Taking another mouthful, I lowered the glass.

My aunt’s lip curled and she clucked loudly. “The next thing will be elbows on the table at dinner. Your father would have a fit if he knew you were behaving so.”

As if my father cared about my manners. What was she implying? That he’d be upset that the torture devices I wore under his orders were harming me? Surely not. If anything, he would be glad that they were finally having their desired effect. “I think it might please him.”

“Do you now?” Her eyes flicked to the board, where all the answers lay. I walked in a circle around the four boards, examining my father’s pieces instead of my own. Familiar and expected faces graced the players; expected at least, until I encountered my own. In onyx, I was still a prince, but the piece sat on a square rimmed with steel, which meant that it was not lost, but unplayable. There were several other pieces set up in a strategy to free it, but they were still many moves away from their goal. Leaning closer, I saw tiny grooves on the black prince’s brow where a crown had once sat.

And might sit again.

If I was interpreting the game correctly, my father still considered me one of his players. He had strategies in place to return me to my rank as crown prince and heir, but only on his terms. The piece was onyx – it was his. To regain my position, I would have to be his puppet.

I stepped back to my place across from her. “That piece will not come back into play. I still maintain that the only strategy the white has left is to regain those players” – I gestured at the half-bloods – “with politics, and then maneuver to assassinate the black king.”

“And it might work,” she said, “if it did not play in so well to the third player’s strategy.”

Third player?

Two more boards lifted from the racks off to the side and came over to join our four. With them came another case of players, of which she selected several pieces to set on the boards, none of which were half-blood or human. The pieces were made of garnet, the red jewel glittering in the light.

Angoulême.

“Your new Guerre set is well made,” I said, stalling. It was perfectly made for the purposes of this conversation, but it would have taken months for an artist to craft. How had she known it would be needed?

Setting my wine glass down on the table, I lifted the onyx spy representing Lessa-as-Anaïs, and set it down next to the garnet duke. My aunt nodded slightly, and Roland’s onyx piece floated over to join them, garnet warriors lining up around him to show the piece as captured.

“Correct?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, but the memory of Roland walking with Lessa and Angoulême troubled me. He had certainly not been under guard, and he had not looked discontented with his position. Quite the opposite, in fact.