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November 25 - November 26, 2024
The Masquerade sent its favorite soldiers to conquer Taranoke: sailcloth, dyes, glazed ceramic, sealskin and oils, paper currency printed in their Falcrest tongue.
Lately she always paid attention. Something fragile had come into the air, a storm smell, and not understanding made her afraid.
They know so much, Baru thought. I must learn it all. I must name every star and sin, find the secrets of treaty-writing and world-changing. Then I can go home and I will know how to make Solit happy again.
Baru looked at her mother, at Pinion’s eyes red with fatigue, her shoulders bunched in anger, and wondered what had happened to the woman who was a thunderbolt, a storm cloud, a panther. Of all things Pinion looked most like a wound.
She liked his advice better than Pinion’s, because it was full of things to accomplish now rather than things to avoid forever.
when Baru thought of fat men she thought of happy old storytellers at Iriad, pleased to be old, and large with joy. Cairdine Farrier did not seem that way. He carried his weight like a thoughtful provision, stored in preparation.
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 saw this not merely in the shape of his eyes and the flatness of his regard, but in what they recalled—things he had said and done suddenly understood. And she knew that Farrier had let her see this, as a warning, as
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“Why are you leaving? So many of your cousins are staying as interpreters or staff. Have you forgotten how I named the birds and the stars?” “Mother,” Baru said, her heart breaking within her (how formal the old Urunoki sounded now, when set next to fluid simple Aphalone), “there are strange new birds where I’m going, and strange new stars.”
The Masquerade ruled from Falcrest and its rule was like an octopus: stealthy, flexible, smart, gripping half the Ashen Sea—but soft, so soft. It had to surround itself in hardness to armor itself against the Oriati and its other rivals.
Alpine forest and rugged mountain, coastal plain and rich cold fisheries. A land of mineral and animal wealth. An economic dream and a military nightmare: a land of valleys riven by dangerous geography. Cavalry would be king in the lowlands, the key to controlling the Sieroch floodplains and the capital at Treatymont. But in the north, rangers and woodsmen roaming the towering redwood forests would be able to close the roads during summer. In winter there would be no forage to feed an army to chase them.
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.
Baru considered the woman and the sword, her expression carefully neutral, mind racing through permutations of etiquette and plot, trying to sense some meaning here: was it a traditional gift between lovers? Some insult in her ancestral Oriati Mbo? A reminder of where her loyalties had to lie—or a question of the same? Had Aminata and Cairdine Farrier spoken since Taranoke? What could it mean if she took the blade, or if she refused it?
Baru wondered how she must look, in her barren white gown, her bone-white mask, her long gloves the color of snow.
Where was I?” “Aurdwynn is like a house. You were forcing the metaphor into the lower floor.”
Aminata helped her back upright. “You can’t go home.” “Why not?” “I don’t know. Because it’s gone.” Aminata frowned, finished her drink, and nodded. “You can’t find it again. Even if you go back, it’s not there anymore. That’s history, that’s how it works! Someone’s always changing someone else.”
Her lips really did look a little like a recurve bow, didn’t they? Always drawn in mockery …
“So, then—look on this. Do you believe that this is what must be done?” “I am an accountant.” Baru wished she could close her ears to the screams of the sectioned, smoking crowd. “I deal in costs, not faiths.” “But you are part of this.” Tain Hu was a little taller and she moved with purposeful force. Her words, no matter how soft, were not unintimidating. “This is a cost. This is the cost we pay for broad roads and hot water, for banks and new crops. This is the trade you demand.” And there was no doubt who she meant, for she used Aphalone’s singular you.
They made camp that night beneath cold stars, a sky of tilted foreign constellations. “Are you uneasy?” Tain Hu asked. Baru drew her cloak around her and watched the duchess across the campfire, uncertain whether to take the question as a threat. Duchess Vultjag opened her hands to the brush around them, the shadow of the looming forest, and smiled. The firelight gilt her eyes like an eagle’s. “All I meant to ask was: isn’t this the farthest you’ve ever been from the sea?”
The same could not be said of Tain Hu. She moved and spoke decisively, sometimes with a certain impatience, as if the world dragged two steps behind her will and she found the friction grating. On horseback or with a bow, she performed with boastful mindlessness, her focus clearly elsewhere, on the conversation or the birdsong. But given a challenge—shooting backward from a gallop, answering a question of deep history or philosophy—her brow would furrow and some stiffness would pass out of her, as if she had forgotten, for a moment, to pretend to be someone else.
“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.” Tain Hu looked down at her with regal distance, with no anger at all. “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
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was warm with the wine, with the shape of the plan she’d begun to form, and could not keep the merriment from her voice, the joy of reaching out into the world and altering it. “There will be a price.”
The laugh struck something, an edge of pride or defiance. The actress leaned forward, hands on her knees, and Baru found something in her eyes, maybe offered, maybe revealed by the defeat of the camouflage that had kept it hidden: a distant horizon, a movement of wind across an imagined future, not Cairdine Farrier’s mechanism, not so cold or certain—instead a passion, a want, and a powerful will fixed upon that want. Her voice carried the charge of it.
The actress laughed, a wild unbroken sound, and here after the stage-searing monologue and that laugh, Baru had to admit that perhaps she was not safer company than a diver at all.
What a strange position they found themselves in. They’d cast their spears, and now they sat together, wounded and bled dry. More than anyone else in Aurdwynn, she knew Tain Hu’s wants and secrets. She had already destroyed them as thoroughly as she could. Perhaps that meant Tain Hu could trust her.
“Any price,” Baru rasped, each word a debit, a loss in her account books: secrets given for no advantage, for no reason except that her heart moved her to speak them. Her traitor heart. “Any sacrifice. It is the only way to take a piece of their power for our own.”
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.”
So easy, so satisfying, so sickeningly sweet to use him like this. To find in her hands this pale and pliant oracle, this man who would speak with authority and intellect on any topic she pleased without demands of his own. And hadn’t his jaw relaxed a little? Hadn’t his breath smoothed and deepened like a man on opiates? He had served her by informing her, by using his talents to help. It had brought him real joy. Was it really slavery if the slave was grateful? If that gratitude had been hammered into the alloy of his being?
And Baru, too, wanted to scream: for in this instant she could feel her whole life, all her dreams and ambitions, every painful perfect memory of Taranoki water and seabirds calling, every hope of imperial power and subversion, balanced on a knifepoint, and that knife in the hands of Xate Yawa.
Tain Hu cut the skin of Cattlson’s brow with a flick of her blade, a shallow mock lobotomy just beneath his wolfshead cap, and stepped away. Her eyes met Baru’s and she grinned without calculation or mockery, a wolfish and exultant sign.
Tain Hu’s lips kept careful distance from her ear. “Because I think you’ve realized that who you are will forever hold you back from what you deserve. Because I know you’re selfish, calculating, and farsighted, and when you find no way forward through the Falcresti maze, you’ll resort to tearing it down. I knew it even when you ruined my counterfeits. I knew you’d tire of the chains.” She gripped Baru’s shoulder and bore down painfully, her gloves studded, her strength obvious. “But my support will come at a cost.”
“There will come a time,” Ake said softly, “when this city will not remember a time before the Masquerade. They will be in our language, and our homes, and our blood.”
A whole industry of milk and blasphemy had risen here, complete with its own criminals, baby poisoners, mystic protection rackets that cursed households and demanded gold for the undoing. And other kinds of crime, too, guilds of yellow-jacketed plague survivors who cleared the dead and offered their very flesh as a cannibal inoculant. Graft and corruption and illicit love.
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.
And he really thought he would, this barefoot sweat-soaked duke of waves. He had shown Baru something vital, trusting or uncaring (perhaps this was a habit of the nobility, born into power, unconditioned to secrecy and meticulous self-containment—a habit of those who never had to earn their station). Unuxekome loved stories. He loved them much more than plans. If he could be the saga-captain sailing into death and legend, he would.
She stood at the prow and watched the dawn, trying to see the curve of the world, to imagine it turning beneath the sun, the great patterns of trade and sickness and heredity and force moving on its face. The very ink and grammar of history. Driven by and made from and ultimate master of hundreds of millions of people. The question and the answer: Mother, why do they come here? Why do we not go to them? Why are they so powerful?
She watched the woman’s incomprehension kindle into hate. Above the harbor the gulls shrieked and squabbled and dove for corpse meat.
The Masquerade’s most powerful military discovery had come early in its history: battles didn’t kill soldiers. Plague and starvation killed soldiers, the slow, structural forces of conflict.
“Leave to the Masquerade the keeps and the roads, the sewers and the ports. They are summer lambs. It will be winter soon, and we will be as wolves.”
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
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“Numbers won’t decide this battle.” Tain Hu hooked the bow behind her calf and bent to string it. “My aunt called it jagisczion. Forest war. The battle is won with confusion, deception, and ferocity. We will make them think that the woods are full of us and that they will surely die unless they flee. I need to be close to the line, with the reserves, so I can strike at the tipping point.”
The terror that took Baru came from the deepest part of her soul. It was a terror particular to her, a fundamental concern—the apocalyptic possibility that the world simply did not permit plans, that it worked in chaotic and unmasterable ways, that one single stroke of fortune, one well-aimed bowshot by a man she had never met, could bring total disaster. The fear that the basic logic she used to negotiate the world was a lie.
“But what of the men of Falcrest, the men in masks?” “Slash their tendons,” the Fairer Hand ordered. “Let Cattlson drown in his own cripples.”
There was nowhere in the world, Baru thought, no collection of lords or lovers, that did not have its own politics.
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.
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.
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.
“We are fools,” Baru murmured, “to go into this battle without the certainty that we have already won it. We are all fools.” All the careful manipulation of coin and grain and cattle and marriage, all the delicate alignment of vectors. And it would all be reckoned here, in two masses riding lathered horse and casting their spears, killing potentialities as they killed each other: It will be this way, not that way! This way and no other!
The sight of them raised awe and fear among the Aurdwynni: ghost-pale brave men, leading their cadres of armorer-boys aspiring to one day wear the plate themselves, and grim-faced gray-haired women with ash flatbows, whose eyes snapped like heat lightning.
Baru fell into trance, into the analytic cold. Saw the formations, the phalanx line and the cavalry wing, with an engineer’s eye. Imagined the brace of loyalty and ferocity and discipline that held the soldiers in their places even in the face of barbed spears. Understood what the books and the generals always repeated: that armies did not kill each other, they broke each other, that the day would be won when one army believed it could not survive. A matter of deception, of conviction, of lies made true through performance. Like everything else.
“I called on one sword,” she said. “When offered the quiver, I always chose the same arrow. I put the harshest weight on a single back. And she has carried us here. She has raised us up. She is worth a legion to me.”
