She shook her head, all eagerness, and set them up herself. He let her move first, and she sent one of her maids out into the world. The Marshal moved, and then she again, letting her horsemen jump where it was right to go, and her marshals move to stop an advance, and so on, until suddenly her father was staring at her with a kind of fire in his eyes. She looked back at the board, not to miss anything. He moved again, slowly, watching her. She moved. “Check,” she said, as she had heard him say. “And mate.”
And then she really looked up, excited and proud, only to see that fire burning in his eyes. And she knew it for what it was. Cold wrath. She had done something wrong, terribly wrong.
“Who taught you?” he said in his gravest voice, the one that could not be disobeyed.
She thought frantically. Who had taught her but he, himself. “I watched you, Father.” And then without thinking she said words that were not quite true, that were not really at all true but would nonetheless save her from those eyes. “It is one of the games you played with your friend, father. I just remembered your moves.”
It was true she had remembered the moves, every move either player had made all evening, and though her game had not been the same game as any her father and his friend had played, the claim was the only thing that would help her. The fire in his eyes damped down to a dull glow.
“This game is not for children,” he said. “In future when I play it with my friends, you stay with your mother.”
Previously, Genevieve had believed she loved her father, for loving and honoring one’s father was a Godly duty, something the visiting scrutator covered in detail.
“You would do anything for your father, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, yes, scrutator.”
“Your father is the wisest of men, isn’t he?”
“Oh, yes, scrutator.”
After her birthday, however, she knew she did not love him, and she was careful to cross her fingers whenever the scrutator used the wordlove. Years later, she came to wonder if her mother had ever loved him, whether her loins had ever twitched for the Marshal.
Barbara said her loins had been twitching since she was eleven. Barbara sometimes leaned from her window and flirted with the commoner boys beyond the wall. Genevieve thought this unseemly behavior might have something to do with Barbara’s being a bourgeoise, rich, but a bourgeoise. Barbara sang naughty songs in the showers, even when she was punished for it, and though Genevieve fought against the temptation, she adored Barbara. She envied Barbara’s daring attitudes and her highly individual style. She loved Barbara’s sense of humor and quick wit and flashes of intimate perception, though she was careful not to let her admiration show. Any hint that a girl might be too fond of one of her friends provoked the scrutator, and the Marshal would be much offended to think she could possibly prefer any other role to the frugal, complex, and thankless one that he, God, and the covenants had bestowed upon her.
Like Genevieve, Viscountess Glorieta and Lady Carlotta were provincial nobility, sister-twins and only children of Lord Ahmenaj, Earl of Bliggen, a county in the province of Barfezi. Glorieta was a bit the taller. Carlotta was a lot curvier. They both had the light brown hair, the hazel eyes, and the creamy skin and curly, laughing mouths shared by all the Ahmenaj family. The twins were destined for the elder sons of the Count’s neighbor, Lord Blufeld, Earl of Halfmore. Their weddings would consolidate the two holdings into an enormous estate, which both the Amenaj and the Blufeld families very much desired.
“Though it is troublesome being a dynastic game piece,” Carlotta had once said. “Move here, move there, take that piece, jump, jump, take that piece. And at the end, I suppose I get a Viscountess’s tiara as a booby prize, and so what!”
“At least you have a foreseeable future,” Genevieve remarked. “You’ve said yourself you rather like Tomas. And Glorieta really likes Willum. And you love your father’s estate, and this way you’ll remain attached to it.”