IN AR 117, eleven years after the Treaty of Federation, a few of the dukes led by Duchess Naiu rose up against the reparatory marriage laws. Their cry was the old cry, Aurdwynn cannot be ruled! And they were doomed, doomed from the start, although we did not call it the Fools’ Rebellion yet.

Olake and I decided, together and without remorse, that the common people would only survive if we ended this damn rebellion swiftly and in defeat. Some of the dukes would remain loyal to Falcrest, some would join the rebellion, most would bide their time and play both sides. All of them would trample on the commoners to do it. The cost would roll down upon the folk.

We hated the Masquerade by then. Truly we did. But we needed decades of peace to arrange our own final revolution.

So we betrayed the Fools’ Rebellion to Falcrest. And, oh, did that put my brother’s wife, Tain Ko, in a bind. For her brother, Duke Vultjag, had joined Naiu’s rebels, and now her husband had backstabbed those rebels spectacularly.

I did not do this: a prisoner escaped from an Incrastic sanitarium in Duchy Heingyl and jumped a ferry up the Inirein. The ferry was faster than the yellowjackets who chased it. By the time the escapee reached Duchy Oathsfire his armpits had already swollen and it was too late. Plague swept west to east across the Northlands like a strigil on dead skin.

Duke Vultjag died in the first week, and left young Hu to inherit.

The people of Vultjag called Tain Ko to come home and serve as regent for Tain Hu. Olake pleaded with his wife, but she was a warhawk and a will and she would not abandon her blood.

She went over to the rebellion.

Let me tell you the most pathetic and embarrassing sort of grief in the world. It is the grief you feel as you sit in a canvas tent with your hands over your ears, trying not to listen to your brother fuck his estranged wife for what they both know will be the very last time.

I had a plan to capture Ko and pardon her. I was well into the arrangements when Tain Shir came home on a Masquerade ship up from Taranoke. She traveled with a band of men and women who killed callously and spoke very little. They were in Treatymont for two days before marching north, and by then I had four murders pinned on them. Of course I couldn’t prosecute. They carried a letter with the polestar mark, the Emperor’s authority: they were outside the law.

Tain Shir took her killers north into the forests. By year’s end the rebel leadership were all dead, and careful dispensation of Falcrest’s funds had placed collaborationist relatives into their seats to bicker over the terms of surrender.

Vultjag was the last to fall.