Alice and Eliot were on the same team, facing off against Josh and Quentin, with Janet refereeing. Janet wasn’t the most assiduous student of the Physical Kids—that was Alice—or the most naturally gifted—Eliot—but she was ferally competitive, and she’d decided to acquire a total command of the technical intricacies of welters, which really was an amazingly complicated game.

“Without me you people would be lost!” Janet said, and it was true.

The game was half strategy, half spell-casting. You captured squares with magic, or protected them, or recaptured them by superseding an earlier spell. Water squares were the easiest, metal the hardest—they were reserved for summonings and other exotic enchantments. Eventually a player was supposed to step bodily onto the board, becoming in effect a playing piece in his or her own game, and as such vulnerable to direct, personal attacks. As he approached the edge the meadow around Quentin seemed to shrink, and the board expanded, as if it were at the center of a fisheye lens. The trees lost some of their color, becoming dim and silvery.

Things went quickly in the early rounds as both sides captured uncontested squares in a free-for-all land grab. As in chess, there were any number of conventional openings that had been worked out and optimized long ago. But once all the free squares were gone they had to start slugging it out head to head. The afternoon wore on, with long breaks for Janet’s highly technical welters tutorials. Eliot disappeared for twenty minutes and came back with six slender bottles of a very dry Finger Lakes Riesling he’d apparently been saving for just such an emergency, in two tin buckets full of melting ice. He hadn’t thought to bring any glasses, so they swigged straight from the bottles.

Quentin still didn’t have much of a capacity for alcohol, and the more wine he drank the less he could focus on the details of the game, which were getting hellishly complex. Apparently it was legal to transmute squares from one kind to another, and even make them slide around and switch places on the board somehow. By the time the players themselves had stepped onto the board, everybody was so drunk and confused that Janet had to tell them where to stand, which she did with towering condescension.