The Traitor Baru Cormorant (26 page)

She took another piece of cod, to buy herself and her heart a little time. “I'm going to need your help with a great deal of paperwork afterward.”

“Or you'll need me to nurse you.” His lips twitched, and then the smile fled. He spoke harshly, as if forcing himself to go forward. “If you're going over, if you're planning to cast in with them, I want a chance to warn my family before it happens. Enough to get them on a ship and out of port. Do you remember that huntsman who strangled me when I told him who I spied for? That wrath will come down on them, too.”

Her heart cried out in her chest, full of sudden want to save this child of rebellion past, to warn him what was to come. And from where did that want come? He was older, a trained operative, a native. He could manage himself. But he was tethered to her, wasn't he, under her power. He had been bound to her by Cairdine Farrier.

She spoke in calculated defense: “I won't hear treason spoken in my office. I'm under scrutiny enough.”

Muire Lo bowed his head. “I am at fault. Forgive me. I presumed to know your mind.” He stumbled on his words. “I thought that if—in the event of—that is to say, under such circumstances, I thought you might need my…”

Whatever he was after, he hadn't found a way to say it yet, and Baru couldn't do it for him. She pushed the tray away. “I want to be early. Call a carriage—and if the Governor's already arranged one, have it changed.”

Whatever he had wanted to venture, whatever confidence or daring, he packed it away in an instant. “Of course, Your Excellence.”

Baru found Aminata's boarding saber and buckled it on alongside her chained purse. If she needed it today she had already lost.

Xate Yawa hadn't written a letter about finding a second.

*   *   *

T
HE
crowd roared like storm surf.

It wasn't productive to think about losing. To imagine that she might lose a hand, or take a festering wound, or faint from the unexpected immediacy of the pain. No, Xate Yawa would have a second ready to stand for her. She wouldn't have to fight. If she fought she would lose to Cattlson, who had reach and strength and experience and confidence with a blade.

But she wouldn't have to fight.

She stepped down from the carriage into the middle of the plaza and half the city shrieked their hate or adoration at her.

A coded riot. Ranks of garrison blue trying to hold back the crowd. Banners of coin and mask flying on redwood poles, merchants hawking beer to ragged dock laborers and hollow-eyed rangers with scurvy teeth and Pinjagata spearwomen who stood shoulder to shoulder crying in terrible enthusiastic Aphalone:
Gold from a fairer hand! A fairer hand!
Even men under Ducal banner, Oathsfire and Lyxaxu and Unuxekome, knotted in uncomfortable separation from the common crowd, raised the same cheer.

Cheering for her.

She'd made her loan policy as a calculated move to buy the affection of the commoner. She'd made Bel Latheman's insult to her honor public as a calculated move to buy their outrage.

Apparently she'd calculated well.

A fairer hand!

But of course there was the opposition.

Toward the Fiat Bank side of the plaza, horses jockeyed in the crowd. The riders wore armor or ducal finery. Baru found the stag banner of Duke Heingyl, and then the duke himself, armored and rigid on his black charger. He'd lost so much during Baru's inflationary collapse that Governor Cattlson had stepped in with gold to prop him up. But his loyalties ran deeper than that. He'd pledged fealty to the Masquerade when Aurdwynn first fell, and his sense of honor ran so strong that he'd stood with Falcrest during the Fools' Rebellion. His word was iron.

He lifted a hand to her, and then drew something out of his saddle: a white seabird, bound but twitching. At her shoulder Muire Lo sucked in a sharp breath.

Heingyl snapped its neck and threw it into the crowd. A volcanic roar erupted from the people there, and then a chant, overwhelming in its volume:
she comes too cheap!

“Crude,” Xate Yawa sniffed, coming to Baru through a file of steel-masked garrison soldiers. “What would his daughter say? I will stand judge today.”

Baru tried to smile, tried to present calm. Her knees wobbled and her stomach turned storm-sick flops. “My second?” she asked, as quietly as she could manage.

“Pardon?” Xate Yawa frowned, leaning in. “My old ears fail me when it's warm.”

Baru's heart sank. Bile washed the back of her throat. There was no second.

Courage, now, courage, courage. She'd been a good fighter in school. She'd kept up with her forms. Perhaps—perhaps—somehow—

“Come, come.” Xate Yawa tugged at her wrist. “There's a doctor standing by. Best to confront the pain, and find a way through.”

Her offer had been rejected, coin and blood and all. Xate Yawa must have spoken to her brother, and they still judged the time too soon.

The roar of the crowd fell away into nothing and she walked across rough cobblestone to the chalked circle at the center of the plaza, where Governor Cattlson waited in his wolf's head mantle and sleeveless dark leather, a long two-handed blade at his side.

“Cormorant,” he said. He tried to smile, as he always did, but there was regret in his voice. “Have you counted the crowd?”

“It must be half the city.”

“I had the docks closed and a holiday declared. The mob loves nothing like a show of strength. Aurdwynn must know who rules it, and why—it'll do them well to see that their Governor can win on their terms.” He passed his blade to his left and offered his right hand to shake. “I'll cut you light, if I can. And—I apologize for the chant. It wasn't mine, or even Duke Heingyl's.”

Behind him, Bel Latheman stood with his chin erect and his hands clasped behind his back. Anger felt better than fear. She almost spat at his feet, but the chant—
too cheap!
—made her think of Latheman's words in the longhouse.
Don't be hysterical
. Whatever emotion she showed would be turned against her.

She clasped Cattlson's hand and shook. He frowned. “You've forgotten your mask.”

She'd left it behind as a symbol. She'd left it behind because she wanted her Taranoki heritage to be an issue in this duel. Her second could fight masked.

But she had no second. She had only the Naval System against Cattlson's reach and strength.

Muire Lo nudged her and pointed. She found the remora Purity Cartone, who stood among the Governor's masked retinue, pale and obvious now that she noticed him.

But whatever he was about to say was cut off.

Xate Yawa raised her hands and the garrison troops pounded their shields. The crowd's roar died and the plaza fell silent but for the nicker of horses and a low murmur. “I stand judge over trial to first blood,” she called. Garrison officers repeated the chant, word for word, a booming chorus that spread out through the lines. “Today Her Excellence Baru Cormorant of Taranoke, the Imperial Accountant, challenges His Excellence Bel Latheman of Falcrest, Principal Factor of the Fiat Bank. Baru Cormorant, what grievance do you bear?”

She'd practiced it a hundred times and it came up just as easily as spit, as the bile of fear. “Bel Latheman is faithless in duty and in love. He used his station to better himself at the expense of Aurdwynn, and he used my affection as entertainment while he pursued Lady Heingyl Ri. He insulted my blood, my sex, and my homeland. That I will not countenance, not from a man of Falcrest or any other nation.”

Keep it simple. Keep it personal. The woodsmen and the dockworkers were the audience. The rumormongers who would carry her words north, up the roads and the river Inirein and into every duchy and freetown. Even Duke Pinjagata would hear the story of the sharp-eyed woman who looked like Nayauru standing against Cattlson, and even Pinjagata would remember her name.

“Bel Latheman, how do you answer?”

Now the officers and the ranks echoed Latheman. “Baru Cormorant forced herself on me by authority. She ruined the dukes of Aurdwynn with her disastrous policies and allowed the blame to stain me. She is unfit in mind and heredity for the station she holds, and I will have my freedom from her authority and her repute.”

He hadn't made one allegation about tribadism. Maybe he thought it wouldn't play well. Maybe Cattlson's paternal concern had overriden him. Maybe he couldn't stomach the thought of Xate Yawa's surgeons circumcising Baru's womanhood.

Baru tried to count her own breaths and factor the count. Primes at one (depending who you asked), two, three, five, seven—

There were words Xate Yawa could say now, passages of law that described the fallibility and irrationality of duels. She skipped them, of course. She was here to see Baru wounded and taken out of play. “Let this combat to blood judge the truth of these allegations. Baru Cormorant, will you apologize and withdraw?”

Not here. It was impossible. She had to chance the blade. “No.”

“Bel Latheman, will you?”

“I will not.”

“Bel Latheman, will you name a second to stand for you?”

“I name His Excellence the Governor.”

The Fiat Bank side of the crowd, Duke Heingyl's side, roared and clapped. Horses reared in unison. Cattlson opened his arms to the crowd, claiming in his triumphal grasp the chalked dueling circle, the cobblestones, the arcades and scaffolds around them draped in urchins and commoners.

Xate Yawa turned to Baru, who tried to think of nothing but father Salm, wrestling in the firelight, so sure and strong, and instead found herself thinking of father Salm, gone to war and never returned. There was a hint of apology in the purse of the judge's lips, but just a hint. “Baru Cormorant, will you name a second to stand for you?”

She opened her mouth to seal her own ruin.

“I stand for Baru Cormorant.”

The crowd gasped, hushed, roared like a wave rising and retreating.

And the duchess Tain Hu stepped into the circle, hobnailed boots ringing off the limestone cobble, hair shorn, cheeks slashed in lines of red. She lifted her blade to Cattlson, her eyes to Baru, and touched her brow in salute.

“My lady,” she said, as Xate Yawa tried to disguise her fury, as the garrison officers repeated everything the duchess Vultjag said to the plaza. “Command me.”

And Baru cast the first dart at hand, the words that set the coopers and the fishmongers and the bannermen of Lyxaxu and Oathsfire and Unuxekome roaring: “Show them who should rule Aurdwynn, and why.”

Vultjag!
the poorer parts of the crowd screamed, a raw astonished sound.
Vultjag!

*   *   *

T
HE
Antler Stone
was full of swordfights, sweeping romantic duels in prerevolutionary Falcrest. Scholarship had been written (and she'd read it) on the remarkable transparency of the Second Book's prose, absent all the meticulous descriptions of arms and armor and lineage that filled the old epics. But the fights still went on for pages of parry and riposte, footwork, feint, maneuver. Everyone adored the fights in
The Antler Stone
.

Baru had trained in the Naval System. There were no parries or ripostes. Every response was also an attack—a counterstrike timed to intercept and displace an opponent's blow, bind and leverage it into a grapple or a wound. “On a ship, in a storm, in the dark,” Aminata had snarled, rapping her knuckles, “while drunk and surrounded, and there's six of them to one of you!”

It had always felt right to her, even though she'd never been as good as Aminata.

But Tain Hu did not know the Naval System. And Baru had no idea what Cattlson knew. Maybe it wouldn't matter. Cattlson was taller and bulkier, armed with reach and strength.

The fighters took their places and the plaza waited in silence. Jurispotence Xate Yawa stood with her hands flat on her thighs, the parchment of her face pressed still and flat.

“Watch the feet,” Muire Lo whispered in Baru's ear.

Cattlson took a square stance, left foot forward, and put his long blade up in the Naval System's ox guard, hands at the cross and the pommel, blade level with the top of his head and aimed straight for Tain Hu like an accusing finger. His bare arms bunched, the blade held perfectly still—an incredible display of static strength. A boast.

Tain Hu shrugged out of her jacket, back turned in insult (the bankside crowd jeered), and with laconic confidence set herself toward Cattlson in a half-lunge, bent a little forward at the waist. Her tabard bared arms and knotted shoulders slick with sweat. She gripped her pommel with her left, the cross with her right, and leaned the blade of her longsword back against her shoulder like a laborer carrying a pole.

Cattlson's prow of a jaw twitched and his supporters jeered again. “Put the blade up!” someone cried.

“She could've picked a stronger guard,” Muire Lo muttered.

“It's a fine guard.” Baru had chewed most of the skin off the right side of her lower lip. She switched sides. “It doesn't mean anything.”

Xate Yawa raised her hands and held them a shoulder span apart. “First blood,” she intoned. “Ready.”

As a child Baru had watched the birds as much as the stars—watched the beat of their wings in flight, and tried to decipher the technique.

Someone behind Tain Hu clapped and barked, high and mocking. Duchess Vultjag didn't twitch. The muscles in Cattlson's calves bunched at the sound.

Xate Yawa clapped her hands and stepped back out of the circle. Cattlson struck.

It was a thunderously powerful stroke, an incredible piece of reach, checked at the end of its arc (down in the tail guard) by pure strength. Tain Hu stepped back, hind foot, then front, her blade still on her shoulder, and got out of the way in time. Surrendering the space Cattlson had attacked.