The Traitor Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  They stopped at villages and ducal outposts to provision against scurvy, to buy salted meat and winter fare with stolen tax gold, spending more wealth than the common man saw in a decade. Wherever the villages had phalanxes, they offered training. Where there were woodsmen and hunters, the Coyotes accepted volunteers.

  Tain Hu and her deputies kept harsh order. At every crossroads Baru met with riders from the messenger corps, taking their reports, sending out orders and missives to the other rebel dukes.

  Autumn crashed down into winter. Snow covered the forests and made swan wings out of the boughs. Baru woke in the morning colder than she had ever been, her limbs stiff, toes absent, and stumbled out into the dawn desperate to move, to eat, to do anything warm and vital under the pale sun. Tain Hu laughed at her, and then sobered suddenly. “You’ve never seen a winter before.”

  “In Treatymont, of course. But—”

  “Not enough.” Tain Hu called out to her guard. “Ake! Ake, you will accompany the Fairer Hand. If she shows sign of sickness or scurvy—”

  “I am not so fragile,” Baru said.

  “We are fragile.” Tain Hu took her by the shoulders, so she would listen. “If we lose you, Baru Fisher, we lose everything. Remember that.”

  She could not stop herself from shivering. “I miss my office,” she said, trying to smile. “It had better plumbing.”

  Tain Hu laughed, and swept an open arm to the forest around them. “Welcome to my home.”

  They doubled back through Oathsfire land, then crossed Lyxaxu into their newest ally, Duchy Erebog. Their ranks swelled. They foraged too widely, and the wolves bayed hunger behind them.

  Sickness and madness struck with the cold. Men died trembling of scurvy or drew choleric water from fouled wells and froze in pools of their own bowel. They left a trail of unburied corpses on the frozen ground. Again and again Baru woke in the night from dreams of broken gears and empty-eyed masks and found herself so cold that she could not move, as if her will itself had frozen. It began to feel like creeping madness. The spells did not stop coming until Ake Sentiamut saw something feverish and rabid in her eyes, and began to take her out into the night to teach her Aurdwynn’s constellations. Somehow this made sleep easier. But it did not warm her numb hands, or ease the sight of scurvied men whose bleeding gums left red trails in their porridge bowls, or comfort the parents of all the dead children they helped burn.

  She had always loved the stars. But in the desert of winter it was impossible to forget that they were cold, and distant, and did not care.

  Madness led to bloodshed.

  A southern column under one of Lyxaxu’s ranger-knights strayed into Duchy Nayauru and, finding itself unwelcome at a trapping camp, butchered the families there. Baru, desperate not to alienate the Dam-builder, sent emissaries to Duchess Nayauru to pay blood money. Tain Hu executed the column’s commander. Outrage—at the slaughter, at the discipline—cost the Army of the Coyote good fighters.

  They had to be liberators. Not bandits. The Coyote was an army at service, a reverse brigand, bursting out of the woods to raid the innocent with money and safety and hope.

  In Duchy Erebog, where the Crone in Clay struggled to keep order after cremating all her rebellious landlords in the kilns, the Coyote patrolled the greatroads, hunted down brigands, and brought relief to towns enveloped by the snow. Here they met a strange ally.

  A party of pale red-haired men and women met them on a north road in Erebog, saying in Stakhi: “We are warriors of the Mansion Hussacht. The Necessary King sent us south to find the rebel queen and watch her fortunes. We slaughtered the Mask at Jasta Checniada. Take us in, and we will slaughter more.”

  This news gave Baru Fisher wild dreams, and she invited their captain, Dziransi, to join her column, where, through translators, she questioned him about the Stakhieczi and the politics of the distant land beyond the mountains, so dreaded by the Masquerade. “Be careful of him,” Tain Hu warned. “The Stakhieczi mansions have been silent too long. He was sent south with a purpose.”

  “Purposes are useful. Mutual interests give us ground for alliance.”

  “Or perhaps the Stakhieczi hope to complete the conquest they abandoned so long ago. They are stoneworkers. That makes them patient architects.”

  Baru smiled. “I am glad to have your vow,” she said. “It takes two to keep track of all our fears.”

  Winter’s bitterest months lay ahead. “We must find camp,” the war council advised. “We must winter in a safe valley.”

  But Baru Fisher ordered them south, into the Midlands duchies, a trespassing army, an outrage and an act of war. They passed through abandoned Masquerade forts and raised their own flags: an open hand, for Baru, or a design of coin and comet, for the alliance between the Fairer Hand and the Duchy Vultjag. Word went ahead of them. When they came to Duchy Nayauru’s villages, they found commoners waiting to give them beer, furs, shelter, and hand-sewn flags.

  They marched through the Midlands, drawing new blood faster than they shed corpses, counting on their gold to offset the damage done by forage. At last, frostbitten and fierce, the Army of the Coyote met the phalanxes and horsemen of the duchess Ihuake, centerpost of the Midlands Alliance. The defenders ostentatiously blocked the way, denying access to the roads—but covered their eyes in mock blindness as the Coyote columns passed through the woods between them, and even sent five hundred bowmen and two hundred goats loaded with provisions “to ensure good conduct.”

  “The Duchess of Cattle knows your power,” one of the Ihuake captains told Baru. “She is watching you.”

  Good, Baru thought, good—watch and judge. Weigh my strength. Consider the choice you will make in the spring.

  Victory demanded that she break the Traitor’s Qualm.

  * * *

  IN the darkest days of winter, too cold to snow, the transient sun glaring on the ice, Baru Fisher walked the length of the forage line, her moccasins whispering. At her side strode the ranger-knight and duchess Tain Hu, whose woodcraft was known in the North, where they called her the eagle, and in Treatymont, where they called her that brigand bitch.

  The Fairer Hand and her field-general joined the hunters and showed their talent with the bow, their vigor, their keen eyes and clear level voices, their trust in the seasoned men who led the stalk. Wherever they went the weary wavering Army of the Coyote bristled with hope.

  In warmer days of autumn they had slipped away together, Tain Hu exercising all her stealth, so that she could teach Baru how to string and fire a bow in secret, her tutorship harsh, often impatient. “You must appear a master,” she insisted. “They would forgive an Aurdwynni a missed shot, forgive a man who struggled to string. But never you. Your errors will be written on your blood and sex. You must be flawless.”

  “The draw,” Baru said, “is heavy.”

  “Many women lack the strength.”

  Baru, daughter of a huntress, a mighty spear-caster and a woman of strength, Baru who in moments of frustration or quiet always turned to the exercises and weights of the Naval System, drew with one easy breath.

  Tain Hu touched Baru’s elbow, drew her spine a little straighter, pressed at the curve of her back. “Fire,” she whispered.

  And all those months later in the ferocious cold beneath the pale winter sun Baru Fisher loosed an arrow with bright blue-dyed fletching and they all cried out in joy and leapt up to chase the wounded stag, crashing through the drifts, hearts pounding, lungs full of cold cutting ecstasy. When they brought the stag down Tain Hu opened its throat and helped the woodsmen dress it. All down the column they murmured of the omen, the fallen antlers, the stag of Duke Heingyl, the red of the Masquerade navy spilled across the snow.

  Everywhere they marched they made it known: in the spring they would gain the loyalty of the Midlands duchies, the strength of Nayauru and Ihuake, and together they would push the Masquerade back into the sea.

  AUTARCH

  21

  THE spring would bring t
ests—the decisive courtship of Nayauru and Ihuake and their clients, and greater tests beyond. But there was a little time for Baru yet.

  The winter smeared her in Aurdwynn, caked her in its churned mud, filled her with its guinea-fowl curries and venison and salted fish, clogged her pores with the oils and scents of cumin and wild ginger and crusted salt. Her tongue mangled and then mastered the beginnings of Iolynic. She learned to swear in Urun and Stakhi, and to forgo the formal Belthyc word ilykari—a word now owned, it was felt, by the Masquerade, by Xate Yawa—in favor of the vernacular Iolynic students.

  She learned the different tastes of cedar and redwood smoke. She laughed at fireside stories of Duchess Naiu and her four husbands, who had died heroes in the Fools’ Rebellion. And she laughed harder when they mocked her for her nervous sidelong glances, checking for some frowning social hygienist ready to diagnose degeneracy.

  “Men used to marry men,” Tain Hu told her, as they crouched together over a fire pit to cook their venison. “And women once took wives. It was done by the poor, the starving, the desperate, by those who needed a business pact or a shared roof. By soldiers on campaign with no one else to turn to. Mostly it was done by those without needs or troubles—done for love. The words tribadist and sodomite, the things they mean and define, came later. Before those words there were only people.”

  Baru watched her warily, fearing some bait set out for the Taranoki savage. “But all this was long ago. Before the Mask.”

  Tain Hu tore a strip of meat, chewed slowly, and swallowed. “Long ago? Well.” She grinned across the fire. “Ask around among the divers at the Horn Harbor. Or the actresses at Atu Hall. They will tell you how long ago it was. I am not quickly forgotten.”

  Curiosity came over Baru as instantly and powerfully as conditioned fear, and the mixture made her laugh. “You didn’t. In Treatymont? Under Xate Yawa’s nose?”

  Tain Hu’s eyes rounded in mock hurt. “You think I’d stop my work at the city gates? Please. I have Vultjag’s tradition of conquest to uphold.”

  “There are more?”

  “Oh, yes. It could take some tallying.” Tain Hu made confused number-shapes with her fingers. “Might even require an accountant.”

  Baru began to cough on smoke, and dropped her venison in the fire.

  * * *

  SHE led the Army of the Coyote in a desperate form of war, a war without violence, a war with more casualties than any battle ever fought.

  The steady Incrastic diet of her childhood made Baru strong and tall, healthier and more consistently able than many of the Coyote fighters. She helped them dig latrines, teaching them obsessive Masquerade hygiene, smelling more Aurdywnni shit than she’d ever planned on. Among the women she learned that a regular menstrual cycle in the winter was a mark of incredible prosperity—a noble luxury beyond ordinary reach.

  She was common-born. But the circumstances of her upbringing made her nobility to them.

  Her Coyotes ranged the forests of the Midlands, a ghost of order in a famished hungry land. The Masquerade’s autumn retreat had pillaged the granaries and abandoned the roads, sowing anarchy: a message, a harbinger of life without Falcrest’s glove and gauntlet. The Coyote fought back by opening routes north wherever they could, hiring ducal siege engineers to help with stonework, organizing bowmen and riders to patrol the roads. When the way was ready, they wrote to distant Oathsfire and his swollen granaries, his stores of salt and meat: send what you can. Where they found excess stores, they paid outrageous prices to buy them and bring them where they were needed.

  When they trespassed on the duchies of the Midlands Alliance, Baru prepared messages for them: I am the Fairer Hand. I come to help. But she never sent them. To leave written record of correspondence with the Midlands duchies would be to implicate them in treason. Even runners could not be risked. Better for the Traitor’s Qualm if the Midlands dukes could pretend she wasn’t there. It would be disastrous if they pushed Nayauru and Ihuake into acting too soon, disastrous for their strategy, and for Baru herself: she had assured Lyxaxu and the others that the Midlands would wait.

  She studied the architecture of Aurdwynn’s suffering. When they came to hamlets and freetowns, she took a translator and went among the houses, interviewing the sharecroppers and fletchers and smiths and masons, mothers and fathers, aunts and grandfathers, all tenants of the feudal landlords—recording their diets, their miscarriages, the birth weights of their children, the severity of their scurvy (bleeding gums and spotted skin and low spirits everywhere, universal, inescapable, synonymous with winter itself: the breath of Wydd), their fears, their small phlegmatic hopes.

  She made a map of the feudal ladder, the rungs of duke and landlord, armsman and craftsman and sharecropper serf. During the shivering nights she considered how to smash it. Aurdwynn would never rise to match Falcrest until the feudal nobility could be torn down.

  It would be a better land if only it could be ruled sensibly.

  * * *

  THE snows broke early and all the rivers, gorged on meltwater, began to roar. Baru dreamed of flight. Saw Aurdwynn from the belly of the clouds, sunlight reflected off spring rapids, off the mighty Bleed of Light, a fan of quicksilver bleeding out into the sea. She woke to birdsong.

  Tired of oil and stink, she swam in a meltwater torrent, gasping every breath, the cold a sine of numbness and fire. Her armsmen—bearskin-cloaked Sentiamut rangers handpicked by Tain Hu—clapped and laughed, delighted by her defiant progress upstream and by the whole art of swimming, unknown in the North.

  But when she came ashore shivering, the men averted their eyes, hesitating to step forward and offer their furs, as if they thought she would choose one of them, and signify something by it—and she, too, was suddenly hesitant, unwilling to signify, shackled by things she had never meant to learn.

  “Be careful,” Tain Hu warned her. “You have earned respect. But there are no men in Aurdwynn who can respect what they desire. I learned that from Oathsfire’s courtship, when I was young.”

  “There are other women here. They are not all mistreated.” Baru thought of the archers and fletchers, moss-pharmacists and astronomers, and the rangers like Ake. “Would you have me pretend to be a man, as you once did? Is that the only way to keep their respect?”

  “Go to one of those women,” Tain Hu said, “and ask her how she was spoken of when she left her lover, or took a second, or never had one at all.”

  “I have made brothers of these men. Not lovers.”

  The Duchess Vultjag, her hair unbound, her shoulders rolling beneath her leather and mail, shook her head ruefully. “You have been given a permit of brotherhood, Baru Fisher, and you have no say in when they will revoke it, or why.” Her lips twitched, in laughter or regret. “I learned that from Oathsfire, too.”

  “Is that why you—” Baru could not make herself speak plainly of it. “Why you turned to divers and actresses? Instead of a husband?”

  Tain Hu laughed aloud, delighted. “You think that I turned?”

  Baru felt a little shame. It was a Masquerade question, the kind of question you learned to ask in a white-walled school. Her fathers had taught her better.

  They walked in silence along the column, and came to a place where the canopy thinned and sunlight came down through the redwoods in the pattern of a fawn’s coat. Meltwater roared in the near distance, and together they looked up into the warm divided light.

  “I feel it,” Tain Hu said. “The power.”

  “Is it ykari Himu?” She had never taken Tain Hu for much of a believer, but the duchess did believe.

  “Change,” Vultjag said. “Whatever you name it.” She glanced sidelong at Baru. “You told me that there was only one road forward. That the Masquerade would never be defeated. Only subverted from within.”

  Baru looked away, as if in concession to pride. “You make me think otherwise.” And although it felt colder than the meltwater to say or even think, it was true.

  “What command, m
y sworn lord?” Not even a little mockery in Tain Hu’s voice.

  They’d made their case to the Midlands—shown their strength and resolve. Now it was time to win them, all their cavalry and wealth. Break the Traitor’s Qualm and gather every last wavering maybe-rebel into one united force.

  “Nayauru and Ihuake. We make them ours.”

  * * *

  AS they swung deeper south, Tain Hu resolved to test her courage by walking the cliff roads on Mount Kijune. This was where the war found them.

  “It’s not so far down,” Baru said, and then, unable to help herself, began to laugh. Far below, the treetops moved in slow waves, tousled by the wind. The Coyote camps were tiny brushstrokes of cloth and smoke. North of them the Wintercrests climbed the edge of the sky, flanks as dark as ravenwing, peaks as white and unreachable as the clouds they pierced.

  “Come,” she said. “Just keep your footing.”

  Tain Hu clung to the chains that lined the walkway—a perilous narrow bridge shackled to the cliff face, high above Duchy Ihuake—and looked at Baru crossly. “I am not a goat.”

  Baru loved it. Like the black cliffs and volcano sweeps of Taranoke: wide spaces from a childhood before fear. “Come, Duchess.” She beckoned. “We’re nearly to the top. Come along!”

  Tain Hu sucked in a breath and the wind gusted hard enough to set the whole walkway rattling and singing. She froze, clearly afraid to breathe, and made a face of frustrated misery while Baru laughed some more.

  “Duchess!” the wind called.

  Tain Hu looked downtrail, instantly alert, as if the word had touched a deeper part of her than the height. There was someone coming: straw-haired Ake Sentiamut, her bearskin coat bound tight, struggling up the chains from the stony notch below.

  “Well,” Baru said, as Tain Hu’s brow furrowed. “This must be urgent.”

  The ranger-knight climbed to meet them. They went together up toward a sheltered saddle in the side of Mount Kijune, where they could hold council. Tain Hu moved quickly now, as if it was her duty to be fearless before her vassals—although she kept close to Baru and followed her footsteps.