The Traitor Baru Cormorant (5 page)

They were in an art studio—learning to draw foxes, which they had never seen—when word came around that Diline would be leaving the school for an appointment in Falcrest when the trade winds picked up again. A captain of the Masquerade marines stopped by personally to congratulate him. Baru felt pride, and sick relief, and worry, because she had not done anything at all herself. Aminata had acted for her.

She was powerless without her patrons. Could power be real if someone else gave it to you?

“Hey,” Aminata said, when next she passed Baru in the halls.

“Hey yourself.” Baru grinned, and was reprimanded by the hall proctor for disrespect to an Imperial officer.

Later that year the school announced a class on swordsmanship, in order to prepare its students for possible service. Aminata was the instructor's assistant, walking through the ranks, barking in students' faces, seizing their elbows to adjust their form. When she came to Baru she was no gentler, but she smiled.

They were friends. They whispered, gossiped, speculated. Aminata had come into Imperial service from the outside, like Baru—daughter of one of the Oriati federations that stood wary to the south, fearful of a second losing war with the Masquerade. Together they invented small rebellions, commandeering food, conspiring against teachers and officers. Of all their insurrections, Baru's favorite was the cipher game—Aminata knew a little of naval codes, and Baru used that knowledge and her own formal figures to make an encryption for their own use. It proved perhaps too ambitious, certainly too ornate (at one point it required three languages and complex trigonometry), but through exasperation and a lot of squabbling in the teachers' larder they whittled it down into something usable.

And Baru came into the habit of slipping out of the quarantine, sometimes with Aminata, sometimes alone with the key Aminata had provided her, to see her mother and father and assure them that she was not yet lost to them.

If Cairdine Farrier knew about this, he showed no displeasure. But when Diline left Taranoke, he visited Baru in a curt mood and said: “We will need to find a replacement of equal diligence.”

He looked at her with guarded eyes, and she thought that he knew what had been done to save Lao. But she could not decide if he was pleased, or angry, or waiting to see what she would do next.

More and more of her fellow students began to leave the school. She found herself assigned special duties, puzzles and tasks, riddles of coin and account-books, geometry and calculus. The teachers began to murmur the word
savant,
and behind their glances she saw Cairdine Farrier's eyes.

*   *   *

S
HE
mastered figures and proofs, demographics and statistics. Struggled with literature and history, geography, and Aphalone, all of which should have been interesting but in practice bored her. All these fallen empires: the husk of ancient Tu Maia glory in the west, their blood and letters scattered everywhere, and the Stakhieczi masons now dwindled away into the north, maybe someday to return. They were yesteryear's methods, the losers of history. Falcrest had surpassed them. Even the Oriati, artisans and traders sprawling away to the south in a quilt of squabbling federations—well, Aminata didn't seem to miss her home so much, and their strength had not been enough to win the Armada War, so what could they offer?

Easy enough, at least, to perform with unremarkable competence in social hygiene and Incrasticism, the Masquerade's philosophy of progress and hereditary regulation. And she excelled in swordsmanship, surpassing even most of the boys, who by seventeen were now, on the mean, bigger and stronger than the girls.

But swordsmanship was not on the civil service exam, and as the proctors and teachers and Cairdine Farrier kept reminding her, as she told her mother on her forbidden nights out, the exam was everything. The key to Falcrest, to the academies and the murmured Metademe where they made special people of clarified purpose; the key—perhaps—to a seat in Parliament.

If the Masquerade could not be stopped by spear or treaty, she would change it from within.

And at the beginning of that trade season the exam came, shipped in from Falcrest in wax-sealed tubes, brought in under armed escort and prepared for the remaining students like a banquet.

Cairdine Farrier slipped her a flask of clear spring water, mixed with some invisible drug which he assured her would help her focus—“All the polymaths in Falcrest use it!” She left it in her bed and sat down to take the exam with her mind clear, all worry and fear pressed into clean geometric lines, everything focused on this day and the day after.

She did not let herself think about the way her whole life from this moment on would pivot around how well she could write on these papers.

Falcrest,
she did not let herself think.
I will go to Falcrest and learn to rule, as we have been ruled. I will make it so no Taranoki daughter will lose a father again.

She was eighteen.

Two days passed, and she turned the exam over to the headmaster knowing she had demolished it. “Did the placebo help?” Cairdine Farrier asked, eyes sparkling.

That night she worked in the training room with Aminata, the brutal naval routine of partnered exercises and dead weights meant to keep a woman ready for ropes and masts and combat. They dueled with blunted longswords, Baru losing but still high on her own future, on the knowledge that she had
won
. Taranoke would not be her cage. (When had Taranoke become a cage?)

“You didn't tell me,” now-Lieutenant Aminata said, panting between clashes.

“Tell you what?”

“Why that hygienist was going to treat your ‘friend' a few years ago.”

Baru lifted her blade and set herself at the wide mensur, two footsteps away, sword at the day guard. “Should I have?”

“One of the merchants told me yesterday,” Aminata said, her blade down in the fool guard. “He told my captain, who told me.”

Baru breathed in, out, in, trying to center herself.

“Diline didn't want some lewd congress,” Aminata said. “He was trying to cure your
friend
of tribadism. Of love for women!”

Baru struck. Aminata struck in counter, fast as reflex where Baru still needed thought. Rode her sword down the length of Baru's into a killing stroke to the neck that threw Baru back and left her gasping and pawing at her throat.

“Surely you've heard of that condition!” Aminata advanced, unrelenting, striking again. Baru missed the counterstrike and suffered a crushing blow to her gloved fingers. Crying out, she disengaged, but Aminata followed still. “It's common on this island, I'm told. A pervasive affliction!”

“He had no right to put his hands on her!” Baru gave ground, in the ox guard, blade at brow and waiting for another stroke. Her heart hammered and it was impossible to tell the battle-rage from the rising sickness of betrayal.

“I had to learn it from my captain!” Aminata's guard was down but Baru sensed a trap and held back. “Do you know what's done to a suspected tribadist, Baru? There's a list somewhere, a list of officers who'll go nowhere. And do you know what's done if the crime can be proven?”

Baru struck, weary, weak. Aminata batted the stroke aside contemptuously.

“They'll take a knife to your cunt,” she said, and struck Baru's hands so hard she dropped her blade.

Aminata stepped into the opening, seizing Baru beneath the shoulders, clinching her arms in a hold she remembered from firelight and drums and lost father Salm wrestling some other champion. She struggled, roaring, but could not escape.

They stood locked together, panting, Aminata's proud high-browed face close and ferociously angry.

“It's a crime against law and nature,” Aminata hissed. “And you should've told me.”

She dropped Baru to the matted floor and left.

A merchant told her captain,
Baru thought, her mind awhirl.
A merchant—I know only one merchant—

And when the results of the placement exam came back from Falcrest, and Cairdine Farrier came to her smiling to say: “Congratulations, Baru. You've excelled beyond all expectation. You'll go to Aurdwynn, to prove yourself as Imperial Accountant in those troubled lands. And perhaps later to Falcrest.”

When this happened, she knew she had been punished for going against him.

“Don't be disappointed,” Cairdine Farrier said, patting her shoulder. “You've come so far, given where you began.”

 

3

E
IGHTEEN
and hungry, the memory of father Salm an old scar kept close at hand, Baru made ready to leave Taranoke.

Imperial Accountant for the Federated Province of Aurdwynn.
The north. The wolf land. Troubled Aurdwynn and its thirteen treacherous dukes. A test? Or an exile? Had Cairdine Farrier betrayed her?

It felt like he had. “You will have high station,” he'd told her. “Dangerously high, for one so young. It will ask everything of you.”

But it was not Falcrest. It was not the power she had warned her mother of, in their endless, spiraling war:
You will never change anything with your hut and your little spear! They are too vast, and you understand too little! We cannot fight them from here!

And her mother's answering disdain:
Go, then. Learn all their secrets. Cover yourself in them. You will return with a steel mask instead of a face.

Iriad harbor gave birth to a new ship, hulled in Taranoki lumber, flying the red sails of the Imperial Navy. Baru's letter of assignment said it would take her north—two children of Taranoke, cut and worked by the Masquerade, leaving together.

Walking down to the harbor, blunt practice blade on her belt, she found herself looking across Taranoke with Imperial eyes.
Plentiful lumber. Good labor. A fleet base, securing the southwest of the Ashen Sea.
Feed the forests to the shipyards, expand the plantations, tame the plainsmen and use their land for cattle—

All of this would happen. They would marry their bureaucrats and shipwrights into decimated Taranoki families, a gift meant to stop the devastating plagues carried here from Falcrest's pig pens, plagues against which the Taranoki had no immunity. Incrastic eugenics would dictate the shape and color of the island's children.

There would be families who clung to the old ways, both in their marriages and in their trading habits, but the island's economy was a Masquerade economy now. There was no reason to buy or sell anywhere but Iriad.

While she had waited behind the walls of the school, her home had been conquered. The soldiers of the invasion, the paper money and the sailcloth, the pigpen diseases, had won. The old divisions of harborside and plainsmen exploited before she was even old enough to understand them.

Had she been conquered, too?

No. No. She would play their game, learn their secrets. But mother Pinion was wrong. It would only be a mask. She would come home with the answers of rule and find a way to ease the yoke.

She looked up to the slopes of Taranoke, where as a child she had brought her spyglass, where the dead volcano slept. Raised a hand in salute, in promise:
After Falcrest. Once I find the way.

*   *   *

I
N
Iriad she spoke and signed an oath to the Emperor, and another oath to the Imperial Republic and all its many organs. She received her papers of citizenship, slick with beeswax for waterproofing: socialized federati (class 1) with a civil service star and a technocrat's mark, inflected with the mathematician's sign. Marriage rights after hereditary review, with further review after first childbearing.

“You can go to the docks now,” the clerk said. He was Taranoki and younger than her, but his Aphalone was perfect. Probably an orphan, raised in a Charitable Service school. A whole generation amputated from its past.

Orphan—

They aren't coming, Baru thought, her throat dry. They're too angry with me. I
wrote
—maybe I wrote the letter in Aphalone, and didn't notice, and they couldn't read it—

But there at the harborside she found found mother Pinion and father Solit, dressed in mulberry-cloth skirts and work shirts as a concession to the new modesty. She saw them in the crowd before they saw her, and had time to straighten herself, to blink a few times, to call: “Mother! Father!”

Mother Pinion took her by the shoulders. “You're strong,” she said. “Good. Daughter—”

“Mother,” Baru warned, breathing raggedly. Her eyes prickled.

“I want you to answer two questions.” Her hair had no gray in it and her gaze was very firm, but plague scars pocked her cheeks. “Why are you leaving? So many of your cousins are staying as interpreters or staff. Have you forgotten how I named the birds and the stars?”

“Mother,” Baru said, her heart breaking within her (how formal the old Urunoki sounded now, when set next to fluid simple Aphalone), “there are strange new birds where I'm going, and strange new stars.”

Her mother considered her in silence for a moment, and nodded. “Well enough. And are you still ours?”

“Yours?”

Pinion lifted her eyes to the dead snow-speckled peak. “You spent more time in that school than you did with us. Are you still ours?”

How much betrayal had Pinion seen? How many of her cousins still fought? How many of them had taken on new jobs, new husbands, saying as her own daughter had said:
We cannot win?

“Mother,” she began, stumbling, trying again: “I'm going to find another way to fight them. Be patient. Be strong. Don't—don't waste yourself on futility. They are vast, and no count of spears can change that.”

“You chose one kind of strength, daughter,” Pinion said. “I choose another.”

Baru took her mother by the shoulders and kissed both her cheeks, unable to answer that. It was father Solit who took her by the shoulders next, and asked his own question: “Do you remember Salm?”