Chapter Thirteen #2
“He does not want anyone to know him,” she said crossly. “I do try my best to empathize with him, when he is not actively trying to quash any remaining charitable feelings I might have. He trusts no one these days, especially not strangers.”
“But you’re his sister.”
“Yes, but I did not grow up in this castle. Our political landscape can be quite tumultuous. Tír nAill is divided into thirteen territories, each of which is ruled by a king. But only one of them may claim the title of High King, who has dominion over all of them. For now, that is my brother.” She waved a hand.
“As you can imagine, wars are common. So it is customary for faerie nobles to send their children to be fostered in the household of another noble family. It solidifies alliances among territories—or, if nothing else, ensures peace between them for a decade.”
“Sounds like a hostage exchange,” said Shea.
Ciara grimaced. “More or less.”
It hardly seemed like a comfortable childhood, growing up behind enemy lines. “So, when did you leave home?”
“When I was seven. Although I would hardly call it home. I do not remember my mother or father. But I do remember Midir.” Her voice grew wistful.
“He taught me to play chess. Our lessons were the best part of my day. There was nothing sweeter than his rare words of praise or the way his eyes lit up when I saw a tactic. I was devastated when he sent me away to Sid Ban Find. I harbored the secret hope that if I improved enough to defeat him, he would call me back sooner.”
Shea had only to look at her face to know he had not.
“So, there I stayed. There were no other children to play with, so I spent most of my free time reading chess books that my tutors brought me. Most of them were from the nineteenth century.”
Well, that explained her style, Shea thought. The nineteenth century was a romantic era of chess, where sacrificing all your pieces for a pretty checkmate was fashionable. The romantic players saw little point in winning if it was not elegantly done.
“My foster family wanted little to do with me. But still, I was well cared for. They provided me with the best tutors in languages, riding, poetry, dancing, singing, and swordplay. They even summoned a mortal chess tutor. Perhaps you know Lusine Vardanyan?”
“Of course I do,” Shea said, a little breathlessly. Lusine Vardanyan was a famous grandmaster who had disappeared one day and never returned. It was a loss that the chess world never recovered from. Her style was inimitable, improvisational, poetic. “You trained with her?”
“Ah, that caught your interest, did it?” Ciara smiled with exasperated fondness.
“Yes, for a while. She saw promise in me. And when she spoke to me of the mortal world, it captivated me. Her stories were a window I could look through, out of that echoing castle and its heavy silence. Through it, I could see cities and lights, protests and wars, rock shows and films, cars and clubs and chess. Once, my kind walked in that world freely. It seemed unfair that I’d missed that window by two hundred years. It is unfair.”
Ciara closed her eyes, as if lost in those memories. “I wrote to my brother and begged him to allow me to cross the Veil to compete. He agreed to arrange it.”
“And that’s when you started terrorizing us.”
Ciara glared at her without heat. “As you say.”
Shea saw it now: a complete picture of Ciara’s obnoxious behavior.
She did not like the way it made her feel, knowing that Ciara had been nothing but a child so starved for attention she seized it the only way she could: being a menace at tournaments.
But attention was fleeting, and it sure as hell wasn’t love.
“So what did Midir mean when he said he could’ve left you on the heath?”
“Ah.” Ciara leaned her weight on her desk and stared down at the flask in her hands. “A few months before I was meant to return to Bri Leith, my foster family was killed.”
“What?”
“It was a raid from a rival family. They were looking for me. They came in the middle of the night. But Beann heard them coming before the guards did.” Beann, who’d been lying in the corner, lifted his liquid black eyes to her.
They shone with unwavering, companionate understanding.
“He and I escaped. No one else did. It was because I had played in all the servants’ hallways and knew all the secret passageways.
Because I ran away like a coward, without even stopping to think.
We wandered the heath for nearly two days, searching for aid, before a rider from my brother’s house found us. ”
“Jesus, Ciara.” She’d never been any use at finding the right things to say, much less offering comfort. “When was this?”
“Last year.” Beann rose to his feet and padded toward Ciara. He leaned his thin frame against her, until she knelt at his side and laid a hand on his narrow head.
“So that’s why you stopped coming to tournaments in the mortal world,” Shea said quietly.
“Yes. There were arrangements to be made.”
“And then you were brought back here.”
“At first, I believed Midir would welcome me back eagerly. But I soon discovered I’d traded one empty castle for another.
” She gestured around her, at the wreckage of her bedroom and the branches twining determinedly through its stone walls.
“After this tournament, there will be no guests for another hundred years.”
“Can’t you go somewhere else?”
“I would likely be picked off by another assassination attempt. I am revered as a chess player, but to anyone with political aspirations … Well, I am an easy target. For now, I am Midir’s only heir.
It is quite inconvenient, considering I have no interest in becoming High Queen, let alone the constitution for it.
And now that he is making ominous threats… ”
Ciara sighed fretfully, then rose to her full height. Beann shook out his ears, watching her pace about the room with his anxious, unblinking stare.
“What will he do to you?”
“He will bar me from crossing the Veil. I might be forbidden to play chess, even in Tír nAill. And if that doesn’t bend me to his will, he will likely turn me into a swan for nine hundred years.
I imagine he’ll do something of the sort anyway as soon as he and Aideen have their own children, just to clear the way for them.
There is no shortage of things to do with unwanted half siblings.
” Her cloak billowed behind her as she flung herself onto her bed.
“The walls are closing in on me, Shea. This tournament is my last recourse.”
From here, Shea could see only the line of her profile, noble and tragic.
Slowly, Shea came to sit beside her on the bed.
Ciara’s dark gaze slid from the ceiling to hers.
Ciara’s despair was a tangible thing. It settled heavily around Shea’s shoulders and pressed down on her like a weight.
Shea didn’t know how to lessen it. Maybe it was enough to simply vent it, the same way trading a piece alleviated the pressure of a thorny position.
“I get it,” Shea said quietly, and she did. She wouldn’t have survived her mother’s house for much longer. When she used to count the years that lay between her and freedom, sometimes they threatened to crush her. “You want to leave.”
“I want to cross the Iron Veil.” Ciara spoke with a quiet, fervid conviction.
“I want real freedom, instead of the taste of it I’ve been given.
Midir is right about me, after all. I am a dissident.
I belong nowhere and to no one. I know that will not change in the mortal world, but I love chess too much to give it up. ”
An unexpected flash of anger tore through Shea. “Don’t listen to him. That’s a fucked-up thing to say to someone.”
“Then where?” She was almost pleading.
A soft wind sighed through the open window.
The curtains rustled, casting lacy shadows over Ciara’s skin and the cool silk sheets beneath them.
Shea did not know what possessed her. She took one of Ciara’s ringlets between two fingers.
The rise and fall of Ciara’s chest stopped abruptly.
Shea’s gaze traced the necklaces shining against her sternum, the smattering of freckles across her collarbones, up to her dark eyes.
“I don’t know,” Shea said quietly. “But if that’s how you really feel, you’re not alone. Let’s not belong together.”
Ciara’s lips parted softly. “That’s the most generous thing I’ve heard you say all week.”
Shea huffed. “Yeah, well. Don’t get used to it.”
When Ciara laughed, her cheek dimpled and Shea’s heart tripped over itself. Having grown up alongside Aideen, she’d believed herself inured to the fae’s charms. It seemed she’d lost both her tolerance and her good sense somewhere along the way.