There is no title that cannot be taken, no station that cannot be lowered. This is true of any empire, but especially of ours.

- A Tragedy of Houses by Lady Avanise d'Turtell

If my mother is sunshine, my father is a rock. Not in physical frame; outside of his regalia, the Prince of the Emeriald Crest might be mistaken for a particularly stern scholar. But his aura is often stone-silent, which makes it nearly impossible to read him. Sometimes I wonder if this is why Mother loves him so much; she cannot Hear his every feeling nor Sing it into submission.

It certainly increases my respect of him. As a child, I had every servant in the house wrapped around my finger, but Father could never be bent. In that way also is he like stone.

I pass his threshold with a quick curtsey. He acknowledges me with a nod, closing a folder he was working on and rising from behind his small greenwood desk.

Most nobles choose massive pieces to convey their status, but Father is smart enough to realize that the bigger the desk, the smaller you look. Instead, his desk is thin, solid, and simple, its only ornamentation the green staining and a small carving of the Emeriald Crest on its front. Decorating his furniture with nods to his Crest is another unconventional move, considering Crests can change hands from Census to Census. But my father is nothing if not confident, and more than that, capable. Our family has held the Emeriald Crest for nearing twenty consecutive years.

"How is my songbird this week?" he asks. He takes my shoulders warmly and leans to either side of my cheeks. He used to sweep me into chest-aching hugs, but he stopped when I remarked at thirteen that since I was smarter than half his court and certainly more useful, I didn't deserve to be treated like a child. I'll take that under advisement, he said, face as unreadable as ever. Now the only one who hugs me is my mother.

"Interested," I admit, moving over to the breakfast spread by the fire. Strawberries in cream, dusted with slivers of macadamia and paired with golden scones and bunches of grapes. The chocolate pot still steams, and I pour while he takes the seat across. The rich, bitter liquid cascades into each cup. He sweetens his with a dash of cream, while I add a tang of lemon to mine. The ritual is familiar and easily my favorite part of the week. "Mother was waiting outside my door this morning."

I eye him as I sip my cup. His brow quirks. "She couldn't sleep," he says, waiting to see if I'll tip my hand any more.

"That's what she said." My cup clinks politely against its saucer.

He doesn't bite either, though of course I would never expect him to ask anything so trite as What else did she say? Even if he is concerned that she dropped something he told her in confidence, he'd never show it. I've never seen my father afraid of anything—not when a band of blustering dukes threatened to remove their support, or when the Emperor's servants came threatening, or even when he pushed an assassin out of his room at knife point to interrogate him until the authorities arrived. The closest thing I've seen to a flicker of fear on his face was when mother's sideways tongue landed her in a legal trial and we didn't know if she'd be acquitted.

I expect him to sidestep, to continue our usual friendly spar, but instead he considers me for a long moment. Not wanting him to think I can be rattled by something as small as my father's heavy gaze, searching me, weighing me, I pick up a pair of fine, ornamented grape scissors. Carefully, I snip three from the bunch and eat them one by one.

"Would you like some?" I ask.

He sighs. His finger taps the rim of his cup. "You're of marriageable age now."

"I was last Census as well." I cut a small bunch and lay them next to his plate. My eighteenth birthday fell early in that year; my twentieth birthday has now come and gone and I've not been invited to join his political games any more than I was as a teenager. He didn't even bother asking who I'd vote for last Census; he knew it would be him.

"If I ask you what games you have playing, can I expect you to be honest with me?"

"When am I not?"

"I hope never." He plucks up one of the grapes I cut him and considers it. "But I also try not to ask you questions you might be tempted not to answer."

"Father."

He waves it away. "Just answer my question, Sylnavi." His brows rise as he eyes me, and for just a moment I can Hear him. It is the faint, subtle shift of a forest just before spring: the groaning of waiting, the solemnity of winter, the branches creaking in the wind of hope. "Can I trust you?"

My mouth opens automatically, and he holds up a finger. "Only make me promises you can keep, daughter."

I swallow. Perhaps it should sting that he doesn't trust me, but I'm starting to see a path opening up, a path to what I've always wanted to be to him: an ally. Because family, kept at arm's distance, are too safe to betray you, and enemies too distant. An ally is the only thing worth fearing.

"I promise, Father," I say. "I want to make our name great. I would never do anything to endanger that."

He nods thoughtfully, as simply as if I'd given him the correct answer to one of the many hypothetical scenarios he drew up for me as a child. He resumes his spoon. "Then tell me. What are you working on these days?"

A tendril of apprehension, like smoke, coils in my stomach. At any given time, I've laid out one of my plans, or maybe two if they were related, when I wanted his advice or to give him an option of some little favor. What would you like served at Duke Drisk's banquet, Father? Would you rather Duchess Lasilia or Cenesei purchase the opera box next to ours? It is a delight to tip my hand just enough for him to glimpse the future and then let the future I held come true in its full glory.

But to give up all my plans? To expose the infants, the doubtfuls, the could-bes and contingencies? He might as well have asked me to walk around the floors of our house undressed.

It is a test, plain as a star in the dark, and I plan to pass it as I do every one of his tests. But the twisting smoke in my stomach bids me collect my thoughts first at least, and I gather a spoonful of strawberry. "Of course, Father. Why don't we set up our board and I'll tell it while we play?"

His brow rises slightly at my buffering, but he draws open a drawer on the nearby Crests and Banners table to pull out pieces. The little jade flags, representing a Banner each, he disperses among the eight sectors of the board. Each vividly-colored sector represents a Crest, and a standard game starts with all the Crests having equal support. On the outskirts of the board is a dark strip, where the outcast Blackened pieces will go.

"I suppose you'll take Emeriald?" I ask slyly.

He just raises a brow and waits for me to make my selection. Father always takes Emeriald, though the choice is mostly aesthetic. Only its spot relative to the other player matters.

"Sapphria," I say, tapping the blue sector. It's the Crest I'm most interested in right now in real life; it's the one most likely to change hands in the coming Census.

"Very well." He pays us from a dish of tiny gold chips that represent our political influence, and the game begins.

As is our custom, we eat and talk while we play. The point of the game is to collect Banners into your Crest sector, weakening and perhaps even toppling other Crests as you go. The political influence chips let you bribe and blackmail pieces, drawing them closer to your Crest or further away from someone else's. You can also push them toward the outskirts to Blacken them and remove them from the game. Each turn, you earn political influence based on how many Banners you have, and at the end of twenty turns, the person with the most Banners wins the empire.

It's an oversimplification of Imperia's real political structure, but still a decent model. Besides, the strategy is complex enough without adding in the machinations of the lower House lords or that the ruler of the empire isn't sorted out by anything so easy as the size of your Crest.

I drop a few coins into the dish and pull a neighboring, neutral Crest's piece three spaces closer to my sector. "Let's see. I'm prepping some girls to say yes when the Twins ask them to the Census Ball. Neither party will know I arranged it, though I did make sure Mother approved of the girls."

"You asked her about it?" His tone, as always, is such that I can't tell if he's impressed I let Mother in on my plot or is chastising me for it. Mother is a worrier, a dropper-of-cryptic-hints, and a woman of a strange honor. She's discreet in everything she does, to the degree that sometimes she can't get a point across straight if she wanted to, but discreet is rarely enough in our line of work. The safest information is kept in silence.

"No," I say, and frown as he pays to push one of my Banners toward the edge. "I just asked her opinion of the girls. She gives it easily enough."

He hums noncommittally. "What else?"

My heart thrums annoyingly in my chest, and I sip at my chocolate to still it. "I'm arranging for Princess Rasiya's dressmaker to apply for work under Mother."

His eyes cut up from the board. "And if the princess's husband hears of it?"

"One, I doubt the Prince of the Topazian Crest troubles himself with dressmakers."

A warning note fills his voice. "He will if he knows you undercut his wife on purpose."

I take my leave of his stern gaze, returning my attention to the board. Father wants me to waste time on that escaping Banner, but he wastes time with each turn he pushes it out. I pay to pull two of his pieces into a neighboring Crest. "I would think you should know me better by now. No one will know my hands were in the matter at all."

"How so?"

He believes me, I think—surely after all these years he believes me—but he wants to make me prove my work. Or perhaps, I think as he finishes exiling my Banner piece, he never realized how fraught with risk my plans have always been.

They never felt particularly risky to me, though. The important ones always succeed, and the failure of the unimportant ones I always account for.

"It's all indirect," I explain as I take my turn. "I never talk to the dressmaker, or the princess. I set things in motion so that someone else is motivated to say what I want said. Or I seed rumors that I heard someone say the princess is thinking of firing, and elsewhere that the dressmaker hates working for such an unattractive figure." In fact, I've spent the better part of a year creating a rift between the princess and her prized and much-admired seamstress. "Soon, the dressmaker will be looking for a new home, and someone will put it in her head that Mother would love to hire her. But Mother's hands will be clean, for she knows nothing of it, and so will mine be because I never made her an offer, directly or otherwise. I don't have to. If you control the variables, you control the game."

With that, I place a Banner to block the advance of some of his, spending capital to make it so only I may move it from now on.

"I want you to drop the matter," he says, and my jaw falls.

"You wouldn't if you realized how close I am. Days away from ensuring it close. And this dressmaker I'm after isn't servant class; she'll get to vote in the Census. I'm steps away from her voting for your House."

Not, of course, that Father would be worried about his House falling. He has more than enough votes not only to secure our House, but the many Houses underneath that which make up a Banner, and the many Banners which make up a Crest.

But each Census is its own beast, and every vote counts. It is folly to throw away any one on a whim.

"It wasn't a suggestion, Sylnavi," he says levelly. "Can you follow the leader of your House, or can you not?"

My lips pinch, and my spine arches. "I will always do for the good of our House."

"And am I good for our House?"

The board game has been forgotten. His eyes bore into me with all the weight of stone. This is the only game that matters now: pride versus submission, choice versus trust.

My chin tips, and I quote a line from the Imperian Primer. "I shall always serve well, for the light of the high shines also on the lowly who lift him up."

"I don't want textbook answers, songbird." His eyes roam my face. "I want your answer."

"Why don't you believe I trust in you?"

"Because even when you lay your chips out for me to count, you still want to spend them yourself."

I lean back in my armchair, exasperated. "Is that so wrong, Father? When you were my age, you were duke of the Banner Blue, soon to become prince of this Crest. Meanwhile, I sit at home in nice dresses"—I fluff my skirts with my foot—"and drink tea in the Ladies' Court and run social cons when I could be of use to you. And not 'look out after your mother' use, but real, gainful, difference-making use! I'd help you win the Emperor's throne if you cared for it. I'd turn lords into dukes and princes into paupers. I'd Blacken anyone's name you wanted if all you would do is ask!"

"Sylnavi," he says, folding his hands on the table and leaning forward. "What do you think I'm trying to do?"

My composure falls for the second time today. I straighten in my chair. "You want me to help you? In truth?"

"I have a job for you, but I need you to drop everything for it. That's why I say abandon the dressmaker; I don't care who adorns your mother as long as she's happy with it. But I need your full attention."

"Done."

His lips turn wryly. "I should hope someday you come to trust my reason without having to hear it."

It stings because he is right. He has more experience than I do, and the successes to prove it. He might not have the magic at his disposal that I do or the same, subtler sphere of influence, but he sees the game board as clearly—or maybe, I admit ruefully, more clearly—than I do. The only bit of his judgment I've ever questioned was not letting me be a part of it.

"You are the honor of our House," I say adamantly. "My name is your name, and my goals are your goals. Just tell me what those are."

He nods slowly, leaning back in his chair. "Well, songbird," he says, "how do you feel about wiping the Banner Red off of the map?"