The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #1)

by Seth Dickinson

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.

The island of her childhood was gone. It had died in pus and desperation while she took lessons behind white walls.

Could power be real if someone else gave it to you?

“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.”

seemed to lack. 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.

Baru did her absolute utmost to look unflappable in the face of compounding absurdities.

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

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