The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #3)

by Seth Dickinson

She takes a breath, pours it out again. Fear flowing away like wash water. You will never wake up to anything worse than Sieroch. You will never wake up to anything better than Tain Hu’s arms. Then she sets to work.

She wore an invisible mask: the laughing face of Cairdine Farrier, carved into the skull of her soul.

Not for the first time, Lindon thought that the principle of cordoned power had been enshrined in the Republic’s law entirely and exclusively to fuck him over.

My god this humor is dry

Barhu had walked away from so many things. Taranoke. Treatymont. Sieroch. The Llosydanes. Eternal. Always escaping just in time, before the real cataclysm. She had no idea what kind of strength it must take to stay behind.

This is why Baru needs her. Baru can play games of strategy with the very masters of those games. But in the end she cannot do what Shir is capable of doing. She cannot reach across the board and cut the other player’s throat.

Hu rolled on her back and stretched. She was one golden-brown coil of power from toe to fingertip; she was a catamount. Baru, intellectually calibrated and mentally awakened to the highest planes of aesthetic and philosophical appreciation, stared at her tits.

Everything ends. Everything will end and you cannot fear that. But you must decide what the endings will mean.”

Barhu considered the economy of the clouds in the sky. What currency did clouds use? How did they pay for their own existence, so as to grow fat and thunderous? What difficulties and expenses made them dwindle away?

Writers of rag novels overheat into metaphor to create women like this:

This was battle: seven parts trying to find out where to go and what to do, two parts shouting, and one part horrific, irrevocable violence.

In that moment, against all reason, Aminata felt like she was in a fleet of two, a navy of her and Baru: she had just been promoted to Grand Admiral, captain of everything she had ever wanted.

Hell yeah Aminata 🥹