Baru had been reading the rules of the Great Game. She knew, now, how to manage a few of the rules, how to play as more than make-believe. She had arranged the board to represent a simple confrontation between Falcrest and the Oriati: Aurdwynn tidied away in the north, the Stakhieczi quiescent, nothing looming across the Mother of Storms. Just Old King Poison against the thousand-year Mbo.

“I’m nothing special, Mr. Farrier,” she said. Play the humble student, Baru, and bait him, bait him till he tells you the truth you have to know.

Why is Falcrest saved? What have I done that he wanted so badly for me to do?

“Nothing special!” He set down the pawns of Federal Princes across the Mbo. “How can you think that, Baru?”

“Well, as you say, there’s the matter of age.” She opened her hand to the empty northwest of the world. “The War Princess Shiqu Si died at twenty-one with the biggest empire in history. And how old was Dautiare when she led the first purge after the revolution? Twenty? And there was her father’s tactician Iro Mave, although I haven’t found many good books on her.”

Farrier applauded gently. “You have mastered your history. Now, we play Hesychast rules: all character is determined by heredity. No one may disobey their intrinsic nature. Begin.”

Behind him the southern-facing window, the harbor birds, the glittering wavetops that receded to a white line. The patterns of wave-crest and trough like the lines of a mountain range. Were mountains waves traveling through earth, millennia in their crest and crash?

On the board she’d marshaled her resources in Falcrest. She, the Baru-piece, had no rules yet in the game, so she had granted herself dominion over trade and commerce on the Ashen Sea, and over Falcrest’s internal economy. No fleets. No votes in Parliament. No laws or judgments. Just money.

She chose, and played, a currency gambit. Exactly what Farrier had used on Taranoke. She would sell exports to Oriati Mbo—lumbers, spices, textiles, clocks and art especially—cheaply, and for whatever money the Oriati would pay. She would buy only with Falcresti fiat notes. Their currency came out, Falcrest’s went in. Like a straw shoved into the rind of the Oriati economy, and her mouth sucking out all their native money, until they traded only with hers.

“In Aurdwynn,” she said, thinking of the mastery of history, “a man told me that the future is an edict issued by the past.”

“Historical contingency.” Farrier nodded. “The notion that the shape of tomorrow depends, by fixed laws, upon the shape of today. Quite radical, in the days when kings claimed absolute rule. People were executed for claiming that history had power over the monarch. Ah—what’s this?” Reading Baru’s orders now: “Ah, I recognize what you’re up to.”