The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #1)

by Seth Dickinson

“The tide is coming in,” he said. “The ocean has reached this little pool. There will be turbulence, and confusion, and ruin. This is what happens when something small joins something vast. But—” Later she would hold to this moment, because it felt that he had offered her something true and grown-up and powerful rather than a lie to shield her. “When the joining is done there will be a sea for you to swim in.”

If she was going to throw up, she decided that she would do it now; and when nothing came she resolved to believe it would not happen at all.

Your error is fundamental to the human psyche: you have allowed yourself to believe that others are mechanisms, static and solvable, whereas you are an agent.”

Her fury had nothing else to eat and so it began to eat her.

Baru watched it all and with an accountant’s mind made a table of the credits and the debits, a double-entry ledger, hot iron for the sodomites against soap and dentists and a greater purpose.