The Traitor Baru Cormorant (44 page)

“He plans to use the river to move troops north into our heartlands. He's pinned his whole strategy on it. If we can meet him on the floodplain at Sieroch, just short of the river—” The lines around his eyes crinkled, like writing translating itself. “One decisive battle will give us the war.”

“If we have the spearmen and the horse to win.”

“If we have a united Midlands behind us.”

Baru set aside the chicken carcass and raised herself to a crouch, balanced on her toes and fingertips. “Convenient,” she said. “I've been going over the books. We've spent ourselves to death. Unless we resort to wholesale pillage, there's not enough left in our treasuries to campaign through another winter. Not even enough to last until autumn, if we have to besiege the coastal forts. Or Treatymont itself.”

The old man held her in a wary regard. “We won't need another winter if we can defeat Cattlson in the open field.”

“Or someone knows that our only hope is a single decisive battle, and they sent you here with a false battle plan to draw us out.”

Xate Olake's wry gaze reminded Baru of the years he'd spent in Treatymont, bricking the foundations of rebellion, playing long games. “What Falcresti chemistry or coercion could do that? They would have to pluck my guts out my eyes before they could break me. When I betray rebellions, child, I do it only by my own will.”

“And your sister? The one who fed you Cattlson's plan?” Baru did not hide the menace in her smile. “Perhaps it is
her
will.”

The Duke of Lachta hesitated, and Baru thought: Ah—even you doubt her. Even you believe that no one can lie so ably, so completely, about her true loyalties.

But Baru knew it was possible.

“We have no choice,” Xate Olake said. “Either we unite the Midlands and march to meet Cattlson, or we wait out the summer and run our treasury dry.”

Baru took up her writing lantern, the sturdy little oil-burner she'd trusted all winter, and lifted it between them. The light put shadows in every crag and fold of the duke Lachta's face. He looked older than the world.

“Duchess Nayauru will never join a rebellion I lead,” she said. “She cannot forgive the Coyote. She will not abandon her dream of a reborn Tu Maia empire.”

Lachta held up a hand against the glare of the lamp. It made a fingered shadow on his face, like a raven wing. “If she goes with Cattlson, so will Autr and Sahaule. They will counterbalance Ihuake and Pinjagata and we will never win a battle.”

Baru looked at the canny old man in her tent and thought, a little ruefully, that he was too old and too clever for her, that it would be the height of arrogance to think she could surprise him, impress him.

But arrogance or no, she spoke.

“We can solve all our problems in one stroke. We're running out of money to sustain a campaign. We cannot allow Nayauru and her consorts to go over to Treatymont. And Ihuake will not join us unless I can demonstrate my strength. So—”

Baru wiped grease and marrow on the hips of her trousers. “Tomorrow night we murder Nayauru, Autr, and Sahaule in their camps, kill everyone who marched with them, and order their duchies pillaged for funds. Ihuake will receive Nayauru's richest lands as a gift. Duchess Erebog will take the rest.”

So easy, so decisive, spoken that way.

So much blood in so few words.

Xate Olake's lips curled. It was not disgust. “I was afraid,” he said, “that you would insist on finding a subtler way.”

Baru selected another marrow-rich bone and felt for the breakpoint. “Did you really give me a slow poison last summer?”

“Child,” Xate Olake said, with a kind of wary fondness, “I thought you would bring yourself to ruin without my help.”

*   *   *

S
HE
called for Tain Hu, then stopped the messenger before he could take three steps. It would be unsafe to see her now, unsafe to look her in the eye and command her, or to wait in silence for her hunting look, her golden eyes searching for a path in. It would be unsafe.

“Bring me an ilykari instead,” she commanded. “Someone trusted.”

The priestess who came must have been one of Unuxekome's divers—she had the broad-shouldered, long-legged look of a deep swimmer. It could have been a coincidence that she had Baru's Maia skin, or some ill-thought attempt to make her comfortable. She looked a little like Nayauru, and much more like Cousin Lao.

“Rest,” Baru ordered. She'd strung up the oil lantern and it cast flickering shadows like a sickly sun.

The woman sat in silence. Baru watched her arrange herself, tracing the geometry of muscle and limb with uneasy fascination. She was strong, tall; she had power in the breath that filled her chest, in the line of her thighs. Through labor she had made herself able. A small ability, in the scheme of the world—only the power to dive deep, climb high, to win laughing contests of strength and draw eyes that admired that strength. Not a power that would bankrupt dukes or change the names of islands. But power enough to rule a tent, to surprise Baru with violence or other sudden acts.

Baru wished she'd cleaned out the ruins of the chicken.

The priestess waited in contemplative peace. A devotee of Wydd, then. “What do you do?”

The priestess frowned for a moment as she parsed Baru's awkward Iolynic. Her eyes were strange and round, Stakhi-shaped. “I am a pearl diver and a midwife.”

“You've come a long way for war. You must be a mother, a sister, a daughter. How do you know your family is safe?”

“The same way as all the other fighters. My great-family shares its house. There are a hundred hands among them. A few young men and women can be spared in time of need.”

For all her whirling disquiet, Baru could not help but note: Cairdine Farrier would be fascinated. The Imperial Republic thought of families as a man and a woman, thought of the mother and father as fixed necessities. But here, as on Taranoke, they had always practiced other ways—useful ways, methods that liberated strong young hands for labor and war—

Not so fascinated. He would only be curious how to repair it.

The thought curled back around into the heart of her unease. Suddenly she wanted to weep: she could not escape it. “I have committed a terrible crime,” she said, voice firm, controlled, machined to a polish. “So terrible that I feel I can do anything, commit any sin, betray any trust, because no matter what ruin I make of myself, it cannot be worse than what I have already done.”

“Speak,” the ilykari murmured.

Baru tried, and it all caught in her lungs, a tumor, an avalanche, a drifting Oriati mine. The
size
of it, the depth of the roots, the test she faced, the doom she had brought down on herself.

“I cannot,” she said. “I cannot speak.”

“What do
you
do?” the priestess asked. Perhaps this was some method of Wydd, turning her own questions back on her to reveal her secrets.

“I try to save my home,” Baru rasped. “Everything I do. For Taranoke.”

“You've come a long way to do it,” the priestess said, and left the rest of the mirrored question unspoken, the
mother
and
sister
and
daughter,
the
how do you know your family is safe
?

“Too far,” Baru choked, unable to weep, unable to want to, to make herself believe it could ever be safe or right. “I've come too far.”

*   *   *

A
T
daybreak she went to Tain Hu's tent to order the killings.

She found the duchess Vultjag engaged in a curious ritual with Ake Sentiamut. They knelt across from each other on the ground cloth, a wooden game board between them. Baru had studiously avoided learning the game of rule—learning would surely involve losing a number of games, which would make Tain Hu insufferable—but she knew the principle: pawns claimed land, nobles took power from pawns to fight other nobles. But here Tain Hu's nobles seemed fed by something else. She read from a little leather-bound book, her lips making awkward hesitant shapes, and depending on her performance at this mysterious task, Ake smiled, or laughed, or shook her head and killed a few of Tain Hu's pawns. It must be a learning game, then—a way to keep Tain Hu's attention, penalizing or rewarding her standing in the game according to her performance in the book.

How curious they were together: Tain Hu a nighthawk, a panther, and Ake a pale white-gold fawn wrapped up in bearskin. And yet they did not act unequal.

Baru watched them in silence for a moment (the guards had not announced her: in camp Coyote-men knew that crying out the Fairer Hand's presence would only mark her for assassins). Tain Hu sat with her strength coiled, her eyes sharp with concentration, and at times she spooled her unbraided hair around one finger in thought. Baru took a kind of delight in this: in the field Vultjag would never have permitted that gesture to slip. And so strange, too, the way she spoke to Ake, each of them interrupting the other, their gestures lively and unconsidered, their laughter free. When Tain Hu looked away, jaw set, troubled by something she had said or some problem that occupied her mind, Ake reached out and clasped her wrist with easy camaraderie—and it meant nothing more that Baru could see, asked nothing in return, disguised no secret missive or hidden maneuver.

It would be nice to stand here a while longer, and watch this world she had never been part of. But dangerous, too—

“Vultjag,” Baru said. “A word.”

Tain Hu startled a little, and Ake hid a laugh at that. They stood together, bowing their heads, and Tain Hu dismissed her ranger-knight with a clap on her shoulder and a murmured word in Stakhi. Baru caught the secret handoff they made through the swirl of broadcloth and bearskin.

“Come,” she said, more lightly than she actually felt, “don't be bashful. Show me.”

Ake looked to Tain Hu. Vultjag arched a brow. “The Fairer Hand commands it.”

So Ake gave Baru the book as she stepped out of the tent. Baru turned it over and read the title, printed in neat blocks of Iolynic:
A Primer in Aphalone, the Imperial Trade Tongue; Made Available to the People of Aurdwynn For Their Ease.

It was like holding a centipede. She wanted to hurl it away.

Tain Hu watched her with a disinterested half smile that might, last year, have hidden from Baru her profound self-consciousness. “I'm learning to read it. So I can spy on your letters,” she explained, lips half-parted, eyes sly: all her countermeasures set. “And those books you read, too. Learn what madness drives you, hm?”

Baru acted, so that she wouldn't have to think: she stepped into the tent, into Tain Hu's space, and with her own fierce eyes and confident stride seized a kind of control, in that she startled Tain Hu and made her freeze a moment.

Baru, close now, offered the book. “You said there was nothing worth taking from the enemy.”

“Perhaps an item or two of note.” Tain Hu clasped the book but did not take it, and for a moment they were joined by it, their fingertips not quite in contact but still mutually aware. “I have some regard for a few products of the Masquerade system. They can be useful. Or delightful.”

She tucked a lock of wild hair behind her ear. It slipped loose at once.

Her damned eyes, so close, so cutting; her awful hateful unforgettable smile—and Baru already in a panic, tossed by the book, by the things about to happen. Desperate to avoid an error she terribly wanted to make, Baru seized on a blunt instrument, sniffed, said: “A few useful products, yes. They did wonders for dental hygiene.”

Tain Hu laughed. “Spoiled ass. All those latrines dug, and you still complain about morning breath?” She stepped away and went to her field kit, to find a pellet of anise to chew. “How can I serve? Do you have an answer for Nayauru?”

“Why aren't you with her?”

“Hm?”

“She's proud, capable, and ambitious. Young and lovely, too. All cause for your interest.”

“Undeniably true.” Tain Hu tossed a pellet of anise seeds wrapped in mint. Baru caught it, fumbled, and caught it again. “Her tastes don't run to that kind of alliance, though. As I'm sure you've seen.”

“That's not the sort I meant.” It was easy to pretend to be cross. “Why do you all do that? Every time anyone mentions Nayauru I hear these snide asides about her love of men. She engineers majestic dams and fine roads, her troops are formidable, her ambitions plain and her alliances firm. Are you all so menaced by her that you feel the need to reduce her to a—a docklands pimp sampling from her boys?”

Tain Hu chewed for a few moments, narrow-eyed. “You respect her.”

“I do. I do.” Baru let herself sigh. “She's cunning. She might outplay me again.”

“So how do you plan to—”

“Without any subtlety.”

Tain Hu stopped chewing.

“I'm having her killed,” Baru said, holding her field-general's stare. “Her, Autr, and Sahaule. Murdered in their camps tonight.”

After a moment's unblinking regard, Tain Hu came forward into the center of the tent and knelt, arms braced against the earth, gold-black eyes fixed on Baru's with a ferocious loyalty that concealed nothing. Baru's heart trembled, because she saw the truth there, and the plea, too—Tain Hu's honor, her regard for Nayauru as a fellow duchess and a worthy foe, and for herself as a noblewoman who did not need midnight knives.

“My lord,” Vultjag said. “As you command.”

“No,” Baru said, and then, more roughly, her throat choked as if by drink and smoke, “no, Vultjag, not you. I will not ask you to do it. I have other weapons to employ.”

Tain Hu would not avert her eyes, would not blink, and although the danger now was different than the menace of half-open lips and panther strength, it was not less awful. “You are the Fairer Hand,” she said, “and I am your field-general, oathbound to earn you victory at any price. I will not shrink from that oath.” And then, her cold breaking, her voice raw and rampant: “I rule a small land, poor in wealth and arms; I have no husband and no heirs, no great alliance and no well-made dams, and thus few strengths to offer my lord beyond my cunning and my loyalty. Do not deny me the exercise of those as well.”