The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #1)

by Seth Dickinson

She touched Hu’s shoulders, her high cheekbones, hesitant, conditioned, trembling against more than a decade of fear and repression and rigid self-control. Her skin felt transparent, burned raw. A sudden gust made her shiver. Tain Hu’s eyes were wide and close and utterly aware. She had been chewing anise and smyrnium. Baru could smell it, clean, sharp. Fuck them, Baru thought. Fuck them. They can all burn. I will destroy myself if I choose. On this one day I will not deny what I am.

The masks killed husbands with fire-stoked iron, and the screams were a reminder: the old ways were not hygienic. “How grateful we must be,” her mother said, that childhood voice, that vein of utter unquestioned truth. “To have soap and sanitation. To watch our children survive and grow and learn all the names of sin. How fulfilling our lives must be, now that we labor for a greater purpose. Did you know that we died of tooth abscess, child? It was very nearly the foremost cause of death. How grateful we must be for dentists.”

“You had a question for me,” he said, as in the distance the waves began to freeze, became steel and porcelain, a web, a road, a sluiceway that ran with blood and molten gold. From Taranoke east to the heart of things. “About the nature and exercise of power.”

Tain Hu does not flinch. “What secrets could I know about Baru Fisher? What truth did you ever give me?” She laughs quietly. “You were wise. You trusted only yourself.” “There was one,” Baru says, her voice terrible to her own ears, burdened with the memory of crimes more beautiful and dear than rebellion or treachery.

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.