The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #1)

by Seth Dickinson

A PROMISE This is the truth. You will know because it hurts.

“My mother is the huntress Pinion, and my fathers are Solit the blacksmith and Salm the shield-bearer.”

I must understand it, so I can stop it from ever happening again. I will not cry. I will understand. This was Baru Cormorant’s first lesson in causality.

Perhaps doctrines could be rewritten.

And he looked at her with open eyes, the bone of his heavy brow a bastion above, the flesh of his face wealthy below, and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth.

She was powerless without her patrons. Could power be real if someone else gave it to you?

If the Masquerade could not be stopped by spear or treaty, she would change it from within.

I am a part of this, but I do not have to love it. I only have to play my role. Survive long enough to gather power. Gather enough power to make a difference.

The Masquerade had taught her all the names of sin. But her parents taught her first. And she knew in her heart, in the habits of her eyes and thoughts, what she was.

“The Imperial Accountant!” he called. “Her Excellence Baru Cormorant!”

“You’ve written your own history.” The point was blunt but she fed it back to him anyway, although it was a concession. “And it gives you power.”

“A people can only bear the lash so long in silence. Some things are not worth being within.”

“I have a theory,” Tain Hu said, “regarding your attention to birds.” “Oh?” “It’s the only tongue of your homeland that you can still hear spoken aloud.”

“Money is only one kind of power. Faith is power, too. Love is power. Slaughter and madness are both roads to power. Certainly, symbols are power—you wear one wherever you go, that purse you carry. And you wear others when you decide how to dress yourself, how to look at men and women, how to carry your body and direct your gaze. And all these symbols can raise people to labor or war.”

“And you are a symbol. Look at yourself. Taken from one conquered land because you were young and bright, and set to rule another. How can you be anything but a challenge? A commonborn girl, given authority over a land of old noble men? You are a word, Baru Cormorant, a mark, and the mark says: you, Aurdwynn, you are ours.”

“As long as you believe that is all you are, you will never be anything but a piece of the machine.”

In the absence of direction, claim and expand the freedom to act as you will.”

Young folk respect theater more than death.”

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.”

Was it really slavery if the slave was grateful? If that gratitude had been hammered into the alloy of his being?

It’s not what the Masquerade does to you that you should fear, she wanted to tell Ake. It’s what the Masquerade convinces you to do to yourself.

Baru saw in the city what she felt in herself. The two-faced allegiances, the fearful monitoring of self and surroundings, the whimpering need to please somehow kneeling alongside marrow-deep defiance. One eye set on a future of glittering wealthy subservience, the other turned to a receding and irretrievable freedom.

“I have been a servant too long. I want to help make something free.”

Baru Cormorant was at last, however briefly, on a ship to Falcrest.

Truth does not need a mask.

“—but I know the signs for your name. You’ve written them too many times for mere accounting.” “You know the signs for my name?”

“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.”

“This is my vow: in life, in death, I am yours.”

Where civilization had purged the wolf the coyote still flourished.

Baru squeezed her shoulder, comrade to comrade. For a few moments Tain Hu leaned against her, in acknowledgment, or to get a little warmth.

“I vowed to die for you—don’t make a liar of me.”

That we are not free. Not even when we march beside them, nor even when we lead them. Freedom granted by your rulers is just a chain with a little slack.

“Every moment is an edict spoken by its past. The past is the real tyranny.”

“Imuira,” Tain Hu whispered, an Urun word, a breath under the rising wind. Her voice trembled with things left long unsaid. “Kuye lam.”

“Forgive me,” she said. “I’ve never done this before.” “Such an ascetic.” Tain Hu chuckled warmly, and in that warmth Baru heard the life she had never had, would never reach. “Fear not. I am practiced.” “So many conquests,” Baru said, trying to tease. But Tain Hu did not let her finish the sentence.

“There is nothing behind you. You understand? Everything lies ahead now.”

Her accountant’s mind makes note: turning away hides the woman but not the pain.

“It was no lie,” Baru whispers.

“Because it was no lie,” Tain Hu whispers, and turns away.

But I will not be bound as you are. I will walk among your council and you will tremble at what you have unleashed.

Good-bye, she thinks. Good-bye, kuye lam. I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood.

I used to wonder if you were a monster. Now I know the answer. If you want power in this world, power enough to change it, it seems you have to be.