The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #3)

by Seth Dickinson

“No,” Shir says. “Pinion had two husbands.” “At once?” “Yes.” Iscanine, who has no husbands, makes a salacious eyebrow waggle. “Lucky bitch.”

“You’re being very difficult for a man who’s just been given a scone.”

She was reasonably certain in retrospect that one “uncle” had been a man her father Solit was either sleeping with, or who shared with Solit an obsession with ancient arrowheads.

“Wouldn’t stop crying,” an aunt said, “until that bird started calling, that big ugly cormorant. And she stopped crying so she could listen. Ugliest thing she could hear, and she loved it.”

“No, Mother. He treats me like a daughter. Scrupulously so.” She looked nearly as sickened by that.

“A cultural misconception sustained by lurid rumor? In our great republic?” Heia covered her heart. “Perish the thought.”

Women like Baru, he’d written in his last letter home before everything got very confusing, were the reason why Falcrest needed mannism so badly. Men might make money and show their faces in Parliament, but women had a coldly natural disposition toward schemes and plots, and given a station and an opportunity, they would wrap men in their webs.

He’s been told intrusive sex thoughts drop off with age. He can’t wait.

Ant Juice helps you do work that will make your important governor wife happy when she comes home from whatever the fuck she won’t tell you about.

bel latheman wife guy

“I’m not shouting!” Bel screams.

Helbride’s away. Set out back upwind to Aurdwynn yesterday. Svir sends, and I quote, ‘best wishes for the negotiations, and his most affectionate Fuck Yourself.’”

“Nothing you own by Falcrest’s means is owned by anything but Falcrest. When you think you possess them, that is when they possess you.”

“Everyone dies, little Prince. Everyone. But if we die to make tomorrow better, it’s worth it! That’s what I say to the ruins of Kutulbha. That’s what I say to Abdu’s dead mother. That’s what I tell myself, when my guilt runs up my throat and fills my nose.”

“No! No, fuck that, she’ll claim it’s that but I won’t believe it. I know Baru. I know she was telling the truth. She’s calm when she lies. It’s the truth that makes her start shouting, because it scares her. She was furious. She was telling the truth.”

“Tell your people,” the Brain murmured, “never to eat the bats.”

well.

“You don’t know that,” Solit protested. “Just because she’s trying to be sweet doesn’t mean she’s going to do something which will torture us in the small hours of the night for years to come, as we wonder whether we did something wrong, something that drove her away from us.” He blinked at Barhu. His belly bunched up pleasantly over the hem of his slops. “Does it, daughter?”

“That’s the difference between obeying him and pretending to obey him, even if they look the same from the outside. Even if no one else can see it. This is what I do, mother. I let them think they’ve won, so that we can win.”

Barhu wondered if her parents would be proud or concerned that she was sitting here beside her half-naked lover arguing arctic survival tactics.

They would’ve seen a monster coming after them. Aminata saw the gentle man who had always treated her well.

The first man who had ever told twelve-year-old Aminata that she looked like a full-grown woman gave her a flower and asked her to smile. He was a post captain now, somewhere.

“You people are satires,” Svir snarled, and went for his flare pistol.

Svir grinned wildly—so the brigand bitch of Vultjag still lived in her people’s hearts!

Farrier falls still. She knows, from watching Svir do it so many times, that he is withdrawing to his place of absolute strength, the foundation of his mind, where he can separate his foolish instincts from the things he needs to do.

She raises her eyes to him. Very slowly, she smiles that old and wicked smile.

His trousers must’ve been tailored to the exact contours of his perfect ass; you could not quite see his cock but you could tell he wore it left.

STOP

We’re small people, right? Except Hesychast, that man’s not small at all.”

S T O P!!!!!!

“But I’m too kind to tell the truth? But I’m too gentle to lay it out in public? But I’m too soft to do this to you?”

“You didn’t finish your threat.” “I don’t think I need to, do I? A child with two fathers. Isn’t that enough?”

I’ve a fairer hand to deliver your verdict.

OOOOOOOOOHHHHHH MY GOOOOOOODDDDDDDD

Still, the story is ready, the plan is clear, the ending is set. We have only to help her reach it. And I want to do a good job of helping her; I want to do it right.

<3!!!!