The Traitor Baru Cormorant (29 page)

Perhaps that was why they had done it. All the conspirators bound together under the imminence of ruin.

The ilykari priestess went to sit in the center of the circle, sandaled feet whispering. She carried a small pot of ink and a palimpsest in a cedar frame, stretched taut by cord. “In our silence we exemplify Wydd, who gives us patience to endure. In our will to act we exemplify Himu, who drives us to war. In acting now, when the time has come, we exemplify Devena, the middle course, who tempers these extremes.”

Baru caught Xate Yawa shifting in subtle impatience, her lips drawn down. She hadn't thought the time had come, had she? She wouldn't be here at all, given her way. But her accomplice Tain Hu had acted, and she had been drawn along.

Surely she was too old and canny to go in without a fallback.…

“I will read now from the missives I have been given, anonymous and unsigned.” The priestess lifted the palimpsest and Baru saw old Iolynic characters, columned and incomprehensible. She spoke with apparently infinite calm. “Let me serve as a conduit for the fears and hopes of all those gathered, that we may hear what they cannot voice. This they have written:

“I fear this Taranoki woman is an instrument of the Masquerade. I fear the people's love for Baru Cormorant may outstrip their loyalty to us. I fear we will not have the strength to overcome the Masquerade, even with her. I fear we will fail to act, and that the opportunity will never come again. I fear her youth and rashness.”

The silent calm of the place came over Baru, and although she did not believe in ancient men and women who had practiced their virtues so perfectly that they subsumed and became them, she found all her knotted-up wariness pressed flat and still. Water, and oil, and light through paper, and somehow the words spoken were true without being dangerous.

But still she tried to match each sentence to one of the circled faces. Her curiosity remained.

“I hope for a free Aurdwynn for my daughters. I hope the Taranoki will be the spark we need. I hope—” The ilykari smiled gently, as if moved. “I hope for her hand and a throne. I hope for freedom, and no more. I hope for freedom. I hope for freedom.”

The wind outside blew against the walls and small clear drops of water seeped in through the roof to tremble against the waxed paper and the oiled cedar poles. The caged light of the lanterns danced and flickered.

“Some of us are enemies outside this place.” Now the priestess spoke with the wind behind her. “Xate Yawa hunts and kills my fellow ilykari. Baru Cormorant wears the mask of the tyranny in Falcrest. Dukes Oathsfire and Lyxaxu bicker with Vultjag over marriage and land. Duke Unuxekome consorts with the pirates that trouble our waters. If we are to unite in rebellion, we must bind each other close. I have tied that bond between you, and now I will tie another. Baru: come forward.”

Tain Hu's dark eyes glimmered gold in the candlelight. Baru had to will herself to move. The stillness of the place had seized her bones.

“I am here,” she said.

The priestess offered the ink pot, the pen, the palimpsest. It had been filled with small square provinces of old Iolynic script. “On this palimpsest I have written the secrets offered to me by all those gathered here. Secrets of deadly power. You will offer a secret to me, and I will write it here, so that you too will be bound.”

“What if,” she said, the smell of olive oil in her nose, her eyes, “I lie?”

“I will know,” the priestess said, and then, whispering in Baru's ear, close and soft as clay, “just as Cairdine Farrier knew the potential in your eyes, just as Devena knows the divisions in your heart. I will know.”

Baru drew away with a start, her spine prickling. Duke Lyxaxu chuckled softly and murmured inaudibly to Oathsfire.

The priestess held the pen low and tight like a woman gripping a snake. “You don't know Old Iolynic. But I do. Whisper your secret to me, Baru Cormorant, and Wydd will hear.”

The secret of secrets rose in her like a rotten thing trying to retch itself up, and just to stop it, to head it off, to do anything but say it or feel it like a pole of obsidian strapped to the curve of her spine, she seized the priestess by the back of the neck and held her close to hiss a different secret, her lips against the ilykari's small dark ear:
“I want to fuck women.”

Why had she done that? Oh, no, why had she
said
that—what a fool, what a gullible fool—what desperation could possibly have driven her to vomit that truth up, that truth she struggled every day to hide—

The pen scratched in short geometric arcs. “Is it enough?” Xate Yawa asked, breaking the silence. “Something of power?”

“In the Masquerade, it is enough to end her life,” the priestess said. “She will never go back to them.”

“Good!” Unuxekome, the sea duke, clapped his hands against his knees. “Then we have a rebellion to begin.”

*   *   *

A
ND
so they began: the circle now a war council.

Xate Yawa spoke first, to claim her primacy. “I stay in Treatymont.” As if this were the simplest and most trustworthy duty. “Play my part as Jurispotence as long as I can. If I learn something vital it will go through my brother.”

So eerie to see Xate Olake sitting alongside her, those jungle-crow eyes twinned and sharp. What did they see when they looked at each other? Could any secret survive? Was there, perhaps, a sort of compact of vigilance, a mantra or instinct that kept them from ever blinking at the same time, so that one Xate or another always watched—

But Olake was speaking. “My spies will do their work. We must determine which of the dukes will join us, who will go with Cattlson, and who can be courted. Heingyl is Cattlson's, of course, but although they were once as brothers, I have hopes we will turn Radaszic—he dwells on the books Lyxaxu gave him, and the ruin Baru Cormorant made of his estate. Now he chafes against his chains.”

“The Midlands?” Lyxaxu asked.

“Nayauru Dam-builder and Ihuake could fall either way—or both, if their split grows deeper. With Nayauru comes Sahaule and Autr, good soldiers and good salt. With Ihuake comes Pinjagata, and we all know his worth.”

“His worth,” Oathsfire murmured to Baru, “is that he and all his people are mad bastards who spilled out of a rabid bear already clutching spears.” Baru grinned, remembering her baffling meeting with Pinjagata, and then hid the grin, so that Oathsfire would not be misled.

Olake set them all aside with a gesture like a bucket poured. “But the Midlands can wait. Your neighbor is the real priority, Lyxaxu. We must buy Erebog to secure our hold on the North—and we must keep her from falling to her own landlords.”

“Why the North?” Baru wondered, as she spoke, how long and how carefully these plans had been considered. She had come late to their council—in the span of the night, and of years. “You won't begin by seizing Treatymont?”

“Treatymont is a trap.” It was Unuxekome who spoke, the Sea Groom's voice smooth, eager, full of long-checked need to act. “Heingyl Stag-hunter will rally to his friend Cattlson with a frightening count of cavalry. Radaszic may not turn to us. He loves and fears Heingyl.”

“With or without Radaszic, the move would still destroy us.” It was lamplight that put the hawk-gold in Tain Hu's eyes, but Baru imagined it as an inner fire. “If we took Treatymont we would be bottled up. Powerless to defend our duchies from reprisal when reinforcements came from Falcrest.”

Xate Olake's murmur brought the taste of wine to Baru's tongue, the memory of maybe-poison. “If we act too suddenly, we cannot untangle the Traitor's Qualm. We must display endurance … make a case to Nayauru and Autr and Sahaule, to Ihuake and Pinjagata, that we are a safe investment. We need them for triumph.”

“That endurance depends on accomplishing three tasks before winter.” Tain Hu rapped on the floor, her eyes circling the conspiracy. “First, build a base of power in the North, a place that will tell the people”—her eyes flickered over Baru—“that we can offer them a fairer kind of rule. When the time is right, we will declare open rebellion and drop the bridges on the Inirein. My neighbors and I are agreed?”

To each side of Baru, Oathsfire and Lyxaxu nodded and made sounds of assent. “The other dukes know they can't root us out of the woods,” Lyxaxu said. “High Stone itself is beyond siege. Oathsfire's longbowmen are peerless, and Vultjag—well, we all know the difficulty of troubling her.”

Unuxekome raised a hand. “My friend Oathsfire here is marriageable again, if we're desperate to sweeten the pot with Nayauru or Ihuake. They are unwed—Nayauru, of course, keeps the old Maia habits, but she might accept a political marriage so long as it didn't bind her to one bed.”

Oathsfire sighed. “My southerly neighbor is always thinking of my happiness.”

“She's quite lovely—”

“And she knows it too well.”

“I'm sure your heart would win her.”

“Against Sahaule, it's not my heart that needs to impress her—”

“Our second need.” Tain Hu cut them off with admirable curtness. “Our serfs will only leave their families and fight if we can give them food, protection, and salaries. We need money for all of these. Once open rebellion begins, that need will only grow.”

Everyone looked at Baru. She nodded, offering confidence,
feeling
confident. This web of money and terrain and treason felt familiar, tractable—easier than sitting in an office drinking wine and folding sedition into polite words. She'd been so pliant for so long. A joy to act at last. “I can give you the tax ships. With Xate Yawa's help, I'll arrange for them to travel back to Falcrest in convoy, where they can be taken together.” She considered Unuxekome, struck by his enthusiasm and by the respect in his eyes. What had she done to earn that? “We only need a fleet to seize them.”

He nodded. “If you can disrupt the naval escort, my ships can do the rest. But how can you be sure Governor Cattlson will let you have any authority over the tax ships, after—?” He gestured to Tain Hu, to the duel that had thrown Treatymont into havoc. “Surely he suspects your loyalties have wavered. Last time an Imperial Accountant strayed toward the rebellion, he killed her. Why would he let you near the tax harvest?”

Xate Yawa smiled a thin efficient smile. “Because I won't let him constrain her. He may not trust his Accountant, but he cannot overrule the Jurispotence without a writ from Falcrest. That writ will be some time coming.”

Tain Hu rose from her crouch, her scabbard whispering across the flooring as she moved. “Our third objective follows from there. Once we seize the tax ships, Cattlson will call for reinforcements. They'll come sailing against the trade wind and the currents, hoping to put down the rebellion quickly, but they'll be racing the end of summer and the storm season. Duke Unuxekome, your ships will be the only means we have to head them off. Can it be done?”

The sea duke's confidence suggested to Baru that perhaps he knew very little about the Masquerade navy. But then again, she knew very little about him. “My ancestors sailed this coast for centuries. We know every inlet and harbor, every trick of current and wind. There are pirates coming north, driven out of Taranoki waters, and we have gold to offer them. Yes, I think we can make a fight of it.”

Tain Hu looked to Xate Yawa. “You doubted the time was right.”

Xate Yawa shrugged slightly. “Soon all doubt will be erased.”

They all stood together, Baru missing whatever silent signal brought the meeting to an end. “We leave separately,” Oathsfire murmured to her. “At intervals.”

“I can't imagine why.” She stepped away from him, irritated by his condescension, her irritation springing from some deeper restlessness, an eagerness to begin. “Unuxekome, Your Grace. A moment.”

The Sea Groom walked with her as she stepped away from the circle. Above his gloves the black cords of his lower arms were raw with rope burns. He'd spent time sailing rough waters, not long ago.

“You called them Taranoki waters,” she said. “Not Souswardi.”

“My maps say Taranoke.” He had a comrade's smile, wry with the knowledge of shared suffering. “As long as I rule, they always will.”

“I'm grateful.” And she was.

“Is that why you're doing this?” The candles behind him moved softly in their glass as the wind hissed outside. “Because of what happened there? The pirates told me how Taranoke fell.”

She felt the test, and hesitated. He spoke into the silence: “I dreamed of liberating and ruling Aurdwynn, you know. I think we all did, in the years after the occupation began. I had the ships and I had the hate. But I couldn't find the way. It was all so—” He grasped at something, gloves tight, like an invisible knot in windblown rigging. “So
complicated
.”

“I want to show you that way,” she said, seizing on that hope, that truth. “I have been a servant too long. I want to help make something free.”

He bowed his head in acknowledgment, perhaps in gratitude. Behind him, Oathsfire watched their conversation with hooded eyes.

*   *   *

C
ATTLSON'S
retaliation fell swiftly, in the shape of a letter, copied to every organ and factor of the provincial government.

It was Unuxekome who slipped her away—out of the Horn Harbor on a little mail ship called
Beetle Prophet,
past the burnt towers, between the torchships, and east toward his home at Welthony, where the river Inirein joined the sea.

“Tell me a story,” the duke Unuxekome said. They stood at the prow, early in the afternoon. Baru was reading her letters.

“A story. Hm. There are riots in Treatymont.” Duel riots—Baru's riots. The cauldrons of Little Welthon and the Arwybon finally spilling over as all the rage of poverty and stolen children boiled and flashed into steam. Garrison troops swarming to the Horn Harbor to protect the shipping. They'd left too much unguarded: a cadre of woodsmen in green wool had led a mass breakout at the Cold Cellar.