The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #3)

by Seth Dickinson

that brief rapport with him was so precious to her that she had not wanted to wear it out by remembering it too often. Leave it in a glass case in the back of the vaults, and marvel, once in a while, that it existed at all.

“I should not be one of the things you choose to keep in your heart. Not because I don’t deserve it. But because you and I are cryptarchs, and you must, you must be able to wield me as a tool. You think that you don’t want to do that.” He shook his head. “But what you really don’t want is to fall into grief again. You don’t want to think of yourself the way you did when you were at your lowest.”

You wanted this power, Baru. Will you use it or not?”

There was, by that logic, no choice. But she felt that she had a choice anyway.

His voice wanted forgiveness. His face said he would never accept it.

“It’s figurative, Osa. For people who think life is about enduring pain.” “I suppose I think that,” Osa said, “except I like to complain, too. Knife now.”

A frustrated pang of loneliness, absolutely irrational, why will no one go to the ball with me, sent Barhu down into the hold and the bilge.

A counterfeit emotion but damn it nothing was so thrillingly taboo to an accountant as a really, really good counterfeit.

“Everything I am demands that I help you, Agonist. It’s my purpose.”

Barhu looked down at Ri the way Tain Hu had looked at her: open curiosity and playful menace. The memory helped her smile.

“Four years since you and I met. Four years since our last ballroom. The man who introduced us is dead. You worked so hard to build your rebellion, and then to crush it. And while you labored, did you ever remember me?” “Of course I did,” Barhu lied.

“I did my own work,” Barhu said, stamping on an ember of real nervous attraction, schoolyard desire for the clever older girl’s interest, especially after she insults you, “for the Emperor and the republican people. Not for you.” “Not for me?” Wide, innocent eyes looked up at Barhu.

Behold me, the shrike with all the rebels pinned on my thorns, and consider what I may accomplish for you. “Loyal hand of Its Majesty the Faceless Emperor, champion of the commoner, bane of all nobility.” “Are you the bane of me?” “I would be some things to you,” Barhu said, smiling up from the bow, “but not your bane.”

you married Vultjag? Oh! I always knew she’d do something intolerably superb.”

A feeling rose up in Aminata, a little like nausea in its power, a little like nostalgia because it was a yearning for something lost, a little like fantasy because it was the loss of something she’d never known before. Maybe it was reverence for majesty. Maybe it was a blood-deep joy at the rightness of this connection: she and Iraji and Osa and the Eye and Tau all come together to avert disaster.

Aminata discovered the power of friendship. Or somthing

Of course her own house is going to try to kill her, Barhu thought. Women are mostly murdered by the men closest to them.

“PEOPLE are always begging me to abandon ship,” Aminata complained, “and I always find, at the last minute, that I don’t really want to.”

She fled the thing which frightened her most, which was wanting something more than her duty.

This was the price of attachment. This was the truth Svir had warned her against. We leave people behind. But that same lesson had two edges, and the other edge said: there are other people in this world, with their own wants and means. And sometimes all you can do is make space for them to work.

“I seem insane to you,” Barhu countered, “because I know things you do not.

The Aphalone name Aratene would come from the Urunoki name Iritain, which came in turn from the name of the old harbor town Iriad, Barhu’s home, joined with tain, the Urun word for foreign. The very same root yielded the name Tain Hu: which could be read as great foreigner or foreign bane.

“Oh, come off it,” Barhu snapped, “you were happy enough to ride my arm in front of a whole ballroom.”

“Your Excellence, if you must indulge a vice which could compromise you, then you should indulge it with a woman who can be trusted. A woman whose entire purpose is your betterment and success.”

WOAH?

This was the first time in Barhu’s life that she had actually been turned down. It was unexpectedly upsetting.

“So even in the city of merit, in this republic of merit, I don’t belong in the women’s organizations because I’m from Taranoke?”

“The trouble with Falcrest, I find, is that they’re very good at aligning the self-interest of their subjects with the preferences of the empire.

But it was so magnificent, so very close to magical! Didn’t she want all the gory detail, the minute glands and fine bones of the beast Barhu would invent?

Nerd

Barhu wondered how Yawa would react if she suggested that Yawa should let Olake be lobotomized. Well: how would she, Barhu, have reacted to Tain Hu’s execution if they’d known each other for sixty years instead of three? Put that way it was obviously impossible.

She cocked her hip to support the barrel she was filling. “Is this your idea of courtship?” It was. “Did you know that in Oriati Mbo they have a lot of salt and spices, and not nearly enough steel?”

In winter memory, Tain Hu touched Baru’s elbow, drew her spine a little straighter, pressed at the curve of her back. She whispered, “Shoot.”

Crouched at the fireside now, she was curious to see Heia noticing her legs.

“I feel quite self-conscious.” Heia plucked at her square neckline. “I’ve never, ah, thought of another woman as—it’s quite—you’re so much taller than me!” Barhu laughed. “So?” “I’ve always been shorter than my suitors. It made me nervous, knowing they could hurt me. But it’s not the same with a woman. You’re taller, but it doesn’t trouble me.” “Why?” “I don’t know. Women always felt safer to me.”

Heia clasped her hands and thought. And of course Barhu fell in love with her. Just for an instant. She saw a tiny duchess with sharp eyes and an ocean of blood on her hands, staring into the fire, considering the possible futures she might engineer. Of course, in that moment, she loved her.

“Baru,” her mother said, “your hands smell like pussy.”

Lmaooo

“Solit! Solit, come down! We caught our daughter fingering some falca girl in the woods! She’s so embarrassed!”

LMAOOOOO

“What? You left Taranoke to sell coffee?” “We wanted a change of scenery. People do that.”

“Taranoke!” Barhu said, as fierce as one should be when speaking true names.

“Eat that, it’s delicious.” “Why don’t you eat it, then?” “I want you to have it, dear husband.” “You always give me the things you don’t like.” “If we liked all the same things, dear husband, we would not like each other.” “I’m not sure that follows from reason.” “You’re being very difficult for a man who’s just been given a scone.”

Vichamnacoded

Fear sprang up to cage her, and she tucked her elbows to her sides as if wrapped in wire. What if no one recognized her as Taranoki? What if merely fearing she didn’t belong proved she didn’t? Wouldn’t a real Taranoki know without a doubt that she belonged? How could she claim to be Taranoki again if she was afraid the whole time? They would give her some test and she would fail—

Barhu shoved her hands into her pockets so that she would not fold them arrogantly behind her head.

Province Governor Oya-dai Mahoro instituted something called the Risk Market (this name accompanied by eye rolls from Pinion and Solit), in which wages at provincial jobs were tied, inversely, to the rate of crime and sedition. If your neighbors rioted, your wages would be cut. When your neighbors behaved again, your back pay would be filled.

“Oh, you poor dumb thing,” one of her aunts clucked. “You sound just like you did when you were born. Someone find a cormorant.” “Do they starve her? Is that why she cries at food?”

“If it’s bigger than a rat and it goes on all fours, Pinion wants to spear it.” “I spear your mother on all fours,” Pinion said.

“Look at her hands. Look at her face. She’s suffered for us, matai. Maybe not the way all of us would have wanted. Maybe not in a way we’d all have approved. She’s done things I don’t understand. She’s certainly collaborated. But she’s still our child at heart.” “A very difficult child,” an uncle said. “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.”

“Baru,” Pinion said. “I don’t understand what you’re up to, and I don’t want to.” She took her daughter by the arm, not gently, but with care for how it felt. “But I want you to know, whatever happens, that you’ve been true to yourself. You’ve followed your curiosity to places I can’t go. Become someone I could never be. That makes me so proud. A daughter who’s more than her mother … that’s what I always wanted.”

What if Iscend had simply been attracted to Barhu? She didn’t spend much time accounting her own charms, but she supposed her luck with Xe and Shao (if you could call that luck) spoke to a certain aspect that caught women’s eyes. And Hu had murmured such praises.…

What a foolish little problem to have, this matter of Iscend! But it kept her from wallowing in anger at Shao Lune. She began to daydream of seeing Aminata again.

Girl

but men who love girls often murder the women they become.”

“So sensitive to the foreign faith,” Barhu teased. “I am a Jurispotence.” “And a religionist.” “Hush. That’s a secret.”

Durance, Barhu remembered, meant imprisonment.