User:Kasmed/sandbox

Plot
On the island nation of Taranoke, seven-year old Baru watches the ships come in for the trading market, including ships from the Masked Empire of Falcrest, a sight which worries her two fathers. Made curious and nervous by this, the next day she goes to the market to learn about Falcrest and encounters a merchant, Cairdine Farrier, who takes an interest in her. Baru notes that the Falcrest merchants are flooding Taranoke with their currency, and not long afterward, Taranoke allows a Falcrest school to be built, as one of the terms of a treaty between their lands. Unsettled by the treaty and fearful of conquest, the plainspeople of Taranoke threaten war, and the harbour people - including Baru's mother and one of her fathers - go to fight them, accompanied by Falcrest soldiers. In the months that pass, Baru is allowed to attend the Falcresti school and begins to acquire an imperial education, including the ideology of Incrasticism, which among other things, forbids homosexual relationships or more than two parents.

The war is won, but Baru's mother returns alone, saying that the Falcrest soldiers hated her father for having a husband, and took him away somewhere. Arguing over his fate and Baru's attendance at the school, Baru grows distant from her parents, while Cairdine becomes her sponsor. She is told that if she does well in the civil service exam, she could gain a high position in the empire. At eighteen, she passes the exam, earns the position of Imperial Accountant, and is promptly sent to the northern nation of Aurdwynn to govern its expenses and root out rebellion.

In Aurdwynn, Baru learns that Cairdine holds a mysterious and powerful role in Falcrest. She meets the dukes and duchesses who divide the land between them, and the Jurispotence Xate Yawa, who seeks out and corrects moral crime. In watching them, she concludes that the rebellion she is seeking is already among the Aurdwynn nobility. In pursuing it through Aurdwynn's accounts, she gets to know the duchess Tain Hu, who Baru is dangerously attracted to, and who is funding the rebellion. Baru causes a massive inflation of the Falcrest currency, bankrupting the nation and starting months of poverty and riots. She is then approached by another agent of the Falcrest Empire, who issues a test of her worth: she is to draw out the rebellious Aurdwynn nobles and purge them. If she does this, she is promised all the knowledge and power of the Masked Empire, which Baru plans to use to destroy it from within.

Using the outrage of the impoverished people, she begins to challenge Falcrest's rule and makes overtures of joining the rebellious nobles. They demand she confess a secret worth her life, to be written down alongside the secrets of the nobles, and Baru admits that she is a lesbian. Now trusted, she takes a position as a symbolic leader of the rebellion and leads a bloody civil war against Aurdwynn's governor. Choosing Tain Hu as her general, they grow closer as the war progresses, but Baru refuses to act upon her feelings.

Baru's forces emerge victorious despite the betrayal of one of the nobles, and Baru declares herself queen of Aurdwynn. She spends a night with Tain Hu, and then urgently dispatches her with her spymaster to get as far away as possible. Baru herself flees the encampment in secret, while the Empire's agents kill all of the remaining nobles, beheading the rebellion and proclaiming Baru a weapon of Falcrest. Coming upon enemies, Baru is struck in the head, and wakes to find herself among the imperial agents which secretly rule Falcrest. The head injury results in cortical blindness, cutting off Baru's perception of her right side. A month passes as she awaits the final test before she is granted the power she seeks. One of the Empire's highest circle arrives with Tain Hu, and poses the test: she must execute the person she loves and trusts the most.

Meeting with Tain Hu for the last time, Baru confesses everything she has done. Tain Hu tells her what she learned from her captor: that Baru is expected to fail, and Tain Hu will be kept alive as a hostage to ensure her loyalty to the ruling conspiracy. She asks Baru to kill her, so that she escapes the Empire's hold.

Baru orders Tain Hu chained on the shoreline, and she is drowned by the tide. Joining the conspiracy, she takes the name Agonist.

Themes
The novel faces three major themes of societal oppression: sexism, homophobia and racism. The Masked Empire of Falcrest participates in a relentless pursuit of imperialism, bringing plagues as well as inoculations to Taranoke, embedding its doctrines in native youth while promising a rational, better way through the guise of a meritocracy. As a Taranoki, a woman and someone raised by two fathers and who loves women, Baru faces each facet of oppression, and finds a way to subvert or take power through it. Her goal is the liberation of her home, and the question of how far she can go before she is co-opted by the power she uses for Taranoke's sake is central to the book. The battlefield is one of ideas and plans, and as Baru works within Falcrest's power to get closer to what she wants, so Falcrest also gets closer to her.

Another pivotal theme is that of sacrifice and agency. Seth Dickinson notes that “she can sacrifice something, a person or a piece of herself, to get past it.” These sacrifices build up in difficulty, until the choice itself is a weight upon Baru, increasing with each step. To go up against an empire by working within it is to become complicit, and to accept that complicity requires ruthlessness, a choice "where much of the depth and sorrow of the book comes from". How many hard choices can someone make, and what is the cost of them? The final, most crushing sacrifice demanded of her is Tain Hu's, and yet this is also the one which signals the breaking of the Masquerade's control and defiance of its tactic of learned helplessness. Tain Hu chooses to die, and Baru attains the power and secrets of Falcrest without being leashed to it by a hostage.

Reception
Paul Di Filippo of Locus (magazine) called the novel one which "delivers action and philosophy, economics and warfare, love and hatred, in equal measures" and drew inspiration from Samuel R. Delany and C. J. Cherryh. Kirkus Reviews praised Dickinson's writing as a "dense... deftly orchestrated narrative" dealing with both economics and statecraft.