Rook(16)

“But whatever I think,” Tom continued, “I would never say that I don’t obey the laws of my land. Or yours.”

Sophia moved her rook across the chessboard, setting the next prong of her attack. Tom was helping her disobey those laws every day. He just wouldn’t be so stupid as to say so, of course. Their father snored softly from his chair, and René moved a sheriff, his mind obviously elsewhere.

“And what about you, Hasard?” Tom said, turning the tables. “Do you agree with your city’s revolution? Do you think technology will make the poor poorer, and the rich richer? Do you think the people of the Upper City are being executed for funding the return of technology at the expense of the Lower City, or for merely having the money to do so and owning property your government wants? Or is it because of their religious beliefs, because your cousin wants to replace the chapels with a cult? Or are they being put to the Razor because they do not agree with Allemande’s absolute power, and the way he executed your last premier?”

For a few moments it seemed as if René wouldn’t answer, and then he leaned back in his chair and began to laugh loudly, like the man of her Banns ball. “Oh, no,” he said. “You have me, Monsieur! Here I was, hoping to impress my fiancée with lofty questions, when to say the truth, I never think on these things myself. Benoit is always telling me I should.”

Sophia stared doggedly at the game and moved her vicar.

“But one thing I know to be true,” René went on, recovering from his laugh. “No machine could make a better coat than my tailor. Now there is an opinion I can stand behind.”

Really, the man could not have annoyed her more if he sat up at night and planned it.

Tom was still smiling. “But isn’t a loom a machine, Hasard?”

“Or the Razor?” Sophia added.

René thrust his vicar across the board before he threw up his hands. “Please!” he cried in mock distress. “No more! I am defeated! Benoit was right again. As usual.”

Sophia ran a hand through her ringlets, wondering how she could ever survive a lifetime of nights like this. There might have to be sword fighting in the sitting room after all. Spear rustled his newspaper, but she did not look his way. She moved her queen. Two moves and she would win.

“My love,” René said, voice miraculously lowered. “Do you not think we should choose a date for our wedding? I really should write to my maman.”

“I’m surprised you ask me, Monsieur,” she replied. “I thought you would have banged out all those details with my father already.”

He jumped his sheriff. “You could call me René.” His voice was softer, but the amusement in it was loud and clear.

“I will call you ‘monsieur’ until you earn something better. And since you bring it up, I’ll also thank you to drop this silly pretense of ‘my love.’ ”


Spear was pretending to read his newspaper, but Sophia could see where his attention lay: on the conversation he could no longer hear. She moved her rook and René immediately moved after her, almost as soon as she had taken her fingers from the black-carved wings. She considered holding back her words, and decided she could not.

“And while we’re speaking freely, Monsieur, there is something I have been meaning to ask you. I wonder what sort of proof you’ve offered my father that your inheritance is intact.”

“You think I am a … what is the word? A ‘con man’?”

“I think I shall know you are not before I make any plans with the vicar.”

René laughed, not the one that set her teeth on edge, but something deeper. “Oh, Sophia,” he said, shaking his head. “You see so much, and yet you only see so far. Shall I tell you why?”

She crossed her arms, staring down at her queen.

“It is because you do not choose to look.”

And it was then she saw it. She sat forward, staring at the board while the wind howled, lips parted in a silent gasp. Before her was a trap, subtle yet effective. It was not his king but her queen that was lost. The game was lost. She had been a fool.

She raised her eyes, and for the first time gave René Hasard’s face her full attention. He was still leaning sideways in the chair, their candle putting half his expression in shadow as he looked toward the hearth. Square jaw just showing the end of the day’s stubble, straight nose, and eyes that were an intense blue, a fire in the forge blue, an almost unnatural color against the powdered hair. The brows were drawn down, thoughtful, not black or brown, she saw, but a dark russet. Did René have red hair?

Who was this man who never contemplated the matters of his city, but who could so easily out-strategize her on a chessboard, apparently without even trying? And why had he really gone to see his cousin that day, his dangerous, murdering cousin, the cousin that was threatening her father with jail unless she brought him the Rook? And then she saw where those hot blue eyes were looking: straight at her brother’s bad leg, propped on the cushion.

A blast of wind whistled past the chimneys, smacking a branch sharp against the windowpane. “Oh!” Sophia squealed, leaping from her chair and upsetting the table. St. Just yelped and René caught the board before it hit the floor, chess pieces rolling to the far ends of the carpet. Bellamy woke with a snort.

“Blimey, Sophie,” Tom said. “What’s the matter with you?”