The Traitor Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  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

  EIGHTEEN 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.

  * * *

  IN 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 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?”

  And Baru took him in her own arms, shocked by how frail he felt, by how close they were in height, and whispered in his ear: “I remember my father. I remember my fathers.”

  She felt his breath go out of him, a slow release that felt like it had waited years. They stepped away from her, their faces dour now, as they had to be. “Go, then,” her mother said, and then, with softness: “I hope you return carrying all the things you want.”

  Baru backed up a few steps, not ready to look away. But it hurt too much to see them receding step by step, so at last she made herself face the sea.

  She went down the quay, and found Cairdine Farrier waiting for her by the skiff. He beamed at her.

  Baru held his gaze and shook his hand as an equal. “You’ll accompany us to Treatymont and then continue on to Falcrest, I presume?”

  “I’m going home,” he said, “just as you’re leaving it. My work on Taranoke is done, and now you can begin that same work in Aurdwynn. It feels like a design, doesn’t it? Like a made thing. Elegant.”

  “And what work is that?”

  “My favorite work,” he said, tugging at the breast of his summer jacket. “Finding those who deserve more, and raising them up.”

  They settled themselves in the skiff. Baru glanced over the crew, assessing their ranks and races, and found someone else watching her in return. “Lieutenant Aminata,” she said, smiling, her stomach turning with uncertainty and anger. “Congratulations on your new post.”

  “Likewise,” Aminata said, and smiled back. “Congratulations on your service appointment. I understand you performed remarkably.”

  The new ship was a frigate called Lapetiare, and from her deck Baru saw for the first time the whole shape of Taranoke, hazed in birds, black and fertile and oh so tall, falling down past the horizon and into memory.

  * * *

  LAPETIARE turned north with the trade winds, racing along the Ashen Sea’s western coast. Baru kept to the main deck and practiced her navigation. The master’s mate took sightings of passing landmarks, logging their course by coastal navigation, but Baru preferred to watch the sun and stars—more beautiful, and more absolute. Computing longitude demanded more than an hour of hand-scratched calculations. Baru resolved to work that time down to twenty minutes by the time they reached Aurdwynn. If she failed as an accountant, at least she could find a ship.

  Spray crashed off the bow. The warm trade winds carried dark-winged shearwaters with them and the southern sailors, from Oriati Mbo and its many islands, threw them salted fish and called out wishes in their own tongues.

  “Salt and citrus,” Cairdine Farrier said, joining her at the stern with half a lemon in each hand. “The chemicals of empire.”

  “Salt to preserve food for long journeys,” Baru recited. “Citrus for scurvy.” Farrier had made the trip into an extended service exam (his very first question when aboard was Do you recognize the name of the ship, and she had; Lapetiare was a character from the revolutionary classic The Antler Stone). It might have annoyed her, but she was restless and appreciated the chance to work herself.

  She’d grown proud.

  “They have a strange red salt on Taranoke.” Farrier arranged himself against the stern rail and threw a gnawed bone into the wake. “Iron salt, I believe it’s called. I’ve sent samples home to Falcrest these past few years. Two of my colleagues are greatly interested in exploratory chemistry.”

  Baru pursed her lips. “I’m sure the work being done in Falcrest is very important.”

  “Falcrest is the heart and mind of the world.”

  “So I’ve been taught.”

  Farrier offered her one of the lemon halves. She waved him away without a glance. He clucked at her, shaking his head. “You’re being petulant. Falcrest isn’t lost to you. There are other paths than the service exam. Paths that reward patience, loyalty, and ability.”

  “One wonders which I’ve failed to demonstrate.”

  “You are young. The hereditary strengths of your people are untested, and their degenerate, unhygienic mating practices are a source of great unease. You should be pleased to—”

  “And here I thought only wit mattered behind the mask.”

  Farrier drew a sailor’s knife and began to cut the rind free of his lemon. The motion of the ship made him cautious with the blade, and he laughed softly at himself. “Perhaps you’re asking the wrong questions,” he said. “It could be that you’ve demonstrated truly exemplary capability. That you’ve been judged fit for additional tests. More rigorous evaluations, in more demanding environments, without the usual slow path of apprenticeship and advancement. The Imperial Republic is, as you justly remind me, a meritocracy through and through. And we will need merit in the years to come. There are wolves to our north, rising from cold dens, and water buffalo in our south, circled and ferocious. Very soon the Masquerade will win or lose a great game.”

  She lifted her eyes to judge the winds by the course of distant birds, playing for time. She was nervous, unsure of her position. Cairdine Farrier was not a simple merchant—she’d suspected that since the early days of the school on Taranoke, been certain of it since he meddled with her service exam. “I prefer to know who’s testing me, given the choice. I prefer to know why I’ve been given an Imperial province and a high office, instead of an apprenticeship.”

  “You will have to trust that the Imperial Republic knows how best to permit you to serve it,” Farrier said. He lifted his peeled lemon in toast.

  Baru went to find her practice blade and a sailor who could test it.

  * * *

  THAT evening Baru summoned her new secretary to her cabin.

  “Muire Lo.”

  “Yes,” he said, slipping sidelong through the doorway. “Your Excellence. At your service.”

  He was a slim man, narrow-shouldered, his skin almost invisible to Baru in that it was so very Taranoki (a little pale, perhaps, like someone who shut himself up inside, like father Solit). He wore gentle Falcrest-style makeup over a careful composed face. Instantly and inexplicably Baru wondered if he could sing, and only after a moment did she realize that he reminded her of a finch, curious and abrupt in his movements. She hated to trust these impressions: there seemed no reason for them to be true.

  “You’re from Aurdwynn,” she said, gesturing sit, sit. There was barely room in the slot cabin for two and a table. She’d tidied her effects with a nervousness she preferred not to admit. This was her first subordinate.

  “Yes, Yo
ur Excellence.” He had a way of showing deference with his eyes, downcast and polite, but he couldn’t quite hold it. Every few moments he glanced at Baru. When he did this his eyes were sharp and probing, frankly curious. “I left at thirteen. After the Fools’ Rebellion. A Charitable Service selectee.” When she didn’t ask for details (somehow it felt dangerous to even discuss rebellions) he took his seat. “Several years in Falcrest at a School of Imperial Service. Then two years on Taranoke, assisting in the census of labor and resources.”

  Falcrest-educated. She felt a snap of resentment and possessiveness at that. He was four years older, too, but no matter, no matter, it was for the best. In Aurdwynn she would have to command her elders, and the Falcrest-educated. If Muire Lo or anyone else challenged her authority on those grounds, she could always invoke that delightful word savant.

  “Muire Lo is a Tu Maia name, isn’t it?” This said mostly to bait him. She knew how the Maia had risen in the west to rule half the Ashen Sea in centuries past. Legend and linguistics said their children had settled Taranoke long ago.

  “Yes, Your Excellence. Aurdwynn’s families descend from the Maia and the Stakhieczi, for the most part.” He hesitated for an instant, too brief to be an affectation. “If a native eye might be of use, I’ve prepared a brief survey of the province. At your discretion, of course.”

  Baru made a small gesture of permission, much more subtle than the relief she felt. How fundamentally satisfying to have a knowledgeable subordinate—like a little auxiliary mind. But she would have to be careful: he had been chosen for her.

  They opened a map and tried to remedy Baru’s atrocious grasp of geography. “Aurdwynn stretches north to the Wintercrest Mountains,” Muire Lo said, tracing the contours of the land with long ink-stained fingers. Bent over the map, some of the self-consciousness had gone out of him. “East to the river Inirein, which can only be bridged here—and—here. West to the old Tu Maia keeps at Unane Naiu, and the desert beyond. And—obviously—”

  “The Ashen Sea to the south.”

  “Quite, Your Excellence.”