A Pleasant Game of Intrigue
“N o.” She had to force the word out as if trying to speak through sleep.
“No? But I set it up special just for you and have expended a great deal of...effort doing so. I even gave you the green pieces. We never did have a proper game that one time.”
Six years ago. He’d been aiding the lord-governor of Mirwell and Zachary’s brother, Amilton, in a coup attempt. The encounter introduced her to the strange plane of existence she called the “white world.”
“You are not the Triad this time around as there are only two players. You and me.” He leaned over the board.
His azure eyes of fractured glass glistened in the depths of his hood.
“This time you are a known entity, not an unexpected player. Yes, I know you quite well now, G’ladheon, my dear auntie. I’ve been watching you. ”
In her dreamlike state, her sense of violation and disgust was a distant thing. She tried to shake herself awake, but despite the layers of cobwebs that dulled her perception, she knew it was no dream. “I will not play your games.”
“Pity. I thought I could interest you in willingly participating in an honest match.”
“Nothing is honest with you.”
“Really, now. I may engage in deception, but I do not lie.”
“There is no difference,” she replied. “What is the point of this?”
He shrugged. “I am simply dissatisfied by the outcome of our last game.”
“If you want me dead, why not just kill me?”
“Kill you? No, Galadheon, I thought I made it clear that that’s not at all what I wish. I have a much greater plan, which you rejected in haste. I thought I’d bestow upon you another chance to reconsider.”
“The answer is still no,” she replied.
“That is the trouble with mortals, always so quick to pass judgment without thoroughly considering the possibilities. In the meantime, I just want a little entertainment. What if we raise the stakes? Let’s see if you’d be more willing to play.”
Gray mist cleared behind him and revealed a row of people standing shoulder to shoulder, heads bowed and eyes closed as though they slept on their feet.
They were castle folk—maids, soldiers, courtiers, and among them the Weapon Donal and Green Riders, Tegan and Gil.
Most wore their night clothes and were barefoot, and looked so very vulnerable, but others who must have been on night duty were uniformed and armed.
“What is this?” Karigan demanded.
“I thought it rather obvious,” Shawdell replied. “They are some of your people.”
“What have you done to them?” she demanded. “What are they doing here?”
“They are in a state akin to sleep,” Shawdell replied, “and under my command.”
“Release them, release them now.”
“Why would I do such a thing? The game would be so dull without them.” He picked up a game piece from the board, an archer.
“We begin the game thus.” He moved the archer two squares forward.
A corresponding person in the line behind Shawdell, an archer, stepped forward, arrow nocked. He aimed at her.
Fear curdled in her belly. “I thought you didn’t mean to kill me.”
The archer drew his bowstring.
Karigan tensed to dive out of the way.
Shawdell smiled his insufferable smile.
At the last moment, the archer pivoted and loosed his arrow.
It soared silently through the air and thunked into some target.
She whirled to see where it had gone and was horrified to discover another row of people behind her, also standing shoulder to shoulder.
She had not heard them arrive, nor had she perceived their presence.
A guard lay on the floor with the arrow in his chest. None of the people standing with him reacted—they all remained bespelled like those who stood behind Shawdell.
She leaped out of her seat and rushed to the guard’s side.
Sergeant Keen, she thought with dismay. Blood seeped around the wound. He was dead. Dear gods, no. To Shawdell she said, “This man had a family. A wife, young children.”
Shawdell shrugged, which infuriated her. He didn’t care in the least whom he killed.
She discovered Zachary beside the space where Sergeant Keen had stood. His head was bowed and eyes closed like all the rest.
No, no, no!
“Your move, Green Rider,” Shawdell said, laughter in his voice.
She grasped Zachary’s hands. They were cool and limp and heavy. “Wake up,” she told him. “Oh, please wake up.” She shook and cajoled him, but he did not respond.
Desperately she moved down the line and found Anna, Ty, and Mara among the castle folk. Shawdell meant to use them as life-sized game pieces in a game of Intrigue with real life and death consequences.
She rushed down the line trying to snap them out of the spell that ensnared them.
She found Fastion. Weapons wore black nightshirts?
Of course they did. She shook him, too, pleaded with him to wake up.
He did not. Ty, a few people down the line from Fastion, would not wake up either.
She yelled into his face and slapped his cheeks, but to no effect.
She returned to Zachary and shook him again. “Please wake up—it’s Karigan! Please. ”
His body seemed to tense and his eyes moved beneath his closed eyelids. His fingers twitched. It was more than she’d gotten from anyone else.
“Wake up!” she cried.
But then his muscles slackened and it was like trying to coax a rock to life.
“Even your mighty king,” Shawdell said, “is no match for my spell.”
She glowered at him. “Release him. All of them.”
“And ruin my game? I think not. Now, if you want some of them to survive,” Shawdell said, “I suggest you make a move. If you do not, you will forfeit your turn on the count of five, starting now. One—”
The archer pulled another arrow from his quiver.
She refused to play along. She always lost at Intrigue, which meant innocents, her people, killing one another for Shawdell’s entertainment. No, she couldn’t let him hurt any of them. Not Zachary, not Ty, not Anna, not Mara. Not any of them.
“Two.”
The archer nocked his arrow.
She thought back again to the day she sat bespelled in her office as two game pieces, just like the ones sitting on the board in front of Shawdell, had appeared on her desk and come to life as if in a dream. An archer and a king.
“Three.”
The archer had killed the king.
“Four.”
“No!” She sprinted across the floor even as the archer aimed at Zachary and drew his bowstring.
She leaped.
“Five!”
She knocked the archer over and looked back. The arrow flew over Zachary’s head. With an exhalation of relief, she disentangled herself from the archer and climbed to her feet, shaken and bruised. The man remained sprawled on the floor and looked to be simply asleep.
“That is not how the game is played,” Shawdell said, “though you do have a knack for throwing yourself into the middle of trouble, which is not at all useful. Your display of love and devotion for your king, however, was diverting if predictable. I wonder if he knows and appreciates all you’ve done for him and his realm. ”
“He knows enough.” She strode toward Shawdell, intend ing to...She did not know what. It wasn’t like she could simply throttle him in his current form.
Hastily he pushed another game piece forward, and to her discomfiture, Donal stepped into her path, his bonewood staff at the ready. She jumped back and ducked just in time as the staff hurtled at her head.
“Donal!” she cried. “Wake up!”
His eyes were open but shone like dark pebbles, and his expression was not the granite facade of a king’s Weapon, but blank, almost unrecognizable.
The staff whooshed past her ear as she stumbled aside from another strike.
She dodged behind a column and the crash of the staff against it sent a shockwave through her.
He stalked her relentlessly across the ballroom as she darted about trying to evade lethal, or, at least, crippling blows.
The staff blurred in flawlessly executed forms.
He pushed her to the opposite end of the ballroom, and anxiously she looked for anything she could use to defend herself but found only another table with playing cards upon it and some chairs.
The staff grazed her temple and she stumbled backward too stunned to side-step a jab to her ribs. She gasped and doubled over. Sharp pain stabbed through her rib cage with each breath. Were the bones broken? Or merely cracked?
She could not recover before Donal grabbed her and threw her against a column.
· · ·
Her eyes fluttered open. Her head pounded.
Bad hangover, she thought. Really bad. She’d had too much ale at the Cock and Hen.
But then her vision resolved enough to realize ale had nothing to do with it.
She was in the ballroom. Donal towered over her, his expressionless face all the more horrible.
His staff rushed down on her in a blur. Instinctively she threw her right arm over her head to shield it.
Bone snapped. Her scream resonated through the vast space of the ballroom. Blackness claimed her.
· · ·
The ceiling slid by overhead, which was very strange, until she realized she was being dragged. Donal’s big hand was wrapped around her ankle as he pulled her across the dance floor.
“Donal,” she whispered.
There was no indication he heard her.
With a suddenness that almost made her pass out again, pain caught up with her.
Her pounding head bumped over tiles, her broken forearm trailing behind her.
It was not the first time it had been broken, but the memory of that previous injury was hazy.
She drew it to her to cradle it to her belly and was sickened to discover bone jutting through her bloody sleeve.
Consciousness dimmed and returned in a muddle of disorientation. Donal had faded into the shadowy background and she lay beside the table that held the Intrigue board. Shawdell stood over her.
“I do not think,” he said, “my father recognized your self-destructive tendencies when he adopted you.”
It took too much energy to reply. Besides, she couldn’t help but kind of agree with his assessment.
“Now,” he said, “will you play the game and make your move, or will you forfeit yet another turn?”
“What happens if I lose?” she asked, though she had a pretty good idea.
“Probably most of these folk will kill one another,” Shawdell replied. “Your king most certainly. And, you will taste of Salvistar’s heart.”
He was back to eating dead god-beings again. “What if I win?”
“Then,” he said, “I will congratulate you and perhaps several of these people will survive, including your king. I will offer, in fact encourage, you to taste of Salvistar’s heart.”
Friends and innocents stood in their rows.
Engaging in the game would only lead to more deaths, and those deaths would be on her whether she won or lost. No matter how this went, she would not touch Salvistar’s heart.
She glanced back at Zachary. His body shook.
He fought the spell, she knew, so he could help her.
She could not allow Shawdell to hurt him.
Somehow she lurched to her feet, consciousness fading with the effort.
She held her broken arm to her and wavered before the table.
“Yes,” she said faintly, and her breath hitched at a sharp pain in her ribs. “I will make a move.”
“I am positively delighted to hear it. Let’s see it.”
She reached across the table, but she did not move a game piece. Instead, she swept her good arm across the gameboard and sent all the pieces flying through the air. Glass shattered on the tile.
And then there was nothing.