The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #3)

by Seth Dickinson

“I don’t want to marry anyone,” Kinda said. “Not yet. I wanted a political marriage, a very good one, when the time was just right. I wanted to use what I have,” an unselfconscious shrug, she remarking on herself, “to do good work. I wanted … but I do love him, Tau. And he loves his house.”

I didn’t even know you had friends. We’ve lost a magical archon.”

She’d felt so good after the passage through Tain Shir’s test, after Yawa’s unexpected mercy, after hurling herself at Ormsment and surviving. Everything seemed like it had turned around. And then she’d lost Aminata, and slept, and that cold sore ring of fog had settled back down around her head.…

“You never did this for Tain Hu,” he said. “I was afraid. For obvious reasons.” Because then the Throne would know she cared.

You were in deepest despair yesterday. You thought that all was lost, that you were going to die. You struck the bottom of your fall. And suddenly you were so high, so free, and everything was all right. But really what’s happened is that you struck bottom so hard you bounced. Now you’re sinking again. This is how it goes, Baru. There’s no magical way out. You will be fighting your Oriati disease for months. For years. Maybe forever.”

She wiped her eyes on the back of her arm and growled. “I hate letting things be.”

They can put a hole in your skull, and cut off your fingers, and rip your cheek, and slice your back open, and your damn itch will still drive you mad. Like the way loss works: you cannot hide Tain Hu behind Aminata, or diminish Aminata with Tain Hu. How much could you lose in a year?

She would have beaten herself into believing she had to die to be worthy of Hu’s legacy.

If Barhu had promised to paint Tain Hu across history in the color of Falcrest’s blood, then the Kettling was the perfect paint. And she’d failed to obtain it, because she was too cowardly to accept death as Tain Hu had— Stop. Stop. I died so you could be free.

“No.” Svir shook his head in perfectly performed disappointment. “This is not the way Agonist, betrayer of Aurdwynn, conducts her work. Where’s your calculation? Where’s your foresight?”

You had to be empty, Barhu thought, if you were to condemn an entire people. You had to make yourself distant.

They were insane. They were insane and it made perfect sense to Barhu because this madness was, like her, made by Falcrest: a pattern of authority by bodily violence which remained, like a scar, after Falcrest departed.

No matter how vivid and imminent the horrors here, Falcrest was in a distant but powerful way responsible.

To say that these people were doing monstrous things entirely of their own monstrous nature was to deny Falcrest’s immense historical crimes. But to say that these people were doing monstrous things solely because Falcrest had made them into monsters was to grant Falcrest the power to destroy the soul: to permanently remove the capacity for choice.

One day, Baru, you will not be able to blame all the evil humans undertake upon Our Republic. And what will you do then? I will continue to blame you for the evil that is yours!

“It’s her,” Ake whispered, “it’s her, I saw her poisoned, I saw her go into the water. How is she alive?” “I don’t know.” As if she had been called back to the world by the massacre here. As if the wall between life and death were too thin.

“I never died.” “You asked for death. That was the important part.”

“I hope I’ll never be like you.” “Of course you do. You need me nonetheless.”

You cannot destroy the masters by mastering them. You destroy them by destroying.

He’d wept over the copies of Baru’s school transcript.

And Shir realized, watching him weep, that even if she had never touched him she was still a rapist. She was the kind of woman who took people prisoner and made them so desperate that they would offer their bodies to win a rumor of their daughters. She had coerced him and then called herself noble for placing limits on her coercion. She had chosen not to rape but she had still kidnapped him and taken him into her power where rape could be inflicted without any hope of justice. The entire situation was therefore evil.

“We can save this place!” “You cannot,” Shir says, for she cannot be saved, and Kyprananoke is now akin to her.

This was how kings kept their thrones: by currying the support of those who could threaten them, at the expense of all those who needed their protection.

But those were my people. I’d starved in Aurdwynn. I’d hacked cubes of frost from frozen ground to bury little children in the winter. And when spring came again, there was still an Aurdwynn to remember the dead.

There would be no memory of Kyprananoke. Or, at least, no Kyprananoki memory of Kyprananoke. And I was sure in my soul that there was some vital difference between the memory of seeing and the memory of being.

The less she understood, the more she wanted to know. And there was no other living woman in the world who had done anything as intimate to Barhu as chopping off two of her fingers.

Okay..

Are you there? she thought. Are you there, Hu? I’m here. Are you there? I’m with you, Baru. Are you there, please? Can’t you hear me? Give me a sign, please, somehow. If I can find a way. I need you. I need you. I need you. I’m here! Listen!

Is that you? Is that you, imuira? I love you, Baru.

No. That was accountant logic, the logic that had failed her in Aurdwynn. Because numbers alone couldn’t count what Tain Hu had meant to her. She was one life on paper and yet a universe to Barhu.

And doggedly, determinedly, she had gathered the survivors to rebuild. Because she believed that the right of an individual or a people to have a chance, even the smallest chance, was inviolable. That right was what kept powers from rationalizing the destruction of entire peoples as an acceptable cost.

“Baru loves me.” There was a silence of a different kind. Not, Aminata thought, a choreographed one. “You know Baru?” the voice asked, quietly. Its whole character had become wary, thoughtful, interested. “Know her? I’m her sworn protector. I’m her knight! The Duchess Vultjag made me her knight! Fuck with me, and you’re fucking with Tain Hu!”

Now she could allow herself to call Shao Lune a cunt, if only in her head.

lmaoooo

“I saw her volunteer to die in another woman’s place,” Aminata added, simply because it irritated her to hear Oriati nobility disparaging Baru.

Yes, Juris thought. Keep trying. Keep finding wrongs, and naming them, and trying to make them right. Never stop. Even now.

“She will never be yours,” Shir promises. “I will peel her brain apart at the gyres before I let you rule her.”

And still Baru tormented him! Even with the whole rash of her treachery revealed, she’d still sent him an emissary,

Love maddened him, made him stupid—but so did starvation. And like starvation it would pass in a few months.

I WILL WRITE YOUR NAME IN THE RUIN OF THEM. I WILL PAINT YOU ACROSS HISTORY IN THE COLOR OF THEIR BLOOD.

“Come on. I didn’t inherit all the brains when we were split in two.

Lmao

“So why do you think that you’d use war in your great work? When you’ve realized so proudly that power comes not from brute strength but from the control of the context in which strength is deployed?”

Baru lay her ear against the warmth above Hu’s heart.

“To our home,” Hu said, with satisfaction.

“You can’t stop everything. You certainly can’t expect to force your own idea of salvation on every people you meet. If you try to carry everyone else’s mistakes you will break, Baru.”

“I swore to paint you across history in the color of Falcrest’s blood!” “You want to paint me in plague blood? I hate plague.”

They take away what we need to survive on our own, and they erase everything that tells us who we were before them. They want us to need them.

“You’re turning into me.” “You egotist. You’re so pleased with your ideas that you want to fuck yourself.” “I do not!” “Then explain this,” Hu-with-Baru’s face said, poking Baru in the chin.

“You taught me. I didn’t understand, not completely, until you exiled me from Sieroch. Then I saw how utterly you had devoted yourself to the answer.”

She leaned back on her hands, smiling up at Baru: the cocked grin was Hu’s but the face was Baru’s, the body was Baru’s, and for the first time Baru-as-Hu felt the deep feline satisfaction of at last getting the brooding young savant in helpless and willing range of her hands.

You think you paint a portrait of me with your life if you ignore your heart, your hands? I couldn’t.” She touched her smaller nose, her narrow lie-corroded throat, the small groove down her abdomen where muscles lay against each other like books in a shelf. “This is what tormented me, all those days I couldn’t have you. This is what I saw. Do you see what I saw? Someone worth love?”

AFTERWARD Baru whispered, with her own lips, “I thought dreams always stopped before the good part.” “Never dreams about me, I’m sure. I have a reputation to uphold.” “Preening aristocratic ass.” Baru swatted her. “Guilty on three counts.”