All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [8]
Cecilia smiled nervously. “You have that look on your face”—she poured hot water into a teapot with spiderweb patterns etched into its white glaze—“the look where people go missing.”
Odors of chamomile, mint, and mandrake wafted across the table.
“I was just thinking that there are advantages to having some things cut.” Audrey sighed. “Set up the game and ask no more foolish questions.”
Cecilia paled. She unrolled the leather mat upon the table and then removed the game cubes from their pouch.
Long ago, Audrey had had to sever herself from a collection of feelings and instincts that some might call motherhood. She’d left only one connection: the instinct to protect.
Did she still love her children? Was there some vestige of a desire to give them the best of everything? Where was the urge to hold them and soothe away their fears when they had nightmares? Or were these things forever lost to her?
It had to be that way, though. Otherwise, she would not have had the strength to do what was best for them all.
Audrey shifted her focus to the game. It was a study on the forms of combat, on strategies and death, a metaphor on the families and their never-ending politics. They called the game Towers.4
Audrey smoothed the rumpled leather mat and ran her fingers over the lines that radiated from the center, around the circles that divided the space into four tiers. Slaves (or their modern equivalent, Pawns) sat on the outer edge. Warriors took the second tier. Princes collected near the nexus of power on the third tier. The Master sat in the center space. Rings about rings. Rings of power and love and deception and regret.
She and Cecilia divided the stone cubes and took alternating turns, selecting their starting positions along their respective inner areas.
Much of the game was decided by this deceptively simple planning stage. Good players could tell how their game would end from such opening moves. One could set up near an opponent’s boundary, preparing for an aggressive rush. Or they could set up in the back regions and strategize to take the center—a longer game of dominance and subtlety.
Like the twins. How things went today at school would very much affect their endgame.
Cecilia set up on Audrey’s boundary. In response, Audrey placed only a few weak defenders to counter her and concentrated her efforts on the longer back-region game.
Cee immediately took one of Audrey’s border guards. “I am worried about their father,” she said, a smug smile appearing on her face as she removed Audrey’s piece.
“There has been no word from him,” Audrey replied.
“Exactly!” Cee said. “It can mean only one thing: He’s plotting something.”
Audrey’s answer to this obvious statement was silence.
She countered Cecilia’s move by advancing a stone from her first circle to the second, blocking Cee’s clumsy advance.
“We should tell the children,” Cecilia said. “Tell them everything.” She poured Audrey and herself cups of tea. Steam curled around the old woman like living tendrils. “We should prepare them for the coming violence.”
“No.”
“But this is not like the last time, when their ignorance protected them.”
“Their ignorance serves a purpose still,” Audrey told her. “They have lessons to learn. The entire truth would only distract them.”
“But they are so smart.” Cecilia moved another piece along her opposite border, poised to attack.
Audrey moved another cube onto her second tier, stacking it with the first to make a low Tower.
Cecilia frowned at this, realizing her error. She moved one of her own cubes to the second tier. Too late, however, to be an effective counter.
“ ‘Smart’ will help them only so much,” Audrey said. “Better they learn how to be ruthless. They must be pushed to the brink, broken, and then remolded. It is the only way they have a chance of surviving.”
“And the place for this is Paxington? That so-called Headmistress, Miss Westin. We will be lucky if she does not kill them first.”
“Westin is not the threat she once was to children,” Audrey told her. She toppled her fledgling Tower,