The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #3)

by Seth Dickinson

Perhaps she is on Helbride, dreaming of Tain Hu, while honey trickles through her eye socket and meningitis burns up her brain.

And she hears that traitor hitch of compassion in his breath, spoor of his hidden weakness: she finds herself salivating, because she wants so badly to get a claw into that hidden wound and tear it bloody.

“Oh, Abdu, are you trying to work out your arms? Are you trying to get big arms like Cosgrad’s?”

Who ever heard of an avenger satisfied? Even one?

“You’re really reprehensible,” Baru said, in wonder and in relief.

How purposeless. You got hopelessly drunk and slept with me!” Shao blinked at her, mockingly astonished. “Healthy people don’t do things like that.”

“Please,” Shao wheezed. “Let me be useful.”

You don’t understand, Baru thought, you don’t know what it is with me. If we—if I allow myself to—then you’ll be lost here, Shao. I’ll have to abandon you to get what I want. That’s the life I chose. Oh, fuck that.

“You are a foreigner. Xate Yawa is a foreigner. Apparitor is a foreigner. Do you really believe the real Throne would have so many foreign-born members? Do you really think it would have so many women?”

People bent. You hit them hard enough and they just bent.

Her heart cried at that firmness, that discipline. What the navy asked of its young women. How gloriously they answered.

You thought she was your friend, didn’t you, Aminata. And a part of you still thinks so.

I wore a structured quarantine gown and a black filtered mask, and I knew Iraji would see a spider descending on him. Xate Yawa in her web.

“She’s playing you, child,” Execarne warned him. “Is she?” the boy said, quietly. “I’ve saved her life twice, on Helbride and at the Elided Keep. She saved mine, too, on Cheetah. And I am sure that I am the closest thing she has to a friend. We are bound together.” “That’s how she lies to people.” “No,” Iraji whispered. “It’s not a lie. No matter how much you both want it to be true, you and her … you’re wrong.”

the way iraji is the ONLY person to see the heart of baru.

Hey, bird. I’m gonna find out what the fuck is going on with you, and I’m not going to let anyone hurt you until I do.

How precious it was to be this close to her. The mask of her power, prince-power, beauty-power, broke down into simple facts: the little ridges between her nose and the top of her lips, shaped in the echo of her throat.

Tau wondered what all the misfortunes Cosgrad had suffered meant about Cairdine Farrier’s trim.

A very long way away, on a continent vast enough to hold Tau’s heart, mountains fell.

“You need me to be your little amphora, your bottle of reserve goodness, to shatter and use up. You’ve been dying a slow death since you killed Hu. You need to take another soul to finish your work. Only it’ll never be done. You’ll always need more. And no matter what you do here, Baru, I expect that by some strange coincidence it will end up being what Mister Cairdine Farrier wants. Don’t you think so, too?” Baru lost her breath.

“You can’t change who you are,” Shao said, Shao Lune the perfect, coiled ideal of Falcrest womanhood, who would never need to change. “And that’s why it’s good I’m here with you. Because”—she folded Baru’s hand between hers—“I can tell you the truth. Which is that you’re being weak, and sentimental, and stupid. It doesn’t matter if you feel bad. It doesn’t matter if you’re tired or sad. You need to work.”

That’s the trick, she thinks. You let them choose which road to follow. But first, you have your people build the roads.

“You will be understood. Do you hear me? I will know your law. If I know the law, I can master it. First the mangroves and then the rest. Even you!”

This, Abdumasi was thinking. This is what we become when we are desperate. We grow thorns from our skin, we shout ancient words, and we beg our people to stay away from us. For we cannot be bent from our purpose, which is revenge.

make your spine a sword

Each moment she destroys all that she is and yet the need to avenge her cousin re-forms from the nothingness as if it is now axiomatic to the universe like gravity or the first winter frost.

Please see to the well-being of my lord even when she will not. Please ensure that she is not alone even when she convinces you that she needs no one (she is lying). Please do not abandon her even when she makes herself wholly intolerable.

She decides that she enjoys the Oriati woman. She needs to be stripped of her beliefs, as most do. But then she could be so exquisitely violent.

Shir saw them together, once and only once, when they snuck out of the school at Iriad. Aminata tall and lanky and sailor-smooth, drawling stories to Baru from the side of her mouth. And Baru perched beside her on a stone on the harbor cliffs, dark-eyed, looking up intently at Aminata’s face, taking every word and biting it like a coin. When Baru laughed it was like flash through thundercloud.

“Oh, any little lord can make her people do scut work. That’s dominance, and it’s brittle.” The Brain knelt, grunting, to get the pig by its two trotters. “But if you do your own work, and do it very well, they come to you with questions. As it is with Akhena. And if you answer well enough, not just about what they should do but why they should do it … then they learn to think as you think, and to make the choices you would choose. And you lead them without a word, from a thousand miles away, because you are with them in the shape of their thoughts.”

“Because cancer is the aristocracy of the body. It captures the means of growth for its own use. It convinces the body to serve it, and delivers nothing in return. If it grows too much it brings the whole body down.” She had that old, old accent again. “We see how our lords destroy the people they rule. We think that if we can make a cancer that can live in peace with the body … then we can be like it. Cancer without grief. Aristocracy without end. We overthrow our lords, but in the end we fail to rule the people well. I do not hate the mbo for driving us into the jungle. But they need us now, and the time has come for our return.…”

“I liked your son,” Baru said, and oh, Wydd save her, she wanted to weep again, she wanted to die, to stop being the woman who had led the dashing Duke Unuxekome to his end. “I wish he hadn’t— I wish he were still here—”

This, she thought, is what happens when I travel without a bodyguard. Old women pour poison down my throat. Oh, Devena, this is what happens when I try to run from a choice.

“I do not like pineapple!” Baru snapped, because she was so bemused at being called a slut. “YOU DO!” Tau screamed, and the blood rushed into their eye like poured wine. “I ASKED YOUR PARENTS WHAT FOOD YOU LIKED! AND THEY SAID PINEAPPLE!”

“Can’t you go anywhere without starting a civil war?” Baru croaked a little laugh. “This one’s really not my fault.”

She’ll make you worse, if she can. Don’t let her. I always tried to make you better. Listen. Listen. There is a difference between acting out their story, and truly obeying their story. Do you know what it is?

You would not know, looking at her, that she was a drunken monster addicted to the suffering of others. But you would know, probably, that she was difficult.

If Baru was a victim of Cairdine Farrier’s ingenious process, as Tain Shir had convinced her—if she’d been taught to sacrifice all those close to her, and to protect her own isolation—then why hadn’t she thought of executing Hu until Hu herself suggested it? That’s right, Baru. Why?

Tau repeated this to Abdumasi a few minutes later. “I’ll mix the wet bread with the spider webs,” Tau-indi explained to Abdumasi, pretending to be Cosgrad, “because my brain has been cooked by meningitis. Pretend I’m not flexing my abs.” “Urgh,” Abdumasi said, crunching up. “Me Cosgrad. Give frog. Want lick.”

😭 stop he can’t take any more

Years later, when Cosgrad Torrinde produced his seminal (an Aphalone word that meant exactly what it sounded like) work on the similarities between Oriati Mbo and the colonies of insects, Tau would regret this conversation.

“Plague,” Baru repeated. She was wrapped around me, holding herself up. “Yes,” Apparitor snapped, “that’s what I called you, do you want an apology?”

It occurred to Aminata, not for the first time, but more urgently than it ever had before, that Baru might be insane.

It felt weird to watch her friend kiss a woman. Not good weird. But weird like eating cantaloupe, which Aminata hated. You could see, theoretically, why someone else liked it.

theoretically.

“Power can’t be separated from its history. A choice can’t be taken in isolation from its context. Power is the ability to set the terms of the riddle. To arrange the rewards and punishments by which the choice is judged.”

“I have a question for you.” “What?” “Do you understand that other people exist?”

“Hey. How long were you dosing my vodka?” “The whole time, Baru. From that first bottle we shared. I had to know how you’d react.” “You needed to know how I’d react to rye ergot and vidhara? Vidhara’s an aphrodisiac, Svir.” “Anything to get you to do something for yourself. Something he didn’t want.” “I thought the idea was to give me a seizure. So you could blackmail me.” “That too.” He shot her a tired, twisted smile. “I am a cryptarch. Plots within plots.”

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.

Hey, thirteen-year-old Baru said, in the throatiest, most confident voice she could manage, not, in the end, really managing at all. Hey, she said, to the girl she envied so much, the lanky Oriati midshipman who got to carry a sword. Hey yourself, Aminata said.

“And the women,” she says, with a chuckle in her voice. “Too much trouble by half.” Farrier’s hands seize for a moment on her hair. “Baru! Don’t say things like that.”

“No, no no no,” the woman said, chuckling, but looking away. “Don’t trust anyone who says a thing like that to you, understand? Not while you’re a child.”

Tau-indi gaped. It felt right and good to learn this about Cosgrad, to understand what drove him. He had a majestic conviction. But what he proposed was an act of cosmic hubris. It was like rewriting the end of a story to change its beginning. Like reaching up with your finger and blotting out the moon.

“What are your criteria. Don’t say no more secrets between us, or I will scream.”