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!
* * *
THE 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.
Jeers and raucous shouts answered her retreat. The Governor reset to high ox guard, began to circle with long smooth steps. Tain Hu matched him, expressionless, her breath almost invisible except in the slow roll of her shoulders.
“She can’t afford to attack.” Muire Lo wrung his hands at the edge of Baru’s stinging unblinking vision. “He’s too—”
Cattlson’s stance dropped abruptly, as if about to leap. Tain Hu did not respond. The Governor chuckled, grinned.
“Do you think she’d still have ruined you,” Tain Hu drawled, “if you’d had your way, and put your sword in her back when she—”
She erupted mid-sentence, a hydraulic uncoiling from her toes up through her calves, her sword coming up off her shoulder to strike crosswise and down.
Cattlson struck back, meeting in the cross, strength absorbing the shock, stopping her cold. Their swords rang and shrieked. He roared too. And followed through, stepping into her, pushing her back by the force of their locked blades—
Tain Hu, off balance, arched back past her own center.
(Baru watched the wing beats—)
Tain Hu turned her body and her blade, declining the lock, passing all the fury of Cattlson’s press off to her right. His blade went over her right shoulder, sliding down the length of hers, and he stepped forward to keep contact, to overpower and disarm her.
Steel scream
ed where the swords crossed.
Tain Hu’s shoulders bunched in sudden anatomical relief as she turned, letting the energy of Cattlson’s step carry him forward into—
(Baru caught the movement of her hands: one glove wrapped around the blunt base of the blade, for the leverage she needed to aim—)
—the pommel of her sword. She smashed it into his brow with a sharp grunt, as if Cattlson’s ferocious bind and disarm had only been a convenient way to get his sword out of position and punch him with the back of her own.
He fell on his side on the cobblestones, stunned. The crowd howled. Muire Lo made a raw sound and leapt a little on his toes.
Tain Hu cut the skin of Cattlson’s brow with a flick of her blade, a shallow mock lobotomy just beneath his wolfshead cap, and stepped away. Her eyes met Baru’s and she grinned without calculation or mockery, a wolfish and exultant sign.
It had all lasted a second. Perhaps two.
“It goes to Baru Cormorant!” Xate Yawa cried into the silence.
The garrison troops, fearing riot, began to bang their shields before the crowd even started to roar. Muire Lo gripped Baru’s shoulder as she stood, stunned, gaping—Purity Cartone went to the Governor’s side, kneeling to help—Bel Latheman put his head in his palms and began to shake—
“The carriage!” Muire Lo hissed. “Quickly, while they’ve still got the road open!”
He pulled on her hand, but she reached out, toward Tain Hu’s lopsided grin and badly reset nose, to draw her after them, up into the carriage and safety. All around them the crowd boomed: A fairer hand! A fairer hand!
15
NOW would be the moment for rash countermoves, for sealed orders opened in the event of Cattlson’s defeat, for Xate Olake’s unsubtle men with their inelegant knives. She had won the duel, won the heart of Aurdwynn. But she had lost the last vestige of security in Treatymont.
Which could be fatal. She’d counted on Xate Yawa’s protection while the rest of her design went forward—little chance of that. And she certainly couldn’t go back to her tower, swarming with Cattlson’s guards.
“Duchess,” she called, shouting over the roar of carriage wheel on cobblestone. “I need a safe harbor.”
Tain Hu sat with her scabbard in her lap and a wolf smile that hadn’t faded since they left the plaza. “My men quarter at Duke Oathsfire’s estate in Northarbor. He’s a rival in the North, but an ally here. If you need to flee, he can get you on a ship to the mouth of the Inirein, and Duke Unuxekome can take you upriver to my keep in Vultjag.”
Where she could be pocketed and held like a coin. But at least it was an option. “Good. Muire Lo?”
“I’ll tell the driver.” He went forward.
“How long have you been waiting to do that?” Baru asked the duchess. It was impossible to keep herself from grinning back.
“Since that self-satisfied prick sailed into harbor.” She stretched her arms across the back of the carriage bench and sat like a warlord for a portrait. “He didn’t know how to fight, back then, and neither did I—I was barely a grown woman.” Her lips quirked. “But it seems my learning outpaced his.”
“It seems so.” It was so easy to be giddy. “Where did you—with the sword, I mean, how did you learn?”
“Woodsmen. Rangers. A few real skirmishes.” She shrugged. “Stakhieczi poachers from the Wintercrests come south into Vultjag in the autumn, and we fight them off.”
“You’ve killed,” Baru said, queasily fascinated.
“The man with the iron circlet,” Tain Hu replied, referencing, perhaps, some legend or intimate mark of memory. Her smile flickered, and Baru, thinking again of rashness and countermoves, reminded herself that Tain Hu was not safe, was not a known quantity. You are not the only player on the board.
She leaned across the bench to whisper in Tain Hu’s ear. Duchess Vultjag smelled of sweat and leather, of victory. “Shall I pretend to believe that Xate Yawa chose you as my second? That she meant for me to win?”
“It won’t matter,” Tain Hu murmured back. “She and her brother believed it was too soon to back you, even after you offered them the tax ships. They wanted you wounded and taken out of play. But I’ve broken ranks and put my vote behind you. If we can show them that we have a chance, they’ll come along.”
“Why?” she asked, meaning not why will they come along, but—
Tain Hu’s lips kept careful distance from her ear. “Because I think you’ve realized that who you are will forever hold you back from what you deserve. Because I know you’re selfish, calculating, and farsighted, and when you find no way forward through the Falcresti maze, you’ll resort to tearing it down. I knew it even when you ruined my counterfeits. I knew you’d tire of the chains.” She gripped Baru’s shoulder and bore down painfully, her gloves studded, her strength obvious. “But my support will come at a cost.”
* * *
THE riots that rocked Treatymont over the next few days ran the garrison out of acid wash. Xate Yawa’s courts declared an amnesty and set up clinics where the burned could put down their names and collect soothing ointment. Baru imagined the judicial clerks diligently copying those names into hidden ledgers, referencing them against known pseudonyms, building tables and matrices of the guilty. Recrimination would come. The Masquerade never failed to punish the smallest insurrection.
Despite his careful protests, she sent Muire Lo back to her tower to make excuses for her absence. He wrote, mornings and evenings, but the businesslike brevity of his notes—tax yields on target; Governor Cattlson occupied with great unrest and his own private matters; Xate Yawa asks about your health—made it clear his letters were being watched.
And Baru, too, knew she was being watched, watched and judged, though the means were not secret. Tain Hu had chosen her price carefully, made her instructions clear. She would wait in Oathsfire’s estate, and Tain Hu would send for her.
One morning soon after, Baru came down the stairs to find a Stakhi woman in a simple wool dress, her long straw hair braided and coiled. “Your Excellence,” she said, and bowed.
Baru recognized the bow. It caught her and held her frozen between two steps. “Ake Sentiamut.”
The woman smiled courteously. If she remembered what Baru had done to her—that offhand order, disposing of Tain Hu’s agent in the Fiat Bank, that callously simple fire her—it showed only in the tightness around her eyes. Without her bearskin she was rail thin, almost emaciated. Perhaps it was not the bearskin alone she had lost.
“The duchess sent me.” She carried a small case of inlaid wood. “I will be your guide to Treatymont’s slums.”
“Why?”
“As a lesson. The duchess wants you to see the plight of the commoner.” She offered the wooden case. “You’ll need this. Your face is too well known.”
It was full of Falcresti cosmetics, of the kind Bel Latheman had used so expertly. Beneath the lid was an etching of a deer in its antler morph. Baru considered the powders and jars with skepticism. “I think,” she said, “that it will be very difficult to disguise me as a man.”
Ake’s lips twitched. “We will leave that art to Her Grace, Your Excellence. Cosmetics can be a woman’s disguise as well as a man’s ornament.” She paused delicately. “I know their use well. And I am not unpracticed with Maia skin.”
Baru, curious, uncertain, offered her the case.
Ake took her into the drawing room and made her sit very still. Baru tried to speak without moving her face, as if her skull were a porcelain mask. “Did you learn cosmetics from Bel Latheman?”
Ake chewed on the tip of her tongue in concentration, applying some mark or line to Baru’s forehead. “No. I taught him.”
Baru frowned, making Ake cluck. “But it’s a Falcresti art, and he was always so fashionable.”
“He was a shy man, poorly raised. He struggled with the expectations of his station.” Ake’s brush tickled Baru’s eyelashes. “I helped him become a man Cattlson could respect.”
&nb
sp; Baru’s curiosity drove her past propriety. “But how did you learn?”
“My husband worked as an entertainer on the docks. Oriati ships came in to harbor. There were lamen in the crews who taught him.”
“Ah.” Baru’s upbringing armed her to understand this, at least; when lamen went among societies with only two sexes, they often chose to pass as a man or a woman, and became expert at it. “And was your husband ever released?”
Ake did not pause her work. “So you remember.”
Baru wished, now, that she had taken the conversation somewhere else. The starved shape of Ake’s body said that her last three years, the years after Baru had destroyed her, had been unhappy. But it was done. “It puzzles me that you would help Bel Latheman master his station, even while other Falcresti held your husband for sedition. Even while you were Tain Hu’s agent in the Fiat Bank.”
Ake finished and began to put her instruments away. “It puzzles me,” she said, “that you would crush Tain Hu’s rebellion, and then make yourself into a rebellion of your own. But I am a commoner. Perhaps I have no mind for games of power.”
Her eyes were evasive, deferential. But perhaps, Baru thought, this was her own art, to hide herself behind propriety. They all had their own arts of passage. “Show me what your duchess wants me to see.”
Ake Sentiamut took her out into the streets in common garb. “Hide your teeth,” she warned. “They will break your disguise. These parts of Treatymont are not friendly to the noble.”
They walked north and east, out of Northarbor and its brawny salt-caked arcades, into Little Welthon where dockworkers and divers and laborers all kept their families. “I work for a chemist now,” Ake explained as they went. “A Falcresti man.”
“Out here?” Falcresti expatriates kept to the neighborhoods near Southarbor and the garrisons, where they could hide their children from the Iolynic tongues and Maia temptations of the broader city, lining their streets with hired mummers whose job was simply to fill the air with Aphalone—long quotes from revolutionary manuals, ambient Incrasticism for the infants and the youth.
The Traitor Baru Cormorant Page 20