The Traitor Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  She had her prize: Nayauru’s land and treasury. She declared for the rebellion.

  Erebog committed her scurvied, hungry soldiers to the occupation of Nayauru’s land. Too depleted by winter to join the battle to come, they would serve as a garrison against the leaderless and furious duchies Autr and Sahaule. A summer of raids and pillage against Nayauru’s former clients would, Erebog felt, restore her troops and her own treasury to fighting shape.

  The rebels gathered their strength for the final battle.

  Southeast toward the Inirein—the great artery that connected Welthony to the rebel North. Southeast went the ranked and serried phalanxes of Duke Pinjagata, and the torrent of horse and livestock from Ihuake’s pens, and all the wages and supplies stockpiled by Oathsfire.

  On the Sieroch floodplain, where the road from Treatymont came east to the river, they would meet Treatymont’s awakened wrath.

  The Fairer Hand and her field-general returned to the forests of the North to rally the fighters they’d fed and armed over the winter. They were met with rapture, a clamor of joyful disorder—ilykari and mothers, sodomite-husbands and merchants, all crying out to the avatar of their new liberty. Reaching for a future free of the Incrastic disciplines that would bind their bodies and labors to Falcrest’s design.

  Tain Hu and Baru Fisher rode side by side through days of hawk call and redwood.

  A forest of spears walked with them to the Inirein. Phalanx after phalanx. Boarding Oathsfire’s barges for the rush downstream to the great camps at the Sieroch floodplains.

  At the end of their passage, the duchess and the fallen Imperial Accountant returned to Vultjag and saw the valley speckled by the shadows of circling raptors, small hunting signs on the redwood canopy. In the north, the waterfall crashed through the sluiceways of the limestone keep. They sat in their saddles at the fellgate crest, the duchess Vultjag taller and more relaxed than Baru, who still had trouble making friends with horses.

  Tain Hu drew breath. “If we win against Cattlson. If they give you a throne—”

  “Not now,” Baru said, afraid to let her terrible weariness show, her wrenching sickness at the thought of tests to come. “Speak of something other than battle and thrones.”

  In the valley before them a hawk stooped on some invisible prey. “You sound heartsick,” Tain Hu said.

  Baru shifted in the solid-treed saddle and, unable to find relief, stood in her stirrups. She gazed out over the valley, the river, the little constellations of house and quarry and mill. “The people in Duchy Nayauru.” The people she’d bartered to Ihuake like cattle. “Are they much like yours?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never gone west. The Maia blood is strong there, though, as it is in me.”

  Baru smiled sidelong at her. “I thought you knew everything about Aurdwynn.”

  The duchess looked hurt. “The land is vast. There are as many villages in each vale as stars in the sky.”

  “You’re off by…” Baru squinted. “Several orders of magnitude.”

  Tain Hu shook her head ruefully. “Xate Yawa should ban the marriage of accountants and poetry.”

  A murmur of activity behind them. Two men came forward from the retinue—first Dziransi, and then Xate Olake. Dziransi, somber and grave, cast down his eyes and spoke in Stakhi.

  “He wants to sit in council,” Xate Olake translated. His voice thickened with urgency. “He says he has seen enough, and now hopes to act. I know what he wants, and I know what it could mean for Aurdwynn. Listen to him.”

  “No relief for the Fairer Hand,” Tain Hu muttered. “Remember my warnings about him and his nation.” She turned to the spymaster. “We will go to my keep, then, and speak in safety.”

  Baru spurred her mount downslope, seeing, for a moment, only a chasm before her, an avalanche of consequences drawing her down to the end.

  She’d known all along that this moment would come. She hadn’t expected it to rise up and swallow her. Hadn’t expected the mistake she’d made.

  * * *

  “TAKE the throne,” Tain Hu said.

  They stood on the dais in the waterfall keep’s audience chamber, the long rafters red in torchlight, the air thick with pine. The muddy boot-tracks of a thousand petitioners, left unwashed, traced the way from the door to the duchess Vultjag’s seat.

  “It’s yours,” Baru insisted. “You’re the duchess.”

  “I’m your field-general, sworn to serve. I can’t sit above you.”

  “I don’t have any formal standing. I’m a commoner.”

  Baru expected a retort, some levity of ducal protocol. Instead Tain Hu looked into the distance. “You should be seated when he asks you,” she said. “It’s tradition.”

  “Sit. I’ll stand by your side. I’ll be higher than you, and you can keep your rightful station.”

  “The Fairer Hand indeed.” Tain Hu sat in a rattle of mail on stone. “Are you ready?”

  The stiffness in her voice asked some other question, and Baru looked to her, hurt and troubled, hoping to help. But now Dziransi came through the door, armored and stern. Xate Olake walked beside him, washed and plainly dressed.

  The armored brave man, emissary of a power beyond the Wintercrests that the Masquerade was not even sure still existed, drew to a halt at the base of the dais. He spoke in a low, respectful crackle of consonants, the Mansion-accented Stakhi of his home. His cadence sounded like oath and solemn ritual.

  “My people were the father of Aurdwynn,” Xate Olake translated, “and yours the mother. We fought the Maia for this land until beetles ate their empire and the cold broke ours. Aurdwynn remained as we dwindled into the north, clinging to our mansions beneath the peaks, fighting for brine and citrus and arable land. The Great Assembly shattered, and we fell into civil war.

  “Now the Stakhieczi rise in fear of a new power on the Ashen Sea, an empire of coin and lies. The Masquerade would see its laws written in all flesh. Already it has stolen our fairest prince, plucked from the deck of his ship. From among the brothers of the lost we have crowned a Necessary King. He has carved stone and beaten steel into shapes of war. He has dispatched his chosen jagata to scout the lay of the world.”

  Dziransi paused. Xate Olake bounced his beetled gray eyebrows in almost comical excitement. At Baru’s side, Tain Hu exhaled a long, astonished breath.

  Dziransi spoke again. Xate Olake followed:

  “The Necessary King, a man of Mansion Hussacht, a brother to me, sent me south to chase rumors of rebellion. He sought allies. I found him something more.”

  Xate Olake grinned explosively and rocked on his heels. With a gleeful rise he finished, a moment behind Dziransi:

  “I found a worthy queen. Together—” He swallowed an exhilarated laugh. “Together Aurdwynn and the Stakhieczi Necessity can turn back the Masquerade.”

  Dziransi knelt and waited in silence.

  Everyone thought she would be queen. It had been an implicit truth of the insurrection, a condition everyone else had agreed on behind her back, somewhere before the beginning.

  She looked to Tain Hu, tense and rigid on her throne, a green-brown arrow fletched with raven hair. The duchess looked back, and twitched her chin toward Dziransi, as if to say: he’s asking you, not me.

  I don’t want a king, Baru thought, and then, against the iron cells of her self-restraint, through the bars and gears and endless flagellation of her careful denial, although thinking it felt like sliding a long splinter up beneath her thumbnail—

  I know what I want.

  Tain Hu’s eyes, empty as a storm night.

  Baru spoke with care, with smooth assurance, with the stolen inflection of a noble lord. “Many men would be my king. Many men would buy my hand with gifts. I have been offered fleets of swift ships and columns of fine bowmen. Now I am offered a nation. But I cannot see this nation. I cannot look over the mountains and touch its stonework. I cannot know the character of its king.”

  Dziransi spoke to the floor. Xate Olake star
ed at her with mingled horror and respect as he translated. “In matters of state, we must always be careful engineers. We must build a truss of gift and obligation. The Necessary King is prepared to demonstrate his strength, and the victories it might win for you. Two thousand Mansion Hussacht jagata wait by the headwaters of the Inirein. At your request, they will come south to Sieroch and join the battle. This gift the Necessary King offers without condition, save that you know him to be generous and his men brave.”

  To see Cattlson’s face, on the field at Sieroch, when two thousand Stakhieczi warriors lifted banners against him—to hear the tumult in Falcrest when they saw the ghost empire in the north corporeal and furious—

  “You cannot refuse,” Tain Hu murmured. “You cannot refuse a man who offers victory with one hand and sets ten phalanxes at the head of the Inirein with the other.”

  Xate Olake’s eyes begged her to be sane.

  What could she say? A gift this large was no different from coercion. How could it be refused?

  And it would work to her advantage to draw out this hidden power.

  “I accept,” Baru said, and through Tain Hu’s sharp absence of breath, her abrupt utter silence, the rest: “I accept the gift. Tell the Necessary King that I will meet him after our victory, and judge whether I accept him as a man.”

  * * *

  TWO weeks passed in a blur of ink and starlight. Baru wrote letters until her wrists cramped, dictating monetary policy to Oathsfire, penning sermons for the restless levies at Sieroch, responding to Lyxaxu’s newly resumed philosophical inquiries about Masquerade policy. He wrote this:

  How can you, a rationalist, believe in our chances of victory strongly enough to rebel? Do you not fear their gradual return? Do you see any hope for us in five decades, in a century?

  She wrote:

  Duke High Stone, above all else I promise this: I have planned for the long term.

  How long ago she’d stood on the balcony with him and heard him say: Revolution is a filthy business, and prices must be paid. But I am not your coin.…

  The trouble with philosophy, Lyxaxu had said, was that it so often failed to survive a test.

  She saw little of Duchess Vultjag. Tain Hu had been gone too long, and needed to set her house in order—but that was an excuse, wasn’t it? They’d walked side by side through the winter, Fairer Hand and field-general, equals and comrades. They’d spoken as friends. Sometimes as—well.

  But now the Stakhiezci bargain raised itself to say: one of you will rule, and one will serve.

  Tain Hu was avoiding her.

  In her absence, Baru found herself taking counsel with Xate Olake, beer-soaked but no less crafty for it. A deeper drunkenness had taken him, the exhilaration of an old man who had planned to die before he saw his dreams made real, and then, one morning, found those resignations undone.

  “I wish Yawa could see you now,” he said. They’d gone to raid Vultjag’s larder for interesting cheeses. “She’s caged herself in cruelty. Taught herself to believe in a world where nothing goes right except by the harshest exercise of power. She thought you were just a girl, you know, too young to lead. She forgot—” He belched. “Mathematicians do their best work young, eh? A Falcresti told me that.”

  “What will Xate Yawa do when we besiege Treatymont?” Baru found herself drawn along by the old man’s optimism. “The mobs will tear her apart.”

  “I’ll save her, of course.” Xate Olake’s eyes gleamed over his tankard. “She’s saved me often enough, in all the years when I played Phantom Duke. Devena knows these things come back around.”

  * * *

  THEY waited for word from Unuxekome: Cattlson is marching on the Inirein.

  But it did not come.

  One sun-drenched day Baru set out to visit the place where Muire Lo had been cremated and, at the keep’s gate, found Tain Hu waiting in place of her guards, hair bound up, blade at her side. She had gotten too sharp to remember, somehow: every time Baru saw her she felt a little start, a shock of surprise at the grace of her motion, the fierce impatience knit up in her brow, the dawn color in her dark, dark eyes.

  “Duchess.” Baru nodded to the absence of armsmen. “Will we be safe?”

  Tain Hu looked at her with sarcastic skepticism. “You walked these woods with me when I had every reason to kill you.”

  The absurd memory made Baru chuckle—audits and archery, when her greatest concern was stopping Tain Hu’s uprising. “I wasn’t afraid of you.”

  “Perhaps you should’ve been. Perhaps you still should be.”

  “Oh? What new danger would I have to fear?”

  Where the Tain Hu of winter past would have smiled, would have risen to the bait and done something almost but not quite utterly improper, the duchess Vultjag lowered her eyes in deference.

  “Would you have your field-general’s company?”

  Say the wise thing, Baru. Say no. Be hard.

  “Of course,” Baru said, and smiled a stupid honest smile, one calculated to win no advantage at all.

  They walked the forest path through geometries of sieved and scintillescent light. A bird called above, and Baru, remembering old habit, thinking of Taranoke, made a note in her census: one hawk.

  “There’s something here.” Tain Hu took Baru’s gloved hand (alarm, stomach-turning giddy alarm—but Baru would not resist) and drew her off the path. “A sacred place. Built long before the touch of any empire—even before my ancestors.”

  “How did your Maia foremothers get a noble line with a Stakhi name?”

  “Very proactively.” She parted the brush. “There’s a henge ahead.”

  A relic of the old Belthyc people, who had birthed the ilykari, who had made words like Imadyff—and there, like everything, this wrapped back around to horror: ice in her gut at the thought of that hamlet, at what she had allowed to happen there, at the slaughter it had driven.

  To hide from the memory, Baru tried to pull away, just so Tain Hu would firm her grip, just so she could feel the strength in that guiding hand.

  Thorns pricked her calf. Baru ripped them away, cursing softly in childhood Urunoki, grateful for her gloves. The duchess laughed a little, delighted, perhaps, by the way Urunoki sounded like a drunkard’s Aurdwynni Urun; or by something else.

  They came to a clearing, a well of light, a ring of broken, moss-encrusted stones. Tain Hu moved with hushed awe. “Can you feel her?”

  “Which Virtue?” She was so like a mountain cat.

  “Wydd. Her stone endures best.”

  Wydd: passivity, obedience. Strength in endurance. Death, erosion, and time. “I’d rather have found Himu,” she said, showing off.

  “Dangerous to call on her in springtime. Genius and birth are twins of hemorrhage and cancer.” Tain Hu’s breath caught. “Look here. The moss has been fed.”

  Beneath her hand the moss had grown thick and green in the shape of some ragged unmistakable sign—a lichen rune printed on the stone. The duchess looked around the clearing in sudden alarm. “This is a Belthyc art,” she said. “They were here.”

  “Pureblood Belthyci?” Baru cocked her head. “I thought they’d all been—”

  All been what? Civilized? Tamed? Turned into servers in fashionable Treatymont longhouses?

  “A few of their tribes persist here in the North, deep in the woods. Irritations at best. Savages when their whims move them.” Tain Hu touched her sword. “My rangers have been lax to let them so near.”

  Baru spoke with unchecked anger. “In a few generations the Falcresti on Taranoke will say that about the pureblood remnants of my people, and send their own rangers to drive them up the mountain.”

  “Hardly the same. The Belthyci live on in our mingled bloodlines. These woodland tribes are just a fragile remnant. Their season is gone.” She brushed the moss from the fallen stone. “There. Fair warning to them.”

  Fair warning. Maybe some soldier at Jupora had given fair warning to father Salm. “When you speak of bloodlines
and fragile remnants, you sound like Cattlson.”

  Tain Hu stiffened. Her eyes were sharp enough to cut. “Who are you to invoke Cattlson’s name?” A little sneer on her lips. “I haven’t been making games of marriage.”

  The ruin inside Baru, the yawning precipice, had filled her up with scars. She swallowed the jibe, let it strike that barren tissue, felt it only as a distant prick. “No game I ever chose to play,” she said. “I would not be courted by these men—not Oathsfire nor Unuxekome, not the lords of the Wintercrests, not any other. But I made the right choice for Aurdwynn. I must think of my people.”

  “Your people?” Acid in Tain Hu’s voice. “Yours?”

  Baru turned away, pretending indifference to Tain Hu’s anger. Just scars, in her gut, in her throat. Just numbness.

  “I couldn’t refuse.” She stared out into receding geometries of light and shadow, redwood trunks and reddening sunlight. “You told me yourself. You cannot refuse this man—you said that. What else would you have had me do?”

  “Find a means of alliance that doesn’t make a prize out of your womb.” Tain Hu lashed out at something, a sound of sudden breath and motion. Stone rattled against stone. “I refused Oathsfire all those years ago, and I still have my duchy. I still have my power. Perhaps my people suffered for it—”

  Baru might have thrown her own words back at her: 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.… Might have said: what do you think to offer me, Tain Hu, if your own counsel has brought you here?

  It would be a good move. It would set her in her place. But Baru would not say it.

  Tain Hu’s voice a growl, her anger smoke, disguising her movements. “Pay some other price. You do not need to spend yourself as coin.”

  “Your Grace,” Baru said, eyes pressed shut. “I am not promised yet.”