Shara shook her head. “You’re wrong. Fervor and strength is what keeps the peace. And the world hasn’t changed that much.”
“You think the world is such a cold and bitter place, my dear Shara,” said Vohannes. “If your great-grandfather taught you anything, I’d hope it’d be that one person can vastly improve the lives of many.”
“Saying something so admiring of the Kaj on the Continent would get you killed.”
“A lot of things on the Continent would get me killed.”
Both simply assumed that, as educated children of power, they would change the world, but neither could agree on the best way to change it: one day Shara would wish to write a grand, epic history of Saypur, of the world, and the next she would consider running for office, like her aunt; one day Vohannes would dream of funding a grand art project that would completely remake the Continental polises, and the next he would be shrewdly planning a radical business venture. Both of them hated the other’s ideas, and gleefully expressed that hatred with unchecked vitriol.
In retrospect, they might have started sleeping together solely out of conversational exhaustion.
But it was more than that. Deep down, Shara knew she had never really had anyone else to talk to, to really talk to, until she met Vohannes, and she suspected he felt the same: they were both from famous, reputable families, they were both orphans, and they were both intensely isolated by their circumstances. Much like the game they’d played in the tournament, their relationship was one they invented day by day, and it was one only they could understand.
When she was not studying in her first and second year of college, Shara was engaged in what she would later feel to be a simply unfathomable amount of sex. And on the weekends, when the academy maids would stay home and everyone could sleep in, she’d stay in his quarters, sleeping the day away in his arms, and she would wonder exactly what she was doing with this foreigner, this boy from a place she was supposed to hate with all of her heart.
She did not think it was love. She did not think it was love when she felt a curious ache and anxiety when he was not there; she did not think it was love as she felt relief wash over her when she received a note from him; she did not think it was love when she sometimes wondered what their lives would be like after five, ten, fifteen years together. The idea of love never crossed her mind.
How stupid are the young, Shara would later think, that they cannot see what is right in front of them.
*
Shara sits back in her chair and studies her work:
3411 HIGH STREET, SAINT MORNVIEVA BANK,
BOX 0813, GHIVENY TAORSKAN 63611
She wipes sweat from her brow, checks her watch. It is three in the morning. And once she realizes it, she finds it feels like it.
Now the real difficulty, thinks Shara. How to get at whatever is in this box.
There’s a knock at her door. “Come in,” she says.
The door swings open. Sigrud lumbers in, sits down before her desk, and begins to fill his pipe.
“How did it go?”
He pulls an odd face: confusion, dismay, slight fascination.
“Bad?”
“Bad,” he says. “Good, some. Also … odd.”
“What happened?”
He stuffs his pipe in his mouth with some hostility. “Well, the woman of the two, she works at the university. She is a maid … Irina Torskeny. Unmarried. No family. Nothing besides her work. I checked her rotation—she cleaned the professor’s office, quarters. All of it. She has been assigned to Dr. Pangyui’s offices since he got here.”
“Good,” says Shara. “We’ll look into her, then.”
“The other one … the man, though …” Sigrud recounts his confusing exploits in the ravaged neighborhoods of Bulikov.
“So the man just … vanished?” asks Shara.
Sigrud nods.
“Was there a sound of any kind? Like a whip crack?”
Sigrud shakes his head.
“Hm,” says Shara. “If it had been a whip crack, I would have thought it—”
“Paresi’s Cupboard.”
“Parnesi.”
“Whatever.”