Those were the mathematical rudiments of the new Great Game, and the roots of much of what had happened since then. The preponderance of later historical scholarship suggested that most of the Eves didn’t know that they were playing a game until they were a few years into it. Aïda, based on what she had said in her Curse, might have been the exception to that rule. But decisions made about one’s children were the most personal decisions that one could make, and no mother of sound mind would have admitted to herself, at the time, that she was playing a sort of game vis-à-vis the other mothers.