The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #1)

by Seth Dickinson

In Baru’s eyes she was a coil of storm surf, a thunderbolt, as slow and powerful as sunlight.

<3

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.

A whole generation amputated from its past.

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.

“The people can still see their shackles. The Masquerade rules them, but it has not yet made them want to be ruled. The chains are not yet invisible.”

She’d lied to them, a terrible kind of lie, a nothing unusual will happen lie: the treason of banality.

battles didn’t kill soldiers. Plague and starvation killed soldiers, the slow, structural forces of conflict.

They waited in silence for some externality, a falling book or a crash of thunder, to give them permission to speak or act.

too firmly in control of her anger to move, too deeply angry for anything but stillness.

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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.”