City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(28)

She nodded.

“Oh, well.” He winced as if embarrassed and returned to his book. “Maybe to get a rise out of you. You seemed such a serious thing, after all. I hadn’t seen you smile all day, despite your admirable record.”

“But what did you mean?”

This provoked a long, confused stare. “Are you, erm, serious?”

“Yes.”

“What did you think I meant when I asked you for … a f*ck?” he asked, slowly and uncertainly.

“No, not that.” Shara waved her hand. “The part about me … not being a girl.”

“That’s what you’re mad about? That?”

Shara simply glared back.

“Well, I mean,” he said. “Well, here. I have seen girls before. Many girls. You can be a girl at any age, you know. Girls at forty. Girls at fifty. There’s a kind of flightiness to them, just like how a man at forty can have the impatience and belligerence of a five-year-old boy. But you can also be a woman at any age. And you, my dear, have probably been the spiritual equivalent of a fifty-three or fifty-four-year-old woman since you were six years old. I can tell. You are not a girl.” He again returned to his book. “You are very much a woman. Probably an old one.”

Shara considered this. Then she took out her own study materials and began to read opposite him, feeling confused, outraged, and strangely flattered.

“That biography of Thinadeshi is shit, just so you know,” she said.

“Is it?”

“Yes. The writer has an agenda. And his references are suspect.”

“Ah. His references. Very important.”

“Yes.”

He flipped a page.

“Incidentally,” he asked, “did you ever give much thought to the thing I said about f*cking?”

“Shut up.”

He smiled.

*

They started meeting in the library nearly every day, and their relationship felt like a continuation of their Batlan game: a long, exhausting conflict in which little ground was ever ceded or gained. Shara was aware throughout that they were playing reversed roles, considering their nationalities: for she was the staunch, mistrustful conservative, zealously advocating the proper way of living and building a disciplined, useful life; and he was the permissive libertine, arguing that if someone wished to do something, and if it hurt no one, and moreover if they had the money to pay for it, then why should anyone interfere?

But both of them agreed that their nations were in a bad, dangerous state: “Saypur has grown fat and weak off of commerce,” Shara said to him once. “We believe we can buy our safety. The idea that we must fight for it, fight for it every day, never crosses our minds.”

Vohannes rolled his eyes. “You paint your world in such drab cynicisms.”

“I am right,” she insisted. “Saypur got to where it is through military strength. Its civilian leadership is far too permissive.”

“What would you do? Have Saypuri children learn yet another oath, another pledge to Mother Saypur?” Vohannes laughed. “My dear Shara, do you not see that what makes your country so great is that it allows its people to be human in a way the Continent never did?”

“You admire Saypur? As a Continental?”

“Of course I do! Not just because I wouldn’t catch leprosy here, which I can’t say of the Continent. But here, you allow people … to be people. Do you not know how rare a thing that is?”

“I thought you would wish for discipline and punishment,” says Shara. “Faith and self-denial.”

“Only Kolkashtani Continentals think that,” Vohannes said. “And it’s a bastard way to live. Trust me.”

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.