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.”

15. If I Tallied My Life Today

15

IF I TALLIED MY LIFE TODAY

AKE’S decision was in retrospect obvious, and elegant, and necessary—but Baru had not foreseen it, and so at first, although she had all the power, she was afraid.

She’d expected rage and sorrow. She had prepared for madness. She had armed herself against despair: all the things she might find among the survivors of Tain Hu’s house she had anticipated.

But Tain Hu’s house was made of people, and people always slithered out of Baru’s plans. She had not expected grace, or tenacity, or greatness of spirit in the face of the end of a lifetime’s hope.

The survivors had organized—oh, Falcrest had expected them to collapse like starved mice when Baru revealed herself—but here in their prison on Moem, so far from home, they had organized magnificently.

If only it wasn’t utterly futile.