(She is still somewhat proud of this: how tranquil she was, how cold, how maintained. And yet she is also ashamed: Was she so shocked, so cowardly, so withdrawn that she could not even allow herself to shout at him?)
She threw herself into schoolwork, suddenly inflamed with a sense of patriotic discipline. He approached her after his graduation, months later, packed and ready for the train trip to the docks, and on to Bulikov. He begged her to come with him, begged her to help him be the man he so dearly wished to be. He tried to bribe her, spin a storybook lie, told her she could be a princess back in his home, if she wished. And Shara, all ice, all cold steel, had hurt him as best she could—What I think you truly want, my dear child, is a prince. But you can’t have such a thing at home, can you? They’d kill you for that—before she shut the door in his face.
One day you’ll know, her Auntie Vinya told her. And understand. You’ll figure yourself out. And things will be all right.
One of the few times, Shara often reflects, that Auntie Vinya was quite terribly and completely wrong.
When I entered the hills near Jukoshtan I felt quite terribly afraid. The moon was yellow-brown, like a tea stain. The hills were stark and white, with short, twisted trees. And the ground was so uneven that it always forced you down, walking the floors of the valleys, lost in darkness. Or so it felt.
Sometimes I saw firelight flickering on the trunks of the twisted trees. There were cries in the dark: animals, or people pretending to be animals, or animals pretending to be people. Sometimes there were voices. “Come with us!” they whispered. “Come join our dance!”
“No,” I said. “I am on an errand. I have a Burden. I must deliver my Burden to Jukov himself, and no one else.” And they laughed.
How I wished I was back in Taalvashtan. How I wished I was home. I wished I had never taken this Burden from Saint Threvski. And yet, I was also curious—I do not know if it was the voices on the winds, or the sniggers from the trembling trees, or the light of the yellow moon, but Jukoshtan was a place of hidden things, of constant mystery, and I secretly wished to see more.
I turned a corner and came to a valley filled with small skin huts. A bonfire roared in their center. People danced around the fire, shrieking and singing. I shrank up against a tree and watched, horrified, as people copulated frenziedly on the sandy ground.
I heard someone step behind me. I turned, and saw an old man was standing on the path behind me, dressed in regal robes. His hair was braided and tied up to stand upon his head, as many respectful Taalvashtani gentlemen did then.
He apologized for startling me. I asked him his business, and he said he was a trader from Bulikov. I could tell he thought me the same, from my Burden.
“A savage bunch, are they not?” he asked.
I told him I could not understand how they lived this way.
“They believe themselves free,” he said. “But in truth, they are enslaved to their desires.”
He told me his tent was nearby, and well hidden, and he offered me shelter in this strange place. He seemed a kind old thing, and I accepted, and followed him through the bent trees.
As he walked he said, “I sometimes wish I was younger. For I am old, and not only am I frail of flesh, but I am bound by the many things I have been taught over the years. Sometimes I wish I had the courage to be so young, so loud, so unfettered and so unburdened.”
I told him he should be proud of himself to have lived to such an age without indulging in corrupt impulses.
“I am surprised,” he said. “A creature as young as you, and you are wholly uninterested in such forbidden wildness?”
I told him I was repulsed by it—a lie, I knew.
“Do you not wonder if slavery to one’s desires could, just a little, make you free?”
I felt myself sweating. My Burden felt so heavy around my neck. I admitted that my thoughts sometimes strayed to forbidden places. And that tonight, they seemed to stray to such places more frequently.
He turned sharply below the dark canopy of trees. I could no longer see him, but I followed his voice.
“Jukoshtan, the city itself, is also a forbidden place, in a way,” said his voice from ahead. “Did you know that?”
I passed the old man’s robes, lying on the sandy ground—discarded, it seemed, as he walked.
A flock of brown starlings took flight from the trees ahead, soaring up into the night sky.
“It moves, shifts,” said his voice. “It dances through the hills.”
I passed a wig, hanging from a tree—the old man’s braided hair.
“It is never where one expects it to be,” said his voice.
I passed a flap of cloth hanging from a bush. Yet it was not cloth, but a mask—a mask of the old man’s face.
His voice floated through the trees: “Much like Jukov himself.”
I entered a clearing. In the center of the clearing was a low, long tent of animal skins. On the branch of every tree in the clearing sat a small brown starling, and each watched me with dark, cold eyes.