Chapter Thirty-One
The next morning, Shea emerged into a rare clear day in the Otherworld—and into the press and heave of the gathered crowd.
They roared and chanted her name as she waded through them, her gaze fixed determinedly ahead, like a ship coming ashore.
Their reaching fingers brushed the ends of her hair and snagged on the cuffs of her sleeves.
Their faces were hungry—ravenous, even—and for what, exactly, Shea did not know.
Whatever the outcome of today’s game, blood would be spilled.
It was a longer procession than usual. The final round was not held in the tournament hall but rather a solarium, tucked away on the far end of the castle grounds.
The spectators were stationed in tiers outside the glass walls, and for those who couldn’t cram into the risers, a massive display board had been built on one of the crumbling stone battlements.
When she shouldered her way inside, the humidity dropped down on her like a wave. Sunlight fell in golden sheets through the glass ceiling and lanced through the condensation streaking the walls. The whole place sweated and shone. Shea suspected she’d soon look the same.
Midir waited for her in the center of the paned-glass dome.
He wore a tunic of emerald green, a circlet of gold, and a brooch that clasped his embroidered mantle.
He cut an imposing figure, but it was the chessboard behind him that made her pulse quicken.
Through the rush of blood in her ears, the sound of applause reached her through the glass enclosure.
“Shea Fury,” he said. “Welcome.”
Shea gave him a curt nod. All she wanted to do was sit down at that board. All she wanted to do was flee. Her every sense was painfully alive—the colors brighter, the sounds crisper—as though her anticipation had brought the world into higher definition.
“I expect I already know what you’ll ask for if you win.”
She shrugged. Best to let him think what he wanted. “So I get to set the time control?”
He seemed almost disappointed that she didn’t want to spar. “You do.”
“Three minutes. No increment.”
Surprise passed over Midir’s face, soon replaced with displeasure. She understood. A bullet game was exciting, but one short game hardly warranted all this fanfare.
“As you wish,” he said, and with that, approached the board.
“Wait,” Shea blurted out.
He paused, then glanced over his shoulder at her.
“That’s it?” She gestured around them—at this beautiful greenhouse and the single elegant board. “No games? No tricks?”
“No.” From this angle, she could see only the soft curve of his smirk and the fall of the light across his cheekbone. It set his silver eye aglow. “We’re only playing chess.”
It was almost worse, somehow. No distractions, no nonsense. Nothing else to contend with but the amalgam of his defeated opponents.
He took his seat, ceding the white pieces to her, just as he’d done when they played six years ago.
And it was that detail—the sight of him there, unchanged from when she first met him, watching her with cool serenity—that made her go cold with dread.
She might as well have stepped back in time.
Once again, she was a little girl up against a faerie lord.
Only this time, she had no bluster or unearned confidence.
She was all too aware of all the ways she could lose and the ways he could make her suffer.
Too late, she realized that she was trembling.
A flash of red in the corner of her eye caught her attention. In the front row, she spotted them: Ciara and Daniil. Ciara lifted her fingers in the smallest wave. It steadied her.
This time, it would be different.
Shea sat across from Midir. Once she did, the room began to disappear. The glass walls blurred, and the people beyond them vanished. All that remained was the mist, featureless and gray, devouring all the sunlight. There was no one and nothing but the two of them.
Midir was very still across from her, like the statue of some ancient god of war.
His posture, dignified but relaxed, exuded power and confidence.
He surveyed the unbloodied battlefield, all sixty-four squares of alternating marble and silver.
So did Shea. She didn’t dare look up at his face—not even when they shook hands.
She could only watch as he took her hourglass and turned it on its head.
With no fanfare, the game had begun.
She wiped her clammy palms on her trousers, then lifted her arm with great effort.
It felt impossibly heavy, suspended there with her fingers hovering over the a-pawn.
The plan they’d devised last night struck her now as fanciful—almost delusional.
But she imagined Ciara’s hand laid gently over her own.
She imagined the devious glitter of her eyes as she picked up the pawn and placed it, decisive as a blade on the executioner’s block, on the a4 square.
Midir shifted backward in his seat, as though recoiling from something foul thrown in front of him. A thrill went through Shea, and she pressed her lips together to stop herself from smiling. It was exactly as Ciara had said: psychological warfare. The move had offended him.
A full three seconds passed before he played e5, accepting her generous gift of the center squares. And when she replied with rook to a3, he made a sound in the back of his throat, low and soft, as though the air had been punched out of him.
She allowed herself to look at his face.
He slumped over the board, with the look of a man who knew he’d been dragged into some joke at his expense.
He supported his head with one hand, which pushed the fringe of golden hair away from his forehead.
Now, Shea had an unobstructed view of what should’ve been his prosthetic.
Only, the silver eye was gone. In its place, nestled in the center of his long, surgical scar, was someone else’s eye.
He glanced up at her then, with a mismatched gaze of forest green and deep brown.
Startled, Shea forced her attention back to the board as they developed their pieces.
Midir had played frustratingly sensible and principled moves throughout the opening.
And although she’d achieved the optimal setup Ciara had taught her, the only advantage she had was familiarity with this ridiculous position.
But looking at it, undeniably concrete, she was all too aware of its flimsiness—and just how close she was to spiraling out of control.
As Daniil had warned, this was losing for white.
If Midir didn’t get rattled, he’d make short work of her.
What had she been thinking? She liked to play aggressively, but there was aggression and there was stupidity.
Last night, Ciara’s breezy conviction and Daniil’s grudging faith had papered over all her doubts.
For a time, in the haze of those early-morning hours, victory had seemed not only possible but inevitable.
Now, the fear came rushing back in. She was on her own from here.
As they moved into the middlegame, Midir’s cautious style had morphed into something else entirely.
Although he took a few seconds to deliberate each move, he played them assuredly.
Each one seemed to come with a veiled threat, a long-term problem for her to avoid.
It resembled one of the sample games from a tactics manual, all pitfalls and trip wires.
After a particularly annoying knight move, Shea had to resist getting up from the board to pace off her disgust. Across the board, Midir wore an expression like placid lake water.
The left eye staring back at her was a clear, piercing blue.
So that’s it, she thought. He was like a conduit.
When it suited him, he could channel a different player’s skill set—whichever one the situation demanded.
It should’ve comforted her, maybe, to discover this limitation.
One elite-level player at a time was far easier to contend with than all of them at once.
Still, it felt as though he’d plunged a dagger of ice into her heart.
With that rush of cold fear came a horrible clarity.
It was not the dread of what came next or what new strategy he might uncork.
It didn’t matter what grandmaster he summoned from beyond the grave.
It didn’t even matter how well he played or where they were or how thoroughly she’d prepared.
No, it was Midir that terrified her.
Even if he hadn’t been cheating, even if he’d played terribly, she still couldn’t win against him.
She didn’t have the strength. She was living in two moments at once.
She was thirteen years old, and she was nineteen years old, and she was trying desperately to defend a crumbling position against a force she did not understand.
And if it fell, her entire world would come apart. It was coming apart.
Nothing had changed at all.
She had no time to think. This game was too sharp, too tactical.
He hadn’t been as thrown as she had hoped he would be.
In fact, he’d thrived. She could see it in his smug expression.
Had he caught something she’d missed? Had she made a mistake somewhere and not even realized it?
Had he calculated twenty moves ahead? Every possibility filled her with a sense of deep and paralyzing shame.
Shea closed her eyes, if only to hold the defeated tears at bay.
Before him, she’d never felt this way. Before him, the only thing she had to lose was her temper.
Since him, she’d never gone a day without him looming over her games like some kind of cruel taskmaster, a specter, a villain of her own invention.
She missed it, sometimes—the way it felt to play when she wasn’t so scared.