IS THE OATH KEPT?
She woke in the captain’s suite of her new flophouse, alone, angry, still tangled in a dream about money.
She had been a child. She was showing Cairdine Farrier her butterfly collection, her killing jar. She had a gorgeous monarch in the jar, and it was beating its wings of paper money against the glass as it died.
“Look, da,” she said, “I’ve caught money.”
“Don’t be stupid,” her mother said, giving Baru’s head an affectionate scrub with her knuckles. “If you keep money in a jar, it’s just a piece of paper. It’s worthless without the people who value it. You cannot capture money. It lives only as it moves.”
“That’s right,” Farrier said, giving her mother a kiss on the cheek. “Remind you of anything?”
It did. It reminded Baru of the Llosydanes. How could you treat a culture as separate from its connections? How could you draw a circle around it and say, “This, this is the culture, and so it will remain?” A culture wasn’t a final product, like a cup of coffee in alabaster, or a sordid climax in an execution alley. People didn’t have culture, they did culture. In fact, culture was like a mill: it accepted knowledge and people, and it changed them in certain ways, and it even redesigned itself in the process. Change was intrinsic to culture.
How could you draw a preserve around the Llosydanes and say, “They shall not be altered,” if intercourse and dialogue between cultures was culture?
And if that were true—
Then what right did Baru have to “save” Taranoke?
How could she pretend that the culture of her childhood was the right one, the one that had to be preserved, rather than the culture of a hundred years before or a hundred years after? How could she deny the arrival of Incrasticism, when her own people were the descendants of Maia arrivals on distant shores?
Cairdine Farrier had called Falcrest’s ascendancy as inevitable as the rising tide.
How could Baru fight the tide?
She rose up from her appallingly soft covers, stretched, growled, looked out the window, and saw her cousin Lao standing in the sooty, fire-touched square outside.
Baru gaped in shock. Could it be Lao? What obscene unlikeliness would put her on the Llosydanes? But the woman did have Maia skin, and those rapturously long full legs, and strong swimmer’s shoulders that Lao might have trained into, if she decided to bulk up. She wore a diver’s costume, a tightly knotted strophium, a breechcloth, an ankle knife. As divers in Aurdwynn did, she’d even shaved herself seal-smooth from head to toe except for a cap of black hair.
Baru dashed the cup of freshwater over her face, tied herself up, and wiggled back into her trousers. Someone rapped at her door. “What!” Baru called.
“Secretary of the Trade! Open up!”
Oh fuck. Baru shrugged into her jacket, snapped up her purse, and shouted, “Uh, what about?”
“We want to ask you some questions about yesterday’s events in the currency trade!”
“Right. Just a moment, I’ve got to wake up my whores!”
There was a murmur at the door. “Would you let them go in peace, please?” Baru shouted. “Just step away a minute so they can have their dignity?”
While the Secretary of the Trade waited, she got out the window, spider-climbed down the loose mortar and stone, and dropped to the flagstones. “Lao!” she called, almost laughing. “Lao, over here!”
Lao stood there watching her quietly. Baru would’ve expected more surprise. With a thrill of unease Baru fetched up on her toes, staring, trying to remember—
It wasn’t Lao.
Before the massacre at Haraerod, Baru had called a priestess to her tent. She had to confess something and so she called for someone to listen. Everything I’ve done. For Taranoke. But I’ve come too far . . .
The woman had been a diver, and a midwife, and she’d sat with her long legs beneath her while Baru thought how much she looked like cousin Lao.
Her name was Ulyu Xe. The ilykari priestess of Wydd who Tain Hu had teasingly implied might be Baru’s lover. She had soothing eyes, and a summer-ice calm. She might be in her thirties.
So she had gone with the rest of the rebellion to Sieroch. So she had been captured with Tain Hu’s other companions and dispatched to the Llosydanes for interrogation.
But she was not under interrogation. She was here, and she was wearing a knife, and she had every reason to murder Baru on the spot, a killing which Yawa could deny any part in.
“Oh shit,” Baru said, and would’ve run—
—except that the woman who wasn’t her cousin fell gracefully to her knees, prostrated herself, and said, in Aphalone as wonderfully accented as Tain Hu’s, “Your Majesty. I am your sworn companion.”
LET me understand,” Baru said. “Yawa found you yesterday.”
“Yes. And we refused to speak with her.”
“And you were at this Morrow Ministry station. But the station chief, he just lets you run around like chickens? He lets you try to buy passage off the islands? That’s the stupidest interrogation protocol I’ve ever heard.”
“Is it?”
Baru shook her finger at Ulyu Xe, very nearly prodding the other woman in the throat. “Stop that. Stop that Wyddish ‘everything’s a question’ horseshit, I can’t stand it.”
Xe smiled and drank her beer. Behind her a Maia journeywoman sawed away at her gut fiddle and sang of green-gold Aurdwynn and its lonely lads. This was a tavern called the Floating Island, full of Aurdwynni expatriots, and they called out to Ulyu Xe her in the homeland accent, ulYou shee, not the mangled Aphalone Ullyu zee.
Baru tried, again, to prod at the bruise. “You’re not horrified I’m here?”
Xe set her cork mug down. Dark still eyes and pads of fat over swimmer’s muscle. Like a long sleek otter. Of late, Baru’s luck had been exceptional in this one respect: from Iscend Comprine’s choreographed grace to Shao Lune’s viperscale composure and now Ulyu Xe, she had met some fearsomely striking women. More than any attraction, though, Baru felt a stupid cowish tenderness toward Xe. She wanted to make everything all right for the priestess.
“I just can’t believe—” Baru waved in frustration at several abstract concepts, including loyalty, hope, and vendetta, her wave accidentally getting the bartender’s attention, which she had to dismiss with an apologetic shrug. “I can’t believe you’re calling me Majesty.”
“You were acclaimed queen. On the Henge Hill after the battle. It was made known to us.”
“But then I . . . what I did to your people . . .” Baru shook her open hands before Xe: here, do you see what I have done? “What I did to you, I mean, you left your great-family to fight with us. And I betrayed you.”
“You remember,” Xe said, without gratitude, but with satisfaction, as if fitting a missing piece into a puzzle.
“Yes, I remember—I remember you told me that you’d been a diver, and a midwife, and that your great-family had spared you to come fight for me. You told me your story. And I lied to you.”
“You told me the truth.”
“How?” Baru hissed. “How did I—”
“You told me that everything you did was for Taranoke. I didn’t understand then. But I do now.” Ulyu Xe looked at her and Baru saw in her a power like a river, the power to wait and course and watch, certain that in good time she would find the proper course, full of all that she required.
She said, “Tain Hu told us what you’d done.”
Baru drank deeply. The fucking beer was too weak. She wanted Svir’s vodka. “And what had I done?”
“You wanted a post in Falcrest. You sold us to buy power to help your own home. The bargain would have destroyed you. You would have done Falcrest’s work, and died alone.” Xe’s legs trembled beneath the table. She had been at her morning swim before she came to Baru’s hotel. “My lady the duchess was determined to go back to save you.”
“From the Throne?”
“From yourself.”
Damn you, Hu. Damn your maps of me, and damn their accuracy. Baru drank the rest of the tepid piss-water and then, unsatisfied, traded her empty mug for Xe’s. “Why were you traveling in her company?”
“You exiled her at Sieroch. You sent her away.”
“I wanted to save her,” Baru rasped.
“At first she thought you’d decided to marry the Necessary King. She wanted me to come along and teach her Wydd’s acceptance.”
“What did you want?”
“I like traveling with her.”
“You were friends?”
“Occasionally lovers,” Xe said, as if this were a slightly less serious commitment than friendship, and then she smiled. “She was a good woman. Impossible to teach. A very good woman.”
“She’s dead,” Baru croaked.
“I know.”
“How?”
“She told me that if you ever cared for her, you’d kill her. And if you didn’t kill her, she’d die before she let herself be taken to Falcrest for reconditioning.”
“Yes,” Baru said, now trembling too, and not with exhaustion, “yes, she was right. She convinced me what I had to do. She was magnificent.”
But the pure awe of Hu’s death was tainted now. The call of the frigate birds over the drowning-stone rang false with laughter, Farrier’s laughter, his venom was in this story now. Falcrest is saved! He had celebrated Tain Hu’s death and somehow by doing it he had slithered back into her and seized her choice and made it his own.
Baru couldn’t talk about this anymore. She threw a coin at a small and heavily defaced statuette of the late Hasran Cattlson.
“What happened when Yawa found you?”
OUT west and down south, past the bridges that bound the twelve civilized islets together, there stood a tall tower islet called Moem, too stony for agriculture, covered in scrubgrass and wildflowers. But an old Falcresti man named Faham Execarne had set up a little farmhouse there.
Execarne was the Morrow Ministry’s station chief on the Llosydanes.
He had simple rules for prisoners. If he didn’t make regular signals that he was well, all his guests would be killed. Other than that they had their freedom. They might row over to one of the other islets and work a trade. They might try to hire a ship off the Llosydanes. Of course they’d have no papers, so no legitimate trader would take them on, and even smugglers would hesitate—the navy paid very well for the names of captains who transported fugitives.
He would prefer if his guests stayed with him, helped him keep his chickens and work his fields. He cooked a mean fishsteak. He could put a little weed in their pipe and a little leaf in their cheek. And if his new field hands decided to talk a little about their past as insurrectionists, that was their business, in their own time.
“It’s a pleasant life,” Xe said, equitably, “and some of us want to stay. Although I miss my daughter.”
Baru, of course, stumbled obliviously past this invitation to ask after Xe’s family. “Do the Oriati spies ever trouble him?”
“No, no. I believe Execarne’s good friends with their spymaster here.” She fell into a gravelly imitation: “‘A collegial exchange of information helps keep the peace.’”
Fingers clasped in Baru’s mind. A Falcresti man had asked the harbormaster to cover up traces of Oriati warships. Could that be Faham Execarne? Cooperating with the Oriati to prevent a greater war?
“You haven’t asked who else was taken,” Xe said.
Little minnows thrashed and nipped in Baru’s stomach. She very badly didn’t want to know: for the other prisoners would be Tain Hu’s dearest, and all of them would mourn the duchess, and in a fiercely stupid selfish way Baru wanted that all to herself.
“Do they want me to know their names?” she said.
“Of course we want you to know. We all swore an oath. All the Vultjagata.”
Vultjagata. Stakhi for fighters of Vultjag. “What oath?” Baru whispered.
“We kissed Tain Hu’s sword,” Xe said, “and we promised her that we would serve you in your work. If you kept her faith.”
Out of sheer pride and grief and gratitude Baru would have burst into tears or (more likely) begun to hurl things, except that the screaming from outside finally overpowered the fiddler’s song.
IT was all over by the time they arrived. A man in the square had recognized Xate Yawa, and followed her a little ways, unsure of his courage. Then he’d taken a snort of mason dust and tried to strangle her to death.
By the time Baru and Ulyu Xe arrived the man was dead on the ground with cut wrists and a slashed throat. His left thumb dangled by a tab of skin. Baru knew those cuts: you put your hands up by reflex, against the knife. But your hands could be cut, too.
Iscend Comprine hummed as she went through his pockets.
“It’s not the first time I’ve been throttled,” Yawa snapped, fending off Baru’s solicitations. “I see the diver lured you out. Good. The damn prisoners insist they must see you, or they won’t speak.”
“This wasn’t necessary.” Xe looked down sadly at the dead man. “I knew him. He would’ve gone quietly.”
“Gone and died of sepsis from those cuts,” Yawa said. “Baru, be a dear and help me up.”
Baru lifted her by her armpits. “Roll your head about. Tell me if you feel any pain.”
“Of course my neck’s in pain. I’m fucking sixty and I write too much.” Yawa extracted herself from Baru and went forward applauding: “Iscend, Iscend, I knew you were magnificent!”
The Clarified woman took a bow and, like an artist, flicked the blood off her knife onto a stone wall in the lee of an overhang, where the scab would last through rainstorms. “All in the service, my lady.”
Ulyu Xe stared at Iscend, too. Baru hadn’t thought anyone devoted to patience and reserve could easily express pure loathing. She was wrong. Xe looked ready to wait forever for Iscend’s messy death.
“Now we ought to go, I think.” Yawa coughed twice, harshly, into her gloved fist. “I only paid the constables to ignore so much.”
THEY rowed a boat south to Moem islet, where the prisoners waited.
“There’s Helbride,” Iscend remarked. Baru followed her pointing hand southeast. Clipper sails bobbed cheerfully against the bright afternoon sky: it was indeed Helbride, sailing south.
Baru squawked in horror. “Apparitor’s leaving without us!”
“Of course he is,” Yawa said. “Sulane came in last night. Do you think Apparitor would stay in close moor? Trapped against the rocks?”
How Aminata would have teased her for forgetting her sailing rules: make some sea room before you fight.
They beached on Moem’s rocky skirts. Xe led them to a narrow trail that spiraled up the outside of the mesa, and showed them how to belay themselves to the long-lines pitoned into the cliff face. They climbed along the steep path left by the face’s slow collapse. The exercise stole Baru’s thoughts, and her awareness narrowed to the distraction of Xe’s long easy stride, her hard legs glimpsed in swirled-cotton fractions as the wind stirred her robe, the padded curve of fat at her hips.
I’m lustful, Baru thought. I haven’t gotten off since Sieroch and I just spent a night surrounded by beautiful women. I ought to mind myself for foolishness.
On top of the islet a fringe of scrubby salt-grass sloped down into a cupped valley, and there sat Faham Execarne’s little Morrow Ministry station: a whitewashed stone farmhouse, a covered well, a pump-arm with a modesty screen for showers, fields of raw earth bordered in stone walls not quite half-built.
“It’s nice,” Xe said, “isn’t it?”
Iscend looked on it with Clarified eyes. “The proper signs are shown. It’s safe.”
Up the trail toward them came a leathery old man with a crossbow and a fat pipe clenched in his jaw. The wind changed. A powerful stink of weed came over them.
“Faham!” Ulyu Xe cupped her mouth to call ahead. “Faham, I’ve brought the guest.”
“Trouble’s what you brought.” Faham Execarne studied them from ten paces, a compact dark brown man with deeply folded eyes and a strong blunt chin. Farm work kept him rangy and a little stooped, but Baru would never have mistaken him for a real farmer: his eyes marked them one by one, like files. “Hello again, Jurispotence Yawa. And if I’m up on my telltales, you’re the Imperial agent Baru Cormorant. The one from Sieroch. The one my guests insist on seeing.”
His crossbow was pointed at Iscend all the while. He clamped his pipe in his teeth and jerked his chin toward Yawa. “Jurispotence, has your thing here killed anyone yet?”
“Just one I’ve seen. In self-defense.”
“Self-defense. Those Metademe fucks. I tell you, if you teach a woman to feel good when she kills in self-defense, she’ll get real proactive about that defense. I don’t like having her up here.”
“She’s just a person,” Baru said, remembering Purity Cartone shot in the chest at Welthony. “Crossbows work on her like anyone else.”
“Just a person, eh? Isn’t that what they said about Shiqu Si?” Execarne sighed heavily. “Well, come on in. Storm’s on its way, so one road or the other you’re still going to spend the night here. Might as well meet my houseguests. Do you know my protocol?”
“No interrogation,” Baru said. “No guards, no restraints.”
“That’s right.” Execarne let the crossbow down with a grunt. “Never been any interrogator who could open people up as good as a true friend. You hear that, Xe? Friends! Come on, show me that holy smile.”
“Smiles come when they ought,” Xe said, peaceably.
“That’s my Xe.” Execarne squinted at Baru. “Now you, the noki woman, I’ve heard quite a bit about you. Fair warning, lass, they’ve been talking about whether to devote their lives to murdering you. And the arguments in favor seem strong.”
Baru didn’t want to be knifed like Prince V Asra the moment she walked in the door. She didn’t want to be the damn fool sucker coaxed by Ulyu Xe and Xate Yawa into a deadly net.
“I think,” she began, “that I ought to wait outside. Xe, why don’t you go in and warn them all I’m here, so Iscend has a chance to see how they respond—”
Xate Yawa took Baru by the hand. “Let’s not dither, dear,” she said, with no little relish. “Your Coyotes must have missed you.”
“How are they? What are they like?” Baru floundered desperately for information. “How did they react to you? What did you ask them?”
“I told them exactly what you should tell them,” Yawa said. “They are now prisoners of the Imperial Republic. Their best hope for a happy ending is to cooperate fully with us. And if they do, I will ask for their pardon from the lawful Governor of Aurdwynn, Her Grace the Stag Duchess, Haradel Heia, who is styled Heingyl Ri.”
WITH one hand already on the door latch, Baru discovered she could not possibly see this through.
She had never gone backward before: she had never gone back to anything. She’d left Taranoke and she didn’t know if she still had any hope of return. She’d abandoned her tower in Treatymont, forsaken Muire Lo to die of plague, and walked out of Tain Hu’s tent at Sieroch to meet her destiny. She’d even failed (after all these weeks!) to open the letters from Aminata and her parents.
She was simply incapable of turning back. Therefore, she could not go inside the farmhouse, nor confront the survivors of Tain Hu’s house: she would have to return to Helbride, and find another way—
She tried to back out of the breezeway. Ulyu Xe was in her way.
“Move,” Baru hissed.
“I feel good here,” Xe said.
“What’s the problem?” Faham called. “Is it stuck?”
“No,” Yawa assured him, one hand on his shoulder—how quickly she worked to charm him—“it’s just that Baru’s faintly addled. Watch, in a moment she’ll remember how doors work.”
“I am not addled,” Baru protested, “I just think that Iscend really ought to go first.”
Xe put her warm, strong hand on Baru’s shoulder. “They swore an oath,” she said. “Remember that an oath runs two ways. Remember to be worthy of it.”
And while Baru was distracted, Xe’s other hand worked the door latch, and Baru fell stumbling backward into a farmhouse full of people whose loyalty she had ultimately and completely betrayed.
The last thing she saw before they fell on her was Yawa’s impish smile as she reached out and pushed the door closed behind Ulyu Xe, shutting Baru inside. Then everything was hot flesh and wetness, meat flapping at her hands, on her face, the bestial panting of someone who stank of grass and meat—
Baru got her arms around it before she realized it was a dog. “Oh,” she said, with enormous relief, as the golden barrel of man-sized love and drool pranced around her pawing and woofing. “Oh, it’s a—very friendly—er—Xe, would you please—”
“Down, boy,” Xe clucked. The dog went down on all fours, panting enthusiastically, as if it couldn’t wait to lick Baru more. Gingerly, she mopped the dog drool off her chin.
Everyone sat there, staring at her.
All her old companions. Gathered, as if for portraiture, at Execarne’s long dinner table: one ragged exile family under cedar rafters and whale-oil lamps. Closest to Baru sat widowed Ake Sentiamut, who had run Tain Hu’s counterfeiting scheme, and who Baru had left as regent over Vultjag. By her were two men—or, really, a man and a boy—Baru’s jumpy bodyguard Ude Sentiamut, who’d shot a friend in the stomach on the Fuller’s Road, who hadn’t had the courage or ice to slit that man’s throat and end his pain. He had his fatherly arm around pimpled Run Czeshine, a boy who’d been so pathetically taken with Baru that she’d been afraid he might have a glandular condition.
And three more: Nitu the cook, whose enigmatically clotted and greased curries went down like a dead squirrel scraped off a wagon axle, but who never ever made anyone sick. Yythel the herbalist, who brewed prophecy tea and planted silphium everywhere she went, sewing the love groves that let women decide when and how often to bear children.
And a wraith. A pale, half-real sketch of a man with moss-colored eyes and bloody hair. The jagata fighter Dziransi, ghostly son of the Wintercrests, who had offered his king’s hand to Baru, and led his phalanxes into battle for her lie.
How terribly he must want to murder her.
“Uuf, uuf,” the dog said, and nuzzled Baru’s boots. No one else spoke. Baru stood in the doorway barefaced and unready.
In time the things you’ve done become too large to carry with you. So you set them down. And you think that you are free. But then you look back and see that someone else carries your burden now: you see that you have dropped your weight upon those who stood behind you.
Dziransi rose from his place at the table. Little abacuses clattered in Baru’s mind, judging the speed of his lunge, the strength of his arms, the chance he’d have to kill her. But he did not try.
He spoke in deep, earnest, awful Aphalone. “Is the oath kept?”
“The oath is kept,” said Ulyu Xe. “Duchess Vultjag is dead.”
Ake Sentiamut rose up across from Dziransi with tears in her eyes and a tremble of power in her throat. When she spoke, for all her Stakhi blood and somber age, she could have been Hu’s sister.
“Your Majesty Baru Cormorant, Traitor-Queen of Aurdwynn, I am Ake Sentiamut and I speak for your oathbound Vultjagata. By the power of that oath, and in the name of the people of the rebel duchies, I wish to negotiate the rebellion’s conditional surrender.”