Sigrud swallows. “Carin’s?”
“I would assume so. You only had her and…and Signe, right?”
He nods, feeling strangely alien, as if someone else is wearing his body.
“Carin has had five now,” says Mulaghesh. “Four girls and one boy.”
He lets out a breath. “That’s…that’s quite a brood.”
“Yes. It would be.” She pauses, then asks kindly, “Would you like to see if I could get their pictures for you?”
He thinks about it for a long time. Then he shakes his head.
“No?”
“No. It would make what I am about to do much harder.”
“What do you mean?”
“Saypur will not let me go back,” he said. “So there is no need for me to know of such things. Because I will never have them.”
There’s an awkward silence. Mulaghesh sips her wine. She says, “Did she ever contact you, Sigrud?”
“Who? Hild?”
“No. Shara, of course.”
“No,” he says. “I only learned she was dead secondhand.”
Mulaghesh nods slowly. “So…You don’t know what she was doing on the Continent.”
“No.” He sits up. “Why? Do you?”
She smiles mirthlessly. “No. Not a whit. Wish I did. And I did ask. She wouldn’t tell me. Seemed to think it’d put my life in jeopardy. Which, considering what happened to her, might have been true. The only thing she told me was that it was…how did she put it…Ah, yes. She said it was, quote, ‘increasingly likely that Sigrud will visit you one day.’ ”
Sigrud blinks, surprised. “She told you I would come to you?”
“Correct. I didn’t understand it. You were a gods damned criminal. But she said that, if you were to come to me, I was to give you a message—but I assume you have no knowledge of this message, do you, Sigrud?”
He shakes his head, stunned. He hadn’t anticipated this at all.
Mulaghesh stares into space, thinking. “She must have known,” she says. “Must have known there was a chance she’d be killed. Must have known you’d find out. And that you’d come to me. Eventually.” She laughs hollowly. “Clever little woman. She finds such delightful ways to make us all do her dirty work for her, even beyond the grave.”
“What is the message?”
“It was very simple,” says Mulaghesh, “and very confusing. She said that if you ever came to me, I was to tell you to protect her daughter. At all costs.”
Sigrud is still for a moment. Then he shakes his head, exasperated. “But…But that’s what I’m already here to do,” he says. “I came to you to find out where Tatyana Komayd is!”
“You didn’t let me finish,” snaps Mulaghesh. “Because no one knows where Tatyana Komayd is. And apparently no one has for months.”
“What?”
“Yes. After the assassination, finding Tatyana was a national priority—and yet the Komayd estate was utterly empty. Apparently Shara had been circulating the idea that her daughter was staying behind at the Komayd estate…yet that was far from the truth. But now is where it gets confusing,” says Mulaghesh, sitting forward with a pained grunt. “Fucking arthritis…It’s just bullshit, how your body rebels against you. Anyways. Shara told me to tell you to protect her daughter—but she also told me that her daughter could be found with the only woman who ever shared her love.”
Sigrud stares at her, bug-eyed. “What?”
“That’s what I thought too,” says Mulaghesh. “I never really thought she was, you know, that kind of a person. I try not to assume anything, since lots of people have assumed things about me over the years, none of which I’ve exactly appreciated, and I—”
Sigrud holds up a hand. “No. I don’t think this is right.”
“Well, hells, Sigrud. What right do you have t—”
“No. I mean, that sort of message, Turyin. I think it is intended to be confusing, to anyone but me. Perhaps she is referring to someone both she and I knew, once.” He sighs and grips the sides of his skull. “But…I don’t know who that could be.”
“Why wouldn’t she just tell me who it was?” asks Mulaghesh. “Wouldn’t that be easier?”
He remembers the pale Continental girl saying that Nokov would pull every secret out of his guts. “Your address is publicly listed,” he says. “And your security is not very good, as I have proven. I think she believed she could take no chances. Even with you, Turyin. But wait…When she told you this, did you not do anything? Did this not alarm you?”
“It alarmed me plenty,” says Mulaghesh. “But by then I was already pretty alarmed.”
“By what? What had Shara done?”
Mulaghesh sighs, sits back down, and drinks the rest of her wine in one giant gulp. “Now, that is a very interesting question.”
“It was early 1733,” says Mulaghesh. “I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Shara in, what, two years? She left office in 1726, and though we’d stayed in touch it’d been a damned while, I’ll say that. But then one day my assistant lets me know that a woman left a message for me, and this woman was quite insistent—said she was a friend of Captain Nesrhev, from Bulikov.”
Sigrud smiles. “The police captain you were involved with.”
“Right. But it was only a few times,” says Mulaghesh defensively. “At least, by my standards it was only a few. Anyways. So I’m damned curious to find out who this woman is, and I show up at the restaurant mentioned in the message, and who is it but Shara. I was surprised. I mean, the former prime minister can get a meeting with anyone she wants, right? But she wanted to keep all of it a secret. She couldn’t be seen meeting with me, couldn’t be seen asking me what she was about to ask.”
“Which was what?”
“It was about an intelligence compartment, an operation. One she didn’t have access to, had never had access to throughout her career in the Ministry, even when she was prime gods damned minister. One called Operation Rebirth. You know it?”
“I have been forced to do a lot of remembering in the past few days, Turyin, but this I do not know.”
“I’d never heard of it either. She asked me to look into it. She looked shaken too. Paranoid. It was odd—she’d been living on the outskirts of Ghaladesh with her daughter, just…keeping quiet. But then there she was, coming out of nowhere with this. Said it’d be a pretty old operation—back when Vinya was running the show, maybe during the 1710s, while you and she were just young pups and barely knew how to slit a throat.”
Sigrud was actually very much aware of how to slit a throat by 1710, but refrains from correcting her.
“So I did some checking. Reached out to some trusted sources in the Ministry, in the archives. And all they came back with was a file with one piece of paper in it. Just one. A report on a Saypuri dreadnought, the SS Salim. Know it?”
Sigrud shakes his head.
“Me neither. It was lost in a typhoon in 1716. That was all I had to give her. But it seemed to excite her plenty. She suggested she’d discovered something ratty, and it smelled pretty ratty to me too. ‘I see Vinya’s fingerprints all over this,’ I told her, and she…suggested that was right but said she wouldn’t tell me more. Again, for my own safety.”