Free Last First Snow by Max Gladstone

Caleb’s closed door and the jamb. He heard giggles, groans, and shouts in High Quechal: “Mine!” “No!” “Unfair.” The language of the priests, the language of his youth, spoken nowhere now but in this house.
    He knocked once on the door, and opened without waiting for an answer. “Hello?”
    Two lamps lit his son’s narrow room and its furnishings: a small bed with a cotton sheet, a table, a bookcase. Mina insisted Caleb learn to own, and care for, books. Sponge-printed multicolored lizards climbed the walls. They’d done that as a family, when Caleb passed through a brief but intense lizard fixation at age five. The boy printed the ones nearer the baseboards himself, blurred and blotted. Temoc and Mina took turns hoisting Caleb on their shoulders to do the ceiling. Drops of paint dried in their hair, and Mina’d cut hers short to get the clumps out.
    Caleb and Mina crouched on the floor beside a lamp, each holding a small stack of cards, with a larger pile between them. They dealt cards into the center by turns, and every few deals one or the other slapped the pile with a triumphant cry, matched by their opponent’s wail.
    â€œBe careful,” Temoc said. “You’ll knock over the lamp.”
    â€œGive us some credit,” Mina answered without turning.
    â€œHi, Dad!” Caleb waved, and Mina dealt a card and slapped the pile. “Hey, no fair.”
    â€œIf you don’t mind the game, you lose.”
    â€œCan I join?”
    Caleb frowned. “We can’t deal three equal piles. Someone would have eighteen.”
    Temoc sat by the foot of his son’s bed, legs curled beneath him. Prayer position, they called this in the old days. “I will take your cards from under you.”
    â€œNo cheating,” Mina warned.
    Temoc raised his hands, and adopted as innocent an expression as he could manage.
    They played Apophitan Rat Screw for a half hour more. Even without the gods’ help, Temoc’s reflexes were fast enough for him to seize a small stack of cards, though Caleb and Mina both seemed to have access to a side of the game denied him. Caleb sometimes slapped cards he could not possibly have read.
    â€œCounting cards,” Temoc said, “will lead to your being thrown from most games.”
    â€œIf they catch you,” Mina pointed out.
    â€œSo the idea is don’t get caught?”
    â€œThe idea is to win through virtuous play.”
    â€œMostly to win, though.”
    No one lost that night, though Mina’s pile was largest in the end. Caleb purified the cards, wrapped them in silk, and returned them to the box. So simple a contest, with no soulstuff at stake, invited only an echo of the Lady of Games, but still they observed her rites. These, at least, the boy understood. Temoc had invited Caleb to his services, and watched him from the altar. Sacrifice scared the boy. The long litanies of heroes’ names and deeds that once made young Temoc hunger to prove himself, these bored his son. But Caleb understood games and their goddess, who was for all her limits the last still worshipped openly as in Dresediel Lex of old.
    Caleb went to brush his teeth, and Temoc and Mina waited in the bedroom. He sat on his son’s bed, and she watched painted lizards climb the wall. “It’s late,” she said.
    â€œMore work today than I planned.”
    â€œGood work?” They’d been slow to learn this skill of marriage: to take time, and let each other bring as much of the office home as needed.
    â€œI hope. A chance for peace.”
    â€œCaleb worried.” Meaning, I worried, but she had trouble saying that. Neither one liked to admit weakness. Luckily, they knew each other well enough to hear the unsaid words.
    â€œI know. I’m sorry.” He smoothed the covers of his son’s bed. “I appreciate his wanting to wait up.”
    â€œNot just him,” she said, before the