THEY dared one meeting at Welthony, though Purity Cartone’s corpse had never been found, though the Stag Hunter’s cavalry or the Masquerade’s ships could sweep east and come upon them in days. They needed the certainty of voice and face before they scattered.
To the balcony of Unuxekome’s house, where the harbor wind already prickled with the end of summer, came Tain Hu and Unuxekome and Baru Fisher. Then, down the river from the north, Duke Oathsfire, the Miller, and Duke Lyxaxu, High Stone.
The others were beyond reach. Xate Yawa still played her part as Jurispotence in Treatymont, and Xate Olake wouldn’t break cover to come. Somehow this troubled Baru less than the final absence—the ilykari priestess who’d bound them all together. Baru wanted her presence. A terrible guilt had been rankling her in the night, something worse than the feverish insomniac hunger to think, to know what the Masquerade would do before even they did. A loyalty she’d betrayed.
“I thought we’d agreed she would only be the bankroll.” Stout Oathsfire had chopped off most of his beard, perhaps to look younger or more flattering. Chance had betrayed him there—he had an awful cold. “She gives us a few ships and in exchange we let her say she rules us? We all know she’ll be important afterward, if we win—but so soon?” He didn’t look at Baru here, although she expected him to. Maybe his pride couldn’t bear to touch on their last conversation, the delicate matter of kings and dynasties. “Are we already so desperate for a figurehead?”
“More than a figurehead.” Unuxekome’s casual glance and smile carried a hint of defensiveness—possessiveness, even, though Baru didn’t trust her sense for it. “She’s the only one we can rally behind. An Imperial prodigy, certified by their merit exams, turned back against them? She refutes everything they offer.”
Lyxaxu, pale and towering, his marten-skin mantle loose about his shoulders, put a hand on Oathsfire’s shoulder to restrain him. “The choice is made. The word has gone out. Whether we want it or not, this is Baru Fisher’s uprising now.”
Tain Hu leaned against the railing in her riding leathers, her back to the sea. “And yet,” she said, her eyes on Oathsfire, “you’re all very reluctant to let her speak.”
Baru took the opening—any chance to get out of the cage of ducal politics. She slapped her map of Aurdwynn down on the table, weighted by the coins bound to each corner. “Thirteen dukes of note. Four of them are here and openly committed to the rebellion.” Her eyes circled the table: the mismatched northern men, Unuxekome, Tain Hu. “And we have Xate Olake as spymaster in Treatymont, though he has no vassals or political presence. That gives us five. As for those who’ll declare for the Governor—Duke Heingyl’s lands are north and east of Treatymont, and we all know he’ll stay loyal to Cattlson even when we have him dangling from a noose.”
She touched the coastal farmland directly to the west of Heingyl’s duchy. “Radaszic is dead. We needed him, his horses, the food he could have offered us. But he leapt too early.” She slid her hand to the northwest corner of the map, imagining the miles racing beneath her, the land fracturing as it rose toward the Wintercrests. “Duchess Erebog, the Crone in Clay. Lyxaxu’s neighbor to the west. With her alliance we’d have the whole North, from Erebog in the west to Oathsfire and the River Inirein in the east. If Treatymont keeps her, they’ll be able to turn our flank, maybe even send troops into the Wintercrests to envelop us. If she doesn’t declare for us before winter, we’ll be lost.”
They stared expectantly. “And the rest?” Unuxekome asked. “The five in the Midlands? Nayauru Dam-builder, Autr Brinesalt, and Sahaule the Horsebane? Ihuake of the thousand thousand cattle and Pinjagata Spear-forest? Nayauru can’t keep two lovers and expect to be a friend of Cattlson or Falcrest. Ihuake’s too proud to accept anyone’s rule. Surely they’ll come over.”
“The Traitor’s Qualm,” Baru and Tain Hu said together. They made apologetic looks at each other, began to speak again, and—Tain Hu shrugging—finally Baru continued. “Just as Xate Olake thought. Until we prove we have a real chance, they’ll hold back and pretend loyalty.”
“What if they don’t?” Lyxaxu cocked his head in curious challenge. “Nayauru’s ambitious. Defiant. She wants a throne. She might take the chance for her own gambit.”
“I’m confident she won’t.” Lyxaxu’s intellect was useful, dangerously sharp, but sometimes it led him into useless abstraction. “Nayauru’s every bit as bound by finance and logistics as the rest of us.”
“Her bloodline is rich, her consorts strong—”
“Her bloodline means nothing. She doesn’t have the coin for war.” Baru held Lyxaxu’s eyes, facing down thirty-five years of study and all the weight that carried, until he blinked. “We have time to court Nayauru and the rest. The Midlands dukes will wait out the winter before they move.”
“Send Oathsfire,” Unuxekome said.
“What?” said Baru, as Oathsfire huffed, as Tain Hu grinned and chuckled.
Unuxekome shrugged and put his hands behind his head. His shoulders bunched impressively (Oathsfire glared). “We need Nayauru. We lose the war in the spring if we don’t win the Midlands to our side, and Nayauru is half of that alliance. So send her what she treasures. Another noble father for another heir.”
Oathsfire bristled. “I am not a brood stallion.”
“She’s quite lovely,” Tain Hu offered. “Exactly your type. Your new type, I mean.” Unuxekome made a little choked sound of mirth.
“Perhaps I’m not the best choice. Whoever we send will have to distract her from Autr and Sahaule. Someone with a laborer’s build.” Oathsfire adjusted his gloves. “A sailor might do. If we can find one with a working cock.”
Unuxekome shrugged with his upraised elbows, as if to offer the shape of his arms in answer to the jab. He’d never married. Baru supposed that was Oathsfire’s target. “Whatever the Fairer Hand prefers.”
Save her from noble men and their games of position. “What I prefer is that we leave the Midlands be until spring. Winter is our chance to make our case to them.”
“We need a bold victory, then,” Unuxekome said. “A raid. Before the autumn storms lock my fleet in harbor.”
“No. We need to withdraw.” Baru set her palm on the map, fingers aimed north. “The best thing we can do is consolidate our hold and wait out the winter. It’s the only way out.”
Unuxekome crooked a brow. “Persuade me.”
Baru stabbed Treatymont with her forefinger. “The Masquerade’s control is economic. I know—I enforced it. Their garrisons are small, their outposts undermanned compared to fortresses like Ihuake’s Pen. Falcrest has never trusted its army, because they know that republics are the natural prey of a professional military. But they are patient, thorough, methodical. They’ve never relied on the sword to conquer.
“They’ll draw their strength in to Treatymont, abandoning the Midlands, securing the coastal plains and the harvest. Bandits will take the roads they abandon. Poverty will fester in the absence of their banks. They’ll leave Aurdwynn to rot through the winter, to feel the cold of life without the Masquerade, while they keep the harvest for themselves. Come spring, when the marines land from Falcrest, when the trade winds are ready for easy shipping again, they’ll come north in campaign. Marching up through Duchy Nayauru into Duchy Erebog, then into our western flank, through Lyxaxu and Vultjag to Oathsfire. Unuxekome, you will be the target of a second thrust.” She sketched a spear thrown inland from the sea. “A naval assault on Welthony, then a push up the Inirein to meet the other column at Oathsfire’s keep. And thus we will be erased.”
Lyxaxu measured her. “It would be an error of rigor if I didn’t ask: when did you become a general?”
Blessed Lyxaxu, asking the right questions. “I’m not. I know money, logistics, shipping, and infrastructure. And those are the weapons they’ll use to defeat you.”
They were all watching her now, silent, respectful, and it gave her the same thrill she had felt auditing the Fiat Bank, speaking to Purity Cartone, hearing the adulation of the crowd—the shock of power.
“Until spring,” she told them, “most of the Duchies in Aurdwynn will, for the first time in almost a quarter of a century, be left to their own governance. Pulled between the rebellion in the north and the Masquerade to the south. We’ll have a few cold, desperate months to court them. And we have one advantage that Falcrest and Treatymont never foresaw: we are rich. We can keep our troops fed and armed through the winter. We can step in wherever the Masquerade has left them to crumble. Hold the roads open. Buy out the banks. And if the Masquerade tries to stop us—you are Northmen, are you not? If they cross the Midlands and come up into the vales and the woods, into the land we know like our fathers’ hands, struggling through the snows, we kill them.”
Tain Hu set her fists on the table. “Is this how you think we should fight, Baru Fisher? With coin and open roads?”
“No war has ever been won by slaughtering the enemy wholesale.” Baru found skepticism in Unuxekome’s eyes, on Oathsfire’s face. Only Lyxaxu looked thoughtful. “Come, Your Graces. Surely you have read it in the Dictates—war is a contest of wills. The will of the people breaks when war makes them too miserable to do anything but acquiesce. We can turn that will to us.”
“It may work,” Tain Hu said, slowly, thoughtfully. “What we need in spring are healthy cavalry and sturdy phalanxes. Cavalry rules the coastal plain, from Unane Naiu to Sieroch. If we can find enough forage during the winter, if we can keep our own armies from being pinned down or bled dry, if we can convince the Midlands to declare for us … in the spring we can ride in force.”
“They could come at us in winter across the Inirein, from Falcrest’s western reaches.” Oathsfire looked to Lyxaxu, as he always seemed to. “One march could take you, I, and Vultjag at once.”
“Not once we destroy the bridges. The river may freeze enough for a northerly crossing, but they’ll never march an army north from Falcrest to the Inirein without losing most of it to the snow.” Lyxaxu offered Baru an open palm, upraised. “I’m convinced. This will be our strategy.”
“Why not one strike before the winter?” Unuxekome pressed. “One raid on Treatymont harbor. I could take Devenynyr and gather my fleet.”
Tain Hu shook her head. “The other side of the Qualm. If we seem too strong too soon, we’ll force the undecided dukes into a choice. And they will choose the surer bet.”
“There’s one other matter,” Baru said, speaking, at last, the guilt that had been gnawing her. “A weakness I want addressed. I’ll need a ship and a way to pass a secret message to Xate Yawa.”
They waited in silence.
“There’s a man in Treatymont who needs to be smuggled out. One I couldn’t move without betraying my real allegiance.”
“No,” Tain Hu snapped. “You’ll risk Xate Yawa’s cover if you pull him out. You’d court disaster, and for what gain?”
“I want him here.” Baru stared the duchess Vultjag down, wishing, incongruously, that she still had her white mask, the impassive glaze of her station. It had gone down with Mannerslate. “He’s a liability in Masquerade hands. And he’s my responsibility.”
“Saving him would be a worse betrayal than abandoning him,” Tain Hu insisted. But her eyes roamed the other dukes, and following her, Baru saw what Vultjag must already know: Oathsfire and Unuxekome leaned in, jockeying for a chance to offer their help.
Tain Hu raised her eyes to the distant Wintercrests and said no more.
“My secretary, Muire Lo,” Baru told the men. “He’s the only one who knows my books as well as I do. Without him, Cattlson will have no way to set his accounts in order, no way to conceal his mismanagement from Parliament. He will call on Bel Latheman, who is clever—but it will not be enough. We can make it worse for them if we find and destroy the books.”
I was here during the rebellions, he’d said. I don’t want to see Aurdwynn go back to that.
Surely he’d realized what she was about to do when she sailed with the tax ships. Surely he hadn’t believed she was actually returning to Falcrest for judgment.
Surely he’d found some way to protect himself, his family—
“Xate Olake arranged for the removal of Su Olonori,” Lyxaxu said. “He could do it again.”
Baru cut him off with an upraised hand, an unwise desperation seething within her, the terrible fear that she had just caged herself. She had forgotten something vital, something that Tain Hu might know, something that Xate Yawa certainly did, because three years ago she had sent a burly Stakhieczi woodsman to watch the new Imperial Accountant, and in a smoky tavern beneath a brothel that woodsman had met Muire Lo and—
And tried to kill him, driven to rage by the knowledge that Muire Lo was an agent of Falcrest, a watcher set to guard the new Imperial Accountant. A trained spy.
What would Xate Yawa think when she learned that Baru had tried to bring Muire Lo into the rebellion? Would she go to the ilykari woman in her temple of air and light and say: tell me the secret that would destroy Baru Fisher?
Tain Hu’s eyes had left the Wintercrests. Tain Hu’s eyes dwelled on her.
It would be safest, Baru realized, to order Muire Lo’s death. It would prove her loyalty to the rebellion in the eyes of the twin Xates.
The tests would never end.
“I cannot betray him,” she said, talking at Lyxaxu, speaking to Tain Hu. “I cannot abandon him, not when I have made him seem so complicit. Permit me this one loyalty.”
“A dangerous loyalty,” Tain Hu murmured. And Baru knew that she knew, that Xate Yawa had told her about the woodsman, about Baru and Aminata in the tavern, about Muire Lo’s letters to Falcrest.
Had she ever really assured herself of Muire Lo’s loyalty? He’d kept the book with its incriminating notes, rather than sending it to Falcrest—but couldn’t Cairdine Farrier have made a copy and left the original with him—couldn’t the Masquerade in all its love of subtlety and deception arranged Muire Lo’s vulnerability and need for a moment such as this? A way to send him into the heart of the rebellion?
No. She had known him. She had known him.
“Send word to Xate Olake,” Baru told the council, her voice hard, insistent. “Tell him I want Muire Lo alive.”
Lyxaxu watched her blankly, impenetrably; but Oathsfire and Unuxekome looked at each other, a brief silent challenge, a contest.
* * *
JURISPOTENCE Xate Yawa ordered a bulletin posted on every door in Aurdwynn and read to the illiterate in every market and square:
We will execute all those who provide succor to the Imperial Accountant Baru Cormorant.
We will sterilize their families and the families of their husbands and wives. We will seize their property and award it to the loyal.
Inaction is succor. Negligence is succor.
Collaboration is death.
Give us Baru Fisher.
It was the most powerful endorsement she could have offered. Xate Yawa, sister of the forgotten Duke Lachta, the Jurispotence of Aurdwynn, killer of ilykari, arbiter of marriages, had devoted her life to building her own cult of hatred.
Now it was time to leverage that investment.
And she had created one other precious resource for the rebellion. Her years of methodical, ferocious persecution had forced the ilykari priests and their devotees to scatter and adapt, to don subtle camouflage and speak in secret new tongues, to send warnings that could outpace the Masquerade’s own sealed directives. From the oil-drenched temples in Treatymont the ilykari sent the word out through the quietly faithful, to every vale and peak, every granary and olive field and trapper’s post: justice comes from a fairer hand.
Aurdwynn had so many divisions. Consider these two souls, examples Baru plucked from tax record and Incrastic report—
An Iolynic-speaking Stakhi woodsman, gone to pray to ykari Devena for his wife’s love at a secret henge in high cold duchy Lyxaxu, where the Student-Berserkers grew their strains of mason leaf and studied philosophies of fearless death.
And a Maia olive farmer who worked in Duchy Sahaule and sang the Urun of her warlord ancestors, sang of the duchess Nayauru and her many proud lovers, of her sons and daughters who would one day rule. Sang, lately, of the cruel Duchess Ihuake, whose jealousy was thick as pus.
All they shared was this:
The sullen memory of a time more than twenty years ago when the gate to Treatymont had read AURDWYNN CANNOT BE RULED, and the understanding that one could go to the Fiat Bank and get a loan in gold from someone named Baru Cormorant, who, very recently, had won a duel with that dry tit Cattlson. (These things and, of course, a hatred of Xate Yawa.)
On this common tinder the rebellion hoped to build its fire.
And the fire spread. In the freetown Haraerod, at the heart of the Midlands, the outraged crowd seized the masked messenger who read Xate Yawa’s notice and cut out his tongue.
In Duchy Erebog, the farthest northwestern reach of Aurdwynn, a column of ghost-pale spearmen and archers overwhelmed and massacred the Masquerade garrison at Jasta Checniada, leaving the duchy’s landlords and merchants full of panicked conviction that Duchess Erebog had cast in with Baru Fisher and that the Masquerade would come for all their wealth and blood. They rose up against their duchess. Erebog spent two months putting down the uprising, and lost so much money she found herself unable to purchase food stocks for the winter. The Crone in Clay had seen seventy winters. She knew what came next—madness, cannibalism, the death of children.
The rebellion pounced. Lyxaxu sent word through the forest to his neighbor:
Erebog, old foe:
You taught me cunning. You disciplined my errors. Above all else I value a rigorous teacher, and above all others I know your strength.
Now the time for lessons is over. I want you as an ally.
Cattlson cannot save you. But we can. A loan can be arranged.
A loan stolen from the tax ships. Treasonous by nature—irrevocably bound to the uprising. But how could she refuse? She had already purged her land of the disloyal. Starvation bayed at her door.
Old Erebog declared for the rebellion.
When the report came to Tain Hu, she burst in on Baru past midnight, wild-haired and flush with wine, crying: “We have the North!”
Baru blinked up at her. “Erebog?”
“Lyxaxu bought her.” She gripped Baru’s shoulder, then the curve of her skull, that grip ferocious and exhilarated. “Well done. It was your gold. Well done.”
And so it was: all four northern duchies gathered in the rebel camp, a solid strip of forest and stone that commanded every approach to the Wintercrests and the long-silent Stakhieczi mansions beyond.
In the south the Masquerade built its reply. Xate Olake, at the center of his web in Treatymont, passed sly reports:
Duke Heingyl took counsel with Cattlson. Together they devised a solution to the riots in their capital. Heingyl’s armsmen took command of the occupation, filling the streets with Aurdwynni faces, familiar Stakhi freckles and proud Maia noses. The Masquerade garrison formations traded places with them, marching northeast to seize the late Duke Radaszic’s precious fields and granaries. The riots didn’t stop—cries of traitor! greeted Heingyl’s men—but without steel masks to hate they were starved for fuel.
Outside the city, the Masquerade’s forces staked out a great defensive semicircle.
The western flank met the sea at Unane Naiu, ancient fortress of the Maia conquerors. The circle swept east around Duchy Radaszic and Duchy Heingyl, keeping Treatymont safe at its center, until it met the western edge of Duchy Unuxekome. There Heingyl positioned his elite cavalry, a threatening arrowhead aimed toward Welthony and Unuxekome’s land on the Sieroch floodplain.
The cordon kept the rich coastal fields of Duchies Radaszic and Heingyl under Masquerade control. They were Cattlson’s best weapon—a lance of starvation thrown north.
The Governor recalled every garrison that fell outside the cordon. Abandoned the Midlands and the North. Even Xate Yawa’s social hygienists closed their offices. Methodical, defensive, patient, the Masquerade strategy left most of Aurdwynn to its own devices. “What are they doing?” Oathsfire asked, writing to Baru about matters of finance, scribbling questions in the margins. “Why not use their strength to hold the Midlands? Ihuake and Nayauru could deal them so much harm, and Cattlson needs to go through one of them to reach us. Why abandon all that land?”
And Baru replied as Xate Olake would have: “They are playing the Traitor’s Qualm. Leaving the undecided dukes room to consider their loyalties.”
Leaving them to weigh their choice while swift Scylpetaire raised anchor and set out for Falcrest, bearing the official declaration, two months after the loss of the tax ships: rebellion in the Federated Province of Aurdwynn.
And the first storm of autumn howled in off the Ashen Sea.