The Traitor Baru Cormorant (34 page)

But before she could find a way to do this best, to ignite all that blue on her map like one of the Oriati mines, Tain Hu came down the Inirein and interrupted her.

*   *   *

“Y
OU
should've gone north already.”

Tain Hu spoke in Baru's ear and the force of her presence snapped Baru from her work trance in a galvanic jerk—the coiled weight of her bent over the chair as if to draw Baru away from her writing, one arm braced like the preface to strangulation or embrace.

Baru managed not to gasp aloud. “Duchess Vultjag. You weren't announced.” Perhaps Unuxekome's guards outside the study had assumed Tain Hu was expected.

“Cattlson won't believe you're an innocent hostage. He'll send his Clarified to kill you. You'd be safer at Vultjag.” Tain Hu circled the desk, her hawkish profile bent in curiosity. “What have you been writing?”

She'd been writing drafts, a whole midden of scribbled parchment, now mostly torn up in frustration. All of it in Aphalone, at least, which Tain Hu could speak but not read. “I've been trying to figure out disbursement plans. For the money we've seized.” She began to gather up her papers, trying to look finished. At least she hadn't had the loyalty map open. “Just an accountant's habits.”

“I may not know Aphalone script—” Tain Hu pinned one rag of parchment beneath her splayed fingers. The gold darkness in her eyes startled Baru. “—but I know the signs for your name. You've written them too many times for mere accounting.”

“You know the signs for my name?” Baru leaned back, to project insouciance, to escape those eyes. Why had Tain Hu come? Why hadn't Unuxekome announced her arrival? Surely the conflagration swallowing Aurdwynn would have called her elsewhere.… “What a curious place to begin an education.”

For a moment only the candle fire moved.

Then Tain Hu came around the chair, her hobnailed boots clattering on the hardwood. Baru began to rise, and the duchess took her by the throat and hooked a heel behind the leg of her chair and threw her down thunderously on her back. The chair splintered beneath her.

Tain Hu drew her sword.

“Guards!” Baru shouted, head ringing, sight a red glare. “Guards!” She felt, more than anything else, a strange childish outrage—had she not whispered in the ear of the ilykari woman? Had she not bound herself to the other rebels in trust?

The blade that had opened Governor Cattlson's scalp tickled her brow. “You gave us too much,” Tain Hu said, her voice distant, thin, agonizing, like a glass cut. “I saved you from Cattlson so that we could bargain with you, and you gave us too much. Do you understand?”

“You still need me.” The duchess wheeled in Baru's sight, an osprey circling. How had she forgotten? How had she made
the same mistake
? A game of dukes and nations, decades of occupation, centuries of betrayal and realignment, a ledger filled with the transactions of power, and she had thought she could be the center of it—that she could step in and rearrange the pieces and not in turn be played. “The tax ships aren't enough. We still need to break the Traitor's Qualm.”

The tip of the blade pricked her skin. “I spent years listening to Xate Olake plead the Traitor's Qualm. Years bowing to Xate Yawa's protestations that it was too soon to act. Now the time has come and Aurdwynn will rise. Tell me why—” The blade trembled with her mocking shrug. “Tell me why we need you. Why we would not all be safer without a Masquerade technocrat among us.”

“The fisher,” Baru said.

Tain Hu's blade stilled. She looked down at Baru and her lips parted for one curious breath. “What?”

“The name you gave me. On the docks, three years ago. Baru Fisher, the Fulcrum, beloved of ykari Devena.” Baru pushed herself up, pushed herself into the sword fighting screaming instinct, and Tain Hu drew the point away. “Has the word reached you? Have you heard Radaszic break the gates of Treatymont? Seen the red sails burning in the Horn Harbor? No! You never will. The rebellion is stillborn—the other dukes won't join us. Nayauru and Ihuake will watch us drown and divide our land and riches. But listen, Tain Hu, listen to your serfs calling—”

“A fairer hand,” the duchess Vultjag murmured. “Even the Sentiamuts in the foothills know the chant.”

Baru had never killed anyone face-to-face. Never faced real, imminent death—Xate Olake's poison had been an invisible game, and she'd been saved from Cattlson and the duel before the moment of reckoning. The slaughter in the harbor had been a trial of her stomach, not her heart.

So now she found herself trembling as she drew herself up the side of the desk. Her hands shook as she tried to seize the papers, to lift them and offer them to Tain Hu. A coward after all.

“I will lead the rebellion,” she said. “In name if not in deed. I have ruined Aurdwynn's dukes once already—they fear and respect me. I have taken up the sword against the Governor and made myself beloved to the people.
I
will break the Traitor's Qualm. Do you see what I have written? Do you see the signs for my name?
I am Baru Fisher, the Fairer Hand
—”

“And what,” Tain Hu hissed, “if that is what I came to stop? This rebellion must be Aurdwynn's.”

“The dukes are not Aurdwynn, Vultjag! The dukes have failed Aurdwynn again and again!
I
am the commonborn, the foreigner, the newborn hope!” Baru struck the table, rustling the parchment, the still-wet ink. “I am your last and solitary chance!”

Duke Unuxekome's voice came from the door. “Enough, Vultjag. She's right.”

The smoke in Duchess Vultjag's voice spoke to all the things Baru had forgotten, had hidden from behind the schoolyard walls—the rage of a nation brought low. “Once she is in us we will not get her out. She will be like a tick. She will grow fat on us and we will never dig her free.”

“She's earned her place.” Of course Unuxekome would speak up for her—they had sailed together, taken plunder together. They were comrades now. “She wants what we want. And she only has to be a symbol, Vultjag. Nothing more.”

The tip of Tain Hu's blade described one small analemma in the air, and Baru remembered her words, three years ago, spoken into the forest, into the birdsong and the silence:
Symbols are power. You are a word, a mark …

And it pierced Baru's heart to realize that no matter what Tain Hu chose in this moment, she would regret it to the end of her life.

“So,” Tain Hu said, sheathing her sword, suddenly wry. “Have you already joined the court of would-be kings, Unuxekome? My bearded neighbor in the north is all atwitter. He's finally found someone less interested than me.”

The Sea Groom smiled in shared mirth. “I think Oathsfire's wealth makes his solitude more lonely.”

“Are you done, then?” Baru looked between the two, her lips pressed thin. “Was the secret I gave the ilykari not enough? Must I make some other proof?”

A split silence.

“There's a prisoner waiting for you at the harbor,” Unuxekome said.

*   *   *

“I will not do it,” Baru said.

The captain of the
Mannerslate
knelt in the harborside mud. Two of the Sea Groom's armsmen had dragged her from her cage, silent and rigid, and beaten the backs of her legs until she'd fallen. She'd left a print of her face, like a mask, in the wet earth.

She spoke no Urun, but then again, she had been asked no questions. The test was not for her.

Tain Hu offered Baru her sword again, for Baru had not worn the boarding saber. “You have betrayed them already. You've led hundreds of them to die. You will be the traitor queen of a rebellion that will slaughter tens of thousands more.” Her mailed shoulders caught the evening light and broke it into rings of reflected fire. “Kill her. Make it true with blood.”

Everything she said was true. Baru had already killed this woman—led her to her death. Beheading her would only be correcting an error, a mislaid mine, a malformed charge, an errant spear.

But Baru turned away.

Tain Hu's mocking voice took an edge. “Have you forgotten what you are? You are a
traitor
. No home will ever love you. No one will ever call you
good
or
just
again without thinking of what you did to those who raised you up. You cannot avoid this price.”

The woman in the sand, weary, uncomprehending, spat between them. “Fuck yourselves,” she said, in Aphalone, and brushed some of the sand from her uniform.

No place for sentiment here. And she had already killed, hadn't she? Destroyed Aurdwynn's fiat economy, driven the dukes to tax their vassals into malnutrition. Murdered the sickly and the weak. One more life would weigh no heavier—

But it did.

She turned back to the duchess Vultjag.

“This I will not do,” Baru said, though she could only manage any courage by speaking softly. “It is too much.”

“The reparatory marriages forced on us. The children taken by the Charitable Service. The murdered ilykari. The sodomites they execute with hot iron rods—did you ever watch it, Baru?” Tain Hu's voice fell to a hiss. “Did you listen to the screams? Take revenge for all that evil.”

And in a convulsion of aimless doubt, a cannibalistic self-destructive exercise, the breaking pains of the white porcelain mask she had worn, the first cold claws of the test she'd swallowed, Baru found herself thinking of a rebuttal, of all the lives the Masquerade had saved—
the innoculations, the sewers, the roads, the schools, the wealth—

She raised her hands, as if in panic, or as if to take the sword.

“Vultjag,” Unuxekome murmured, and only his murmur saved Baru from the choice. “Enough. We've seen enough.”

And Tain Hu sheathed her blade again. “The prisoner lives,” she said, and smiled with what, after a moment, Baru saw as relief.

Another test.

Her outrage—
is this not
enough
?
—must have reached the duchess, who said: “We had to see what you would do.”

“I know,” Baru said. Better a woman of divided loyalties than one of no loyalty at all. Better a reluctant traitor than the terror of a true sociopath.

“No more tests.” Tain Hu raised one gloved palm to ward off her anger. “Tell this captain what you have written. Unless—” She raised her brows and the red ink war-lines written on her cheeks moved over the high bones. “Unless you need a few more drafts.”

The harbor surf lapped up at them, peaked, receded.

Baru stepped between the two Aurdwynni lords and the kneeling captain. The Aphalone words came easy to her tongue, but she hesitated at that ease.

She had been pretending loyalty for so long.

“Go to Treatymont,” she told the
Mannerslate
's captain. “Go to the Governor's House. Tell Cattlson that I renounce my name and station, that I repudiate his false Republic and all its power. Tell him that I am Baru Fisher, the Fairer Hand, and that I will set Aurdwynn free.”

She watched the woman's incomprehension kindle into hate. Above the harbor the gulls shrieked and squabbled and dove for corpse meat.

 

19

T
HEY
dared one meeting at Welthony, though Purity Cartone's corpse had never been found, though the Stag Hunter's cavalry or the Masquerade's ships could sweep east and come upon them in days. They needed the certainty of voice and face before they scattered.

To the balcony of Unuxekome's house, where the harbor wind already prickled with the end of summer, came Tain Hu and Unuxekome and Baru Fisher. Then, down the river from the north, Duke Oathsfire, the Miller, and Duke Lyxaxu, High Stone.

The others were beyond reach. Xate Yawa still played her part as Jurispotence in Treatymont, and Xate Olake wouldn't break cover to come. Somehow this troubled Baru less than the final absence—the ilykari priestess who'd bound them all together. Baru wanted her presence. A terrible guilt had been rankling her in the night, something worse than the feverish insomniac hunger to
think,
to know what the Masquerade would do before even they did. A loyalty she'd betrayed.

“I thought we'd agreed she would only be the bankroll.” Stout Oathsfire had chopped off most of his beard, perhaps to look younger or more flattering. Chance had betrayed him there—he had an awful cold. “She gives us a few ships and in exchange we let her say she rules us? We all know she'll be important afterward, if we win—but so soon?” He didn't look at Baru here, although she expected him to. Maybe his pride couldn't bear to touch on their last conversation, the delicate matter of kings and dynasties. “Are we already so desperate for a figurehead?”

“More than a figurehead.” Unuxekome's casual glance and smile carried a hint of defensiveness—possessiveness, even, though Baru didn't trust her sense for it. “She's the only one we can rally behind. An Imperial prodigy, certified by their merit exams, turned back against them? She refutes everything they offer.”

Lyxaxu, pale and towering, his marten-skin mantle loose about his shoulders, put a hand on Oathsfire's shoulder to restrain him. “The choice is made. The word has gone out. Whether we want it or not, this is Baru Fisher's uprising now.”

Tain Hu leaned against the railing in her riding leathers, her back to the sea. “And yet,” she said, her eyes on Oathsfire, “you're all very reluctant to let her speak.”

Baru took the opening—any chance to get out of the cage of ducal politics. She slapped her map of Aurdwynn down on the table, weighted by the coins bound to each corner. “Thirteen dukes of note. Four of them are here and openly committed to the rebellion.” Her eyes circled the table: the mismatched northern men, Unuxekome, Tain Hu. “And we have Xate Olake as spymaster in Treatymont, though he has no vassals or political presence. That gives us five. As for those who'll declare for the Governor—Duke Heingyl's lands are north and east of Treatymont, and we all know he'll stay loyal to Cattlson even when we have him dangling from a noose.”