THE storm crashed ashore.
The rebels called it a blessing from ykari Himu, whose virtues included spring, birth, genius, leadership, war, hemorrhagic diseases, and cancer, all the forms of energy and excess, including the hot open water of the Ashen Sea and the storms it spawned.
As long as there had been sailors on the Ashen Sea, ships obeyed the law of seasons: in summer, ride the trade winds clockwise around the sea, from Falcrest to the Oriati Federations to Taranoke and onward past western lands until you come at last to Aurdwynn. Or voyage against the wind if your oars and sails and seamanship permit it, accepting the costs in time and labor, trusting in your navigators if you venture away from the coast.
But once the autumn storms begin, get your ships to harbor. No voyage, no matter how swift, no matter how close to shore, can be considered safe. The trade winds will betray you and vicious new currents will cast you up on the rocks.
Whether Scylpetaire made the journey to Falcrest no agent of the rebellion could say. But with the early storm they had won a powerful victory. The easy ways between Falcrest and Treatymont were cut.
Any reinforcements would have to come by land, through snow and rock and frozen marsh, across the Inirein. And Oathsfire had dropped the bridges there, blocked the risky fords with his phalanxes. The marines, Falcrest’s lash, would not arrive until spring.
* * *
THE storm reached Vultjag, scattering the kettles of birds that circled the forest, swelling the river Vultsniada that ran through the valley, spilling its last rain against the slopes of the Wintercrests and Tain Hu’s keep. Baru stood on the battlements and let herself soak, shivering in wet broadcloth, trying to feel cold and small and insignificant.
Like an idiot. If she fell ill there would be no saving her, not here in the north of Aurdwynn, far from Masquerade medicine. She had left the coast and Unuxekome’s house behind and gone into the farthest north. Safer, yes, but easier, here, to feel far from things, to pretend she could hide and be small, to deny the burden she had lifted.
Rebellion.
From The Antler Stone she’d come to imagine rebellion as a creature of banners and fields, riots and mobs, secret signs and families divided. Swift and harsh as wildfire.
It had been two months since Welthony harbor, since Radaszic’s disastrous march on Treatymont. Except for the uprising in Erebog, there had been no great battles, no dramatic betrayals. Just a slower, more powerful unrest, a movement of the earth, a stirring disease.
The Masquerade’s most powerful military discovery had come early in its history: battles didn’t kill soldiers. Plague and starvation killed soldiers, the slow, structural forces of conflict.
Maybe rebellion was the same. A change in structures. Like a bridge bending under wind and wave.
Tain Hu moved flags and symbols around the maps in her plotting room with agonizing imprecision. Here, the shape of a mask, going south: Masquerade formations withdrawing, raiding granaries and fields as they went. Farmers and ducal levies turning out to oppose them in a thousand tiny skirmishes that stoked resentment and hate. “We win these,” Tain Hu said, “even when we lose.”
Letters reported a string of peculiar assassinations. Ducal secretaries, freetown ombudsmen, ilykari priests, trade factors. Someone chiseling at the bridge between serfdom and nobility. This troubled Baru because it was so clever. It spoke to real talent in the Masquerade command. Cattlson had his strengths, and one of them was his instruments, the Clarified, the web of technocrats around him.…
The rebel dukes readied for war.
Like the others, Tain Hu had levied her able-bodied men and women—they appeared on the map as little pins, each one a phalanx ready to march. But the levies were temperamental creatures, their loyalty kept by salaries and the promise of reward. Fighters would set down their arms and go home if payment came late, or their families needed them, or morale fell, or an omen struck, or this, or that. So there were two other kinds of soldiers: professional cavalry, terribly rare in the North, and the all-important rangers who would rule the winter.
Baru left the soldiering to Tain Hu.
Soldiers were an Aurdwynni duke’s answer to the problem of war. But Aurdwynn had not conquered the Masquerade, which meant that Aurdwynn’s answers weren’t enough. Baru turned her own attention to the greater problems, the problems a Falcresti would address.
Reports came too slow, and often proved inaccurate. This drove Baru mad. (Only now, deprived of its vast sprawl, did she fully appreciate the Imperial Accountant’s subordinate bureaucracy). So she ordered every duke to detach a section of their cavalry—yes, she’d insisted, I don’t care how precious they are to you, how badly you need them to prance around to herald your arrival, news is more precious still—to form a messenger corps.
A problem there. Most of the cavalry were illiterate.
Fucking hell, but of course, of course—no one raised in a white-walled Masquerade school would ever become ducal cavalry. After a few cups of wine Baru hit on a solution—incorporate the scattered ilykari priests as scribes. They knew old Iolynic and they had their own ecclesiastical codes. Once the protocols reached Erebog and Unuxekome, Baru hoped they could deliver a stream of secure information from the full reach of rebel territory.
“Is this how you’ll lead?” Tain Hu sometimes came to her study to mock her. “Bolted up behind a desk, ink-stained and often drunk?”
“This is how your conquerors overcame you. This is their strength.” Baru shook a cramp out of her wrist. “And I’m nowhere near drunk.”
“I can correct that.”
“Go away,” Baru said, laughing.
* * *
AS ever, there was the money.
The dukes wanted to split up the tax plunder. The very idea panicked Baru—separate treasuries, separate policies, mismanagement and graft. So she cornered Duke Lyxaxu at a council in his home, High Stone, leaving Oathsfire and Tain Hu to trade barbs while she herded him out into a marble-floored rotunda with a breathtaking view of autumn forest below. The towering Student-Berserkers he used as bodyguards waited at a polite remove.
“How are the accounts?” he asked.
“Too fat. We need to buy food and war material. We have the craftsmen we need to make weapons, and the granaries to survive the winter. Now we need to feed that engine.” More than anything else, the rebels needed to turn their gold and silver into spears and bread.
“I understand the need.” Memory of desperate winters in his eyes. “How can I help?”
“I need control of the money,” she told him. “Every coin.”
He arranged his mantle against the chill, taking care with each crease and fold. He was graying and slim, and up here the wind sang dry and cold as starlight. “You think I can give you that?”
“I’m certain you can.”
“But I only have my own share.” There was a kind of curiosity in his eyes when he spoke to her, as if he expected strange words and foreign connections, ligatures of philosophy that he could savor and tug at and try to take apart. “How will I take Oathsfire’s? Unuxekome’s?” A spark of wicked delight in his eyes. “Do you have another trick of finance? I came out quite poorly from your last maneuver.”
“They look up to you.” Maybe he wanted her to say this. “You’re the philosopher-duke with the books of ancient wisdom. When you act, they watch your example. When you give me your share they will know their best mind has faith in me. And if they aren’t persuaded—” She smiled dryly. “I know how persistent your letters can be.”
“Mm. It might be so. Oathsfire takes my counsel, when it suits him. Certainly others have done well for themselves by mimicking my successes … and avoiding my failures.” He turned away, stepped to the edge of the rotunda to consider the forest far below. “You want me to help you be more than a figurehead. And in exchange?”
“In exchange?” Lyxaxu, of all of them, should understand why she needed this. “I do my job. I guarantee the fiscal security of the rebellion.”
“Yes. You preserve the common good.” Here the trees were not all conifers. Lyxaxu watched the wind peel the forest canopy of its autumn dead and throw the leaves up toward the mountains. Baru caught a little sigh of appreciation. “But we’re bargaining, aren’t we? Wouldn’t I be a fool to do this for you without some personal gain?”
Baru would have caught his shoulder and pulled him around if it weren’t for his height: she would only be emphasizing the difference and giving him a kind of power. “If you insist on playing the rebellion for your own benefit then we will all go into the Cold Cellar together. Is that how you want this to end?”
He looked at her over his shoulder, eyes narrow above the silver marten-skin. The great storm of leaves blew across the sky behind him, troubling birds. “I miss the man who would rise to that argument. I miss Lyxaxu the philosopher-duke, moved by grand selfless ideas; he was a good man to be. But that man—I hesitate to call him a duke at all, knowing what I do now—led his people into starvation. That man watched his neighbor and student, his boorish venal ill-read goat of a friend, grow wealthy and fat by being very selfish indeed. Can you imagine how that felt? To counsel a man out of boyhood, only to see him surpass you? To see his people prosper while yours wept and ate their rags?”
The wind fell off. Baru spoke softly, to show respect for the confidence Lyxaxu offered. “Perhaps it means you counseled him well.”
The marten-skin mantle tricked her. For one instant she saw not a man but a rabid fox, his eyes sharp with wit, hot with rage. And she sensed the things he might have said, an arsenal of plain pointed words to remind her that she faced an equal, a mind that would not be turned by flattery or indirection.
But part of that cunning was restraint. Lyxaxu did not lash out.
“No,” he said. “It was my turn to learn a lesson from Oathsfire. No philosophy will feed my daughters. No common good will buy grain for my serfs.”
The cold made her shiver, but Baru held his eyes and offered terms. “I can arrange for some of the money to vanish. How much will you need?”
“I don’t want money. I want a promise—better: a contract.” He lifted himself from the rail to turn back toward her, and again something in the motion of leaf and wind fed Baru an illusion, as if Lyxaxu were unwrapping the man from the marten-skin, or concealing the fox. “Play the others as you must. Lead Oathsfire and Unuxekome around by their dreams of dynasty. Feed the Xates with blood and poison to keep their teeth from your neck. All this I understand: revolution is a filthy business, and prices must be paid. But Duchy Lyxaxu is not your coin. Do you understand? My home is mine. When it comes time to sacrifice—spend another.”
A deeper cold moved along her spine, like the ghost of an obsidian blade. Lyxaxu saw too much. “They will all ask me this. Who would not?”
“And you will lie to satisfy them. But not to me.” He held out his hand. “This will be the truth.”
They shook. Lyxaxu looked over her shoulder. “We should go back in and see to Oathsfire,” he said. “Before Vultjag kills him.”
* * *
BARU got her money. Lyxaxu gave his share, and as she’d expected, all the others followed. She went back to her study at Vultjag and made arrangements.
The rebellion had touched off a crisis of confidence and a spectacular crash in the Masquerade fiat note. This was ideal—everyone now preferred silver and gold, which meant a little rebel coin could buy a lot of wheat or flour or salt.
“Oh,” Vultjag said, following Baru’s explanation. “So we’ve gotten wealthier just by sitting here? No wonder you became an accountant.”
Baru had to be wary; Cattlson would try to trick the rebels into buying poisoned or weevil-ridden grain. So she arranged for Xate Olake’s agents to steal a set of official seals from Treatymont. With these she could forge purchase orders from the Masquerade government.
Her instruments were ready. Time to provision the rebellion for winter.
For this she reached out to Oathsfire. He’d made his fortune trading along the Inirein, running goods up from Duchy Unuxekome and into the North, dodging taxes and playing arbitrage. He gave her the cutout agents and smugglers she needed, her own makeshift Imperial Trade Factor. She wrote contracts backed with rebel gold, payable on delivery, and even delighted the smugglers and merchants with the first insurance policies they’d ever seen.
“I have concerns,” Oathsfire wrote, “that they may insist on such generous terms in the future, making business difficult.” She ignored him.
Food, wood, and metals began to flow north, filling out the granaries and stockpiles. The need for salt, their only reliable preservative, was desperate—Duke Autr would not sell to the rebellion without the consent of the duchess Nayauru, leaving the rebels dependent on sea salt from Unuxekome.
Desperate, too, was Baru’s need for a staff. Coordinating purchases and transit from Vultjag’s isolated valley posed an impossible challenge. She needed a trustworthy agent, someone she could send south to Welthony to manage Unuxekome’s ports, someone who would understand what she wanted without needing a letter to confirm it.
A secretary.
At the southern pass, Vultjag’s armsmen at the fellgate raised a banner: unknown riders coming.
* * *
“NO,” Baru said, and then, more softly, her mind taking better measure of it, “oh no.”
“You can’t see him,” Tain Hu said, and took Baru’s shoulders, to stop her from bolting toward the carriage.
Baru let herself be drawn to heel. Stared, hollow, at the mud-splattered carriage that had come to a halt just beneath the gates of Vultjag’s waterfall keep, at its veiled windows, its pus-yellow warning flag. At the yellow-jacketed drivers.
The yellowjackets were survivors, immune. The flag predated the Masquerade occupation, but it still meant the same thing: plague. Some Aurdwynni sickness, some ferocious hybrid, brewed in this cauldron of bloodlines and cattle, the rats and fleas of five civilizations.
An infected passenger.
“I’ll call to him from outside,” she said, toneless, her detachment involuntary and inadequate. “He’ll hear me.”
“No one gets close.” Tain Hu’s boots made wet phlegm noises in the mud. She circled Baru, to stay between her and the carriage. “He’s traveled in quarantine all the way from Treatymont. If he passes one flea, one breath … you understand? The winter keeps us huddled close. I had this pox when I was a child. My parents had it, too. I became duchess very young.”
“A note, then,” Baru begged. “A palimpsest. We’ll wear gloves. Let me write to him.”
Tain Hu’s eyes softened. “I’ll carry it between you. I have immunity.”
“You could give whatever he writes to me—”
“No. You can’t touch anything that’s been near that carriage.”
“You could hold it up for me to read.”
Anger folded the corners of Tain Hu’s mouth, softened, after a moment, by a stroke of something warmer that passed almost instantly back into irritation. “He’ll have to dictate the message to me. Nothing leaves that carriage. I’ll read your messages to each other. You’ll write what you want me to say—”
“But I can’t write anything you can read to him,” Baru said, amazed at the incredible, stupid injustice of it: Tain Hu couldn’t read her Aphalone script, and Baru couldn’t write in Iolynic.
The irony of it almost ripped a wild laugh from Baru. The plague signs were Aurdwynni, but the paranoia, the doctrines of quarantine, were Masquerade, were the basics of Incrastic hygiene.
The liquor of empire. Everywhere.
“Dictate your messages to me,” Tain Hu said, taking command, plucking the simple solution out of Baru’s grief. “I’ll take them down in Iolynic. Or, if you prefer, I can bring a translator.”
An armsman brought a palimpsest. Baru stood beneath the overhanging battlements, huddled against the cold and rain, and wrote in runny black ink:
To His Excellence Muire Lo, the acting Imperial Accountant, once secretary to Baru Cormorant: Baru Fisher sends her regards. She knows no finer candidate for the position. No more capable or deserving mind.
She began another sentence, at first an apology, then a thanks, and then, in the end, just a sharp strikethrough. She could say something else after Muire Lo’s reply. The translator came out of the keep, bowing to her duchess and the Fairer Hand, and did her work swiftly.
Tain Hu went to the carriage, walking into the invisible potentiality, the immanence of plague. Could she be sure it was the same pox she’d had, and that she was immune? Perhaps so. She spoke to the drivers, poised on the balls of her feet. Accepted something from them—a letter in a horn case—read it under the rain-shield of her cloak, and then returned it. Went to the windows of the carriage, lifted a veil, spoke softly to the glass.
Baru’s stomach felt glassy, a decanter, an acid flask.
Tain Hu returned, her head bowed, stopping a long shout away. The mud caked her boots. “I’m sorry,” she said. “The nurse says he’s asleep. I think I heard him coughing, but he didn’t reply.”
“Ah.” Baru swallowed. “The letter the drivers gave you? Is it from Xate Yawa?”
“Her brother, I think—it used one of his ciphers. Xate Yawa seized Muire Lo for interrogation so that Cattlson couldn’t get to him first. He was too close to you to escape suspicion, and he would have been given to the Clarified if she didn’t put him in the Cold Cellar. When the Xates had a chance, they arranged for him to escape prison and leave Treatymont. But the prisons are unsanitary, the old sewers backed up by rain, the drinking water not always properly boiled … there was sickness among them.…”
“Ah,” Baru said.
“He was lucid when they passed through Haraerod. But he relapsed.” Tain Hu took a step back, as if afraid her words would be infectious, too. “Nothing can be done for him in the North except what the yellowjackets have already done. We can only wait.”
Wait. As Baru had waited to warn him. And look what that had done.
Baru turned away and went back into the keep, her steps filthy, accretive, heavy with mire. At the portcullis she stopped and began to kick the stone, trying to get herself clean.
Tain Hu did not call after her.
She went up to her high tower and ordered the servants to draw a hot bath and then leave her to her work. Tain Hu, delayed by the need to bathe and smoke her own clothes, was not there to tell the yellowjackets to wait when they next checked on their passenger, was not anywhere her servants knew to look for her when they tried to send word. And so it was the next morning when Baru learned that the body of the man in the carriage had been taken out into the forest and burnt.
* * *
WHEN her control faltered it let slip rage: jaw-splitting, teeth-breaking, thought-killing anger, minute and obsessive in its detail, omnivorous in its appetite. Anger at every choice and circumstance that had brought the world to this unacceptable state.
Fury against causality.
And as she traced the chain, the knot, the map of all the roads that had brought Muire Lo to ash in the forest—at the center of the map, between the thickets of empire and revolt, she came, again and again, to herself. Her fury had nothing else to eat and so it began to eat her. She sat at her table with her trembling pen and wrote nothing.
Into the fire came a knock.
Tain Hu stood at the door of the study, her boots immaculate. She held two scabbards in the crooks of her arms.
“I don’t want to duel,” Baru said, absurdly self-conscious of her loose gown and bare feet. She’d plundered Vultjag’s wardrobe. Everything was too long.
“So be it.” Tain Hu stepped past and set the two scabbards on Baru’s worktable, covering the notes. “I’ll leave them there. You can use them when you want to make me leave.”
Her gaze was direct, but she picked at a loose thread on her tabard, at first with a slow, considered rhythm, and then in impatient yanks.
Baru poured a glass of unwatered wine, and then, after a purse-lipped pause, a second. Tain Hu accepted with a nod and a murmur. They waited in silence for some externality, a falling book or a crash of thunder, to give them permission to speak or act.
“He could have been very useful,” Tain Hu said.
“He always was.” The dry benediction felt like satire, a cheap joke, a pretense of mourning come too early. She wondered if Tain Hu could hear the bitterness in her phrasing: “He’ll be missed.”
The angle of Tain Hu’s gaze deflected a few degrees, a rudder bracing against an expected gust. “You were close to him.”
A range of lies and misdirections, careful admixtures of the truth, diluted by implication: I cared about him. He helped me come this far. We were friends. I never thanked him.
But they felt stale, pointless, rotten. Instead she said the harder, truer thing: “I trusted him. Unwisely. But I did.”
And Tain Hu frowned and nodded, as if she understood. “Trust is precious,” she said. “And hard to share.” She twisted the loose thread around her fingers. “I’m sorry they didn’t trust him. I’m sorry they didn’t trust you with him.”
“What?” Baru frowned for a moment, puzzled, and then stepped back, her weight on her right heel, stumbling in place. “Xate Yawa? Her brother? No. They didn’t.”
They had known Muire Lo’s letters went to Falcrest. Xate Yawa’s woodsman had made sure of that.
“I don’t know.” As Tain Hu spoke, Baru wished that she would stop being honest, so that she would find nothing new that hurt. But she continued, merciless: “I might have done it, in their place. I might not have trusted the Imperial Accountant’s secretary in the heart of the rebellion, out of my reach. He had been to Falcrest, and he was sent back. They would have suspected his purpose as a check on you, and marked him as a threat. Perhaps they thought they were helping you.”
Baru saw her own reaction reflected in the taut muscles of Tain Hu’s neck and shoulders, the readiness of her stance. But even in the face of Baru’s fury Tain Hu did not speak in anger.
“It is very dangerous,” she whispered, in sympathy, in warning, “for those in our position to admit emotion. It will always be taken as weakness.”
Baru nodded, a cold acknowledgment, a recognition from strength, passing over in that instant of conversation all the admissions and disclosures that might have unfolded, the shapes of the invisible cages around them.
Then she said, just as she realized it: “But if I had never asked them to send Muire Lo…”
If she had never called for him—
“I don’t know,” Tain Hu said. That awful honesty. “Maybe the sickness in the jails was real, and you were the best chance he had to get out. Maybe it was them, and if you hadn’t asked, they would have let him live. I don’t know.” She jerked the loose thread out of her tabard and considered it as if seeing it for the first time. “Will you look for revenge?”
“No. It would be an error. None of us can afford an error.” Baru set down her rattling wineglass. “Not one mistake. The stakes are too high.”
“No,” Tain Hu murmured. “Too high.”
Baru raised her hand to smash the wineglass. Checked herself, checked even her trembling, and stood there in absurd pantomime, too firmly in control of her anger to move, too deeply angry for anything but stillness.
Tain Hu stepped closer, her own hand raised, as if to save the wineglass, or Baru’s fist. “At Welthony I knew I wouldn’t have to kill you,” she said. “I knew you’d pass the tests. I always had faith.”
“There is no one,” Baru said thinly, bitterly, “in whom I can place my own faith. Nowhere I can show myself unmasked.”
Tain Hu shook her head reproachfully. “A man died. Think of his loss, not your own.”
Baru nodded, chastened, infuriated, paralyzed.
The Duchess Vultjag stood close by. For a moment Baru thought of their confrontation in the ballroom of the Governor’s House, of Tain Hu’s lure, her fierce dark eyes, her parted lips, her slow breath, and she felt that in some way Tain Hu stood unmasked, and was the more dangerous for it. But she was not afraid.
“He brought you something in the carriage,” Tain Hu said. She averted her eyes midway through the sentence, to protect Baru or herself. “A notebook. The yellowjackets say he’d kept it hidden and safe, even in prison.”
Baru’s heart skipped. “What did he write?”
“He’d shredded all the pages.” Tain Hu shook her head. “They were just pulp. Perhaps he was feverish. I wanted you to know, before we burned it too.”
Ah. That notebook.
“Go,” Baru choked, pushing clumsily. Static snapped when she touched Vultjag’s shoulders. “I—please—go.”
Tain Hu hesitated at the threshold, as if reluctant, hungry, craving still something left unsaid or unwitnessed. But she left and closed the door before Baru put her head down and, broken by this last loyalty, by Muire Lo’s scrupulous destruction of the Stakhi woodsman’s book and the sins it implied, at last began to weep.
* * *
WHEN she descended from her tower and went through the whispering passages of the waterfall keep to the greathall, she found the war council waiting for her, Tain Hu at the foot of the table. “The Fairer Hand,” Tain Hu called, and the armsmen and ranger-commanders, men and women from the families named Sentiamut and Awbedyr and Hodfyri and Alemyonuxe, murmured with her.
“We’re leaving Vultjag,” Baru said. “Gather the woodsmen and the hunters. Make ready to march.”
A ripple of unease. “Why now?” Tain Hu asked, though her eyes were curious. “Surely it is too soon.”
“We will not spend the winter in our keeps and valleys while the Masquerade readies the ground for spring and war.” Baru took the back of the high chair at the near end of the table and moved it sharply across the stone, a terrible sound. “We’ll move through the forests. Travel light. Live by forage.”
“To what end?” Ake Sentiamut asked, as the others muttered about starvation and cold, about an islander woman ordering them to march in winter.
To what end, indeed? To the end she had found in her grief, in her obsessive study of the tear-spotted maps. A way to reach the scattered vales and hamlets, the commoners and craftsmen and, before the spring, make them part of the revolt.
A way to become formless, ineffable, beyond the reach of the Masquerade and its spies, its clockwork plans and careful schedules of recrimination. She’d provisioned the rebellion, arranged investments and lines of communication, because that was the way to victory—and now she had a way to extend that strength, a way to build the logistics of rebellion on cold dangerous ground. A way to win the Traitor’s Qualm by showing the Midland dukes a power more real than the enemy’s, older yet more immediate, an Aurdwynni power, a power born not of coin and calculation but from the land.
And a way to get past those dukes and go directly to the people who had filled out her tax rider, who’d painted so much of her map blue.
“To show the people of Aurdwynn that we have the initiative. To prove to them, and their dukes, that we are real. That even in winter we fight for them.” She met the eyes of each fighter at the table, one by one. “Leave to the Masquerade the keeps and the roads, the sewers and the ports. They are summer lambs. It will be winter soon, and we will be as wolves.”
Tain Hu rose from her place and drew her sword. Those gathered around the table looked to her, silent, breathless.
“The Fairer Hand,” she intoned, and setting her blade flat across her knee, she knelt. “This is my vow: in life, in death, I am yours.”
“You will be my field-general.” Baru reached down to draw her up, and Tain Hu took her hand to rise, glove in glove, her grip fierce, her eyes golden. “Choose your captains and lieutenants.”
The gathered fighters rose, knelt, rose again. Baru looked across them, still hollow with grief, the hollow filled in turn with a cold exhilaration. She could survive this loss. She could make advantage out of any grief.
At her side, Tain Hu looked to the ducal armorer. “She will need a suit of mail. And a better scabbard for her saber.” And then, whispering in her ear: “Before we march. Do you want to see where they burnt him?”
“Yes,” Baru said. “Yes.” And then: “Will you come?”
INTERLUDE:
WINTER
THE march began.
The word of their passage went ahead of them, carried by huntsmen and trappers, greatened by the mechanisms of rumor until it became a declamation, a prophecy. When they crossed from Vultjag forests into Oathsfire land they found the commoners calling them coyote. Tain Hu, stirred by the rhetoric of the war council, had wanted to be the Army of the Wolf, but Baru preferred the wisdom of the commoner’s name.
Where civilization had purged the wolf the coyote still flourished.
They traveled by foot through the dark paths mapped by generations of woodsmen, light-armored and swift, armed with bow and hunting spear. The army split into loose columns, divided by family. When forage was lean they subsisted on beer, Aurdwynn’s favorite source of sterile, portable calories.
They stopped at villages and ducal outposts to provision against scurvy, to buy salted meat and winter fare with stolen tax gold, spending more wealth than the common man saw in a decade. Wherever the villages had phalanxes, they offered training. Where there were woodsmen and hunters, the Coyotes accepted volunteers.
Tain Hu and her deputies kept harsh order. At every crossroads Baru met with riders from the messenger corps, taking their reports, sending out orders and missives to the other rebel dukes.
Autumn crashed down into winter. Snow covered the forests and made swan wings out of the boughs. Baru woke in the morning colder than she had ever been, her limbs stiff, toes absent, and stumbled out into the dawn desperate to move, to eat, to do anything warm and vital under the pale sun. Tain Hu laughed at her, and then sobered suddenly. “You’ve never seen a winter before.”
“In Treatymont, of course. But—”
“Not enough.” Tain Hu called out to her guard. “Ake! Ake, you will accompany the Fairer Hand. If she shows sign of sickness or scurvy—”
“I am not so fragile,” Baru said.
“We are fragile.” Tain Hu took her by the shoulders, so she would listen. “If we lose you, Baru Fisher, we lose everything. Remember that.”
She could not stop herself from shivering. “I miss my office,” she said, trying to smile. “It had better plumbing.”
Tain Hu laughed, and swept an open arm to the forest around them. “Welcome to my home.”
They doubled back through Oathsfire land, then crossed Lyxaxu into their newest ally, Duchy Erebog. Their ranks swelled. They foraged too widely, and the wolves bayed hunger behind them.
Sickness and madness struck with the cold. Men died trembling of scurvy or drew choleric water from fouled wells and froze in pools of their own bowel. They left a trail of unburied corpses on the frozen ground. Again and again Baru woke in the night from dreams of broken gears and empty-eyed masks and found herself so cold that she could not move, as if her will itself had frozen. It began to feel like creeping madness. The spells did not stop coming until Ake Sentiamut saw something feverish and rabid in her eyes, and began to take her out into the night to teach her Aurdwynn’s constellations. Somehow this made sleep easier. But it did not warm her numb hands, or ease the sight of scurvied men whose bleeding gums left red trails in their porridge bowls, or comfort the parents of all the dead children they helped burn.
She had always loved the stars. But in the desert of winter it was impossible to forget that they were cold, and distant, and did not care.
Madness led to bloodshed.
A southern column under one of Lyxaxu’s ranger-knights strayed into Duchy Nayauru and, finding itself unwelcome at a trapping camp, butchered the families there. Baru, desperate not to alienate the Dam-builder, sent emissaries to Duchess Nayauru to pay blood money. Tain Hu executed the column’s commander. Outrage—at the slaughter, at the discipline—cost the Army of the Coyote good fighters.
They had to be liberators. Not bandits. The Coyote was an army at service, a reverse brigand, bursting out of the woods to raid the innocent with money and safety and hope.
In Duchy Erebog, where the Crone in Clay struggled to keep order after cremating all her rebellious landlords in the kilns, the Coyote patrolled the greatroads, hunted down brigands, and brought relief to towns enveloped by the snow. Here they met a strange ally.
A party of pale red-haired men and women met them on a north road in Erebog, saying in Stakhi: “We are warriors of the Mansion Hussacht. The Necessary King sent us south to find the rebel queen and watch her fortunes. We slaughtered the Mask at Jasta Checniada. Take us in, and we will slaughter more.”
This news gave Baru Fisher wild dreams, and she invited their captain, Dziransi, to join her column, where, through translators, she questioned him about the Stakhieczi and the politics of the distant land beyond the mountains, so dreaded by the Masquerade. “Be careful of him,” Tain Hu warned. “The Stakhieczi mansions have been silent too long. He was sent south with a purpose.”
“Purposes are useful. Mutual interests give us ground for alliance.”
“Or perhaps the Stakhieczi hope to complete the conquest they abandoned so long ago. They are stoneworkers. That makes them patient architects.”
Baru smiled. “I am glad to have your vow,” she said. “It takes two to keep track of all our fears.”
Winter’s bitterest months lay ahead. “We must find camp,” the war council advised. “We must winter in a safe valley.”
But Baru Fisher ordered them south, into the Midlands duchies, a trespassing army, an outrage and an act of war. They passed through abandoned Masquerade forts and raised their own flags: an open hand, for Baru, or a design of coin and comet, for the alliance between the Fairer Hand and the Duchy Vultjag. Word went ahead of them. When they came to Duchy Nayauru’s villages, they found commoners waiting to give them beer, furs, shelter, and hand-sewn flags.
They marched through the Midlands, drawing new blood faster than they shed corpses, counting on their gold to offset the damage done by forage. At last, frostbitten and fierce, the Army of the Coyote met the phalanxes and horsemen of the duchess Ihuake, centerpost of the Midlands Alliance. The defenders ostentatiously blocked the way, denying access to the roads—but covered their eyes in mock blindness as the Coyote columns passed through the woods between them, and even sent five hundred bowmen and two hundred goats loaded with provisions “to ensure good conduct.”
“The Duchess of Cattle knows your power,” one of the Ihuake captains told Baru. “She is watching you.”
Good, Baru thought, good—watch and judge. Weigh my strength. Consider the choice you will make in the spring.
Victory demanded that she break the Traitor’s Qualm.
* * *
IN the darkest days of winter, too cold to snow, the transient sun glaring on the ice, Baru Fisher walked the length of the forage line, her moccasins whispering. At her side strode the ranger-knight and duchess Tain Hu, whose woodcraft was known in the North, where they called her the eagle, and in Treatymont, where they called her that brigand bitch.
The Fairer Hand and her field-general joined the hunters and showed their talent with the bow, their vigor, their keen eyes and clear level voices, their trust in the seasoned men who led the stalk. Wherever they went the weary wavering Army of the Coyote bristled with hope.
In warmer days of autumn they had slipped away together, Tain Hu exercising all her stealth, so that she could teach Baru how to string and fire a bow in secret, her tutorship harsh, often impatient. “You must appear a master,” she insisted. “They would forgive an Aurdwynni a missed shot, forgive a man who struggled to string. But never you. Your errors will be written on your blood and sex. You must be flawless.”
“The draw,” Baru said, “is heavy.”
“Many women lack the strength.”
Baru, daughter of a huntress, a mighty spear-caster and a woman of strength, Baru who in moments of frustration or quiet always turned to the exercises and weights of the Naval System, drew with one easy breath.
Tain Hu touched Baru’s elbow, drew her spine a little straighter, pressed at the curve of her back. “Fire,” she whispered.
And all those months later in the ferocious cold beneath the pale winter sun Baru Fisher loosed an arrow with bright blue-dyed fletching and they all cried out in joy and leapt up to chase the wounded stag, crashing through the drifts, hearts pounding, lungs full of cold cutting ecstasy. When they brought the stag down Tain Hu opened its throat and helped the woodsmen dress it. All down the column they murmured of the omen, the fallen antlers, the stag of Duke Heingyl, the red of the Masquerade navy spilled across the snow.
Everywhere they marched they made it known: in the spring they would gain the loyalty of the Midlands duchies, the strength of Nayauru and Ihuake, and together they would push the Masquerade back into the sea.