The Traitor Baru Cormorant (39 page)

Everywhere they marched they made it known: in the spring they would gain the loyalty of the Midlands duchies, the strength of Nayauru and Ihuake, and together they would push the Masquerade back into the sea.

 

A
UTARCH

 

21

T
HE
spring would bring tests—the decisive courtship of Nayauru and Ihuake and their clients, and greater tests beyond. But there was a little time for Baru yet.

The winter smeared her in Aurdwynn, caked her in its churned mud, filled her with its guinea-fowl curries and venison and salted fish, clogged her pores with the oils and scents of cumin and wild ginger and crusted salt. Her tongue mangled and then mastered the beginnings of Iolynic. She learned to swear in Urun and Stakhi, and to forgo the formal Belthyc word
ilykari
—a word now owned, it was felt, by the Masquerade, by Xate Yawa—in favor of the vernacular Iolynic
students
.

She learned the different tastes of cedar and redwood smoke. She laughed at fireside stories of Duchess Naiu and her four husbands, who had died heroes in the Fools' Rebellion. And she laughed harder when they mocked her for her nervous sidelong glances, checking for some frowning social hygienist ready to diagnose degeneracy.

“Men used to marry men,” Tain Hu told her, as they crouched together over a fire pit to cook their venison. “And women once took wives. It was done by the poor, the starving, the desperate, by those who needed a business pact or a shared roof. By soldiers on campaign with no one else to turn to. Mostly it was done by those without needs or troubles—done for love. The words
tribadist
and
sodomite,
the things they mean and define, came later. Before those words there were only people.”

Baru watched her warily, fearing some bait set out for the Taranoki savage. “But all this was long ago. Before the Mask.”

Tain Hu tore a strip of meat, chewed slowly, and swallowed. “Long ago? Well.” She grinned across the fire. “Ask around among the divers at the Horn Harbor. Or the actresses at Atu Hall. They will tell you how long ago it was. I am not quickly forgotten.”

Curiosity came over Baru as instantly and powerfully as conditioned fear, and the mixture made her laugh. “You
didn't
. In Treatymont? Under Xate Yawa's nose?”

Tain Hu's eyes rounded in mock hurt. “You think I'd stop my work at the city gates? Please. I have Vultjag's tradition of conquest to uphold.”

“There are
more
?”

“Oh, yes. It could take some tallying.” Tain Hu made confused number-shapes with her fingers. “Might even require an accountant.”

Baru began to cough on smoke, and dropped her venison in the fire.

*   *   *

S
HE
led the Army of the Coyote in a desperate form of war, a war without violence, a war with more casualties than any battle ever fought.

The steady Incrastic diet of her childhood made Baru strong and tall, healthier and more consistently able than many of the Coyote fighters. She helped them dig latrines, teaching them obsessive Masquerade hygiene, smelling more Aurdywnni shit than she'd ever planned on. Among the women she learned that a regular menstrual cycle in the winter was a mark of incredible prosperity—a noble luxury beyond ordinary reach.

She was common-born. But the circumstances of her upbringing made her nobility to them.

Her Coyotes ranged the forests of the Midlands, a ghost of order in a famished hungry land. The Masquerade's autumn retreat had pillaged the granaries and abandoned the roads, sowing anarchy: a message, a harbinger of life without Falcrest's glove and gauntlet. The Coyote fought back by opening routes north wherever they could, hiring ducal siege engineers to help with stonework, organizing bowmen and riders to patrol the roads. When the way was ready, they wrote to distant Oathsfire and his swollen granaries, his stores of salt and meat:
send what you can
. Where they found excess stores, they paid outrageous prices to buy them and bring them where they were needed.

When they trespassed on the duchies of the Midlands Alliance, Baru prepared messages for them:
I am the Fairer Hand. I come to help.
But she never sent them. To leave written record of correspondence with the Midlands duchies would be to implicate them in treason. Even runners could not be risked. Better for the Traitor's Qualm if the Midlands dukes could pretend she wasn't there. It would be disastrous if they pushed Nayauru and Ihuake into acting too soon, disastrous for their strategy, and for Baru herself: she had assured Lyxaxu and the others that the Midlands would wait.

She studied the architecture of Aurdwynn's suffering. When they came to hamlets and freetowns, she took a translator and went among the houses, interviewing the sharecroppers and fletchers and smiths and masons, mothers and fathers, aunts and grandfathers, all tenants of the feudal landlords—recording their diets, their miscarriages, the birth weights of their children, the severity of their scurvy (bleeding gums and spotted skin and low spirits
everywhere,
universal, inescapable, synonymous with winter itself:
the breath of Wydd
), their fears, their small phlegmatic hopes.

She made a map of the feudal ladder, the rungs of duke and landlord, armsman and craftsman and sharecropper serf. During the shivering nights she considered how to smash it. Aurdwynn would never rise to match Falcrest until the feudal nobility could be torn down.

It would be a better land if only it could be ruled sensibly.

*   *   *

T
HE
snows broke early and all the rivers, gorged on meltwater, began to roar. Baru dreamed of flight. Saw Aurdwynn from the belly of the clouds, sunlight reflected off spring rapids, off the mighty Bleed of Light, a fan of quicksilver bleeding out into the sea. She woke to birdsong.

Tired of oil and stink, she swam in a meltwater torrent, gasping every breath, the cold a sine of numbness and fire. Her armsmen—bearskin-cloaked Sentiamut rangers handpicked by Tain Hu—clapped and laughed, delighted by her defiant progress upstream and by the whole art of swimming, unknown in the North.

But when she came ashore shivering, the men averted their eyes, hesitating to step forward and offer their furs, as if they thought she would choose one of them, and signify something by it—and she, too, was suddenly hesitant, unwilling to signify, shackled by things she had never meant to learn.

“Be careful,” Tain Hu warned her. “You have earned respect. But there are no men in Aurdwynn who can respect what they desire. I learned that from Oathsfire's courtship, when I was young.”

“There are other women here. They are not all mistreated.” Baru thought of the archers and fletchers, moss-pharmacists and astronomers, and the rangers like Ake. “Would you have me pretend to be a man, as you once did? Is that the only way to keep their respect?”

“Go to one of those women,” Tain Hu said, “and ask her how she was spoken of when she left her lover, or took a second, or never had one at all.”

“I have made brothers of these men. Not lovers.”

The Duchess Vultjag, her hair unbound, her shoulders rolling beneath her leather and mail, shook her head ruefully. “You have been given a permit of brotherhood, Baru Fisher, and you have no say in when they will revoke it, or why.” Her lips twitched, in laughter or regret. “I learned that from Oathsfire, too.”

“Is that why you—” Baru could not make herself speak plainly of it. “Why you turned to divers and actresses? Instead of a husband?”

Tain Hu laughed aloud, delighted. “You think that I
turned
?”

Baru felt a little shame. It was a Masquerade question, the kind of question you learned to ask in a white-walled school. Her fathers had taught her better.

They walked in silence along the column, and came to a place where the canopy thinned and sunlight came down through the redwoods in the pattern of a fawn's coat. Meltwater roared in the near distance, and together they looked up into the warm divided light.

“I feel it,” Tain Hu said. “The power.”

“Is it ykari Himu?” She had never taken Tain Hu for
much
of a believer, but the duchess did believe.

“Change,” Vultjag said. “Whatever you name it.” She glanced sidelong at Baru. “You told me that there was only one road forward. That the Masquerade would never be defeated. Only subverted from within.”

Baru looked away, as if in concession to pride. “You make me think otherwise.” And although it felt colder than the meltwater to say or even think, it was true.

“What command, my sworn lord?” Not even a little mockery in Tain Hu's voice.

They'd made their case to the Midlands—shown their strength and resolve. Now it was time to win them, all their cavalry and wealth. Break the Traitor's Qualm and gather every last wavering maybe-rebel into one united force.

“Nayauru and Ihuake. We make them ours.”

*   *   *

A
S
they swung deeper south, Tain Hu resolved to test her courage by walking the cliff roads on Mount Kijune. This was where the war found them.

“It's not so far down,” Baru said, and then, unable to help herself, began to laugh. Far below, the treetops moved in slow waves, tousled by the wind. The Coyote camps were tiny brushstrokes of cloth and smoke. North of them the Wintercrests climbed the edge of the sky, flanks as dark as ravenwing, peaks as white and unreachable as the clouds they pierced.

“Come,” she said. “Just keep your footing.”

Tain Hu clung to the chains that lined the walkway—a perilous narrow bridge shackled to the cliff face, high above Duchy Ihuake—and looked at Baru crossly. “I am not a goat.”

Baru loved it. Like the black cliffs and volcano sweeps of Taranoke: wide spaces from a childhood before fear. “Come, Duchess.” She beckoned. “We're nearly to the top. Come along!”

Tain Hu sucked in a breath and the wind gusted hard enough to set the whole walkway rattling and singing. She froze, clearly afraid to breathe, and made a face of frustrated misery while Baru laughed some more.

“Duchess!” the wind called.

Tain Hu looked downtrail, instantly alert, as if the word had touched a deeper part of her than the height. There was someone coming: straw-haired Ake Sentiamut, her bearskin coat bound tight, struggling up the chains from the stony notch below.

“Well,” Baru said, as Tain Hu's brow furrowed. “
This
must be urgent.”

The ranger-knight climbed to meet them. They went together up toward a sheltered saddle in the side of Mount Kijune, where they could hold council. Tain Hu moved quickly now, as if it was her duty to be fearless before her vassals—although she kept close to Baru and followed her footsteps.

They gathered in the flat lee of the rock, panting, all winded. Ake offered Tain Hu her coat, but the duchess graciously refused. Baru, chilled by the memory of winter carried in the wind, sat with Ake and huddled with her beneath the bearskin.

Tain Hu set her palms on the rock. “Tell us.”

“There's civil war.”

Silence for a moment, except for the whispering wind. “You mean,” Baru said, “aside from ours?”

Ake unrolled a weighted map. The Midlands opened before them in ink and sheepskin—the second floor of Baru's allegorical house, full of craft and cattle. Baru laid her thoughts upon it, the shapes of tension and loyalty. The west was Nayauru Dam-builder's, Autr and Sahaule at her side, rich with clean water that glimmered in great reservoirs. The east was Ihuake's. Her herds were vast and thunderous, and she kept her soldier Pinjagata curled up beside her like a fist.

“Here.” Ake traced a line from Nayauru's capital at Dawnlight Naiu, to Ihuake's at the Pen. “Our scouts found tracks in the mud.”

Tain Hu exhaled slowly. “Whose?”

“Nayauru's soldiers. Marching east in great strength.”

Baru found their own position, north of freetown Haraerod in Ihuake's heartlands. Haraerod the crossroads, where the merry came to sing, where years ago she had stumbled into Duke Pinjagata on a strange patrol. “Nayauru's coming for us?”

“Not for us. For Ihuake.” Tain Hu spidered her fingers across the corners of the map and looked at it balefully. “Nayauru's always dreamt of rule—but the time is too soon, the heirs unready. She has no child of Ihuake's lineage to use as an usurper. Why now? Why not give us a chance…?”

Baru's stomach turned. She'd insisted Nayauru wouldn't move. Stared Lyxaxu down and committed herself to it. They would never trust her counsel again. How to absorb this, how to turn this back into a strength—

A little movement of Tain Hu's chin said:
blame me
.

“Why didn't we see this?” Baru asked. “Duchess?”

“I hoped she'd turn to us. I respected her.” Her eyes darkened. “The Fools' Rebellion swallowed her whole family. Why would she move so rashly? Does she remember nothing?”

Baru considered the map, raising her eyes once to look past Ake and out across the land. “I know what she's doing.”

The two women from Vultjag watched her.

“Spring is here. Nayauru knows the Masquerade is going to attack us. She must expect Cattlson to march north across her duchy on his way to crush Erebog. She wants to be indispensable to the Masquerade by the time that offensive comes.” Baru cursed herself as she spoke, remembering clues ignored, connections unmade, years of evidence that could have forearmed her against this choice—Bel Latheman pointing to Heingyl Ri, Heingyl Ri's notion of an inevitable crisis in the Midlands, Pinjagata's patrol for a woman who looked like young Duchess Nayauru. A whole web of intrigue, Nayauru's great design for a throne, and Baru had never bothered to tug on any of the threads.… “She knows Ihuake welcomed us into her land. That gives her an excuse to destroy Ihuake and take her herdlands, claim the strike as an act of loyalty to Falcrest, and win Parliament's favor.”