Like a gaggle of boys aroused by a hint of nipple, the dukes and duchesses all got hard for the new Masquerade trade and began to fight over it. In a blink they were at war and we, the antiroyalists, had our moment. I struck a deal with the Masquerade mission. And I kept my terms. I killed Duke Lachta with a little knife, and as his last breath bubbled from his throat, I wiped my blade on his white stacked linens and said, “Will that be all, Your Grace?”
Shir fought, too, on that night of reckoning. She killed. Not for the first time, I think.
My brother, “head of the revolutionary government,” signed the Treaty of Federation. So we gave Aurdwynn to the Masquerade, and at first young Shir rejoiced. But the new Incrastic laws were cruel like bleach—Aurdwynn, the Falcresti explained, had to be cleansed of sin. The land had to be scoured raw. In time their laws would ease, they assured us. If enforced well, and obeyed with enthusiasm. In time the laws would ease.
That, I think, we could have tolerated.
Then their fucking Parliament made an accomodation with the dukes.
The aristocracy would keep their stations and their privilege, in exchange for signatures on the Treaty of Federation. Falcrest’s Parliament had judged it impossible to profitably rule Aurdwynn without the dukes. Tax revenue would be unacceptably low for an unacceptably long time if the revolution disrupted industry. The duchies had to stand.
That we did not want to tolerate. But we went along with it. My brother and I acquiesced.
Shir fought us with the idealism of youth. How could we accept ducal rule, after so long fighting against them? How could her own father accept the title of Duke Lachta—a title stained with the blood and pus of the city’s suffering?
I tried to explain that we’d compromised.
Compromised, Shir told me, was another word for betrayed.
She was fifteen and I was thirty-six, but those twenty-one years between us might have been the distance to the moon. She would not bend. Her cousin Hu (brave young Tain Hu, who would one day meet and strike down the Pretender-King Kubarycz in single combat) was only five years old. Frustrated with the adults, Shir carried Hu on horseback through the forest, and spoke to her of injustice, and showed her how to kill trapped animals without hesitation. Later I would discover that Hu remembered everything.
Hu remembered what Shir had said:
You must understand, no matter what anyone tells you, that you are free. In this moment you may do whatever you choose. No one can stop you. They can choose how to react to your choice, but they cannot stop the choice itself. This is freedom, understand? A knife in your hand. And you may do with it as you please.
When people teach you what you might and might not do—they are bridling you. They are taking your freedom away. Yes, the world has laws, which are consequences for your actions. But remember that there is nothing you cannot choose to do. Only consequences you fear to face.
If anyone ever tells you that they have no choice but to compromise, remember this. They are afraid.
Shir developed an interest in an anonymous correspondent. The more she wrote to him, the less she spoke to us. He signed his missives Itinerant. I would say we tried our very best to reach her, but I would damn myself if I did, for Olake and I didn’t even know who we’d become, let alone the girl. I was preoccupied by the lies I had begun to tell my twin: lies of omission, lies about my plans, because whatever I told him he would tell his wife, the daughter of Duke Vultjag, the aristocrat in our midst.
And then one day Shir was gone. She left a letter tucked in my comb.
I have gone to seek out the nature of justice. Somewhere in this world there must be a good true way to live.
I knew very little about what she did after that. But I do know what turned her. I know where she began her descent toward the killing woman in the marsh.
IN AR 117, eleven years after the Treaty of Federation, a few of the dukes led by Duchess Naiu rose up against the reparatory marriage laws. Their cry was the old cry, Aurdwynn cannot be ruled! And they were doomed, doomed from the start, although we did not call it the Fools’ Rebellion yet.
Olake and I decided, together and without remorse, that the common people would only survive if we ended this damn rebellion swiftly and in defeat. Some of the dukes would remain loyal to Falcrest, some would join the rebellion, most would bide their time and play both sides. All of them would trample on the commoners to do it. The cost would roll down upon the folk.
We hated the Masquerade by then. Truly we did. But we needed decades of peace to arrange our own final revolution.
So we betrayed the Fools’ Rebellion to Falcrest. And, oh, did that put my brother’s wife, Tain Ko, in a bind. For her brother, Duke Vultjag, had joined Naiu’s rebels, and now her husband had backstabbed those rebels spectacularly.
I did not do this: a prisoner escaped from an Incrastic sanitarium in Duchy Heingyl and jumped a ferry up the Inirein. The ferry was faster than the yellowjackets who chased it. By the time the escapee reached Duchy Oathsfire his armpits had already swollen and it was too late. Plague swept west to east across the Northlands like a strigil on dead skin.
Duke Vultjag died in the first week, and left young Hu to inherit.
The people of Vultjag called Tain Ko to come home and serve as regent for Tain Hu. Olake pleaded with his wife, but she was a warhawk and a will and she would not abandon her blood.
She went over to the rebellion.
Let me tell you the most pathetic and embarrassing sort of grief in the world. It is the grief you feel as you sit in a canvas tent with your hands over your ears, trying not to listen to your brother fuck his estranged wife for what they both know will be the very last time.
I had a plan to capture Ko and pardon her. I was well into the arrangements when Tain Shir came home on a Masquerade ship up from Taranoke. She traveled with a band of men and women who killed callously and spoke very little. They were in Treatymont for two days before marching north, and by then I had four murders pinned on them. Of course I couldn’t prosecute. They carried a letter with the polestar mark, the Emperor’s authority: they were outside the law.
Tain Shir took her killers north into the forests. By year’s end the rebel leadership were all dead, and careful dispensation of Falcrest’s funds had placed collaborationist relatives into their seats to bicker over the terms of surrender.
Vultjag was the last to fall.
The way Tain Hu told it, Tain Shir came down into the valley, alone, to negotiate with her mother. They met above the waterfall where Hu would one day build her keep. They paced each other on opposite banks of the river.
Shir told her mother, Vultjag, listen, I serve a better master now. Put down your spear. Come back to Lachta. Mother, you can serve my master, too.
Tain Ko raised her spear for the last time. She chose her final words.
I am not mastered.
The crossbow was faster than the spear.
DURANCE,” Iscend whispered. “He’s ready.”
“Yes.” I shook myself too hard. I had to lean on my elbow, like a reclining lover, to get my head down to the ear of Dziransi’s casket.
“Dzir,” I murmured, in mountain Stakhi. “Dzir, do you hear me? Follow my voice. You’re not alone. Follow my voice.”
Sealed and muzzled within the steel sarcophagus he couldn’t so much as wiggle a toe. I think from the noises he made that he thought he’d been crushed in a collapse in the tunnels of his home Mansion, high up on Mount Karakys in the Wintercrests, where no trees grew.
I signaled to Iscend for light. She lit a candle with her sparkfire and dilated the casket’s left iris to the width of a blade of grass. “I’m holding up a light, Dzir,” I whispered, showing him the candle. “I’m holding up a light for you. Can you come to it?”
He gagged and rasped.
“Come closer, Dzir.”
Like river rapids the dream-hammer sucked him under. Like a sluiceway the drug flowed beneath the dam of his discipline. The dream-ha
mmer gets into the fork of the mind that divides the roads of truth and falsehood, and it turns all the signs toward truth.
I unbuckled the casket’s faceplate.
Fungus-green eyes stared back at me, red with grief and madness. His beard had tangled in the steel muzzle that clapped his jaw shut.
“It’s all right,” I whispered, “it’s all right, I’m here.”
He looked up into the face of a strange woman against aurora stars. Not with a year’s planning could I have staged a better backdrop. The stars were everything to the Stakhi, and against those stars I had blue Stakhi eyes.
Gently I unmuzzled him. I knew he wouldn’t scream. Not as long as I held his eyes.
“Dzir,” I murmured. He shuddered at my touch. “Dzir, do you want to go home?”
He nodded as much as he could in the casket: only a tremor of his lips. He was weeping. He wanted very badly to go home.
“I have a message for you to carry home. Will you do that for me, Dzir?”
His jaw firmed up. His scowl tightened. He was summoning his courage. “Yesh,” he mumbled, in Stakhi. “Yesh. My duty.”
“Tell your king that the final salvation of his people awaits him in Aurdwynn. Tell him—” And I bit my tongue, checking carefully the words I had prepared, keenly aware that Iscend listened to be sure I did not disobey Hesychast’s plan. “Tell him that the bride of the mountains will be Heingyl Ri. Tell him that through their union she will deliver all the milk and grain of Aurdwynn unto the Mansions of the Stakhieczi. Tell your king that if he marries Heingyl Ri he will save his people forever from the Old Foe.”
“Heingyl Ree.” His head trembled against the brackets that held it in place. “Yesh. Heingyl Ree.”
“You came to find a queen for your king. Now you have her. She is Governor Heingyl Ri the Stag Duchess.”
“But . . .” He frowned incredibly: the low corners of his mouth almost reached the cabled muscles of his neck. “But the dowry . . . the blood price . . .”
Hesychast had explained his plan quite succinctly. “The solution to the Stakhieczi problem is trivial. We simply give the Necessary King everything he wants. His people will eat our food, and have babies, and very soon there will be too many of them. The Stakhi will starve by the millions without our trade. After that they will never dare invade.”
Hesychast hadn’t accounted for one thing, of course.
The Necessary King’s honor. The King’s need to redeem himself before his court. To show them the woman who had made a fool of him roped from the ceiling, hooks through her ankles, her scalp slashed open to drain her blood through her thoughts.
He would be destroyed if he could not punish his betrayer.
“I have the dowry,” I whispered. “I promise that I will deliver the dowry to your king. She is in my grasp now. Yes. I offer as dowry the traitor Baru Cormorant.”
WHO the fuck is that?” Baru said.
Xe had convinced Baru to come out and watch the dawn on Moem’s eastern cliffs. Baru found herself in an oddly pleasant mood. A warmth ran between her and Xe. Not the drug rush of infatuation, but a friendly understanding, like a blanket.
She had tried to warn Xe that she might be hurt for association with Baru. The priestess shrugged it off. “All will happen as it must. Take what you have at hand.”
Xe’s morning calisthenics required one to do everything very slowly. A minute for a single crunch, a pushup held for a hundred count. Baru lost patience after she fell on her face, and started doing her Naval System exercises, huffing and uffing and hissing while Xe posed in the dawnlight with her muscles taut and gleaming. In her effort to avoid staring too much at Xe, Baru watched the sea, and so she saw the boat first.
“Who the fuck is that?”
“Who the fuck is who?” Xe asked.
“Look. Someone’s coming in with the tide.”
A short lively black-skinned person rowed in toward Moem, their head bowed, their bright yellow khanga hitched up to their knees. When at last the boat bumped up on the rocks, they unloaded a caravan’s worth of bundles and bags and bolts. Then, looking up at the mesa towering above them, they sat down in exhausted frustration.
“Let’s go help them,” Baru said, with a glimmer of suspicion. “I think they might be looking for me.”
“Why?”
“I left a message for the Oriati spymaster yesterday. I asked to meet.”
“Ah,” Xe said, nodding sagely. “And Execarne keeps in touch with the Oriati spymaster. So they would come here to see you. But that can’t be their spymaster.”
“Why not?”
“Do you see the markings on their throat? The green painted stars? And those golden chains from nose to ear?”
“No, I don’t—do you have telescopes in your eyes?”
Xe laughed. “Those are the regalia of an Oriati Federal Prince. The governing sorcerors of the great Oriati Mbo.”
“Governing sorcerors?”
“Yes, they wield and protect the great trim of nations. They wouldn’t do espionage.”
“Oh,” Baru sighed. “Sure, trim. Whatever that means.”
“Don’t be so dismissive, Your Majesty. The Oriati are a great and scientific people.”
“Did they tell you that themselves?” Baru teased.
“Of course they did.” Xe put her hands under her chin (now they were lying side by side to stare over the cliffside). “Duke Unuxekome loved the Oriati. Their ships would come in to Welthony, and we divers would take contracts to clean their hulls.”
An absolutely eerie sense of synchronicity came over Baru. It was Unuxekome who’d called for the Oriati fleet’s help in attacking Treatymont. And if Ulyu Xe had spent time in Unuxekome’s town, maybe she knew some of the ships involved. . . .
“Xe,” Baru said, thoughtfully, “do you know where those Syndicate Eyota ships sailed from? Before they stopped on the Llosydanes, I mean?”
“No, not at all. Although . . .”
“Yes? What do you remember?”
“Some of the divers from Welthony mentioned a letter for the Duke Unuxekome, from his mother Unuxekome Ra, who was once Duchess but lives now on Kyprananoke. And I remember thinking, oh, that letter must have come in with the Eyota pirate ships, so they must have come through Kyprananoke, too.”
Baru clicked more puzzle pieces together. On the deck of his little mail-ship, Beetle Prophet, Unuxekome had told Baru, I used to dream I was a bastard. My mother sailed with the Syndicate Eyota, see? All those dashing Oriati buccaneers, raiding and adventuring . . .
So Unuxekome’s mother Ra was with the Syndicate Eyota, on Kyprananoke. She might know who had funded Abdumasi Abd’s doomed venture. And if those funds came from the Cancrioth and its agents . . . victory.
So Baru would go to Kyprananoke next, to find Unuxekome Ra.
Baru’s mission on the Llosydanes was accomplished. She groaned in relief. She had done it, she knew where to go next, and she hadn’t betrayed or ruined everyone around her! Except that brief panic—but as long as there were no sign of actual Navy-Oriati conflict near the Llosydanes, it would do no harm to date season. . . .
Ulyu Xe looked at her with amusement. “Have you just found last night’s satisfaction?”
“Hush, you.” Baru leapt to her feet. “Why can’t a Federal Prince be a spy-master?”
“It wouldn’t be good trim for a Federal Prince to lie. Their trim is entwined with all the people they serve and govern. When they lie it touches all those millions. Ordinarily, I think, there is a shadow ambassador for espionage instead.”
Nonsense. A good spy never had to lie. You tell everyone the truth, you tell them exactly what you plan to do: she’d said to Tain Hu, resistance is meaningless, we must find a way up from within. And they believe you, they believe in you, and so they cover up your true intentions with their own belief.
“Let’s go help them carry their gifts,” she said.
THE hardest run is the run downhill. The world wants to pull you forwa
rd by your own momentum and dash you down on your face, and you must resist it: the art of running downhill is the art of the controlled descent.
As Baru ran she also descended, lulled by pounding feet and crashing waves into her past.
Fifteen years ago, before pestilent corpses burnt in Taranoke’s crater, Baru had been a happy hungry child in the Iriad market. Her appetite could only be satiated by cooked sweet pineapple, brown with extra sugar. Usually her parents bought her some if she was good. But she was not a fledgling bird to be fed by mother! Today she was going to buy her own pineapple.
She simply had to figure out how to convert the little shell in her fist (dug up from the Baru Cormorant Industrial Sand Mine, All Liabilities Guaranteed) into actual money.
“You, kind foreigner!” she called.
A smiling Oriati laman knelt to greet her. Their khanga stretched across narrow knees, high smart brow and full lips all misted in sweat. They smelled of pork smoke and grown-up. Behind them the Iriad Percussion Parade banged on their drums and shouted gladly the news of peace. They’d played the last war with the plainsiders, where Baru hadn’t been allowed to watch as her father Salm killed a man and a woman in the circle.
“Kind foreigner,” Baru intoned, “what brings you to our market?”
“I am here to trade,” the laman said, solemnly.
“Excellent,” child-Baru declared. “I have acquired a priceless artifact. This, O most wise lama, is a valve-shell.”
“A valve-shell, eh? What does it do?”
“If crushed up and swallowed, it takes the place of an injured heart valve. Feed it every day with a cup of black coffee and a raspberry tart, and it will provide you long and boisterous life.”
The laman squinted, stroking their chin. “Why would you sell such a marvel?”
“I already have a full set,” Baru boasted, pounding her tiny chest. “I’m immortal. All I ask is a fee of twenty reef pearls, and a signed contract releasing me from all indemnity and malfeasance!”
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