The Traitor Baru Cormorant (9 page)

Baru set herself across from the woman, giving herself space as curious onlookers began to gather. “I've been offered riding lessons,” she said, careful to press any accent from her own tongue.

“By Cattlson himself, I'm sure.” The horsewoman smiled faintly. “I'm sure he'd love to ride with you.” Someone in the crowd tittered.

Baru didn't understand Aurdwynn well enough to find her footing here. What was scandalous? Proper and improper? There was too much to grasp, too many cultures, too many eyes—but forget all that. Breathe. Focus on the woman in the riding leathers, the woman with the lopsided smile, and on her own strengths.

“Duchess,” she said, trusting in her earlier guess to impress the onlookers. “You're a talented rider. Perhaps I'd be better off learning from you.”

The crowd murmured. The duchess tapped the back of one gloved finger against her glass and made it ring softly: a salute of sorts. “Tain Hu,” she said. “Duchess Vultjag.”

Vultjag
—Baru couldn't remember the details of that estate, but she recognized the Stakhi word and tried to pry it apart into cognates. Jag? Something about a forest, so her estates must be far north. She had Maia features and a Maia name, a Stakhi title, a sharp tongue—odds were she was not a friend of the Masquerade in Aurdwynn. Probably here to sniff for weakness, like a wolf after the sick.

Answer weakness with strength. Look for her allies.

“Duchess Vultjag. My pleasure.” Baru stepped into the little circle between them and—to the crowd's delighted shock—cupped the duchess Tain Hu's chin in one gloved hand. “Your bones speak to Maia blood, but you have Stakhi in your ducal name. And here you are, a forest lord trapped in the city. All the paradoxes of Aurdwynn bound up in one woman. I think I could learn a great deal from your lessons, Tain Hu. And perhaps in exchange I could take you to Falcrest and show you to the polymaths, as an exemplar of your kind.”

The crowd hushed. Baru wondered how she must look, in her barren white gown, her bone-white mask, her long gloves the color of snow.

Tain Hu smiled between Baru's thumb and forefinger. “You have never been to Falcrest.”

“Not yet.”

Tain Hu cocked her head, eyes narrowed, and opened her lips as if to speak; but she said nothing, and left Baru suddenly conscious of those unpainted lips, those fierce dark eyes, the slow surge of her breath. She could see the black silk shapes of Masquerade judges among the crowd, and understood Tain Hu's move.
A foreigner,
they would whisper,
from a land of certain crimes
—

“Show care,” the Duchess Vultjag murmured. “The Jurispotence is always watching, and her Cold Cellar is always hungry.”

“The Jurispotence is my colleague.”

Tain Hu's smile widened between Baru's fingertips

Somewhere behind them a quartet of musicians began to play a piece on oboe and plucked lute. Baru released her grip and turned away, heart pounding. “Governor Cattlson!” she called, preferring the appearance of retreat to disaster at Tain Hu's hands. “You have a challenger on horseback!”

The crowd laughed, delighted and scandalized, and while Cattlson—red-faced and tipsy—roared something about hunting, Baru saw the Jurispotence Xate Yawa, smiling beneath her black half-mask, exchanging glances with Tain Hu. Saw the pirate duke Unuxekome nodding silently to a bearded man at his side.

And there in that glance across the ballroom, in the factions and complicities it implied, Baru heard the old carving:
Aurdwynn cannot be ruled
.

From all the possible configurations of maneuver and intrigue, feeding on the map and the history she'd learned and the hints Farrier had dropped and the menace in Xate Yawa's greeting, on Tain Hu's name and presence and smile, Baru's intuition plucked the most dangerous scenario and offered it up.

The rebellion was not coming. It was here, among the dukes, in the very heart of the provincial government. Rising. She had no proof, no evidence, no axis of action. But
it was here
.

*   *   *

T
HEY
sat for dinner at long hardwood tables heavy with venison and duck and buttered squash, golden breads and dumplings stuffed with veal. Baru fumbled with chopsticks over food her stomach had never met. She ate little, Governor Cattlson to her right, Jurispotence Xate Yawa across from her, pleading caution to each of them—“I'll need a week to settle my palate and digestion with these new spices, it's a scientific fact”—and wondering all the while:
I suspect no one wants to be the one to tell her,
Xate Yawa had said. Tell her
what
? Something to do with the last Accountant, the one she'd replaced?

So when dessert came and Governor Cattlson roared for more wine, she asked.

“What!?” Cattlson bellowed, eyes wide, voice pitched to shout above an absent gale. “You weren't told?”

“How curious.” Xate Yawa poured the Governor another glass, her veined hands steady. She had a light voice, untroubled, and she used it without hurry. “One would expect the new Imperial Accountant might be given such important information.”

“You're perfectly safe,” Cattlson insisted, thumping the table. “Between the marines and the walls of the House, you cannot be reached. Not like that dockside whorehouse where Olonori worked—we should've given up on it after Tanifel, but Olonori insisted he had to be near the ships.”

“Excuse me.” Baru rubbed the rim of her half-mask where it met the skin. “What happened to Tanifel and Olonori?”

“His Excellency Su Olonori was murdered.” Xate Yawa smiled graciously, as if in apology for a matter of decorum. “Cut apart in his bed. Please don't fear, though, our retaliation was harsh and precise. And he was only here because Her Excellency Ffare Tanifel, who came before him—”

“Was a
traitor.
” Cattlson's fist rattled glasses all the way to the far end of the table. “A corrupt and perfidious slattern. Yawa put her on trial and I had her drowned. To think! The Throne's taxes trickling out into those woods, probably all the way north to the Stakhi in their rat dens—”

“Oh,” Baru said, understanding. Tanifel, native-born, had gone over to the brewing rebellion, and the Masquerade had killed her for it. And then Olonori (an Oriati name, he would have been a foreigner and harder to corrupt) had refused to go over, and the rebels had killed him in turn.

Where was Cairdine Farrier? Shouldn't he have been at the ball? When he had spoken on the docks—
our difficulties here
—had he known?

She'd never had wine before. “Jurispotence,” she said, smiling as well as she could manage. “Just one glass, please.”

Ducal representatives came to greet her, their petitions disguised as compliments.
We wish to discuss matters of inheritance law, and the taxation of landlords,
Duchess Nayauru's seneschal murmured, and then some man from Oathsfire, the Duke of Mills, right on her heels asking after
transit taxes along the Inirein
. Then Duke Heingyl in his hunting garb, cold and plainly hostile except when he introduced his daughter, Ri, a tiny woman with sharp fox eyes and elaborate jewelry who made her father's hands tighten with some kind of wary protective love. “Your Excellence,” Ri murmured, kissing Baru's hand. “It is a difficult station for a foreigner. I hope no one will regret your appointment. Least of all you.”

“You are gracious,” Baru said, rather daftly—the wine made her feel like her thoughts echoed, and Ri's eyes were damnably disarming.

“There are worthy young minds in Aurdwynn too. Savants of our own.” The Stag Duke's eyes smiled whenever he glanced at his daughter, and froze again when they went to Baru. “We hope the Imperial Republic has not forgotten them.”

Baru had to lift her chin to meet his eyes. “I welcome their correspondence.”

“I have concerns about the stability of the Midlands. Tensions of infrastructure and inheritance between Nayauru and Ihuake.” Ri released Baru's hand, smiling softly. “Doubtless you will swiftly detect and resolve them.”

Baru, distracted by Duke Heingyl's unblinking armored stare, made no reply.

She should have been attentive. But she could barely understand their accented Aphalone, barely focus on their words when all she wanted to do was look into their eyes and guess—

Loyalist? Rebel? Or waiting for your chance to choose?

*   *   *

A
FTER
the ball, Muire Lo returned from the master-at-arms and confirmed what she'd learned. Su Olonori, Baru's immediate predecessor, had been murdered in his bed by parties unknown.

Fine. Mortal danger: an incentive to set everything else in order. Her job in Aurdwynn was to make sure tax and trade money went to Falcrest, where Parliament seemed intent on banking for renewed war with the Oriati federations.

One task at a time.

At dawn the next morning she dressed, washed, rang Muire Lo for breakfast, and sat down in her new office with a caged candle to sort through the Imperial Accounts. Parliament—or Cairdine Farrier and his
colleagues
—had given her this high station even knowing Aurdwynn was unstable. Therefore there would be an extensive staff for her, the kind of support that would cushion her youth and inexperience.

But no—she found disaster.

Su Olonori had been so eager to clear out Ffare Tanifel's corruption that he'd sacked the entire Accountant's staff. Meticulously paranoid, he'd kept his own books, working in incomprehensible shorthand that defied both double-entry protocol and any clear mathematical sense.

There should have been ledgers for every key entity in Aurdwynn: the Imperial Trade Factor and its all-important Fiat Bank, the Judiciary, the provincial government and its suborgans, and most critically, each duke and duchess. These books would record a web of debt and credit, and from this web she could map out the arrangement of power in Aurdwynn. No ship could be hired, no land developed, no army raised without some money changing hands. These books were Baru's spyglass, her map, her sword and edict.

But all that depended on having good books. She could barely sort Su Olonori's ledgers by date, let alone subject or point of origin. Nor was there anyone to ask for help. His staff ledger listed only a personal secretary and a few housekeepers on the payroll. Before his murder, he had managed the Imperial Accounts alone.

A scrap of parchment in Su Olonori's fevered handwriting fell from the records:
V. much land sale?
Then a run of Oriati text; he had lapsed into his home tongue.

Someone knocked on the door. She went and opened it.

“You should just say ‘come,' Your Excellence. In Falcrest I mastered the ways of doors.” Muire Lo brought the tray of breakfast to her desk. “I'm assembling a cold-weather wardrobe for you—I got a sense of your measurements while dressing you. And the Governor wishes to know if you'll be joining him for lunch.”

“I think I will.” She clapped Su Olonori's master ledger down on the desk. “Find a literate Oriati speaker and hire her. I need these books carted down to the basement and translated into Aphalone.”

“These are the key ledgers, Your Excellence.” Muire Lo hopped back a half step in a kind of avian alarm. “You can't conduct business without them.”

“I'm going to start new ledgers. This will mean a great deal of travel. Find me a carriage and a driver.” She knifed a grapefruit and managed to spray Muire Lo with the juice. “Sorry—and that reminds me, find me Cairdine Farrier and make him an appointment. When that's done, we're going to need to start hiring a staff. I'll need trustworthy people and that means I need the Jurispotence's advice, so make her an appointment as well.”

“Your Excellence, perhaps the Governor should approach the Jurispotence—”

“We are the Imperial Accountant's office!” she snapped, angry at the mess she had inherited, at the time and effort it would waste to sort it all out, at the distant technocrati who had looked over her service exam and judged this a useful application of her talents. “We will not sit here like schoolchildren and beg for appointments. We control the payrolls, Muire Lo, and that means
they
work for
me
. Remind them of that.”

“That is bluster, Your Excellence,” he said softly, “and they will be quick to challenge it.”

“All I have is bluster.” She swore at the grapefruit and tore a dripping length of meat from it. It came apart into sticky ruin in her hands. “These books say nothing. The Fiat Bank could be printing money and loaning it to the dukes as toiletry and I would be blind to it. I cannot prosecute with that two-faced Jurispotence in control of the courts, and after Olonori's death I cannot even sleep easy in my own bed—”

I don't want this! she almost shouted. I want Falcrest and telescopes, proofs of geometry and the fluorescence of certain sea life! I want to know the world, not these sordid little people in their shattered little land!

I want to save my home!

But she bit down on her own temper and wiped her palms on the hips of her gown. Muire Lo grimaced pointedly at that—a kind of charming little puncture in his deferential composure. “You are, at the very least, an officer of the Imperial Republic, masked and armed with the technocrat's mark. Not a provincial auxiliary.”

“So?” She pushed his suggestions around in her head, trying to put them together in some useful way. “I am a ranked officer and can request the aid of Imperial forces. I suppose I could use them to make a show of strength. But Governor Cattlson is the legal commander of Aurdwynn's garrisons. Why would he give his troops to”—she slipped into self-pity here, for one or two brief syllables—“an untested islander girl?”

Muire Lo offered a linen napkin for the grapefruit. He'd folded it into a perfect triangle, like a lateen sail. “Our frigate
Lapetiare
is still in port,” he said, “and will not sail for a week.”