“Governor Cattlson, Your Excellence, I am honored.” In the Imperial Republic all civil servants got the same honorific, in the spirit of post-revolutionary fraternity. She matched his grip and smiled easily, oh so easily. She would manage this.
“Ah, at last, at last,” said the next in the party, standing between Cattlson and the column of Masquerade regulars in their blue and gray tunics. “Please—if I may—”
Jurispotence Xate Yawa took Baru’s hand and kissed it delicately. Her silver hair fell over a formidable collared gown. She was an Aurdwynn native, some admixture of Stakhieczi and Maia blood. And she had done such mighty work, work Baru had studied with respect—twenty years ago, as the common-born assassin of the old Duke Lachta, she’d ripped out the heart of the resistance and arranged her nation’s surrender to the Masquerade invaders. This station was her reward. Her brother Xate Olake had been given Duchy Lachta, but he ruled in name alone, a ghost of rumors and supposition. Lachta had been taken by the Masquerade so thoroughly that now even the native-born called it Treatymont.
“That is how we greet a lady here.” Xate Yawa straightened to beam at Baru. “Ah, so fresh! So full of promise! Climbing docks in trousers—I remember having that fire.”
“Jurispotence Xate, Your Excellence, I am honored,” Baru said, and marked the woman an enemy: her greeting had started at foreign, gone to woman, then young, and last of all to a reminder of what Xate had done. It was a subtle strike, maybe only a petty snipe from a petty mind. More likely a probe to test Baru’s vigilance.
She held the woman’s gaze and let her mind chase a sudden stabbing intuition.
Aurdwynn has one great habit.
Baru met the cold blue jungle-crow eyes of the Jurispotence of Aurdwynn and realized that the phantom crisis might be very, very close at hand. She’d assumed Xate Yawa would be weak, ineffectual, powerless to control a rising insurrection. But there were other alternatives, weren’t there? Perhaps she wanted the opposite of control.…
“Young, but so qualified!” came a third voice.
Cairdine Farrier beamed out from behind Governor Cattlson’s wolf’s head. “I thought I’d come ashore with the first skiff,” he said, “and make sure everything was ready! And oh, they are excited, Your Excellence—they know about your staggering performance on the civil service exam. So precocious, such a sterling find—you are the youngest Imperial Accountant appointed in several decades! Merit, after all, is our greatest concern in these things!”
He clapped the Jurispotence on her frail shoulder, seized Governor Cattlson’s wrist as if to bring them together in some kind of dance, and looked between them with feverish intensity. “She could go so many places, if she succeeds in addressing our—difficulties here,” he said, still beaming. “Please do give her every opportunity.”
And Baru noted, to her disquiet, that Governor Cattlson barely checked a gesture: a polite, deferential bow, as that of an officer to a superior.
4
THEY had horse-drawn carriages waiting, one in black oak and iron for Xate Yawa, one with wire enamel in white and gold for her. “Horses!” Baru exclaimed, delighted. “They’re enormous! Please—excuse me, Governor, Jurispotence, I simply must.”
She went to them, marveling at their saddled strength, the atlas of muscle and ligament splayed out beneath their chestnut hides, the shoes nailed directly into their hooves. Cairdine Farrier spoke to Governor Cattlson behind her, delighted in his own way: “There is no higher terrestrial life on Taranoke, you see, and she is so curious.”
Baru circled the beasts, skittish around their teeth and hindquarters, thinking all the while: they must have been ridden by Tu Maia warriors—Aurdwynn had no native horses, nor the Stakhieczi to the north—and bred down the centuries for the cold and for warfare. Thus their size, their notorious hunger. They were weapons and symbols, ostentatious and huge.
They’d been bred to serve for generations.
She looked toward Cairdine Farrier, drawn by the thought. But there was a stallion between them.
“You must learn to ride,” Governor Cattlson called to her across the span of the drive team. “The coastal dukes built their power on cavalry. They respect a good rider. My friend Duke Heingyl conducts all his business on the hunt.”
She ducked to eye him beneath the horse’s belly. “You must be an expert, then.”
He patted the horse’s flank and grinned boyishly. “Talented enough to teach. If you can find a minute for leisure, that is! Cairdine Farrier speaks so highly of your dedication. Please, Your Excellence, your carriage. You’ll need time to change before the dinner.”
She watched him mount his own charger, feigning interest in his technique, trying to play for time so she could study Cairdine Farrier’s byplay with Xate Yawa. But Farrier’s chatter only seemed to bore the Jurispotence. If she feared or respected Farrier, she could hide it well.
Cattlson knew who Cairdine Farrier really was. But the Jurispotence, Falcrest’s spymaster and judge in Aurdwynn, didn’t. Because of her blood? Or did Falcrest share Baru’s suspicions—that their Jurispotence might have her own agenda?
Xate Yawa vanished into her carriage. It closed around her like a gauntlet.
Baru let her doorman help her up into her own ride. She found Muire Lo waiting—“Your Excellence,” he said, head bowed—but took a minute to latch the door and check the passenger cabin for vents before she spoke.
“I’m going to make a list of questions. You’re going to start answering them while I waste my time at this gala they’ve set up. Do you have something to write on?”
“I have an excellent memory,” he offered. The stagecoach jerked into motion beneath them.
“That makes it seem like I have something to hide, Muire Lo, and if you’re keeping watch over me for someone else—which I assume you must be—I want to assure them I am not a woman given to intrigue.” She had already begun to cluck (just like her mother) at his hurt, had already prepared some reassuring blandishment, when she saw that his only response was a sage nod. She sat back in the seat and decided that her secretary had to be more competent and more dangerous than she’d assumed.
“Your office is in the Governor’s House.” Muire Lo splayed a sheaf of marble-cream paper. “The letters that described a separate office for the Imperial Accountant are out of date. All Imperial functions have been centralized in one location. For efficiency, I’m told.”
Baru crooked a brow and waited for him to speak past the double-talk.
“I have heard suggestions that there may have been a problem of security at the previous office.”
“Well,” she said, “put that down as the first question I want answered.” It would have been the first anyway, the most pressing threat: precisely what happened to the last Imperial Accountant?
“I sense some urgency?”
She would need to bring him a little ways into her confidence. “I have become concerned,” she said, rearranging the chained purse, “that we are surrounded by conspiracy.”
“But we’ve only met Imperial functionaries, Your Excellence.”
She laughed at that. “If you wanted to seed conspiracy, where else would you be?”
Hooves clattered outside. Baru drew back the curtains, expecting to see Governor Cattlson showing off for her, or a Masquerade armsman moving past. But the charger pacing the carriage was stark white, the color of snow on volcanic stone, cantering alongside at a spear’s reach. The woman riding wore a leather tabard, shoulders mailed in stark ornamental iron. Baru marked the spurs, the towering charger, the minimalist display of wealth, and guessed she must be minor nobility—some feudal landlord?
The rider stood in her stirrups, displaying the casual strength of good health and a rich diet, and turned to meet Baru’s gaze. Impressions in a flash—fierce, aquiline nose, broken and reset. Skin in Maia tones of copper and fallow soil, so close to the Taranoki phenotype but for the high cheekbones and proud nose. A smile that still had all its teeth.
A duch
ess, then. Maybe an important one. Ihuake? Nayauru? Would the influential Duchess of Cattle or the fiery young Dam-builder have come down from the Midlands to show the colors for their proud alliance?
The rider considered her through the caged glass of the carriage window, her smile narrow and lopsided, and then spurred her mount ahead.
Baru settled herself on the bench with the uneasy sense she was prey.
* * *
THE Governor’s House stood not a quarter mile from harborside, an edict in iron and granite, gates guarded by Masquerade marines in red tabards and steel masks and gauntlets sleeved like a surgeon’s sterile garb. The stone of the compound wall had been acid-etched clean.
The Imperial Accountant got her own square tower, her quarters at the very peak. “The ball will expect you at the end of the afternoon watch,” the steward that escorted her up informed her, and took her leave.
“You’ll be painfully late if you arrive then,” Muire Lo warned her. “There will be drinking, introduction, and politics beforehand. If you miss it, all they will talk about is your age and the rumors of your homeland. Someone’s trying to embarrass you.”
“I should think.” Baru threw open the doors between the waiting room and the audience hall. “Look at this place.”
The tapestries and carpets told stories of embroidered figures doing battle on horseback and in bristling phalanxes. “Get some staff and tear it all down,” Baru ordered. “The carpets, too.”
“They are likely quite expensive—”
“All the better. I want to look like a common-born provincial with no idea what wealth means. Wrap the whole waiting room in an anchor and chain, I don’t care.” She flipped through a stack of palimpsest at the secretary’s desk. “Get anything with written Iolynic out of here, too—or Urun, or Stakhi, anything I don’t speak. I need to look self-conscious about it. Post a sign demanding that all business, verbal and written, be conducted in Aphalone. The whole city will think I can’t speak anything but.”
“Your Excellence, you can’t speak anything but.”
“I’ll learn.” Her childhood Urunoki was a descendant of Maia Urun, and the Iolynic creole that the Aurdwynni often spoke would follow from there. She perched on the edge of the redwood desk. “Tell me about this ball. What do I need to do to save myself?”
He pursed his lips, rather like a displeased aunt. “You will need a gown. A woman in Aurdwynn simply cannot attend a formal function in trousers. And unless you wish to make a reputation as a sailor, you should bathe and find a wig, both of which will require some time. As a representative of the Imperial Republic you are expected to have a formal half-mask.”
“I can bathe myself. Find me my mask and something modest to wear and have it brought up—no, bring it up yourself, I don’t know the staff yet, and you’ve had chance enough to be improper on the ship. Forget the wig, I’ll go ship-headed. Then—” She paused in thought. “Then go to the master-at-arms and find out what happened to the last Imperial Accountant. I’ll see if the stories they tell me at dinner align with what you learn.”
She scrubbed herself raw with pumice in the bath (from Taranoke? it could be), then made herself modest by Masquerade standards and allowed Muire Lo to guide her through the technicalities of the darted damask gown he’d found. The half-mask they’d made for her, porcelain and as featurelessly white as the fabric, fit awkwardly—the craftsmen had assumed Falcresti features and a smaller brow. But it would do. She was a technocrat now, a gear in the great machine, and when she performed that function she would need a mask.
If it troubled Muire Lo’s pride or modesty to dress her, he hid it masterfully. “Good luck, Your Excellence,” he offered. She waved him off, too tense to walk the line between confident poise and formal etiquette.
No time to wait in the annex. Straight onto the board. If Aurdwynn did teeter on the edge of uprising, if the rebels knew the power the Imperial Accountant wielded—
It would explain what had happened to the last two names to hold the station.
She buckled on her scabbard and the chained purse. They did not match the gown, but her short hair and heavy boots had already ruined that. After a moment’s consideration, she laughed at herself and left the scabbard and sword beneath her bed. Then she went down the tower, breathing slowly and easily, working her fingers one by one into the white elbow-length gloves that had come with the gown.
A Falcresti servingman in exquisitely applied makeup greeted her at the ballroom door. “Your Excellence. Shall I announce you?”
“Please,” she said, and waited to hear what he would say with her eyes closed behind the mask and her heart clotted shut. Just this one last moment of weakness. Just the one.
“The Imperial Accountant!” he called. “Her Excellence Baru Cormorant!”
* * *
SHE went in through the wide door and the crowd pressed in around her, pale Stakhi and Maia like the rider she had seen and every shade in between, a shout of whispers in Iolynic passing among them. Governor Cattlson waited across the room, Xate Yawa unmistakable in a brilliant ice-blue gown by his side, a stern man in deerskin and leather behind them—Duke Heingyl, surely. Safety there, at the Governor’s table. But the distance between them was a crater. She could feel eyes on her like sunglare, and at once wanted water.
“Governor,” she said, nodding into the hush. “Jurispotence. Dukes and duchesses. Your Excellencies of the Judiciary.” The nobility in the crowd were motley, variegated, Masquerade judges clustered among them like rooks. “I look forward to knowing all of you as well as I know your account books.”
Nervous laughter broke out. She tried to judge the geography of the crowd, to map alliances and circles—was that Duke Unuxekome the Sea Groom, rumored to be a pirate, watching her with clever eyes? But her throat closed at the sight of so many faces. With slow deliberation, she stepped down to the ballroom floor and turned away from Governor Cattlson and the Jurispotence, saying to herself and the crowd: I do not need them yet.
But to her horror she found the crowd withdrawing from her, turning back to its circles and cliques.
She caught the eyes of Xate Yawa across the room, hooded in her own black half-mask, and fixing on her own name heard, quite distinctly, the words: “Baru? I suspect no one wants to be the one to tell her.”
Someone touched her arm. She leapt only a little. “Welcome to Aurdwynn,” murmured the voice in her ear: a woman, her Aphalone accented. Baru turned and found herself face-to-face with the rider with the broken nose, still in her tabard and jodhpurs, her cheeks painted in red slashes and her long black hair bound up. “You should have ridden, not taken the carriage. Men like Heingyl Stag Hunter already expect you to be weak.”
Baru set herself across from the woman, giving herself space as curious onlookers began to gather. “I’ve been offered riding lessons,” she said, careful to press any accent from her own tongue.
“By Cattlson himself, I’m sure.” The horsewoman smiled faintly. “I’m sure he’d love to ride with you.” Someone in the crowd tittered.
Baru didn’t understand Aurdwynn well enough to find her footing here. What was scandalous? Proper and improper? There was too much to grasp, too many cultures, too many eyes—but forget all that. Breathe. Focus on the woman in the riding leathers, the woman with the lopsided smile, and on her own strengths.
“Duchess,” she said, trusting in her earlier guess to impress the onlookers. “You’re a talented rider. Perhaps I’d be better off learning from you.”
The crowd murmured. The duchess tapped the back of one gloved finger against her glass and made it ring softly: a salute of sorts. “Tain Hu,” she said. “Duchess Vultjag.”
Vultjag—Baru couldn’t remember the details of that estate, but she recognized the Stakhi word and tried to pry it apart into cognates. Jag? Something about a forest, so her estates must be far north. She had Maia features and a Maia name, a Stakhi title, a sharp tongue—odds were she was not a friend of the Masquerade in
Aurdwynn. Probably here to sniff for weakness, like a wolf after the sick.
Answer weakness with strength. Look for her allies.
“Duchess Vultjag. My pleasure.” Baru stepped into the little circle between them and—to the crowd’s delighted shock—cupped the duchess Tain Hu’s chin in one gloved hand. “Your bones speak to Maia blood, but you have Stakhi in your ducal name. And here you are, a forest lord trapped in the city. All the paradoxes of Aurdwynn bound up in one woman. I think I could learn a great deal from your lessons, Tain Hu. And perhaps in exchange I could take you to Falcrest and show you to the polymaths, as an exemplar of your kind.”
The crowd hushed. Baru wondered how she must look, in her barren white gown, her bone-white mask, her long gloves the color of snow.
Tain Hu smiled between Baru’s thumb and forefinger. “You have never been to Falcrest.”
“Not yet.”
Tain Hu cocked her head, eyes narrowed, and opened her lips as if to speak; but she said nothing, and left Baru suddenly conscious of those unpainted lips, those fierce dark eyes, the slow surge of her breath. She could see the black silk shapes of Masquerade judges among the crowd, and understood Tain Hu’s move. A foreigner, they would whisper, from a land of certain crimes—
“Show care,” the Duchess Vultjag murmured. “The Jurispotence is always watching, and her Cold Cellar is always hungry.”
“The Jurispotence is my colleague.”
Tain Hu’s smile widened between Baru’s fingertips.
Somewhere behind them a quartet of musicians began to play a piece on oboe and plucked lute. Baru released her grip and turned away, heart pounding. “Governor Cattlson!” she called, preferring the appearance of retreat to disaster at Tain Hu’s hands. “You have a challenger on horseback!”
The crowd laughed, delighted and scandalized, and while Cattlson—red-faced and tipsy—roared something about hunting, Baru saw the Jurispotence Xate Yawa, smiling beneath her black half-mask, exchanging glances with Tain Hu. Saw the pirate duke Unuxekome nodding silently to a bearded man at his side.