Literature / The Traitor Baru Cormorant

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Previously known for numerous short stories on science fiction and fantasy magazines, his work with the FreeSpace mod Blue Planet, and Destiny's Grimoire, Seth Dickinson's debut novel is an extension of his short story "The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Her Field-General, and Their Wounds", which has been adapted as the novel's concluding chapter. Do not read this short story if you plan on reading the book, as this short story spoils the novel in full.

Armed with science, economics, and bureaucracy, the Imperial Republic of Falcrest, or the Masquerade as it is called by its detractors, slowly conquers Baru Cormorant's seaside homeland of Taranoke. Baru, lured away by the Empire's promise of a more prosperous society, watches from within the Imperial academy's walls as the Masquerade rewrites Taranoke's culture and criminalizes the island's customs. However, Baru is a savant, talented with the calculus of numbers and power, and she sees that the only way to defeat the Masquerade is by changing it from within.

While the Empire dismantles Baru's island society, Baru dives headlong into Masquerade education, where her talents catch the eye of an Imperial agent. After her graduation, she is selected for an exceptional post as the new Imperial Accountant for the recently conquered feudal nation of Aurdwynn, a powderkeg of sedition and rebellion. In order to earn the power that will free her people, Baru must navigate Aurdwynn's treacherous politics while keeping her true motives and her sexuality hidden, and in doing so learn that the price of liberation will be exacted on her conscience.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant is the first book in The Masquerade series. The sequel, titled The Monster Baru Cormorant, was released in October 2018.

The following tropes have been found in this work:

• Abstract Apotheosis: The dominant religion in Aurdwynn is worship of the ykari, three people who each practiced a virtue so completely they became them. Himu embodies energy and excess, including life, vigor, war, spring, disease, and cancer; Wydd embodies stillness and passivity, including concepts such as patience, obedience, endurance, winter, scurvy, death, and time; and Devena is the fulcrum between the two extremes, representing concepts such as balance, choice, moderation, and weakness.
• Arcadia: Baru's home country of Taranoke has shades of it, but this is probably the result of us seeing it through Baru's eyes when she was a child.
• Ambiguously Brown:
  • Nearly everybody in the world of the novel is portrayed as being of decidedly non-European appearance, including the people of Taranoke, Aurdwynn and even the Masquerade, which is itself racially diverse. Baru herself, as a Taranoki, has brown skin and epicanthic eyes, but the novel never otherwise describes the appearance of the Taranoki (as the novel is told from her point of view, she has no reason to comment on it). There is a nation of pale-skinned people in the far north, but they are a rare and exotic appearance in the Masquerade's sphere of influence.
  • Aminata's descriptions feel vaguely Asiatic.
  • There's also mention of dark-skinned people with light colored eyes, similar to Cheddar Man.
• Animal Motifs: Shows up a lot. You have The Stag Duchy, the army of the coyote and later the army of the wolf, as well as the general association of birds with Taranoke and Baru herself.
  • Governor Cattlson is symbolized by stallions, as a symbol of physical strength, virility, and obstinacy.
  • Tain Hu is often compared to a panther or other big cat in her strength and poise.
  • Baru is reminded of a finch when she first meets Muire Lo, who is meek, attentive, makes a lot of small, quick movements, and is very sharp.
  • Purity Cartone is likened to a remora, as someone whose existence and reason for being revolves around being attached to someone else.
  • Baru thinks of Duke Lyxaxu as fox-like for his cleverness and cunning, which lend themselves easily to viciousness when he senses he's being slighted.
• Antagonistic Governor: Cattlson is the colonial governor of Aurdwynn and ultimately responsible for enforcing Falcrest's rule over the unruly province. Even before Baru raises a rebellion and turns against him, he's shown to be a deeply patronizing person who never treats Baru seriously, obstructing her efforts to stop the rebellion.
• The Beard: Baru bullies Bel Latheman into being this for a while. It goes about as well as anything else does, really.
• Becoming the Mask: Baru fears doing this for all the figurative masks she wears.
• Big Beautiful Woman: Tu Maia beauty standards leaned this way. Duchess Ihuake, who sees herself as the inheritor of a new Tu Maia empire, epitomizes them. Aurdwynn being a place where famine is common, her fat is also a symbol of the wealth she possesses (her duchy is famous for cattle).
• Big Brother Is Employing You: Baru spends the first part of the novel as the Imperial Accountant of Aurdwynn, levying taxes and such on behalf of Falcrest — a vital part of the colonial apparatus to extract wealth from the country.
• Brainwashed: The Masquerade has a method of making people into what amounts to human robots that are entirely compliant to their established masters, as well as being deadly warriors.
• Bury Your Gays: Baru's love interest, Duchess Vultjag, is executed by the Masquerade at the end. Baru might have prevented this, but does not - she considers it necessary to quash rumors of her "tribadist" inclinations, and to prevent the Masquerade's camarilla from blackmailing her with her lover's existence. But, this being something of a Crapsack World, it's not as though anybody gets a happy ending, either.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Dragonflies are called "krakenflies" here, presumably because humans in this world have no cultural concept of dragons.
• The Chessmaster: Aurdwynn is full of them. Baru is just one of them. Her recurring flaw is seeing people as pieces on a board, to be moved as she wishes, without accounting for the fact that they're players in their own right with their own conflicting ambitions.
• Child Prodigy: Baru is very clever when she's first seen as a seven-year-old child, able to ask questions to merchants about economics. She is seen as a savant as school, though there are still some subjects she is bad at.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Baru, the titular traitor, is afflicted by this, but more out of necessity than desire. In turn, she betrays her homeland Taranoke by joining the Empire, that Empire by leading Aurdwynn's rebellion, that rebellion by betraying it to the Masquerade, and her lover Tain Hu by ordering her execution. All of this, so she can set the stage for one last betrayal that will annihilate the Masquerade from within.
• Climactic Maiming: Near the end of the book, Baru takes a nasty head injury from a mace. When she regains consciousness, she discovers she's been left with hemispatial neglect, a kind of cortical blindness that renders her incapable of registering the existence of anything on her right — give her a plate of food and she'll leave the right side untouched, ask her to draw a clock and she'll crowd all the numbers in on the left. In one sense, it's Laser-Guided Karma for everyone she betrayed in the climax; in another, it's a literal blind spot to match the intellectual one that let other schemers Out Gambit her throughout the book.
• Combat by Champion: In Taranoke pre-Masquerade, when the coastal and plains people had a dispute they would send champions to fight rather than having all-out war. The first sign of what the Masquerade plans to do with Taranoke is when they interrupt the latest such duel by having soldiers massacre the entire plainsmen war party, champions and non-combatants alike, in 'defense' of the coastal people.
• Crash the Economy: To destroy a brewing rebellion in Aurdwynn, Baru deliberately triggers hyperinflation of the Falcresti fiat note, rendering the counterfeits the rebels were using for funding worthless by rendering all fiat notes worthless. This ruins the economy for years and sets back Falcrest's financial colonization of the province by causing a swing back to hard assets.
• Culture Chop Suey: By design, no culture in the book can be mapped directly to any one culture in real life. The Masquerade exhibits features of real-life empires such as those of Britain, France and China. The two former can be recognized in the Masquerade's cultural imperialism, dubious racial theories, and moral zeal. The Imperial Republic's warship names, which include Kingsbane or Egalitaria, echo Revolution-era French ship names such as Tyrannicide or Droits de l'homme. Aspects of Imperial China found in the Masquerade include its bureaucracy and its exams for obtaining government posts.
• Counterfeit Cash: It's how Vultjag gets its riches, despite the duchy being the poorest of Aurdwynn. Specifically, Tain Hu is selling her feudal lands to her peasants — making it harder to tell where the money is coming from — who buy it with the counterfeits, and then she uses the counterfeit money as funding for a rebellion. Baru's solution is to touch off an inflationary crisis that renders all fiat currency worthless, genuine and fake notes both.
• Conflicting Loyalty: Baru is torn between her love for her homeland Taranoke and her duties as a newly-minted Imperial technocrat. And then also between all that and her leadership of Aurdwynn's rebellion, as well as between the rebel dukes' desire to have their putative queen marry and found a dynasty, and her attraction to her female field-general Tain Hu.
• Cool Old Guy: Duke Pinjagata, Duke of Phalanxes, is a crude and genial Old Soldier who holds himself to the same duties as his common-born armsmen despite being nobility.
• Creepy Blue Eyes: Xate Yawa's icy blue "jungle-crow" eyes are often remarked on. As the Jurispotence of Aurdwynn, her job is to hunt down and suppress outlawed cultural practices, and the repeated emphasis on her eyes invokes her all-seeing nature, the ability to identify Baru's motives at a glance. The "jungle-crow eyes" phrase is shared with her brother Xate Olake, the rebel spymaster, and with her niece Shir who's seen as Cairdine Farrier's bodyguard in Baru's childhood.
• Culture Police: The only values allowed in Imperial lands are Imperial values, and it uses a variety of insidiously peaceful methods to write over indigenous values with its own. Marriages are tightly controlled by the Imperial Jurispotence for eugenics purposes. And though force is usually a last resort, promiscuity, religion, and homosexuality are punishable by brainwashing, mutilation, and death.
• Darwinist Desire: The Masquerade carefully manages who in the Empire is allowed to marry who for this reason. Part of its understanding of biology is that every ethnic group has its own specialized advantages and disadvantages compared to other ethnic groups, and that those traits can be combined or bred out by breeding those groups together — which is also a good way to enforce cultural homogeneity!
• Defensive Feint Trap: Unuxekome tries to attack the Masquerade's navy, and when the Masquerade navy are unable to protect their transports they seem to retreat. Unuxekome's navy goes for the transports, only for them to turn out to be filled with torpedoes and the "retreated" navy to take the opportunity to regroup and attack from all sides.
• Defiant Strip: After having a Clarified observer set on her as a 24/7 bodyguard/privacy violation/check on her loyalty, Baru tries to do this as she changes clothes (as a native of Taranoke she wasn’t raised with nudity taboos), but “shame had come into her over the past few years” and she’s unable to face him naked. Not that it matters to him, being Clarified.
• Didn't See That Coming: Frequently, as the book is in large part about Baru learning to be a Chessmaster. See Fatal Flaw, below.
• Disappeared Dad: One of Baru's fathers disappears when she's young, presumably the victim of a hate crime perpetrated by Masquerade soldiers. This is one of the factors that drives her to join the Masquerade, aiming to gain the political power to reform the empire's institutionalized homophobia.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The methods used by the Masquerade to expand its borders are eerily close to methods used by real-world colonial nations to subjugate a colony's aboriginal peoples.
  • During protests in Aurdwynn, rioters are sprayed with a weak acidic mixture in order to identify them for arrest when they seek treatment for their irritated skin. In the real world, similar tactics (albeit with paint or dye) have been used against protestors in some countries.
  • The Empire's "treatments" for sexual deviancy look a lot like conversion therapy.
• Double Reverse Quadruple Agent: It's Baru's whole deal. And Xate Yawa's.
• The Dung Ages: Aurdwynn is going through its own version of this — a feudal society where scurvy is endemic, plague is a regular occurrence, and it's worth remarking on when someone still has all their teeth. The next book mentions that Treatymont, the capital city, was built with sewers, and also that they'd back up whenever it rained. The coming of the Masquerade has improved sanitation... except where they haven't, because keeping the peasants discontent keeps pressure on the aristocrats, who will turn to the Masquerade for assistance.
• The Empire:
  • The Imperial Republic of Falcrest, also referred to as the Masquerade or the Empire of Masks.
  • Which sees itself as The Republic: Falcrest's current, nominally republican régime emerged from a bloody revolution against the ruling nobility.
  • Hegemonic Empire: The Masquerade's imperialism is mainly of the cultural and economic variety. Military force is a last resort.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: The governor of Aurdwynn and every single one of its dukes and duchesses are either killed in the rebellion or assassinated in the Empire's mop-up afterwards. The only Aurdwynni movers and shakers that survive are Baru and Xate Yawa, the Empire's two direct agents.
• Exotic Extended Marriage: Baru's parents, a mother and two fathers, although since it is her culture she doesn't see it as particularly exotic. The Masquerade, on the other hand, is less pleased.
• Fantasy World Map: The novel includes one for Aurdwynn.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • As pointed out multiple times in the narrative, Baru's is viewing other people as static pieces to be played, not individuals with their own agendas playing their own games. It causes her to be blindsided by other people's gambits on multiple occasions.
  • A second, related flaw is narrow-mindedness. Baru believes everything comes down to money in the end, blowing off people who tell her that things like honor, pride, and ducal politics also matter to people, and is consequently blindsided whenever the dukes act according to honor, pride, and ducal politics.
• Foil: Duchess Nayauru is a clear counterpart to Baru, plotting her way to dominance in Aurdwynn through its traditional means of marriage and bloodlines as opposed to Baru's Falcresti-modern populism and economics. Not only does Nayauru look a lot like Baru, her husbands Autr and Sahaule echo Baru's own family: one mother and two fathers. When asked why she remains loyal to Falcrest despite her verboten polyandry, Nayauru unknowingly repeats Baru's own arguments back at her: Falcrest is too powerful to defeat, so she must gather the power to change it from within.
• Gambit Pileup: A given, since Baru, the Jurispotence, the thirteen dukes, the Imperial Governor, and the Masquerade at large all have their own plans for Aurdwynn.
• Good Republic, Evil Empire: Averted, the Masquerade is a republic and that doesn't stop it from having imperialist ambitions, while Aurdwynn is ruled by dukes and the ultimate plan for the rebellion is to be led by Baru as a queen. However the dukes aren't shown as ideal for Aurdwynn either, with most of them oppressing their serfs.
• Gotta Kill Them All: By the end of the book, every single one of Aurdwynn's dukes is dead. The loyalists have been killed by the rebels, the rebels have been killed by assassins, the peasants have been prepare to accept the rule of a single populist ruler in accordance with republican ideals, and the natural resources once jealously monopolized by individual, feuding dukes are now fully opened up for exploitation.
• Grey-and-Grey Morality: No one is squeaky clean, but no one is outright evil, the villains tending more towards I Did What I Had to Do, Social Darwinist, or unwitting puppets of more powerful rulers utilizing their flaws. By the same token, even the most heroic dukes are manipulative, feudal and will turn on each other for the sake of advancement.
• Guyliner: Duke Pinjagata is noted to wear black eyeliner for the practical purpose of avoiding sunglare, since he's often on patrol.
• Identical Stranger: Duchess Nayauru is noted to look very similar to Baru. Which is a foreshadowing that the 'actress' Baru meets in a bar a few months later, who is described as being able to pass for Baru's sister, is none other than Nayauru herself trying to get Baru's measure. Baru doesn't quite make the connection even after meeting Nayaru properly a few years later.
• Incompatible Orientation:
  • Muire Lo, Baru’s aide, is implied to develop a crush on her after years of working closely with her during her stint as Aurdwynn’s chief economist. However, not only is he too professional to bring it up, he’s also aware she’s a lesbian.
  • Some of the rebel dukes are interested in marrying Baru to establish a royal dynasty and keep Aurdwynn united after it's freed, unaware that she's a lesbian.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Baru's justification for what she does for power, and the whole point of the Hierarchic Qualm:
  "The sword kills, but the arm moves the sword. Is the arm to blame for murder? No. The mind moves the arm. Is the mind to blame? No. The mind has sworn an oath to duty, and that duty moves the mind, as written by the Throne. So it is that a servant of the Throne is blameless."
• Heteronormative Crusader: The Masquerade as an institution, and many of its officials, notably Cairdine Farrier, Baru's mentor. It's implied that the Masquerade's institutional homophobia is in part due to his influence.
• Higher Education Is for Women: What the Masquerade believes, surprisingly. Their "Incrastic Science" holds that the female mind is more suited to abstract thought than the male, so women hold prominent positions in the navy (because navigation is complicated), bureaucracy, academia and (as in Baru's case) finance.
• If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: After Baru commits her first treason, arranging for Falcrest's tax ships to be blown up so the rebellion can steal the funds, Tain Hu has a survivor dragged over and orders Baru to execute her personally to confirm her break from the Masquerade. When Baru refuses, this turns out to be a Secret Test of Character to see whether or not she has a conscience.
  Better a woman of divided loyalties than one of no loyalty at all. Better a reluctant traitor than the terror of a true sociopath.
• Insistent Terminology: Loyal servants of the Throne will insist that you address the Masquerade as "The Imperial Republic", or "The Empire of Masks".
• Just Like Robin Hood: After rebellion is declared in the North, the Masquerade responds by pillaging the granaries, abandoning the roads to bandits, and withdrawing to loyalist territory, letting the rebels and undecided dukes starve through the winter to show Aurdwynn what life would be like without them. The Army of the Coyote responds by distributing their stolen tax money so the poor can buy food, restoring order to the roads, and generally winning support by replacing the infrastructure the Masquerade abandoned.
• Kill It with Fire: The Imperial Navy loves burning things, whether with regular incendiaries or their infamous Navy Burn
• Lady of War: Tain Hu, Duchess Vultjag, one of Aurdwynn's ruling nobles, is described as both graceful and a very competent fighter and general.
• Led by the Outsider: Baru becomes the leader of Aurdwynn's rebellion and the prospective queen despite being a former Masquerade functionary born in Taranoke. Aurdwynn's dukes are too fractious to accept the elevation one of their own (and aware of it), so they need an outsider to lead them. As a plus, being Taranoki means she can trace her heritage to the same ethnic group as several of the dukes, so she's not too foreign to accept.
• Let No Crisis Go to Waste: Duchess Nayauru takes advantage of the rebellion while having no desire to join it, attacking he neighboring Duchess Ihuake so she can take power in her land while excusing it with the idea that she is fighting on the Masquerade's behalf against a neighbor who harbored rebels.
• Loophole Abuse: Masquerade law says every duchy must have a ducal accountant. Tain Hu notes that it doesn't specify the accountant has to be a separate person from the duke. As such, she does all her own accounts, letting her cook her own books and hide that her wealth comes from counterfeit cash.
• Lord Country: All the dukes and duchesses of Aurdwynn are named after their duchies to the point where the names of the duchies are used as if they were their personal names: Duke Oathsfire of Oathsfire becomes just Oathsfire, Duchess Nayauru of Nayauru becomes just Nayauru, and so on. Some of them get properly named, but the only one referred by it consistently is Duchess Tain Hu of Vultjag, who is vastly more important to Baru.
• Low Fantasy: Cynical, entirely human and ostensibly magic-less setting where everyone's morals are grey at best, and even wars for independence are laden with greed and machinations.
• Macross Missile Massacre: During the last climactic battle, the Imperial forces roll out hwacha - cart and ship-mounted multiple rocket launchers.
• Magic Feather: Before Baru takes the civil service exam that marks her graduation from school and will determine her career opportunities for the rest of her life, Farrier slips her a vial of water mixed with an attention-sharpening drug he says all the Faculties use. After the exam, Farrier playfully asks if the placebo he gave her helped. Subverted, though: Baru never drank it, and crushed the exam anyways.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The setting is definitively Hard Fantasy, though mentions of curses and magic appear sporadically, usually framed as superstition and given little credence. Then again Baru's notes at the very end of the novel indicate that there may be supernatural phenomenae on a neighboring continent. Dickinson has said that the magic system in the novel is an economy "simple enough for people to twiddle the knobs and get predictable results."
• Meaningful Rename:
  • Baru gets called Baru Fisher while joining the Aurdwynn's rebellion, switching her name from a fishing animal found in her homeland of Taranoke to one found in Aurdwynn, representing her Going Native. Baru takes the name of "Agonist" on becoming one of the Empire's secret rulers. An agonist is one who takes part in a struggle or contest.
  • A geographic one halfway through the book when Baru's native Taranoke is renamed "Sousward," causing her some distress.
• A Minor Kidroduction: The opening of the book features Baru as a child with her parents, when she first encounters the Masquerade, and quickly goes through her adolescence in the Masquerade's schools.
• Neat Freak: The Incrastic philosophy of the Masquerade is obsessed with hygiene and cleanliness on a level that goes well beyond physical sanitation and into mental and moral grounds, leading to their fascination with eugenics and psychological conditioning. It is more notorious in their Navy.
• Noodle Incident: Why Sahaule is called "Horsebane". (What's the name about?)
• Non-Heteronormative Society: People in Taranoke regularly have multiple fathers; Baru herself had a mother and two fathers. People in Aurdwynn before the Masquerade took over also are mentioned to have often had men or women marrying each other.
• Not-So-Omniscient Council of Bickering: The Masquerade's committee of Secret Masters is held in balance because each member has dirt on one of the others — deliberately so. Indeed, being blackmailable seems to be one qualification for recruitment.
• Out-Gambitted: Baru's good, but her more experienced rivals frequently get the best of her.
• Out-of-Character Moment: In Baru's final command meeting before the final battle, the thoughtful Duke Lyxaxu is unusually fatalistic and snappish — foreshadowing that he's deduced Baru's true loyalties. Later, during the battle, he suddenly turns on Baru and tries to kill her before she can betray them.
• Outside Man, Inside Man: Tain Hu and Baru are set up in this way, respectively, with them having a respect and love for each other but Baru arguing the Masquerade can only be changed from within and Tain Hu believing there are some things not worth changing from within. Baru later comes over to Tain Hu's side, subverting this, but Double Subverted when this all turns out to be part of Baru's plan to draw out traitors to prove her worth to change the empire from within after all.
• The Philosopher King: Or rather philosopher duke; Lyxaxu has a reputation as a cunning but idealistic philosopher concerned with the common good. Time has made him more cynical, though, as philosophical precepts of caring for everyone had failed to prevent his own people from starving.
• The Plague:
  • Plague spreads on Taranoke and kills many people after the Masquerade arrives. Being aware this could happen, they quickly provide vaccinations for the children in their residential schools... but no mention is made of them doing so for the rest of Taranoke.
  • Plague is a recurring problem in Aurdwynn, enough so that they've established a system of yellow flags to warn of outbreaks and yellow-jacketed survivors to tend to them.
• Precursors: The ancient Tu Maia empire is a realistic example, akin to the Romans. Innovations like the horse-drawn plow and heavy cavalry let them conquer half the known world before they collapsed, and the legacy they left behind was a root language and a scattering of Tu Maia-descended ethnic groups across the continent. They also coexisted with the Stakhieczi empire and the Oriati federations, both of which are still around (albeit the former being a Vestigial Empire).
• Prestige Peril: Baru quickly finds out upon becoming Aurdwynn's imperial accountant that the last two people in her job met violent ends - first Ffare Tanifel was executed for treason, and then Su Olonori was assassinated presumably for refusing the offer to commit treason. The first half of the book is about Baru trying to maneuver well enough to avoid the same happening to her.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: Baru fears this when she's sent to be Imperial Accountant for Aurdwynn after graduating from school. Aurdwynn is remote, rebellious, and provincial, far from the levers of political power she wants to operate. It soon turns out to be a subversion: she was sent to Aurdwynn to learn how to wield political power.
• Room 101: Xate Yawa operates the Cold Cellar in Aurdwynn, where criminals, rebels, and deviants under Masquerade law go in for behavioral reconditioning... or surgical correction.
• Sea Mine: Naval mines were invented by the Oriati, one of Falcrest’s chief rivals. Most prominently, they’re deployed to kick off Baru’s betrayal of the Masquerade, used to sink Falcresti tax ships so the materials they carry can be used to fund her rebellion. Notably, they don’t work by blasting holes in ships — the blast is to displace all the water the ship is sitting on and being supported by, causing it to split under its own weight.
• Secretary of Evil: As a book concerned with soft power and the logistics of empires, there are a few examples:
  • Baru Cormorant herself is the Imperial Accountant of Aurdwynn, a country recently annexed into Falcrest. Her job is to oversee the economy, including trade, taxes, and loans, to maximize the amount of revenue flowing into the empire's coffers.
  • Baru has her own secretary, Muire Lo, a local who supplies context for Aurdwynni society and handles the actual logistics of her decisions, such as filing her correspondence and writing orders for her staff. He's also clearly a spy sent to assess her loyalty, but ultimately turns out to be more loyal to her than to his own masters, who may have killed him for it.
  • 'Apparitor' is the member of the Government Conspiracy angling to recruit Baru whose job is ensuring their spies, agents, and assassins are where they need to be in time for what they need to do. This is a relatively menial role and he hates his bosses, the conspiracy's actual movers, but they don't take resignations.
• Secretly Earmarked for Greatness: The title character has been groomed since childhood to join the camarilla that secretly rules the empire of Falcrest, after a chance conversation with one of its undercover members (in which she pointed out the economic methods Falcrest was using to colonize her homeland) alerted them to her potential. As she grows up, she's aware she has a powerful patron with high hopes for her, but she has no idea how powerful he truly is, or how high those hopes extend. The events of the book are effectively her qualifying exam, seeing if she has what it takes to manipulate and control an entire nation — one she wasn't entirely aware she was taking until years into her office.
• Secret-Keeper: To ensure none of them can back out and betray them, the rebellious dukes have a ilykari priestess serving as a secret-keeper. When they joined the rebellion, each duke told her an incriminating secret that could destroy them if it got out. When she joins the rebellion, Baru tells her "I want to fuck women", this being the very first time she's ever explicitly told someone her sexuality. The priestess is also a Falcresti plant, just like Baru and Yawa. The rebellion was doomed from the beginning.
• Seen It All: Duchess Erebog, the Crone in Clay, has ruled the coldest and bitterest corner of Aurdwynn for seventy years, and as a result treats all hardship, insults, posturing, and treachery with the same cold disdain. She isn't really a schemer, but Baru respects and is a little frightened of her experience, as is Tain Hu.
• Shadow Dictator: Xate Olake, the Duke Lachta and ruling Duke of Treatymont, nominal capital of Aurdwynn, is also known as the Phantom Duke because he might as well not exist — he has no public presence and never issues decrees. This is probably because of his duties as the rebellion's spymaster.
• Shadow Government: The Emperors are lobotomized vegetables who are disposed of after their term of service is done, and the Imperial Parliament doesn't really get anything done. The Masquerade is run by the "Throne", the paramount masters, a steering committee for the empire, two of whom advise Baru throughout the story, and for whom the whole novel is Baru's entry exam.
• Strictly Professional Relationship: The Will They or Won't They? between Baru and Tain Hu after she joins the rebellion comes partly from the fact that Baru is the rebellion's leader and Tain Hu one of her subordinates, who she shouldn't be seen to favor above any of the other dukes. As such, the day Baru finally openly takes Hu as her queen is the day before the rebellion's complete destruction, when such things won't matter any more.
• Symbolic Mutilation: In the final battle, Baru suffers a head wound that results in partial cortical blindness - in other words, she ends up with a physical blindside to match the tactical one she demonstrated throughout the book. In addition, the wound resembles the sacrifice Odin made to gain wisdom.
• Too Clever by Half: Baru is very cunning and clever, but her skill often leads her to be too confident in her planning and see others as pieces that can be manipulated rather than having their own plans which means it catches her off-guard when Duchess Nayauru uses allying with the Masquerade against the rebellion as an opportunity to go after Ihuake instead of doing what she expected and being pressured into joining.
• Trial by Combat: Halfway through the book, Baru rashly challenges her (unwilling) beard Bel Latheman to a duel over her honor, which is rapidly taken advantage of by both Yawa and Cattlson as a means of removing a troublemaker from play. Bel can't fight, so he gets Cattlson to be his second; Baru was banking on Yawa considering her useful enough to recruit into the rebellion and finding her a second as well, but that doesn't happen, so Baru goes to the duel fatally certain she's going to lose horribly — 'first blood' encompasses a wide range of injuries. Then Tain Hu steps out of the crowd at the last possible moment.
  I stand for Baru Cormorant.
• Trigger Phrase: "Suspire", the command word with which one of the Clarified has been conditioned.
• The Unfettered: Baru will do anything to achieve her goal.
• Unfulfilled Purpose Misery: Purity Cartone. After failing to stop Baru's attack on the tax ships, Cartone was punished by Yawa and exiled. As one of the Clarified, he was trained and conditioned from birth to serve the Masquerade, but now that the Masquerade has deemed him unfit for further service and cut him loose, the lack of direction leaves him lost and miserable, and he seeks out Baru just so he can have a ranking Masquerade agent give him orders again. As it turns out, this may have been arranged by Yawa to give Baru a tool that would be loyal solely to her.
• Unknown Rival: Baru has a blind spot for the plans of other schemers, but she's at least aware that the biggest ones like the Xate siblings are forces to be cautious of. Conversely, she's completely oblivious to Heingyl Ri, daughter of Duke Heingyl, who has her own plans running in parallel with hers across the book, arranging for Baru to kill her enemies and obstacles without Baru even being aware of it, and ends the whole debacle as Falcrest's new governor of Aurdwynn and its vast natural resources, Just as Planned.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Despite the narration being solely from her perspective, Baru often leaves out parts of her plans so then reader will be surprised when they work, notably the ending, where she never explicitly disclosed the fact that she was planning to betray the rebellion all along. The one time she does declare her plan to dispense with all subtlety and just kill Nayauru, Autr and Sahaule, while it is successful the suspense is preserved by how she got Unuxekome to do it and had no knowledge of how he would actually carry it out.
• The Vamp: Pointedly averted. Despite being a female protagonist who achieves her goals by manipulating others, she consciously refuses to use her body as a bargaining chip. The closest she ever gets is very lightly flirting with Unuxekome to push him into fighting a sea battle she knows he has no chance of surviving.
• Villain Protagonist: It turns out that the traitor to the rebellion is the titular character in the book named "The Traitor Baru Cormorant".
• Well-Trained, but Inexperienced: Baru learns swordsmanship at school and is noted to excel at it, doing better than most of the boys. The one time she's compelled to fight a real duel, against an experienced opponent, she grimly takes it for granted that she'll lose and be maimed or killed if she can't find a second to fight for her.
• What the Romans Have Done for Us: The Masquerade will overwrite your culture and government, make you pay for its wars, and mutilate or kill you if your conduct is deemed "unhygienic". But it will provide you with free education, effective healthcare, and sanitation. This is part of what makes it so dangerous.
• World of Masks: Falcrest is known as the Empire of Masks because its citizens all wear masks when they're at work, whether soldier or mathematician or minister of Parliament, to make a point about meritocracy and how things like gender and race don't matter to the empire (even though they do, quite a lot more than Falcrest pretends).
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Baru notes that Unuxekome tends to think of himself as the hero of an epic story, which she uses to manipulate him like getting him to attack the Masquerade's navy when she knows he will fail.
• Young and in Charge: Baru is only 18 years old when she's given a lot of power as the imperial accountant of Aurdwynn, and people often think she's too young to do her job competently.
• You Killed My Father: A big part of Baru's grievance against the Masquerade is her father Salm's disappearance, presumably caused by them.