The Traitor Baru Cormorant (30 page)

“That's not a story, Your Excellence. More of a report.” He stood balanced on the ship's bowsprit, hands light on the ropes. “It's hard to find good stories now. I can't read Aphalone, you know—really I'm a very poor—”

An exocet fish leapt from the bow wave and Unuxekome lunged, trying to catch it by its silver wings. Baru snatched for his tunic to pull him back, startled, thinking already: the idiot, the child, they'll say I pushed him—

But the duke kept his footing, bare toes curled on the wood, hands spidered in the rigging. The exocet glided away. “Ah,” the duke sighed, and then, turning, “You thought I'd fall?”

She hid her embarrassment. He was maybe ten years her senior, salted and authoritative, a captain on any ship he cared to sail. She would have to match him. “I planned against the eventuality.”

“And here Vultjag warned me you thought only of yourself.”

She permitted a soft
ha
. “Even so. Cattlson would've been pleased to charge me with the murder of a duke.”

“Oh? But you're already a wanted traitor, aren't you?”

“No. Suspected seditionist. It means—” She grappled for a moment with the exactitudes of Masquerade law. “He doesn't have the power to arrest me without the Jurispotence's backing. But if he marks me as a seditionist, he gains the power to review all my orders, which lets him counterplay them. And if he still had me in Treatymont, he'd lock me in protective custody.”

“Hmm.” He rested his head in the rigging, as if the ship were all his hammock, and stared up at the circling shearwaters. “Still sounds more like a report than a story. Needs a hero.”

“An illiterate duke captaining a mail ship?”

Unuxekome looked at her like he'd been stabbed, and then laughed. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I must seem like a vain bastard, preening up on the bowsprit.”

“I'd never question the bloodline of a duke of Aurdwynn.”

“Oh, no, please do. I used to dream I was a bastard. My mother sailed with the Syndicate Eyota, see? All those dashing Oriati buccaneers, raiding and adventuring…” He rolled his neck, squinting in the noonday sun. “Better than a father who loved harbor dredging and river trade.”

Baru had an idea what had happened to the duchess Unuxekome and her consort. The same quiet disaster that had left so many duchies in the hands of young people with sparse families and graveyards full of noble bones. But she didn't ask about the Fools' Rebellion. “You may go buccaneering yet,” she said. “If I have my way.”

He lifted himself a little ways off the ropes to watch her intently. “And will you have your way? Can you possibly arrange for the tax ships to be taken, even with Cattlson dogging you?”

Cattlson had tried to countermand Baru's order to the Admiralty—that vital order, the key arrangement:
sail the tax ships to Falcrest in a single convoy, for security.
And that might have been the end there: but Xate Yawa protected her. Baru had won a legal duel, after all, without any firm violation of Imperial law. The protocols of that same law gave Cattlson no cause to relieve or countermand her. He needed the Jurispotence's consent to destroy Baru's authority. And she would not give it.

“Let her manage the remainder of the tax season,” Xate Yawa had counseled Cattlson (or so Muire Lo reported). “She'll work to excel in her duties so she can look better than you in Falcrest's eyes. It won't be enough. By midwinter, Parliament will order her relieved.”

No need for Unuxekome to know how close it had been. Baru brushed his concern away like a circling fly. “The tax ships will go where I want them. I have the law on my side.”

His jaw hardened, as if to bite. “You have Xate Yawa on your side, in the same way I have the sea on mine. The sea takes no side. Be careful about pinning all your plans on her.”

“I'm pinning all my plans on
your
fleet, Your Grace.”

She meant this as reassurance, even flattery. But Unuxekome rose from the rigging and walked down the bowsprit to her, swaying against the wave motion. “And I'm pinning my hopes on you, Your Excellence. Tell me how to take these ships. Tell me where they'll be, and with what escort. I will see to the rest. If you trust anything, trust in me. But give me what I need to do it.”

And he really thought he would, this barefoot sweat-soaked duke of waves. He had shown Baru something vital, trusting or uncaring (perhaps this was a habit of the nobility, born into power, unconditioned to secrecy and meticulous self-containment—a habit of those who never had to earn their station). Unuxekome loved stories. He loved them much more than plans. If he could be the saga-captain sailing into death and legend, he would.

But Baru had heard stories of her own. Aminata's boast:
a single Masquerade frigate can fight four Oriati war dromons and leave them burning.…

The Imperial Navy ruled the Ashen Sea. Unuxekome would never take the tax ships by main force. Not even with the help of the pirates he'd call up out of the south. Baru had to arrange for his victory.

But how?

Everything she sent to the Admiralty in Treatymont would be opened and read. Every order she gave would be scrutinized for some excuse Cattlson could use to reject it. She had to betray the tax convoy to the rebels without betraying herself first.

How?

Unuxekome watched her closely, waiting for her to share her great plan, the masterstroke of manipulation that would give him his chance at heroism. She smiled at him, an easy confident smile laced with secrets, a smoke-screen smile, and said, “I think I'm going to climb the rigging. I need exercise, and space. Would you take my coat down below?”

And she did, wondering if Unuxekome watched her, considering his own bloodline, his mother climbing in the ropes of her own swift ships, and perhaps some day his children, too. That was a duke's story, wasn't it? Noble ancestors, and noble heirs …

She would need to use all the leverage she could find. But it bothered her to think of Unuxekome like this. He was easy to talk to, dangerously honest. And deep down she liked stories too.

Up at the top of the mast, arms burning, she realized how she would take the tax ships.

*   *   *

B
EETLE
Prophet
stopped to take on reports on the progress of tax season. Baru read them nervously. She was certain that Bel Latheman had told Cattlson about her tax rider, the innocuous question she'd asked every noble and commoner in Aurdwynn:
whom do you love best?

Muire Lo's reports were full of numbers, small tiles prised out of a vast buckling mosaic. Unrest sputtered across Aurdwynn—serfs rebelling against dukes, mobs snapping at tax collectors, garrison troops dealing harsh retaliation. In particular there was great tension in the Midlands, where Nayauru Dam-builder and Ihuake the Cattle Lord each suffered terrible raids by mysterious bandits that withdrew back into the other's territory.

The weave of rule beginning to fray.

Baru unrolled a map of Aurdwynn and began to paint it in her secret knowledge.

Her tax rider asked the payer to divide ten notes between the local duke, Governor Cattlson, Jurispotence Xate, and herself. She pulled the results from Muire Lo's reports, quite pleased with her instrument, and painted her map in colors of loyalty—

The red of Imperial Navy sails for towns or duchies that slanted toward the Governor. (Mostly this was Duchy Heingyl).

Forest green, Aurdwynn green, for areas that kept loyalties to their own dukes. Vultjag's people loved her, and Unuxekome's, too; but not those of gentle Radaszic or (
hm!
) clever Lyxaxu and, most of all, Erebog, the Crone in Clay, all of whom suffered in deep debt.…

And then blue, great runs of sky blue and sea blue, whatever excited inconstant blue she grabbed from her paint pots, for the areas that loved
her
.

No one favored Jurispotence Xate, of course. But her power did not require popularity.

So Baru had what she wanted: a map of Aurdwynn's loyalty, as seen through the lens of one kind of power, the power she best controlled. Now all she needed was an empirical test, proof that she could turn the blue on the map into shouting commoners on the streets.…

When
Beetle Prophet
came to the mouth of the river Inirein, the mighty Bleed of Light that ran down from the Wintercrests and marked the eastern border of Aurdwynn, she went ashore with Duke Unuxekome and walked the streets of Welthony, his capital. On the map she'd painted it blue and green.

Word went out through the streets ahead of her, first by whisper, then by shout, then by riders up the river to the duke's house. She strode up the riverwalk with her chained purse at her side, and the people of Welthony, no friend of Cattlson or the Masquerade, turned out from their labor to cry in Iolynic and Aphalone:
A fairer hand! A fairer hand!

Unuxekome walked with her, smiling, bare-headed, his Maia bones proudly unmasked. “My ship has brought good news,” he told his gate guard. “She's not here on audit!”

“I grew up in the sea,” she told the armsmen, invoking Taranoke and her own Maia blood. “But I never thought to meet her groom.”

And the watching crowd roared approval, as blue as the map predicted, pleased that this foreigner knew the meaning of their duke's name.

“Have you found a way?” Unuxekome hissed in her ear, as he drew her in through the gate, as his armsmen closed them off from the crowd. “The tax ships sail soon. How will we take them?”

“Simple,” she said, clapping him on the shoulder, like a brother, a friend. “I give Cattlson what he wants. I offer to resign my post.”

*   *   *

B
Y
the time
Beetle Prophet
sailed from Welthony, headed back west to Treatymont, Baru had written and sealed four letters—to Cattlson, to Tain Hu, to Xate Yawa, and the last to Unuxekome himself, who would bear it south by ship to the pirates and Oriati privateers.

She stood at the prow and watched the dawn, trying to see the curve of the world, to imagine it turning beneath the sun, the great patterns of trade and sickness and heredity and force moving on its face. The very ink and grammar of history. Driven by and made from and ultimate master of hundreds of millions of people. The question and the answer:

Mother, why do they come here? Why do we not go to them?

Why are they so powerful?

She hadn't written to Muire Lo. She hadn't given him the warning he wanted. If she tried, the letters would be opened, the warning discovered—

Surely he'd understand. Surely. He would get his family out. He would save himself.

Everything had a price.

*   *   *

O
N
the way into the Horn Harbor, following the buoys between the torchship
Egalitaria
and the burnt towers, Baru picked out the shapes of the tax flotilla waiting to sail. Twelve great ships riding low in the water, heavy with gold and silver, and the escort—five frigates with red sails, their decks lined with marines at drill. The prize.

The Treatymont garrison was waiting to arrest her.

They couldn't call it an arrest, of course. In her letter to Cattlson she'd been careful to define it as a
voluntary self-recall
. Until she arrived in Falcrest and submitted herself to the judgment of Parliament, she would still be Imperial Accountant of Aurdwynn, with all the powers and responsibilities vested in the title. But to Cattlson, the difference was a formality. Baru would be locked up on the tax ships, isolated from mail or money, consigned to the judgment of a higher power. He'd be free to hunt and drink and marry Heingyl Ri to Bel Latheman without the trouble of Taranoki women ruining economies and winning duels. Muire Lo would take command of her office until Parliament could either (ha) return her with her authority reaffirmed or dispatch a new Accountant.

She'd offered Cattlson a way out.

As she'd written the letter she'd tried to put herself in Cattlson's place, to don his obsessions and fears like his wolf's head cloak, remembering what Purity Cartone had told her—
you are not the only player on the board
. Cattlson would wonder why she'd given up so soon after her victory in the duel. He would go to Xate Yawa to ask about the legalities of the offer. She would help him understand that Baru had realized her impotence: she had no real power without the Governor's backing, and the mercy of Parliament offered her only hope for a continued career. Too proud to beg to him for forgiveness,
of course
Baru would pretend she was going over his head, traveling to Falcrest in search of exoneration rather than clemency. Cattlson, paternalistically merciful, would understand that her pride offered her no other surrender.

But Cattlson was still careful.

So he set his garrison soldiers waiting for her at the dockside, seabirds in blue and gray. Xate Yawa stood between them, her lips pursed sourly, the black robes of her station like a trespassing corvid. “Your Excellence.” She gestured to Baru, drawing her in—
walk with me.
“Perhaps with your departure, Aurdwynn may find some relief from the disquiet that has seized it. The Governor offers these soldiers as escort to the frigate
Sulane,
which will carry you to Falcrest.”

Baru followed her down the row of soldiers, minding her carriage, keeping her head high. Only by pretending victory could she pretend defeat. “I will not travel on
Sulane,
” she said, as they'd planned, as she'd written in her letter from Welthony. “Nor will I tolerate an armed escort. I'll spend the journey aboard the transport
Mannerslate,
organizing my papers and preparing testimony for Parliament.”

“The Governor commands these troops,” Yawa reminded her.