“Oh, yes, silly me.” Cecilia backed away.
“Thanks, Cee,” Fiona said.
“Thanks,” Eliot said.
She and Eliot moved to Audrey and gave her a kiss on the cheek. To Fiona, this felt like one of her morning chores, like brushing her teeth or taking out the trash.
Eliot ran down the hall.
Fiona sprinted after him and got ahead, tramping down the spiral staircase first, and halted at the front door. “Too slow again,” she told him.
The front door was redwood and had four stained glass windows depicting a rose-hedge maze, a meander of river, a field of grapevines and harvesters, and a coastline with churning waves. A million colors sparkled on the tiled floor.[3]
Fiona loved this door and paused to admire it.
“We’d better go,” Eliot whispered. “There’s something weird about this Paxington map deal.”
“I know,” Fiona said. “I feel it, too.”
She glanced back up the stairwell, hoping to see Audrey looking down, maybe with the tiniest farewell wave.
But her mother wasn’t there. . only shadows.
Audrey watched from the second-story window as the children walked down the street. They paused at the intersection and looked both ways before crossing. She reached up and touched the glass.
Always so careful. Good for them. The world was a dangerous place, and it was wise to look before one leaped. But sometimes being cautious was bad. Wait too long to cross the road, and one might be hit from behind by a bus careening out of control down the sidewalk.
She withdrew her hand, returned to the dining table, and sat.
“We must talk,” Cecilia whispered to her. “The children-”
Audrey held up one finger. “Tea first, Cecilia. And bring the Towers game. I fear the time will crawl today without some distraction.”
Cecilia obediently nodded and backed into the kitchen.
Boiling water for tea. The old woman hopefully could manage that.
Audrey nibbled on a piece of curled burnt bacon and reminded herself to make a list of all the restaurants nearby that delivered breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There was no need anymore to pretend they did not have the money for such “luxuries” as edible food.
Cecilia returned with a tea service tray and a rolled-up piece of leather.
Indeed, there was no need anymore to pretend
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
“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, casting its pieces into Cecilia’s territory, capturing two of her cubes. “Besides, I have spoken with her. All is arranged.”
“Oh, I see,” Cecilia said, now ignoring the game. “Miss Westin and Paxington are vastly reformed since the old days, eh? Did you know that seventeen children were so severely injured last year that they could not continue? That there were five fatalities?”
“Of course,” Audrey replied. “I believe that’s the point.”
Cecilia sipped her tea. “That is not the only danger. The students, they are from the families, ours, theirs, all the other great ones, mortal and immortal-the social elite and privileged few.” She huffed. “Do you know what they will do to our poor little lambs?”
“They will devour them,” Audrey told her, “if Eliot and Fiona fail to grow.”
