Chapter 229

The winter was biting.

Not gentle, not pretty, but vicious. The wind howled for days on end, driving the snow into great drifts against the walls, and the cold crept in through every crack, no matter how much we stuffed the gaps with rags and moss. The fires burned day and night, and still we huddled close, wrapped in furs, our breath fogging in the air of the mornings.

And the children were going mad.

They had been cooped up for a week. A whole week, with nowhere to go, nothing to do, and far too much energy for the space they had. They raced through the house, they wrestled, they climbed the rafters, they argued and shrieked and fought over insignificant reasons. And then they did it all over again. By the third day, I was ready to scream. By the fifth, so were they. By the seventh, we were all desperate.

"We need games," I announced.

"What kind of games?" Atlas asked, from where he was sprawled on the floor, looking bored out of his mind.

"Games that keep you busy. Games from where mama is from."

That got their attention.

The first one was easy. A game from the place I had come from, a Khmer game called catch the chick at the end. It was a chasing game, simple and loud, and the children loved it. One of them was the hawk, the others were chicks, and they had to run and dodge and protect each other while the hawk tried to snatch the last one in the line.

We played for an hour, then two. The house echoed with shrieks and laughter, the rafters shook, and the children ran until they were breathless.

Even the mates joined in. Leon played the hawk with terrifying enthusiasm, chasing the children with growls and snarls that made them scream with glee. Ravin let the little ones catch him, pretending to stumble so they could tag him. Aureon laughed so hard he could barely run.

The second game was duck, duck goose.

The children loved it. They loved it far too much. And they had questions.

"Why is it called duck, duck goose?" Levy demanded, poking my arm.

"Because that is what it is called."

"But why?"

"Because... that is what it is called."

"But why is it called that?"

"Levy."

"Mama."

I sighed. "It is just the name. Someone made it up. It does not have to make sense."

"But ducks and geese are different."

"Yes."

"So why are they together?"

"Because it is the name of the game."

"So if it were called something else, it would be a different game?"

"Yes."

"But it is the same game."

"Levy."

"Mama."

"Just play the game."

She played the game. And then she asked the question three more times before bedtime, because she was Levy, and Levy did not let things go.

But it was the third game that took the most work.

I wanted to play cards.

The problem was, there were no cards. Not in this world, not in this village. There was no paper, no printing press, no decks. There was only wood, and cloth, and fire.

So I asked Leon.

"Leon," I said, "can you make me a stack of very thin wood? In the shape of this?" I held up my hands to show him the size, a small rectangle, no bigger than a palm.

"A stack? How many?"

"Fifty or so."

He stared at me. "Fifty."

"Fifty two."

"Why fifty two?"

"Because that is how many you need."

"For what?"

"For a game."

"A game that needs fifty two pieces of wood."

"Yes."

He looked at me for a long moment, the way he always did when I asked him something strange, and then he sighed and went to work.

It took him two days. He cut fifty two thin rectangles from the softest wood he could find, working as evenly as he could manage, though some came out wider than others and a few were slightly warped. He smoothed the edges by hand, sanding and scraping until they were safe to hold, until no child would get a splinter. And when he handed me the stack, he looked almost nervous.

"Is this right?" he asked.

"It is perfect," I said, and kissed him.

The next part was mine.

I found a stick of charcoal from the burning woods and twigs and used it to sketch the markings onto the wood, clumsy and rough, the numbers crooked and the symbols uneven. But when the sketches were done, I took a sharp bone point and scratched over every line, carving the markings into the wood so they would not rub away. Then I rubbed soot into the carved lines, darkening them, making them bold and black against the pale grain.

And I chose my own symbols, because hearts and diamonds and spades meant nothing here. Instead, I carved a sun, a moon, a leaf, and a fang. Four suits, simple and clear, things my children would recognize.

When the cards were finished, I rubbed each one with a thin film of animal fat, then buffed them with a cloth until they shone. It would protect them from the moisture of the house, keep them from warping, and make them slide against one another when we dealt.

They looked rough. They looked handmade. They looked like something a child might have made in the dark.

But they were cards. Real cards. And when I laid them out by the fire to finish drying, the children gathered around in fascination.

"What are they?" Levy asked.

"Cards."

"What do they do?"

"They are for a game."

"What kind of game?"

"A game with rules."

"Can we play?"

I let them dry. And then I taught them.

I taught them the games I remembered from my old world. Simple ones first, the kind you could learn in a minute and play for hours.

The first was a Cambodian game, one the children immediately dubbed "house." The rules were easy. The dealer, or the "head" of the table, took six cards, and everyone else took five. Then everyone looked at their hand and quietly discarded any pairs they already held. After that, the dealer began by laying down a single card. And whoever held the match had to slap it down fast, before anyone else with the same match could beat them to it. Whoever matched the card took the next turn, choosing a card from their own hand to drop next. And so it went, one card laid, one card matched, one turn passed, over and over, until someone emptied their hand entirely. First to lose all their cards wins.

It relied on matching and speed rather than complicated scoring, which made it perfect for my crude wooden cards. And it turned into absolute chaos the moment Aureon got competitive.

They played it for an hour straight, and by the end, Leon and Aureon were nearly brawling over a matched sun, and the children were shrieking with laughter.

Then came a faster, louder game. Back in my old world, it had been called "Red," after the red cards that were the whole point of it. My wooden deck had no red, of course, so I had chosen my own colors. The sun and the leaf would be the valuable suits, light and daylight, the bright things. And the moon and the fang would be the worthless ones, night and the wolf who howled in it.

I explained the rules as best I could. Everyone got a hand, and a few cards were laid face up in the middle. On your turn, you played one card. If it could capture something in the middle, you took both and added them to your pile. If it could not, your card just stayed there, face up, waiting. Then you flipped a card from the deck and tried again. Number cards captured by pairing to make ten, an ace with a nine, a two with an eight, a three with a seven, a four with a six, a five with a five. And the tens, the face cards, they captured only their own rank. The sun cards and the leaf cards were the ones worth chasing, worth points, worth winning for.

And the moon and the fang, night and the howling wolf, were the cards you threw away without a second thought.

But the true goal was the valuable suits. In my old world those had been hearts and diamonds. Here, I chose two of my four suits, the sun and the leaf, and declared them worth points, the way the red cards had been worth points back home. The other two suits, the moon and the wolf, were nearly worthless.

The children took to it instantly. Too instantly. They were ruthless, shrieking and slapping their cards down, lunging for the valuable ones, arguing over whether a capture counted. And finally, old maid, which the children adored immediately, mostly because of the single useless card that everyone passed around and no one wanted to be stuck with at the end.

The children took to all of it instantly. Within hours, they had learned the rules, learned the symbols, learned the strategies and the tricks and the petty cruelties that made card games so delicious. Within a day, they were playing on their own, hunched over the wooden cards, arguing about what was fair, shrieking when they won, groaning when they lost.

They played all day. They played through lunch, through dinner, through the long dark hours. They played until their eyes drooped, and their hands slowed and they finally collapsed, still clutching the cards, dreaming of the game.

And I watched them, my ridiculous, brilliant, competitive children, and I thought about my old world. About casinos. About poker. About the way people gambled away fortunes on a hand of cards.

If these children had been born back home, they would be betting their allowances by age eight. They would be running card games in the schoolyard by twelve. They would be cleaning out the neighbors by fifteen.

Thank god, I thought, that this world did not have money. At least not the kind that ruined people.

But then again, they had shells, and beads, and pretty stones. They had things worth trading.

They would find a way.

They would absolutely find a way.

I sighed, long and deep, and watched my children play, and wondered, not for the first time, what I had unleashed upon the world.