Pieces on the Board

The Emperor came to supper uninvited, which Solaia supposed was the only way he knew how to come to anything.

She heard the guards first, the sharp double crack of boots on frozen gravel as the two Black Guards at the garden gate snapped to attention. Then the cold rolled in, the old familiar chill of graves and iron, and the little flame in its glass jar leaned away from the door and shivered.

Berylla was on her feet before the latch had finished turning. She did not curtsy. She bowed from the waist, quick and perfect, and left without being told, closing the glasshouse door behind her with a click so precise it might have been a statement.

Kieran stood on the threshold and looked at the room.

At the candle. At the dishes. At the dark wool dress, and the girl in it, with a fork in her fist and a cheek still full of roasted pheasant.

"I see you've found the food," he said.

She swallowed. "Is that supposed to be funny?"

"Not at all. I was relieved." He crossed to the table and set down the thing he had been carrying under his arm, a flat box of black lacquer, a little longer than a man's forearm. "I'm told you refused the physician, the seamstress, the dancing master, and the Duke's wife's offer of tea."

"I didn't know I'd been offered the Duke's wife."

"She sent a card. I'm afraid it was quite sincere." He lowered himself into the chair Berylla had vacated, with the kind of unhurried ease that made her want to kick the leg out from under it. "I have declined on your behalf. She will take it as an insult. It is wonderful."

"Is there a reason you're here, monster?"

"I'm lonely."

She stared at him.

His face did not change at all. It was one of the most infuriating things about him. He said the word with exactly the same dry, faintly amused tone he used to order executions, and the only reason she did not dismiss it as a joke was a very slight tightness at the corner of his eye, as if he had been surprised to hear himself say it.

"I would like," Kieran said evenly, "to play a game."

He opened the box.

Inside, on a bed of black velvet, lay a board of polished obsidian veined with silver and thirty-two small pieces. They were not carved. They were made of something, pale threads of light bound into tiny shapes, kings and soldiers and horses no larger than her thumb, all glowing faintly in the dark. He tipped the box and they slid out across the board, turned over once like cats stretching, and settled into their places.

The white pieces blazed. The black ones drank the light.

"Ember and Ash," said Kieran. "It is an old game. The pieces fight for each square, and the weaker one is consumed. You may know a variant of it. Most people do."

"I don't know it."

"No?"

"I don't know anything. That's the problem."

"Then it will be a pleasant evening for both of us." He turned the board so that the white army faced her. "You may begin."

She looked at the pieces for a long moment.

Then she reached out, almost absently, and moved a small white soldier two squares forward and a little to the left. The tiny figure flared, and a single point of black light scattered in front of it.

Kieran's hand paused over the board.

"That is an unusual opening."

"Is it?"

"It is a gambit," he said slowly, "that was out of fashion before my grandfather's time. It sacrifices the knight's file to open the queen's diagonal."

She frowned at the board. "It just seemed like the obvious thing."

"I'm certain it did."

He did not say anything else. But he took his hand off the board, and sat back, and looked at her with that peculiar flat attention, the one he had worn in the tower, as if the whole of his considerable mind had narrowed to a single bright point. The pheasant on her plate went cold.

They played for an hour.

It was not a game she lost, although she suspected that was only because he had not yet decided to win. She played the way she did everything, wildly and without mercy, throwing pieces at the black line as if they cost nothing and then pulling the survivors into a wicked little trap on the left flank. She did not know how she knew where to put them. Her hands simply seemed to remember. Twice Kieran cursed under his breath, very softly, in a language she did not recognize. Once he laughed outright, a short, startled burst, and the sound seemed to surprise them both.

"You're a menace," he said.

"You're a bad loser."

"I haven't lost."

"Yet."

"Careful." The smile in his voice was dangerous. "I've been playing this since I was five. The last person who beat me is dead."

"Then I'd better hope you're not too attached to the habit."

He looked up from the board. The candle threw a thin gold line along his cheekbone and left the rest of his face in shadow, and his eyes were the color of a winter river at dusk, and for the space of a breath neither of them said anything at all.

"What do you remember?" Kieran asked.

It was so quiet and so plain that it took her a moment to understand he had stopped playing.

"I told you. Nothing."

"No one remembers nothing. You woke in the ash. You were hungry, and cold, and afraid of something. A person who had no past would not hoard bread."

She went rigid.

"Berylla reports to me," he said gently. "I did not ask her to. She is simply very good at her work."

"I'll kill her."

"You won't. You like her." He turned a captured piece between his fingers, a tiny struggling gleam of light. "What do you remember?"

Solaia looked at the board.

Snow. Black ash on the white. The taste of a root. She had told him none of it, and she was not going to. She was tired of being turned inside out for his convenience, of handing him pieces of herself like coins across a counter. But something about the quiet in the glasshouse, the candle and the dark glass and the soft hiss of snow against the roof, made the lie harder to keep than she had expected.

"Cold," she said at last. "A lot of cold. And a feeling that I was... supposed to be somewhere else."

"Where?"

"I don't know." She hesitated. "Sometimes I dream."

"Of what?"

"Fire."

His fingers closed around the captured piece.

"It's a white fire," she said, slower now, as if she were reading it off a distant wall. "It's very quiet. Everything inside it is burning, but nobody screams. And there's someone standing in the middle of it. A woman. She has her back to me. I try to call to her, and I can't hear my own voice."

She stopped.

When she looked up, Kieran's face was perfectly still.

"Interesting," he said, for the second time that day. It sounded no more convincing than it had before.

And then, because she was not stupid and he was not nearly as subtle as he thought, she reached across the board and took his hand.

She had not planned to. It was a reflex, one more of the ones that came from nowhere, the same bone-deep, animal certainty that had told her where to put a knight. She only knew that his hand had been lying beside the board for the last ten minutes with the fingers slightly curled, and that every time she glanced at it, a little muscle jumped along the edge of his jaw.

His skin was cold. Not winter cold. Wrong cold, the cold of something that had been left out too long. And the veins running up the back of his hand, from knuckle to wrist and then up under the cuff of his coat, were black.

Kieran did not pull away. She would have given a great deal to know why.

"What is this?" she said.

"Nothing."

"That's not nothing. It looks like—" She turned his hand over. Beneath the sleeve, at the inside of his wrist, thin dark lines branched across the skin like roots, and she could feel them moving, a slow, sickly pulse, the same pulse she felt in the north. No. Not the same. Smaller. Wrongly rhythmic. Something sat inside the pattern like a splinter. "It's the Dark Magic."

"It is a scar," Kieran said, and his voice had gone very soft. "From the border. Do not concern yourself."

"You're lying."

"I'm an emperor. It is my primary function."

"You're lying badly."

He looked at her. And in that moment she saw something she did not think she had been meant to see. Underneath the arrogance, underneath all the lazy cruelty, there was a man who had been very cold for a very long time.

Then his gaze dropped to her hand on his.

"Wait," he said.

She felt it as a kind of drawing breath. A tingling in her palm, a faint warmth under the skin, a bright wire of heat that ran up her wrist and into the crook of her elbow and spread outward like a flower opening. A thin line of white light slipped out between her fingers.

Kieran's breath caught.

The black veins on the back of his hand were going out. Not fading. Retreating. They drew back from her touch like a tide running out, thread by thread, from the wrist to the knuckles and the fingertips, until his skin was only skin, pale and unmarked and whole.

Neither of them moved.

The little white pieces on the board had begun to glow brighter. The candle in its jar had gone from gold to a blinding, steady white. Somewhere in the glasshouse, one of the orange trees let out a sound like a held breath, and a dozen frost-blossoms opened at once on the dark branches.

"Solaia," Kieran said, very carefully. "Stop."

"I'm not doing anything."

"I know. Stop anyway."

She pulled her hand away.

The light died. The candle sank back to its small gold flame. And on the table between them, in the quiet, Kieran drew a long, shaking breath and looked at his own bare hand as if he had never seen it before.

"It doesn't hurt," he said. It was hardly more than a whisper.

"What doesn't?"

"Nothing." He stood so abruptly that the chair scraped, and his coat swung against the table and knocked three pieces off the board. The tiny figures hit the glass floor and went out like struck matches. "It was a trick of the light. Orange blossoms. I'm told they sometimes have a strange effect."

"It was not the blossoms."

"I am the Emperor, and I say that it was."

She laughed. She could not help it. It came out of her short and rough, an ugly, delighted bark of a sound, and his mouth twitched in answer despite himself. He was panicking. The great, terrible Emperor of the Ice Kingdom, who had thrown her into a cage and chained her to a throne and put her in a tower of mirrors, was standing in a glasshouse in the middle of the night, backing away from a girl's hand as if she held a drawn blade.

"You should see your face," she said.

"I would prefer not to."

"You looked like a man who'd been stabbed."

"It is a feeling," Kieran said, with great dignity, "that I do not recommend."

He retrieved his coat. He retrieved the box. He swept the surviving pieces into it with a precise, unhurried hand, and the little lights hissed as they went in, and she watched him do it with the strangest sense that she had won something and had no idea what.

At the door, he stopped.

"Tomorrow," he said, without turning around, "there will be a test."

Her good humor went out like a lamp.

"What kind?"

"A Measuring Stone. In the Hall of Measure, before the court and the Church. They will wish to see what your bloodline is made of." His shoulders were very straight. "It is a stone. You will lay your hand upon it. It will glow. You will stand there, and you will look bored, and when it is over you will walk out with me and we will not speak of it again."

"And what will it show?"

"Whatever it shows." The faintest pause. "I am told that the Ashvales were not a strong house."

He wants it to show weak.

The knowledge came to her cold and clear and exact. He wanted her small. He wanted her ordinary. He wanted a pale, dull, minor bloodline, and he did not want the white fire to come out in front of the cardinals, and he did not want to find out what happened if it did. She could see him bracing for it like a man on a rope.

So there is something he's afraid of.

"And if it doesn't?" she said.

"Then you will stand there and look bored in a different way." He glanced back at her over his shoulder, ash-gray eyes unreadable in the dark. "Good night, Solaia."

"Good night, monster."

The door closed. She listened to him walk away down the gravel path, slow, even steps, the footsteps of a man who had never in his life let anyone see him run. She counted forty before they stopped. Somewhere in the cold garden, she thought she heard him say a single quiet word. It might have been impossible.

…

Kieran did not go to his rooms.

He stood in the frozen rose garden beneath a sky shot through with stars, one hand on the cold iron of the gate, and breathed until the world stopped tilting.

It had been two minutes. Perhaps three. For two or three minutes the Hollow had not just quieted. It had fled. He had felt it go, felt the ancient, hungry darkness in his blood shrink back from her touch like a dog from a fire, and where it had been there had been nothing at all but an astonishing, humbling stillness.

He had never been so afraid in his life.

"Majesty."

Crane's voice, from the shadow of the wall. He had been there the whole time. Kieran had known he would be.

"Speak."

"The Church has been busy. There are rumors the Pontiff will attend tomorrow's measuring in person."

Kieran's hand tightened on the gate.

"The Pontiff has not left the Cathedral in nine years."

"No, Majesty."

"He sent a cardinal to my banquet, an assassin to my throne, and a bowl of poison to my bedchamber. And tomorrow he wishes to see a girl touch a stone." The cold, quiet voice did not rise. "Why?"

"I am a soldier, Majesty. I do not know."

"No." Kieran looked up at the sky. "But I am beginning to."

He stood there a long time under the cold, indifferent stars. Beyond the garden wall, behind the pale green walls of the pavilion, a single light was still burning in a window. A small light. It flickered like a thing that had only just learned to be a flame.

Please, thought the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom, who had never once in his life prayed, let it be weak.

And then, because he was honest in the one way that mattered, he added: And forgive me. Because some part of me hopes that it isn't.