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399 pages, Hardcover
First published September 15, 2015
“I will remake the world so that no woman will ever have to do this again.”
“Freedom granted by your rulers is just a chain with a little slack.”
“This is the truth. You will know because it hurts.”
“This is the truth. You will know because it hurts.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to understand where power comes from,” she said, without any hesitation. “And how it can best be used.”
“Your error is fundamental to the human psyche: you have allowed yourself to believe that others are mechanisms, static and solvable, whereas you are an agent.”![]()
“This is the truth. You will know because it hurts.”
“The island of her childhood was gone. It had died in pus and desperation while she took lessons behind white walls.”
“Perhaps the death of fathers could be outlawed.
Perhaps doctrines could be rewritten.
“I want to be powerful,” she said.”
“I am a part of this, but I do not have to love it. I only have to play my role. Survive long enough to gather power. Gather enough power to make a difference.”
“While she had waited behind the walls of the school, her home had been conquered. The soldiers of the invasion, the paper money and the sailcloth, the pigpen diseases, had won. The old divisions of harborside and plainsmen exploited before she was even old enough to understand them.
Had she been conquered, too?
No. No. She would play their game, learn their secrets. But mother Pinion was wrong. It would only be a mask. She would come home with the answers of rule and find a way to ease the yoke.”
“It's not what the Masquerade does to you that you should you fear, she wanted to tell Ake. It's what the Masquerade convinces you to do to yourself.”
“I am maimed, she thinks. I will fail this test. It will all have been for nothing.
And then, mutinously: if I pass, will it then have been for something?”
They came to the quay. Baru caught a ladder and lifted herself up before the sailors had even roped the skiff. The waiting party looked at her in surprise as she clambered up like a common sailor, purse and sword banging awkwardly beneath her.
The Governer’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.
"Tell me a story," the duke Unuxekome [another problem: so many characters have unpronounceable names] said. They stood at the prow, early in the afternoon. Baru was reading her letters.
"A story. Hm. There are riots in Treatymont." Duel riots-Baru's riots. The cauldrons of Little Welthon and the Arwybon finally spilling over as all the rage of poverty and stolen children boiled and flashed into steam. Garrison troops swarming to the Horn Harbor to protect the shipping. They'd left too much unguarded: a cadre of woodsmen in green wool had led a mass breakout at the Cold Cellar.
"That's not a story, Your Excellence. More of a report."
“You will find no power behind the mask. It will wear you: it will eat your face away. You will pay a terrible price, you will lose yourself.”
“Any price,” Baru rasped, each word a debit, a loss in her account books: secrets given for no advantage, for no reason except that her heart moved her to speak them. Her traitor heart. “Any sacrifice. It is the only way to take a piece of their power for our own.”
You can’t find it again. Even if you go back, it’s not there anymore. That’s history, that’s how it works! Someone’s always changing someone else.