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In the name of thoroughness, she touched the sun. It punished her audacity by stinging her fingers as painfully as a mage of Anthros’s spell. When she tried to pick it up anyway, Lio and the princess cringed, and Chrysanthos leaned back in his chair with a long-suffering expression. The sensation of fiery pin pricks traveled over Cassia’s skin and through her veins all the way to her elbow.
“Well, that was conclusive.” She put her hand back in her lap, resisting the urge to claw at her arm.
Knight rested his head on her thigh, and she gratefully buried her smarting hand in his ruff.
One round after another, Cassia watched the others move their chosen pieces in complicated, deliberate plays, while she worked her way through her options on the board. Lio and Chrysanthos took turns moving scrolls. No piece belonged entirely to either side, it seemed. Cassia found the scrolls, rooks, and apprentices all served her as well.
The strict patterns of movement allotted to each piece began to come clear to her, along with the relative strengths of each token. There was a whole pack of liegehound pieces that, she discovered, had few limitations on their movements. They quickly became her favorites, despite how nervous they seemed to make Lio and the princess.
Harkhuf and Eudokia were enthusiastic commentators, keeping up a running discourse on the game in three languages. Occasionally Eudokia let out a derisive laugh, or Harkhuf groaned in sympathy. Cassia observed their reactions as closely as she did the game. She took into consideration which remarks they directed at the mages in Divine and which hints they dropped her in Vulgus, although she could not understand what must be impolitic insults in an Imperial tongue.
Most of the embassy crowded closer and closer around to watch the game. The back of Cassia’s gown dampened with sweat, and she was glad her black shoulder cape would conceal the moisture on her red gown. But it was good they had captured everyone’s attention. The other mages’ reactions to each turn gave her more clues, and so did Benedict’s. Watching Flavian drink was not the only entertainment in Segetia, it seemed.
“Basilis is becoming quite the menace with her hounds,” Eudias said in an appreciative tone. “They are her tokens indeed.”
“A fitting strategy for a beginner,” Chrysanthos approved.
Cassia vowed to help their side lose as excruciatingly as possible.
Lio smiled and used his rook to take one of the liegehounds she had left in his path. She patted Knight’s head apologetically, and Lio bowed to him. The crowd laughed. Cassia put on a staunch expression and closed in on Lio’s rook with another of her hounds, which she knew she would also lose on his next turn.
Chrysanthos bestowed a forgiving smile upon Cassia and moved the temple for the fourth time in what seemed to be an ongoing duel with the princess’s rose. Xandra left the flower where it was and moved a thorn instead.
Cassia had yet to touch any of the princess’s favorite pieces. There might be hidden traps in this game, not just for Chrysanthos, but for Cassia as well. Would it mean something to the Dexion if she succeeded in moving a piece that was especially Hesperine in character? How much significance was there in a person’s affinity for each piece? She would stay with the safe, neutral choices.
She made a great show of enthusiasm every time she discovered a successful move for which the game did not penalize her. As if thrilled to be moving at all, she threw her tokens into the path of Lio’s and Xandra’s at every opportunity, then laughed aloud at her own mistakes. While Chrysanthos was busy wincing, Cassia studied the layout of the board to determine which of her pieces were protecting his favorites, so she could do away with them next and destroy his defenses.
The Dexion moved the shrine within range of Lio’s rook. Lio, instead of fleeing, subverted the shrine for his own purposes, shifting it from the plane to the path. The more elaborate rules still eluded Cassia, but she gathered that Chrysanthos had abandoned the shrine on purpose. When it was his turn again, she saw what must be the reason why. He stole the princess’s cup and moved it onto the circle where his shrine had been.
The real expert on subverting tokens was the princess herself. When she wasn’t carving a devastating swath across the board using the queens and the moons, she kept stealing Chrysanthos’s favorite pieces. The sickle and the sword both came to her hand and abandoned their master. He met her unapologetic, sympathetic smiles with his unreadable courtly ones. His expression became more and more frozen on his face.
The fires burned lower, casting deeper shadows on the faces of Cassia’s fellow players. The side of the table grew cluttered with her sacrifices, and she began to wonder what she would do when she ran out of pieces. Then suddenly everything ground to a halt.
It was Chrysanthos’s turn. He stared at the arrangement of his torch and the princess’s recently moved blood moon as if he no longer saw anything beyond the game. Xandra smiled at him again, but this time there was an unmistakable challenge in her eyes.
Both their gazes flicked to the sun, which sat on the circle where it had been when the game had begun.
Chrysanthos sat back in his chair, as if in dismissal, and moved the scroll that sat between his torch and the blood moon.
The princess plucked his torch from its place and used it to take his scroll.
The mages in the room gasped.
“Females are never able to use the torch,” Tychon protested.
“How would you know?” the princess asked. “You never let females play.”
“Impossible,” Master Gorgos sputtered.
Eudokia looked down her nose at him. “Clearly not, for you just witnessed it.”
Chrysanthos scoffed. “You could not possibly be that singular, Eighth Princess.”
“It is not very gracious of you to take back a compliment, Honored Master.”
It dawned on Cassia that Chrysanthos was running out of tactics. Now that the princess had claimed the torch and disposed of the scroll, there were few pieces left on the board that the Dexion had touched in recent turns—his tokens. If Cassia understood correctly, he had exactly two left, the powerful temple and a useless macer.
Cassia put her last, best piece, the tree, to the most effective use she could. Completing a long series of gradual repositioning she had worked on with the slow-moving piece, she slid it into place on the plane beside Chrysanthos’s temple, as if to protect him from Lio’s nearby rook.
