The Traitor Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  “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 inoculations, 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

  THEY 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.”

  She touched the coastal farmland directly to the west of Heingyl’s duchy. “Radaszic is dead. We needed him, his horses, the food he could have offered us. But he leapt too early.” She slid her hand to the northwest corner of the map, imagining the miles racing beneath her, the land fracturing as it rose toward the Wintercrests. “Duchess Erebog, the Crone in Clay. Lyxaxu’s neighbor to the west. With her alliance we’d have the whole North, from Erebog in the west to Oathsfire and the River Inirein in the east. If Treatymont keeps her, they’ll be able to turn our flank, maybe even send troops into the Wintercrests to envelop us. If she doesn’t declare for us before winter, we’ll be lost.”

  They stared expectantly. “And the rest?” Unuxekome asked. “The five in the Midlands? Nayauru Dam-builder, Autr Brinesalt, and Sahaule the Horsebane? Ihuake of the thousand thousand cattle and Pinjagata Spear-forest? Nayauru can’t keep two lovers and expect to
be a friend of Cattlson or Falcrest. Ihuake’s too proud to accept anyone’s rule. Surely they’ll come over.”

  “The Traitor’s Qualm,” Baru and Tain Hu said together. They made apologetic looks at each other, began to speak again, and—Tain Hu shrugging—finally Baru continued. “Just as Xate Olake thought. Until we prove we have a real chance, they’ll hold back and pretend loyalty.”

  “What if they don’t?” Lyxaxu cocked his head in curious challenge. “Nayauru’s ambitious. Defiant. She wants a throne. She might take the chance for her own gambit.”

  “I’m confident she won’t.” Lyxaxu’s intellect was useful, dangerously sharp, but sometimes it led him into useless abstraction. “Nayauru’s every bit as bound by finance and logistics as the rest of us.”

  “Her bloodline is rich, her consorts strong—”

  “Her bloodline means nothing. She doesn’t have the coin for war.” Baru held Lyxaxu’s eyes, facing down thirty-five years of study and all the weight that carried, until he blinked. “We have time to court Nayauru and the rest. The Midlands dukes will wait out the winter before they move.”

  “Send Oathsfire,” Unuxekome said.

  “What?” said Baru, as Oathsfire huffed, as Tain Hu grinned and chuckled.

  Unuxekome shrugged and put his hands behind his head. His shoulders bunched impressively (Oathsfire glared). “We need Nayauru. We lose the war in the spring if we don’t win the Midlands to our side, and Nayauru is half of that alliance. So send her what she treasures. Another noble father for another heir.”

  Oathsfire bristled. “I am not a brood stallion.”

  “She’s quite lovely,” Tain Hu offered. “Exactly your type. Your new type, I mean.” Unuxekome made a little choked sound of mirth.

  “Perhaps I’m not the best choice. Whoever we send will have to distract her from Autr and Sahaule. Someone with a laborer’s build.” Oathsfire adjusted his gloves. “A sailor might do. If we can find one with a working cock.”

  Unuxekome shrugged with his upraised elbows, as if to offer the shape of his arms in answer to the jab. He’d never married. Baru supposed that was Oathsfire’s target. “Whatever the Fairer Hand prefers.”

  Save her from noble men and their games of position. “What I prefer is that we leave the Midlands be until spring. Winter is our chance to make our case to them.”

  “We need a bold victory, then,” Unuxekome said. “A raid. Before the autumn storms lock my fleet in harbor.”

  “No. We need to withdraw.” Baru set her palm on the map, fingers aimed north. “The best thing we can do is consolidate our hold and wait out the winter. It’s the only way out.”

  Unuxekome crooked a brow. “Persuade me.”

  Baru stabbed Treatymont with her forefinger. “The Masquerade’s control is economic. I know—I enforced it. Their garrisons are small, their outposts undermanned compared to fortresses like Ihuake’s Pen. Falcrest has never trusted its army, because they know that republics are the natural prey of a professional military. But they are patient, thorough, methodical. They’ve never relied on the sword to conquer.

  “They’ll draw their strength in to Treatymont, abandoning the Midlands, securing the coastal plains and the harvest. Bandits will take the roads they abandon. Poverty will fester in the absence of their banks. They’ll leave Aurdwynn to rot through the winter, to feel the cold of life without the Masquerade, while they keep the harvest for themselves. Come spring, when the marines land from Falcrest, when the trade winds are ready for easy shipping again, they’ll come north in campaign. Marching up through Duchy Nayauru into Duchy Erebog, then into our western flank, through Lyxaxu and Vultjag to Oathsfire. Unuxekome, you will be the target of a second thrust.” She sketched a spear thrown inland from the sea. “A naval assault on Welthony, then a push up the Inirein to meet the other column at Oathsfire’s keep. And thus we will be erased.”

  Lyxaxu measured her. “It would be an error of rigor if I didn’t ask: when did you become a general?”

  Blessed Lyxaxu, asking the right questions. “I’m not. I know money, logistics, shipping, and infrastructure. And those are the weapons they’ll use to defeat you.”

  They were all watching her now, silent, respectful, and it gave her the same thrill she had felt auditing the Fiat Bank, speaking to Purity Cartone, hearing the adulation of the crowd—the shock of power.

  “Until spring,” she told them, “most of the Duchies in Aurdwynn will, for the first time in almost a quarter of a century, be left to their own governance. Pulled between the rebellion in the north and the Masquerade to the south. We’ll have a few cold, desperate months to court them. And we have one advantage that Falcrest and Treatymont never foresaw: we are rich. We can keep our troops fed and armed through the winter. We can step in wherever the Masquerade has left them to crumble. Hold the roads open. Buy out the banks. And if the Masquerade tries to stop us—you are Northmen, are you not? If they cross the Midlands and come up into the vales and the woods, into the land we know like our fathers’ hands, struggling through the snows, we kill them.”

  Tain Hu set her fists on the table. “Is this how you think we should fight, Baru Fisher? With coin and open roads?”

  “No war has ever been won by slaughtering the enemy wholesale.” Baru found skepticism in Unuxekome’s eyes, on Oathsfire’s face. Only Lyxaxu looked thoughtful. “Come, Your Graces. Surely you have read it in the Dictates—war is a contest of wills. The will of the people breaks when war makes them too miserable to do anything but acquiesce. We can turn that will to us.”

  “It may work,” Tain Hu said, slowly, thoughtfully. “What we need in spring are healthy cavalry and sturdy phalanxes. Cavalry rules the coastal plain, from Unane Naiu to Sieroch. If we can find enough forage during the winter, if we can keep our own armies from being pinned down or bled dry, if we can convince the Midlands to declare for us … in the spring we can ride in force.”

  “They could come at us in winter across the Inirein, from Falcrest’s western reaches.” Oathsfire looked to Lyxaxu, as he always seemed to. “One march could take you, I, and Vultjag at once.”

  “Not once we destroy the bridges. The river may freeze enough for a northerly crossing, but they’ll never march an army north from Falcrest to the Inirein without losing most of it to the snow.” Lyxaxu offered Baru an open palm, upraised. “I’m convinced. This will be our strategy.”

  “Why not one strike before the winter?” Unuxekome pressed. “One raid on Treatymont harbor. I could take Devenynyr and gather my fleet.”

  Tain Hu shook her head. “The other side of the Qualm. If we seem too strong too soon, we’ll force the undecided dukes into a choice. And they will choose the surer bet.”

  “There’s one other matter,” Baru said, speaking, at last, the guilt that had been gnawing her. “A weakness I want addressed. I’ll need a ship and a way to pass a secret message to Xate Yawa.”

  They waited in silence.

  “There’s a man in Treatymont who needs to be smuggled out. One I couldn’t move without betraying my real allegiance.”

  “No,” Tain Hu snapped. “You’ll risk Xate Yawa’s cover if you pull him out. You’d court disaster, and for what gain?”

  “I want him here.” Baru stared the duchess Vultjag down, wishing, incongruously, that she still had her white mask, the impassive glaze of her station. It had gone down with Mannerslate. “He’s a liability in Masquerade hands. And he’s my responsibility.”

  “Saving him would be a worse betrayal than abandoning him,” Tain Hu insisted. But her eyes roamed the other dukes, and following her, Baru saw what Vultjag must already know: Oathsfire and Unuxekome leaned in, jockeying for a chance to offer their help.

  Tain Hu raised her eyes to the distant Wintercrests and said no more.

  “My secretary, Muire Lo,” Baru told the men. “He’s the only one who knows my books as well as I do. Without him, Cattlson will have no way to set his accounts in order, no way to conceal his mismanagement from Pa
rliament. He will call on Bel Latheman, who is clever—but it will not be enough. We can make it worse for them if we find and destroy the books.”

  I was here during the rebellions, he’d said. I don’t want to see Aurdwynn go back to that.

  Surely he’d realized what she was about to do when she sailed with the tax ships. Surely he hadn’t believed she was actually returning to Falcrest for judgment.

  Surely he’d found some way to protect himself, his family—

  “Xate Olake arranged for the removal of Su Olonori,” Lyxaxu said. “He could do it again.”

  Baru cut him off with an upraised hand, an unwise desperation seething within her, the terrible fear that she had just caged herself. She had forgotten something vital, something that Tain Hu might know, something that Xate Yawa certainly did, because three years ago she had sent a burly Stakhieczi woodsman to watch the new Imperial Accountant, and in a smoky tavern beneath a brothel that woodsman had met Muire Lo and—

  And tried to kill him, driven to rage by the knowledge that Muire Lo was an agent of Falcrest, a watcher set to guard the new Imperial Accountant. A trained spy.

  What would Xate Yawa think when she learned that Baru had tried to bring Muire Lo into the rebellion? Would she go to the ilykari woman in her temple of air and light and say: tell me the secret that would destroy Baru Fisher?

  Tain Hu’s eyes had left the Wintercrests. Tain Hu’s eyes dwelled on her.

  It would be safest, Baru realized, to order Muire Lo’s death. It would prove her loyalty to the rebellion in the eyes of the twin Xates.

  The tests would never end.

  “I cannot betray him,” she said, talking at Lyxaxu, speaking to Tain Hu. “I cannot abandon him, not when I have made him seem so complicit. Permit me this one loyalty.”

  “A dangerous loyalty,” Tain Hu murmured. And Baru knew that she knew, that Xate Yawa had told her about the woodsman, about Baru and Aminata in the tavern, about Muire Lo’s letters to Falcrest.

  Had she ever really assured herself of Muire Lo’s loyalty? He’d kept the book with its incriminating notes, rather than sending it to Falcrest—but couldn’t Cairdine Farrier have made a copy and left the original with him—couldn’t the Masquerade in all its love of subtlety and deception arranged Muire Lo’s vulnerability and need for a moment such as this? A way to send him into the heart of the rebellion?