of kinship I felt for her at one point, it is all terror and loathing now.

“Is this how you started out?” I ask her. “Casimir telling you how special you are, offering more gold than you'd ever dreamed of?”

“You shouldn't have come here,” she says.

“I suppose not. Is he going to dress me up in leather and put goggles on my eyes?”

Her mouth twists. “Your choices are limited now, but there are worse fates than what he offers, for a girl like you.”

“What kind of girl am I?”

“You are like me,” she says. “Or perhaps I should say that I was once like you.”

And maybe that explains it, her almost kindness, and her cruelty.

“I'm not like you,” I say. “And you were never like me.”

My fingers are itching for my knife. I'm not sure I've ever wished someone harm in this way. I want to erase her.

She grins now, like she knows what I'm thinking and finds it reassuring.

“I was
just
like you,” she says.

There is a bed with an iron frame in a corner of the room. A tall chair and a table by a window. The window overlooks the sea, facing the opposite direction from our boat, if our boat is still there at all. An unlit chandelier, spiked with long white candles, hangs from the domed ceiling, beams climbing up to the center of the ceiling like a spider's web. A chest, locked. A tapestry depicting a rearing unicorn in a wood. I walk despondently about the room, pushing at the walls as if I might discover a secret panel. I consider breaking into the chest, but that's absurd, of course. Why would they put me in here if the room had anything useful or interesting in it?

The servant we saw earlier brings me a white muslin dress like hers, a pair of coarse stockings, and ill-fitting black shoes. She does not stay to watch me change out of my wet things, thank the Nameless One, and they did not bother to search me, so I still have my knife in the lining of my boot, Dek's lockpick in the heel. I take the pick out and slip it into the stocking, up by my thigh, and then I fasten the capsicum gas wristlet back around my hand. I don't think I can run in the shoes, so I opt to keep my wet boots, uncomfortable as they are. I've nowhere else to conceal my knife anyway.

The sky clears, the sea flattens, and the pale winter sun rises up toward midday. The maid returns with a tray of cheese and fruit and bread and a small flagon of what smells like beer. I watch her as she puts it on the table, looking for that flash of silver at her wrist. It looks as if the skin is pulled back around a shining little disk, but she moves quickly, and I can't get a good look before she goes out again.

Halfway through my meal, there is a heavy thud outside the door, like a body falling. The door opens, and the guard posted outside slides onto the floor, unconscious. I leap up, backing toward the window as if I might escape out of it, and then freeze. Sir Victor Penn Ostoway III steps over the body and into the room.

“Ella,” he says. “I'm not here to hurt you.”

“Good,” I say, my voice shaking in spite of myself. I keep my back to the wall and my finger on the nozzle of the capsicum wristlet. “What
are
you here for?”

“I've been talking with Casimir,” he says.

“Have you?” I hear myself laugh shrilly.
Steady, Julia,
I scold myself. “You were working for him all along?”

“No. I met him only yesterday. He had a proposal for me. It's complicated, and I don't know that we have much time….”

The pieces click into place all at once.

“Let me save you the trouble. He wants you to keep tabs on Agoston Horthy. But aren't you about to turn into a wolf any day now?”

His jaw drops.

“My name isn't Ella,” I add.

“No, that's right, he told me. What is it? Julia?”

I nod.

“He told me you are his employee, that you would pose as my niece at court and take your orders from me. That you can disappear. But then why have they locked you up? He is not telling me everything—and I prefer to know everything.”

“He's kidnapped Theo,” I say, a bit of a dodge, but there we are. “I don't work for him anymore. I came for Theo. To get him back.”

Sir Victor yanks the sheets off the bed and uses them to bind the unconscious guard very efficiently to the chair. He gags him with the pillowcase.

“What are you doing?” I say, though I'm nearly ready to weep with gratitude. “You're going to get killed.”

“He didn't see me,” says Sir Victor. “Don't worry—I'm quite good at this. Why Theo?”

“I don't know. Some part of a magic book inside him. Blasted if I understand it; all I know is, they're going to hurt him to get whatever it is Casimir wants out of him.”

“I have a daughter your age,” he says, straightening up and looking into my face, his expression rather sad. “You remind me of her, a bit. She's a good girl—clever, gifted, kind, but the world is not on her side.”

“I know,” I say. “I know about her.”

“Then you are a gifted spy, but you can still choose to be free. You don't want to belong to these people. Not if you can help it.”

“But you belong to them?”

“I ran out of time. Casimir, or rather his witch, Shey, was able to do for me what Mrs. Och and the professor could not do.”

“She cured you,” I say, and in spite of everything, I am rather glad for him. I suppose Pia got to him after I showed her the letters.

“I have been bound to Agoston Horthy for a long time, and now I am bound to Casimir too. But you don't need to be bound to anyone. Not if you can get away. I'm afraid I can't do more than this for you.” He hands me the guard's gun and gestures at the open door.