Page 20 of Rook Takes Queen
“So that makesyou…” Jana is doing the math, pointing at me, her whole face alight. “Oh my gosh, that makes you the best Karrec player on Timbur.”
The grin slips, because she’s right, and saying it out loud feels like too much. “I guess. Technically.”
“Technically nothing.” Roxy raises her glass to me. “Best on the planet. To the Queen.”
I bite my lip, heat spreading across my cheeks.
A slow, knowing smile spreads across Roxy’s face. “Have you noticed he calls you that?”
“Calls me what,” I say, too fast.
“Queen.” She draws it out. “Have you noticed? I heard him say it at dinner more than once.”
The other women goohhhhin unison, a low delighted swell.
“It’s a chess piece,” I say. “It’s just the name of a piece. The most powerful piece, it can move anywhere, so when I won he started to…it’s a chess thing. It’s literally just a chess term.”
“Mm-hm,” says Jana.
“It is.”
“Sure.”
“He named me after the piece because of how I play,” I insist.
Naomi reaches over and pats my hand, gentle and merciless. “Honey. That male does not hand out ‘most powerful thing on the board’ to just anybody.”
“A smitten Xylan,” Roxy says happily, “naming his scented bride after the strongest piece in the game. There is a whole research paper in that. The symbolism alone.”
“Can we please talk about literally anything else,” I whine.
They laugh and let me off the hook. I drink my wine and let my face cool.
“Can I ask you something.” Roxy says, changing the subject for me. “What was it actually like on Chronos? I’ve never been there and it sounds intimidating. You worked at a Royal Pigment House, an actual one, on the inside. Did you like it? Do you regret going?”
The wine answers before I can stop it. “I did it for the money,” I admit, and feel my cheeks heat all over again. “It paid…it paid obscenely well. There was a bonus, every rotation you stayed. Stack enough of them and, well it was a lot.” I shrug. “I had a plan. After I got a big enough savings, I would go hometo New Earth and use this money to open my own accounting firm. I was going to own my own business someday. And then I found the files and the plan died. Because I couldn’t un-know it. So. Here I am.”
“Were you happy there?” Naomi asks. “Before?”
I think about it honestly, which the wine and the dark and these faces somehow make possible. “No. Not really. It was fine. There are actually a lot of humans on Chronos now. There’s a whole expat thing, a club, drinks on sixth day. On the surface it wasn’t so bad.” I shake my head. “But it was a Royal Pigment world, built top to bottom for Royal Pigment Xylan, and everything else is a guest in their house. Tolerated. Useful. Decorative if you’re lucky. I spent three years being the most trusted human in that House and I was never once anything but a tool they’d be sad to misplace.” The old loneliness rises up familiar and cold.
I look around the courtyard. The gold light, the moons, the half-eaten dessert, the six women who pulled me into their once-a-cycle ritual. “Is Timbur the same?” I ask.
“No,” Leah says, simply. “It isn’t.”
“Not even a little,” Lila agrees. “Minecorp’s a Xylan outpost, sure. But it’sMargolXylan. Filled with miners and working people.” She wrinkles her nose. “No Houses. The difference between the castes isn’t as strong here at all. I forget often that the Xylan are usually like that about the dividing line between Margol and Royal Pigment. There are some Royal Pigment Xylan living here, but they are the minority and they defer to the miners because they are so important. The Illibrium chooses the miners and the Royal Pigment Xylan need those miners to extract the most valuable energy source in the whole universe. So they treat them with respect here. And the Margol are just, mellow. They came out here to dig crystal and they built a town and they didn’t bring the rules.”
“I was wondering…On Chronos,” I say carefully, trying to think through the complicated way I saw mating practices work on the Xylan’s main planet, “if a Xylan wants to mate they put themselves on the Xylan mating database. Then the matching it goes through a Manager of the line. They vet the male or female, checking for caste, House, wealth, bloodline, genetics. The whole thing is negotiated between Houses like a trade contract. You don’tmeetyour mate. You get matched to one, again and again and again until finally you clasp hands with someone that’s your actual mate and it turns into a claiming. And when you clasp, it’s at a clasping stone, in front of priests, with chants, with witnesses, blood-letting, the whole performance. And they record the claiming, in these ancient forests they keep pristine for it, so the whole line can sit and watch it later. Is it like that here, too? Is that how all of you were matched with your husbands?”
“Wow,” says Jana, “they put on a whole show on Chronos, don’t they?”
“Don’t worry, it’s not like that here,” Lila says, “It’s much simpler, but also similar. No Houses, no Manager, no stone.”
“How does it actually work?”
And the floodgates open.
“On Timbur, the clasping can accidentally happen anywhere. Mine was in acage,” Leah laughs. “A mining cage. Because of an equipment malfunction we were in free-fall and my glove flew off in the chaos, and the next thing I knew Saxon’s bare claw was wrapped around my bare hand. Bare skin to bare skin. That’s the clasp. That’s all it takes.”
