The board was a map and the board was a field. She could move pawns, but pawns with a soul were still pawns until a wise hand placed them.
"You know the dangers," the woman at the table said softly. "If you are seen as the mover of kings, you will be loved by none and feared by all.
They will call you the queen-maker, the poisoner.
They will make songs that use your name as a curse.
They will watch your mothers, your lovers, your merchants.
They will search for your footprints like hounds.
The court does not forgive those who meddle with its appetite."
"I know," she answered.
There was a small bitterness in the truth. She had watched songs become weapons before.
She had seen how stories sharpened like blades in the mouths of those who wished to wound. "I will accept those roads."
The woman at the table tapped the map, a careful thing placed with pins to show routes and winds. "Then tell me plainly," she said.
"Who are we to set in motion? Who steps into the opening you will make?"
She held her veil in both hands for a moment as if turning a coin to see its rough age.
When she spoke again her voice was quieter and filled with the weight of memory. "There is a captain in the eastern marches," she said.
"He is not noble in blood, but he is tempered like iron. He has a son who is brave and stupid and truthful in equal measure.
There is a widow in the south who keeps her tongue and keeps her grain.
There is a scholar in the college of letters who knows the old laws and keeps them like charms. One of these will step through."
The woman at the table let the names for names they were now settle in the air like the ash of a candle. "And you will favor none?" she asked.
"I will favor the one who can bear a kingdom with less hunger for cruelty," she said.
"That is not a simple favor. It is a test."
They spoke late into the hour before the council would convene above them.
The lamps burned low, and conversation folded into practical things: the movement of grain, the watchers at the northern pass, the old payment to the midwives who kept secrets like talismans.
Outside, beyond the map and the map-keeper's table, the woman imagined a thousand small hands pulling at threads.
If she could make one opening wide enough, a person of reasonable humanity might pass through and change the course of a small region, and sometimes small regions had a way of growing larger.
When at last she rose to go, the woman at the table offered her a thin cup of wine and a small, ancient piece of bread that tasted of butter and thyme.
It was a hospitality that was itself a kind of ritual: seals and small kindnesses that bound people together in the underworld of bargains.
She accepted, ate, and felt the warm, honest glow of sustenance that came from homes not palaces.
The horsewoman, who had remained at the hatch as a sentinel, watched her and when they met eyes there was a long conversation.
"You will be careful," the horsewoman said only. "You will not think yourself a goddess."
"I never did,"
She answered, and the truth of that statement trembled like a bowstring.
She had pretended at godliness sometimes; there had been moments where she had felt certain of the rightness of an act. Those moments were dangerous. They left marks.
They climbed the ladder and found the horse waiting as if no time had passed.
The city above breathed with its usual gatherings and quarrels.
The market that had greeted her earlier had closed some of its stalls for the afternoon siesta; life continued, the great machine chewing up and spitting out the small and the great alike.
She wrapped the veil tighter, and there was a last exchange of air between her and the underground something like a promise that what had been planned would be kept secret until it was time to be known.
The horsewoman guided her through the trees and back into the city and, as they parted under a narrow street, she pressed into her hand a small token: a ring of iron worn smooth by fingers.
"Wear this," she said. "If you need us, drop it into the river by the bridge of the two lions. We will be there."
A simple thing, a tiny loop of iron, more useful perhaps than a boast.
She accepted it and tucked it into the weave of her cloak near her heart. It was enough a little piece of the world that said she had allies and debts that could be called in at odd hours.
When she walked back through the market, no one noticed her.
The matron by the fig-seller held the silver in her palm like a small sun and did not look up; the guard had returned to his post, thinking her under his unseen protection, and the children chased one another, ignorant of the fact that beneath their feet a game had begun that might topple crowns.
Sometimes power was a thunder you could not feel until it struck you.
Sometimes it was only this: a hand that given a coin, a spring between roofs, a secret door in a humble shop, a horse that knew to move silently.
Names would come; songs would follow; accusations would be sung on market days and whispered in the cold.
But for the moment she walked a small distance unnoticed, veiled, and a woman in the city who kept other people's secrets held her close like a small, necessary lie.
She did not think of what the court would call her.
She did not think of the shape her life had taken nor whether it would be written kindly.
She thought only, with a cold and private joy, of the openings she could set. The game had begun, and she had always loved the first moves.