The Traitor Baru Cormorant (38 page)

“No,” Tain Hu murmured. “Too high.”

Baru raised her hand to smash the wineglass. Checked herself, checked even her trembling, and stood there in absurd pantomime, too firmly in control of her anger to move, too deeply angry for anything but stillness.

Tain Hu stepped closer, her own hand raised, as if to save the wineglass, or Baru's fist. “At Welthony I knew I wouldn't have to kill you,” she said. “I knew you'd pass the tests. I always had faith.”

“There is no one,” Baru said thinly, bitterly, “in whom I can place my own faith. Nowhere I can show myself unmasked.”

Tain Hu shook her head reproachfully. “A man died. Think of his loss, not your own.”

Baru nodded, chastened, infuriated, paralyzed.

The Duchess Vultjag stood close by. For a moment Baru thought of their confrontation in the ballroom of the Governor's House, of Tain Hu's lure, her fierce dark eyes, her parted lips, her slow breath, and she felt that in some way Tain Hu stood unmasked, and was the more dangerous for it. But she was not afraid.

“He brought you something in the carriage,” Tain Hu said. She averted her eyes midway through the sentence, to protect Baru or herself. “A notebook. The yellowjackets say he'd kept it hidden and safe, even in prison.”

Baru's heart skipped. “What did he write?”

“He'd shredded all the pages.” Tain Hu shook her head. “They were just pulp. Perhaps he was feverish. I wanted you to know, before we burned it too.”

Ah.
That
notebook.

“Go,” Baru choked, pushing clumsily. Static snapped when she touched Vultjag's shoulders. “I—please—go.”

Tain Hu hesitated at the threshold, as if reluctant, hungry, craving still something left unsaid or unwitnessed. But she left and closed the door before Baru put her head down and, broken by this last loyalty, by Muire Lo's scrupulous destruction of the Stakhi woodsman's book and the sins it implied, at last began to weep.

*   *   *

W
HEN
she descended from her tower and went through the whispering passages of the waterfall keep to the greathall, she found the war council waiting for her, Tain Hu at the foot of the table. “The Fairer Hand,” Tain Hu called, and the armsmen and ranger-commanders, men and women from the families named Sentiamut and Awbedyr and Hodfyri and Alemyonuxe, murmured with her.

“We're leaving Vultjag,” Baru said. “Gather the woodsmen and the hunters. Make ready to march.”

A ripple of unease. “Why now?” Tain Hu asked, though her eyes were curious. “Surely it is too soon.”

“We will not spend the winter in our keeps and valleys while the Masquerade readies the ground for spring and war.” Baru took the back of the high chair at the near end of the table and moved it sharply across the stone, a terrible sound. “We'll move through the forests. Travel light. Live by forage.”

“To what end?” Ake Sentiamut asked, as the others muttered about starvation and cold, about an islander woman ordering them to march in winter.

To what end, indeed? To the end she had found in her grief, in her obsessive study of the tear-spotted maps. A way to reach the scattered vales and hamlets, the commoners and craftsmen and, before the spring, make them part of the revolt.

A way to become formless, ineffable, beyond the reach of the Masquerade and its spies, its clockwork plans and careful schedules of recrimination. She'd provisioned the rebellion, arranged investments and lines of communication, because that was the way to victory—and now she had a way to extend that strength, a way to build the logistics of rebellion on cold dangerous ground. A way to win the Traitor's Qualm by showing the Midland dukes a power more real than the enemy's, older yet more immediate, an Aurdwynni power, a power born not of coin and calculation but from the land.

And a way to get past those dukes and go directly to the people who had filled out her tax rider, who'd painted so much of her map blue.

“To show the people of Aurdwynn that we have the initiative. To prove to them, and their dukes, that we are real. That even in winter we fight for them.” She met the eyes of each fighter at the table, one by one. “Leave to the Masquerade the keeps and the roads, the sewers and the ports. They are summer lambs. It will be winter soon, and we will be as wolves.”

Tain Hu rose from her place and drew her sword. Those gathered around the table looked to her, silent, breathless.

“The Fairer Hand,” she intoned, and setting her blade flat across her knee, she knelt. “This is my vow: in life, in death, I am yours.”

“You will be my field-general.” Baru reached down to draw her up, and Tain Hu took her hand to rise, glove in glove, her grip fierce, her eyes golden. “Choose your captains and lieutenants.”

The gathered fighters rose, knelt, rose again. Baru looked across them, still hollow with grief, the hollow filled in turn with a cold exhilaration. She could survive this loss. She could make advantage out of any grief.

At her side, Tain Hu looked to the ducal armorer. “She will need a suit of mail. And a better scabbard for her saber.” And then, whispering in her ear: “Before we march. Do you want to see where they burnt him?”

“Yes,” Baru said. “Yes.” And then: “Will you come?”

INTERLUDE
:
WINTER

T
HE
march began.

The word of their passage went ahead of them, carried by huntsmen and trappers, greatened by the mechanisms of rumor until it became a declamation, a prophecy. When they crossed from Vultjag forests into Oathsfire land they found the commoners calling them
coyote
. Tain Hu, stirred by the rhetoric of the war council, had wanted to be the Army of the Wolf, but Baru preferred the wisdom of the commoner's name.

Where civilization had purged the wolf the coyote still flourished.

They traveled by foot through the dark paths mapped by generations of woodsmen, light-armored and swift, armed with bow and hunting spear. The army split into loose columns, divided by family. When forage was lean they subsisted on beer, Aurdwynn's favorite source of sterile, portable calories.

They stopped at villages and ducal outposts to provision against scurvy, to buy salted meat and winter fare with stolen tax gold, spending more wealth than the common man saw in a decade. Wherever the villages had phalanxes, they offered training. Where there were woodsmen and hunters, the Coyotes accepted volunteers.

Tain Hu and her deputies kept harsh order. At every crossroads Baru met with riders from the messenger corps, taking their reports, sending out orders and missives to the other rebel dukes.

Autumn crashed down into winter. Snow covered the forests and made swan wings out of the boughs. Baru woke in the morning colder than she had ever been, her limbs stiff, toes absent, and stumbled out into the dawn desperate to move, to eat, to do anything warm and vital under the pale sun. Tain Hu laughed at her, and then sobered suddenly. “You've never seen a winter before.”

“In Treatymont, of course. But—”

“Not enough.” Tain Hu called out to her guard. “Ake! Ake, you will accompany the Fairer Hand. If she shows sign of sickness or scurvy—”

“I am not so fragile,” Baru said.

“
We
are fragile.” Tain Hu took her by the shoulders, so she would listen. “If we lose you, Baru Fisher, we lose everything. Remember that.”

She could not stop herself from shivering. “I miss my office,” she said, trying to smile. “It had better plumbing.”

Tain Hu laughed, and swept an open arm to the forest around them. “Welcome to my home.”

They doubled back through Oathsfire land, then crossed Lyxaxu into their newest ally, Duchy Erebog. Their ranks swelled. They foraged too widely, and the wolves bayed hunger behind them.

Sickness and madness struck with the cold. Men died trembling of scurvy or drew choleric water from fouled wells and froze in pools of their own bowel. They left a trail of unburied corpses on the frozen ground. Again and again Baru woke in the night from dreams of broken gears and empty-eyed masks and found herself so cold that she could not move, as if her will itself had frozen. It began to feel like creeping madness. The spells did not stop coming until Ake Sentiamut saw something feverish and rabid in her eyes, and began to take her out into the night to teach her Aurdwynn's constellations. Somehow this made sleep easier. But it did not warm her numb hands, or ease the sight of scurvied men whose bleeding gums left red trails in their porridge bowls, or comfort the parents of all the dead children they helped burn.

She had always loved the stars. But in the desert of winter it was impossible to forget that they were cold, and distant, and did not care.

Madness led to bloodshed.

A southern column under one of Lyxaxu's ranger-knights strayed into Duchy Nayauru and, finding itself unwelcome at a trapping camp, butchered the families there. Baru, desperate not to alienate the Dam-builder, sent emissaries to Duchess Nayauru to pay blood money. Tain Hu executed the column's commander. Outrage—at the slaughter, at the discipline—cost the Army of the Coyote good fighters.

They had to be liberators. Not bandits. The Coyote was an army at service, a reverse brigand, bursting out of the woods to raid the innocent with money and safety and hope.

In Duchy Erebog, where the Crone in Clay struggled to keep order after cremating all her rebellious landlords in the kilns, the Coyote patrolled the greatroads, hunted down brigands, and brought relief to towns enveloped by the snow. Here they met a strange ally.

A party of pale red-haired men and women met them on a north road in Erebog, saying in Stakhi: “We are warriors of the Mansion Hussacht. The Necessary King sent us south to find the rebel queen and watch her fortunes. We slaughtered the Mask at Jasta Checniada. Take us in, and we will slaughter more.”

This news gave Baru Fisher wild dreams, and she invited their captain, Dziransi, to join her column, where, through translators, she questioned him about the Stakhieczi and the politics of the distant land beyond the mountains, so dreaded by the Masquerade. “Be careful of him,” Tain Hu warned. “The Stakhieczi mansions have been silent too long. He was sent south with a purpose.”

“Purposes are useful. Mutual interests give us ground for alliance.”

“Or perhaps the Stakhieczi hope to complete the conquest they abandoned so long ago. They are stoneworkers. That makes them patient architects.”

Baru smiled. “I am glad to have your vow,” she said. “It takes two to keep track of all our fears.”

Winter's bitterest months lay ahead. “We must find camp,” the war council advised. “We must winter in a safe valley.”

But Baru Fisher ordered them south, into the Midlands duchies, a trespassing army, an outrage and an act of war. They passed through abandoned Masquerade forts and raised their own flags: an open hand, for Baru, or a design of coin and comet, for the alliance between the Fairer Hand and the Duchy Vultjag. Word went ahead of them. When they came to Duchy Nayauru's villages, they found commoners waiting to give them beer, furs, shelter, and hand-sewn flags.

They marched through the Midlands, drawing new blood faster than they shed corpses, counting on their gold to offset the damage done by forage. At last, frostbitten and fierce, the Army of the Coyote met the phalanxes and horsemen of the duchess Ihuake, centerpost of the Midlands Alliance. The defenders ostentatiously blocked the way, denying access to the roads—but covered their eyes in mock blindness as the Coyote columns passed through the woods between them, and even sent five hundred bowmen and two hundred goats loaded with provisions “to ensure good conduct.”

“The Duchess of Cattle knows your power,” one of the Ihuake captains told Baru. “She is watching you.”

Good, Baru thought, good—watch and judge. Weigh my strength. Consider the choice you will make in the spring.

Victory demanded that she break the Traitor's Qualm.

*   *   *

I
N
the darkest days of winter, too cold to snow, the transient sun glaring on the ice, Baru Fisher walked the length of the forage line, her moccasins whispering. At her side strode the ranger-knight and duchess Tain Hu, whose woodcraft was known in the North, where they called her
the eagle,
and in Treatymont, where they called her
that brigand bitch
.

The Fairer Hand and her field-general joined the hunters and showed their talent with the bow, their vigor, their keen eyes and clear level voices, their trust in the seasoned men who led the stalk. Wherever they went the weary wavering Army of the Coyote bristled with hope.

In warmer days of autumn they had slipped away together, Tain Hu exercising all her stealth, so that she could teach Baru how to string and fire a bow in secret, her tutorship harsh, often impatient. “You must appear a master,” she insisted. “They would forgive an Aurdwynni a missed shot, forgive a man who struggled to string. But never you. Your errors will be written on your blood and sex. You must be flawless.”

“The draw,” Baru said, “is heavy.”

“Many women lack the strength.”

Baru, daughter of a huntress, a mighty spear-caster and a woman of strength, Baru who in moments of frustration or quiet always turned to the exercises and weights of the Naval System, drew with one easy breath.

Tain Hu touched Baru's elbow, drew her spine a little straighter, pressed at the curve of her back. “Fire,” she whispered.

And all those months later in the ferocious cold beneath the pale winter sun Baru Fisher loosed an arrow with bright blue-dyed fletching and they all cried out in joy and leapt up to chase the wounded stag, crashing through the drifts, hearts pounding, lungs full of cold cutting ecstasy. When they brought the stag down Tain Hu opened its throat and helped the woodsmen dress it. All down the column they murmured of the omen, the fallen antlers, the stag of Duke Heingyl, the red of the Masquerade navy spilled across the snow.