Chapter 13 – The Last Game

She found him where she always found him, because Tomin did not change his habits for anyone.

Third Communal, table by the east wall, a cup of something dark at his elbow and the Stones of Fate board already laid out between them. Tomin had been playing this game for as long as Kai could remember. He would probably be playing it long after she was gone. There was something settled about that, something rooted and reliable. She had not thought about it before and was thinking about it now.

"I was wondering when you'd show." He didn't look up. His thumb was working the edge of an Air Stone, rolling it back and forth.

"You were not," Kai said, and dropped into the chair across from him. She had sat in this chair a thousand times.

He looked up. "You're right. I was hoping."

She took the bag of stones from the center of the table and started sorting them out by type, in her mother's order. Earth first. Then Water. Then Fire, Air, Spirit last, because Spirit was unpredictable and you didn't want to be touching it while your mind was still on the others.

"Where's Mary?" Tomin asked, sorting his own stones without looking at them.

"Home. She might come later if the mood takes her."

He reset his side of the board. Sixty-four squares scratched into the old wood. Kai had touched every square of this table. She knew the grain of it: which edges were rough, which squares had gone soft from years of dampness, where the old cup ring was, bleached into the wood just left of center.

She set her Spirit Stone in the corner where it would wait until she needed it, and looked at the board.

They had played three moves when Tomin said, without looking up: "Something's different about how you're playing tonight."

"I'm losing the same as always."

"No. You're not." He placed an Earth Stone at the edge of her growing pattern and sat back. "You've been reading ahead since you sat down."

Kai studied the board. He was right. The shape of the next four moves was already there, the signal-structure laid against the board's grain without her reaching for it. She'd been following it the same way she'd been following the signal at the window: listening for where it was already going.

"How far ahead can you read?" she asked. The question came out before she could think better of it.

"On a good day? Four moves." He picked up his Water Stone and turned it in his fingers, the polished surface catching the firelight. "Your mother could read six."

Silence between them, and the silence had weight. The Communal was warm around them, fire in the basin throwing long shadows across the cardium walls, the low talk of two women at the far table, a child running in from the hall and stopping short at the sight of adults playing something serious, then running back out. Kai breathed it in. Cardium walls throwing the light back warm and strange, the smell she had grown up with: wood smoke and the faint chemical bite of the alloy and the slow smell of whatever was cooking somewhere deeper in the cellar.

"Tomin," she said.

"Mm."

"I'm going to follow it east."

He set the Water Stone down on the board. Not in a playing position. He just set it down, gently, in the middle of a square, centered, careful, giving it somewhere to rest.

"When?" he asked. His voice was steady but his hands had gone still on the table.

"A few days. Maybe less." She had been forming this since the second night at the window, when she'd gone deeper and the footprints had gone deeper still. She hadn't said it to anyone yet. Not Thuse. Not Mary. Not Ace, who would want to argue with her and lose and love her anyway. She'd said it here first, to Tomin, at this table. She wasn't sure why, except that some things needed to be spoken aloud before they became real.

Tomin picked up the Water Stone again and placed it properly. "Does the Elder know?"

"Not yet. I wanted to tell you first."

He nodded once, slow and considering. He had known Thuse for longer than Kai had been alive. She had never once heard him question Thuse's judgment, which made her wonder what he thought of hers.

"You know what this game is really about," he said.

She looked at the board.

"The stones don't care what you want," he said. "They do what they do. Earth Stone anchors. Water Stone moves. Fire Stone disrupts. Air Stone connects." He tapped his Spirit Stone where it sat in the corner. "And Spirit goes where it goes. You can't predict it. You can only make room for it."

He placed a Fire Stone between her center two squares. It severed her alignment entirely, and he knew it would.

Kai looked at the board for a long moment, reading the damage. She picked up her own Spirit Stone and held it.

"My mother played Spirit last," she said.

"I know. She told me once that the other four stones handle what you can see coming. Spirit handles what you can't." He picked up his cup. "She was very good at it." His voice carried something careful, the sound of a man speaking about someone he had watched closely and never forgotten.

Kai placed her Spirit Stone at the far edge of the board, outside any pattern, in a position that made no sense for three moves and would make all the sense in the world for the fourth.

Tomin looked at it. Then at her. His hand stopped over the board. He knew what the stone meant.

"There it is," he said quietly, and something behind his eyes shifted.

They played the rest of the game without talking. The Communal filled and emptied around them: a family riding out a small tremor, gone when it passed; old Jara from the far corner watching the board steady and silent, chin on her fist, saying nothing; the child from earlier back with a friend, both of them leaning in to look at the stones until Tomin raised one eyebrow and they retreated. The fire popped. The smell of the cardium was in everything.

Kai won by a narrow margin. For the first time in her life, and they both knew what it meant.

Tomin looked at the final configuration and was quiet for a moment. He reached out and straightened one stone that had gone slightly off its square, then sat back.

"You'll come back," he said.

The words sat between them on the worn table, steady and warm, asking nothing back.

Kai gathered her stones and put them back in the bag. She stood, pushing the chair back, and Tomin rose with her. Old habit, old courtesy that neither of them had ever discussed. He held out both hands and she clasped them.

"I'll be at the table," he said.

She nodded. She looked at the board one last time: the worn squares, the old cup ring just left of center, the marks of every game played here for generations. Then she set the bag down for him to put away.

At the door, she stopped without turning.

"Four moves," she said.

"Four moves," he agreed.

She left.