The Traitor Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  Ihuake waited a moment, as if Baru’s thought were incomplete. When Baru said no more, she spoke:

  “But my debt to you is only a shadow. It exists only as a belief. Perhaps I choose to disbelieve it: now I could give you to Treatymont, and in reward, they would annihilate Nayauru and grant me her land. Or I could listen to her bleating, accept her reparations, and join her in hunting your Coyote down.” Ihuake eyed Baru like a gangly foal, the disappointing issue of a prize stud. “I came to this council to hear the rebellion’s offer. But you cannot outbid the Masquerade with shadows, O Fairer Hand. We remember what happened to the last southern duke who declared for you: Radaszic’s people bow to the stag banner now. We remember the Fools’ Rebellion, and the fate of those who leapt too soon. If you want me to risk war against Treatymont, you must offer me substance.”

  The Traitor’s Qualm.

  Baru set her jaw and met the duchess’s eyes. She considered and discarded one last plea: is a free Aurdwynn worth nothing to you?

  Aurdwynn had not been kind to dukes who spent blood for ideas. Aurdwynn had been kind to those who spent blood for power.

  Aurdwynn and the world. Taranoke, after all, did not rule Falcrest.

  “I hear your question,” she said. “Look to my answer soon.”

  24

  THAT night, Baru called Xate Olake to her tent for counsel. The Phantom Duke came in while she ate, found her picking apart a roasted chicken bare-handed, licking at the salt.

  “Sit,” she commanded.

  Olake settled himself, groaning, across from her. “Winter has ruined your Incrastic manners.” He stripped his gloves and scanned the tent with practiced caution. “Or perhaps it was Tain Hu that made you feral.”

  “Duchess Vultjag’s decorum needs no description.” That made him smile. She cracked a thigh bone. “I wonder if my winter tried me as deeply as yours.”

  “The scurvied wilderness or the Treatymont abattoir? Hard to know.” He closed his eyes and wound his cloak tighter. “I had an ear on every wall and an eye in every lamp. And I watched it all undone.” Here, like strangled punctuation, the sound of his hissing laugh. “You should have seen the streets this spring. Blood in the meltwater.”

  Baru set the two broken pieces of bone down and licked marrow from her teeth. “Did you order the death of Muire Lo?”

  Xate Olake opened his eyes a little. In the dark his blue-slit gaze colored like a bruise. “The Masquerade battle plan I brought. Only Yawa and I can read the code it’s written in. Remember that.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “It’s a reminder, child. I’ve played games of blood for a long, long time. I know how to keep myself valuable.”

  She stripped the meat from a wing. “If you and your sister killed Muire Lo, then you want me to believe that it was necessary.”

  Xate Olake gave a weary sigh. “Forget the dead.”

  “I will keep my own accounts.”

  “I said forget him!” Olake’s roar made her start, and she snapped the wing between her fists. “I killed him, or I didn’t, and it was necessary, or it wasn’t. The boy’s life doesn’t matter now. If you cannot win the Midlands, Cattlson’s attack on the River Inirein will succeed, and his troops will have a highway into the heart of rebel territory. That harbor at Welthony where you drowned so many marines? It will be flooded by thousands more. Marching up on us like angry revenants. Aurdwynn hangs in the balance.”

  “The Inirein. Interesting.” She sat in thought for a moment, moving pieces across her mental map. “That’s his plan? He’ll put all his strength east, to take the river?”

  “He plans to use the river to move troops north into our heartlands. He’s pinned his whole strategy on it. If we can meet him on the floodplain at Sieroch, just short of the river—” The lines around his eyes crinkled, like writing translating itself. “One decisive battle will give us the war.”

  “If we have the spearmen and the horse to win.”

  “If we have a united Midlands behind us.”

  Baru set aside the chicken carcass and raised herself to a crouch, balanced on her toes and fingertips. “Convenient,” she said. “I’ve been going over the books. We’ve spent ourselves to death. Unless we resort to wholesale pillage, there’s not enough left in our treasuries to campaign through another winter. Not even enough to last until autumn, if we have to besiege the coastal forts. Or Treatymont itself.”

  The old man held her in a wary regard. “We won’t need another winter if we can defeat Cattlson in the open field.”

  “Or someone knows that our only hope is a single decisive battle, and they sent you here with a false battle plan to draw us out.”

  Xate Olake’s wry gaze reminded Baru of the years he’d spent in Treatymont, bricking the foundations of rebellion, playing long games. “What Falcresti chemistry or coercion could do that? They would have to pluck my guts out my eyes before they could break me. When I betray rebellions, child, I do it only by my own will.”

  “And your sister? The one who fed you Cattlson’s plan?” Baru did not hide the menace in her smile. “Perhaps it is her will.”

  The Duke of Lachta hesitated, and Baru thought: Ah—even you doubt her. Even you believe that no one can lie so ably, so completely, about her true loyalties.

  But Baru knew it was possible.

  “We have no choice,” Xate Olake said. “Either we unite the Midlands and march to meet Cattlson, or we wait out the summer and run our treasury dry.”

  Baru took up her writing lantern, the sturdy little oil-burner she’d trusted all winter, and lifted it between them. The light put shadows in every crag and fold of the duke Lachta’s face. He looked older than the world.

  “Duchess Nayauru will never join a rebellion I lead,” she said. “She cannot forgive the Coyote. She will not abandon her dream of a reborn Tu Maia empire.”

  Lachta held up a hand against the glare of the lamp. It made a fingered shadow on his face, like a raven wing. “If she goes with Cattlson, so will Autr and Sahaule. They will counterbalance Ihuake and Pinjagata and we will never win a battle.”

  Baru looked at the canny old man in her tent and thought, a little ruefully, that he was too old and too clever for her, that it would be the height of arrogance to think she could surprise him, impress him.

  But arrogance or no, she spoke.

  “We can solve all our problems in one stroke. We’re running out of money to sustain a campaign. We cannot allow Nayauru and her consorts to go over to Treatymont. And Ihuake will not join us unless I can demonstrate my strength. So—”

  Baru wiped grease and marrow on the hips of her trousers. “Tomorrow night we murder Nayauru, Autr, and Sahaule in their camps, kill everyone who marched with them, and order their duchies pillaged for funds. Ihuake will receive Nayauru’s richest lands as a gift. Duchess Erebog will take the rest.”

  So easy, so decisive, spoken that way.

  So much blood in so few words.

  Xate Olake’s lips curled. It was not disgust. “I was afraid,” he said, “that you would insist on finding a subtler way.”

  Baru selected another marrow-rich bone and felt for the breakpoint. “Did you really give me a slow poison last summer?”

  “Child,” Xate Olake said, with a kind of wary fondness, “I thought you would bring yourself to ruin without my help.”

  * * *

  SHE called for Tain Hu, then stopped the messenger before he could take three steps. It would be unsafe to see her now, unsafe to look her in the eye and command her, or to wait in silence for her hunting look, her golden eyes searching for a path in. It would be unsafe.

  “Bring me an ilykari instead,” she commanded. “Someone trusted.”

  The priestess who came must have been one of Unuxekome’s divers—she had the broad-shouldered, long-legged look of a deep swimmer. It could have been a coincidence that she had Baru’s Maia skin, or some ill-thought attempt to make her comfortable. She looked a little like Nayauru, and much mor
e like Cousin Lao.

  “Rest,” Baru ordered. She’d strung up the oil lantern and it cast flickering shadows like a sickly sun.

  The woman sat in silence. Baru watched her arrange herself, tracing the geometry of muscle and limb with uneasy fascination. She was strong, tall; she had power in the breath that filled her chest, in the line of her thighs. Through labor she had made herself able. A small ability, in the scheme of the world—only the power to dive deep, climb high, to win laughing contests of strength and draw eyes that admired that strength. Not a power that would bankrupt dukes or change the names of islands. But power enough to rule a tent, to surprise Baru with violence or other sudden acts.

  Baru wished she’d cleaned out the ruins of the chicken.

  The priestess waited in contemplative peace. A devotee of Wydd, then. “What do you do?”

  The priestess frowned for a moment as she parsed Baru’s awkward Iolynic. Her eyes were strange and round, Stakhi-shaped. “I am a pearl diver and a midwife.”

  “You’ve come a long way for war. You must be a mother, a sister, a daughter. How do you know your family is safe?”

  “The same way as all the other fighters. My great-family shares its house. There are a hundred hands among them. A few young men and women can be spared in time of need.”

  For all her whirling disquiet, Baru could not help but note: Cairdine Farrier would be fascinated. The Imperial Republic thought of families as a man and a woman, thought of the mother and father as fixed necessities. But here, as on Taranoke, they had always practiced other ways—useful ways, methods that liberated strong young hands for labor and war—

  Not so fascinated. He would only be curious how to repair it.

  The thought curled back around into the heart of her unease. Suddenly she wanted to weep: she could not escape it. “I have committed a terrible crime,” she said, voice firm, controlled, machined to a polish. “So terrible that I feel I can do anything, commit any sin, betray any trust, because no matter what ruin I make of myself, it cannot be worse than what I have already done.”

  “Speak,” the ilykari murmured.

  Baru tried, and it all caught in her lungs, a tumor, an avalanche, a drifting Oriati mine. The size of it, the depth of the roots, the test she faced, the doom she had brought down on herself.

  “I cannot,” she said. “I cannot speak.”

  “What do you do?” the priestess asked. Perhaps this was some method of Wydd, turning her own questions back on her to reveal her secrets.

  “I try to save my home,” Baru rasped. “Everything I do. For Taranoke.”

  “You’ve come a long way to do it,” the priestess said, and left the rest of the mirrored question unspoken, the mother and sister and daughter, the how do you know your family is safe?

  “Too far,” Baru choked, unable to weep, unable to want to, to make herself believe it could ever be safe or right. “I’ve come too far.”

  * * *

  AT daybreak she went to Tain Hu’s tent to order the killings.

  She found the duchess Vultjag engaged in a curious ritual with Ake Sentiamut. They knelt across from each other on the ground cloth, a wooden game board between them. Baru had studiously avoided learning the game of rule—learning would surely involve losing a number of games, which would make Tain Hu insufferable—but she knew the principle: pawns claimed land, nobles took power from pawns to fight other nobles. But here Tain Hu’s nobles seemed fed by something else. She read from a little leather-bound book, her lips making awkward hesitant shapes, and depending on her performance at this mysterious task, Ake smiled, or laughed, or shook her head and killed a few of Tain Hu’s pawns. It must be a learning game, then—a way to keep Tain Hu’s attention, penalizing or rewarding her standing in the game according to her performance in the book.

  How curious they were together: Tain Hu a nighthawk, a panther, and Ake a pale white-gold fawn wrapped up in bearskin. And yet they did not act unequal.

  Baru watched them in silence for a moment (the guards had not announced her: in camp Coyote-men knew that crying out the Fairer Hand’s presence would only mark her for assassins). Tain Hu sat with her strength coiled, her eyes sharp with concentration, and at times she spooled her unbraided hair around one finger in thought. Baru took a kind of delight in this: in the field Vultjag would never have permitted that gesture to slip. And so strange, too, the way she spoke to Ake, each of them interrupting the other, their gestures lively and unconsidered, their laughter free. When Tain Hu looked away, jaw set, troubled by something she had said or some problem that occupied her mind, Ake reached out and clasped her wrist with easy camaraderie—and it meant nothing more that Baru could see, asked nothing in return, disguised no secret missive or hidden maneuver.

  It would be nice to stand here a while longer, and watch this world she had never been part of. But dangerous, too—

  “Vultjag,” Baru said. “A word.”

  Tain Hu startled a little, and Ake hid a laugh at that. They stood together, bowing their heads, and Tain Hu dismissed her ranger-knight with a clap on her shoulder and a murmured word in Stakhi. Baru caught the secret handoff they made through the swirl of broadcloth and bearskin.

  “Come,” she said, more lightly than she actually felt, “don’t be bashful. Show me.”

  Ake looked to Tain Hu. Vultjag arched a brow. “The Fairer Hand commands it.”

  So Ake gave Baru the book as she stepped out of the tent. Baru turned it over and read the title, printed in neat blocks of Iolynic: A Primer in Aphalone, the Imperial Trade Tongue; Made Available to the People of Aurdwynn For Their Ease.

  It was like holding a centipede. She wanted to hurl it away.

  Tain Hu watched her with a disinterested half smile that might, last year, have hidden from Baru her profound self-consciousness. “I’m learning to read it. So I can spy on your letters,” she explained, lips half-parted, eyes sly: all her countermeasures set. “And those books you read, too. Learn what madness drives you, hm?”

  Baru acted, so that she wouldn’t have to think: she stepped into the tent, into Tain Hu’s space, and with her own fierce eyes and confident stride seized a kind of control, in that she startled Tain Hu and made her freeze a moment.

  Baru, close now, offered the book. “You said there was nothing worth taking from the enemy.”

  “Perhaps an item or two of note.” Tain Hu clasped the book but did not take it, and for a moment they were joined by it, their fingertips not quite in contact but still mutually aware. “I have some regard for a few products of the Masquerade system. They can be useful. Or delightful.”

  She tucked a lock of wild hair behind her ear. It slipped loose at once.

  Her damned eyes, so close, so cutting; her awful hateful unforgettable smile—and Baru already in a panic, tossed by the book, by the things about to happen. Desperate to avoid an error she terribly wanted to make, Baru seized on a blunt instrument, sniffed, said: “A few useful products, yes. They did wonders for dental hygiene.”

  Tain Hu laughed. “Spoiled ass. All those latrines dug, and you still complain about morning breath?” She stepped away and went to her field kit, to find a pellet of anise to chew. “How can I serve? Do you have an answer for Nayauru?”

  “Why aren’t you with her?”

  “Hm?”

  “She’s proud, capable, and ambitious. Young and lovely, too. All cause for your interest.”

  “Undeniably true.” Tain Hu tossed a pellet of anise seeds wrapped in mint. Baru caught it, fumbled, and caught it again. “Her tastes don’t run to that kind of alliance, though. As I’m sure you’ve seen.”

  “That’s not the sort I meant.” It was easy to pretend to be cross. “Why do you all do that? Every time anyone mentions Nayauru I hear these snide asides about her love of men. She engineers majestic dams and fine roads, her troops are formidable, her ambitions plain and her alliances firm. Are you all so menaced by her that you feel the need to reduce her to a—a docklands pimp sampling fr
om her boys?”

  Tain Hu chewed for a few moments, narrow-eyed. “You respect her.”

  “I do. I do.” Baru let herself sigh. “She’s cunning. She might outplay me again.”

  “So how do you plan to—”

  “Without any subtlety.”

  Tain Hu stopped chewing.

  “I’m having her killed,” Baru said, holding her field-general’s stare. “Her, Autr, and Sahaule. Murdered in their camps tonight.”

  After a moment’s unblinking regard, Tain Hu came forward into the center of the tent and knelt, arms braced against the earth, gold-black eyes fixed on Baru’s with a ferocious loyalty that concealed nothing. Baru’s heart trembled, because she saw the truth there, and the plea, too—Tain Hu’s honor, her regard for Nayauru as a fellow duchess and a worthy foe, and for herself as a noblewoman who did not need midnight knives.

  “My lord,” Vultjag said. “As you command.”

  “No,” Baru said, and then, more roughly, her throat choked as if by drink and smoke, “no, Vultjag, not you. I will not ask you to do it. I have other weapons to employ.”

  Tain Hu would not avert her eyes, would not blink, and although the danger now was different than the menace of half-open lips and panther strength, it was not less awful. “You are the Fairer Hand,” she said, “and I am your field-general, oathbound to earn you victory at any price. I will not shrink from that oath.” And then, her cold breaking, her voice raw and rampant: “I rule a small land, poor in wealth and arms; I have no husband and no heirs, no great alliance and no well-made dams, and thus few strengths to offer my lord beyond my cunning and my loyalty. Do not deny me the exercise of those as well.”

  She would not look away.

  Baru, falling toward disaster, chose a lesser kind of weakness over a greater one. She took Tain Hu by the forearm, a warrior’s clasp, and drew her up eye to eye. “You are my sworn instrument, my best weapon,” she hissed, with all the furious strength she could manage. It was a lie, in that it concealed the truth; but it was also true. “Loyalty runs two ways, Your Grace. I would not waste my finest sword on a task better fit for poison.”