Chapter 13: ch.13 [The Next Moves]

"A video."

Seth heard how small it sounded.

"A video," Astrid repeated.

"By a man on a throne."

His ears were already warm.

"With aliens."

"Aliens."

"Blue ones. They were praising him..." He replied.

She looked at him for a long moment.

The gray in the window had turned to something paler.

Somewhere in the walls, the pipes began their morning complaint.

The kettle had not been touched.

"I see..." she said.

She did not laugh.

But the corner of her mouth did something.

Brief and unauthorized.

and then she put it back where it belonged.

"Again."

"Again?"

"From the knight."

She reached across the board.

The pieces came off their squares, one by one.

And went back to where they had started.

Pawn.

Pawn.

Knight.

Each one set down with the same quiet click.

Centered, Squared.

As if the board were a room she was tidying before guests.

It was how she put things in order when she could not say the thing.

Seth knew that now.

He watched her hands and said nothing.

"You will play it exactly as you did," she said.

"I will not go still this time."

"You went still?"

"I did."

"Why?"

"That is not the lesson."

She folded her hands.

"Begin."

? ? ?

He began.

Pawn. Pawn. The familiar road, the wall with the small door in it.

His knight went out to g5 and his heart went with it.

Click.

Then the leap.

Click.

The knight landed beside the black king, and Seth waited for the board to turn its head.

It turned.

It did not shout.

Astrid took the knight.

In the way a person picks a coin off the floor.

No hesitation.

No flinch.

Her king, which an hour ago had stood in the street in its socks.

Stepped out of the way and walked directly into a house it had always known was there.

Seth’s queen came forward anyway.

He heard the pieces.

He listened for the noise from before, the screaming, the bishop awake and furious.

Nothing.

The pieces had stopped wanting what he had told them to want.

They wanted to go home.

No. No, no. Not yet.

He threw another one in.

It landed softer than the first.

He threw a third, and the sound it made on the board was the sound of something that had been very sure of itself, finding out.

Cold crept in through the window. Or through him.

His hand was shaking a little.

He pressed it flat against his knee.

She answered with a single small move.

One pawn.

A step so modest it looked like an apology.

It closed a door.

That was all it did.

Behind that door sat her king, safe, bored.

Entirely unharmed.

And in front of it, alone and glittering.

In the middle of the board, stood his queen.

Loose pieces drop off.

The old man in the park had said that.

Nobody had mentioned what happened to the person who left them there.

Seth looked at the position.

A knight gone.

A pawn gone.

A bishop with nothing left to be furious about.

Last night this had been the most brilliant thing he had ever seen.

Now it was only naked.

His face went hot, then cold, then nothing.

I gave up everything to feel something.

He did not say it.

He heard it anyway, in his own voice.

Clear and flat and entirely correct.

The silence went on.

Astrid did not fill it.

That was the cruelest part, and also the kindest.

She let it be exactly as large as it was.

? ? ?

"Gambits are good," she said.

He blinked. "What?"

"Gambits are good." She said it to the board.

"They are honest. A gambit asks a question out loud, and it asks with its whole body."

"I lost."

"Yes."

"Badly."

"Yes."

A sound came out of him. Half a laugh.

"But only up to a certain level..."

Astrid went on, in the voice she used for facts.

"Against someone who panics, the knight is a hammer. Against someone who does not, it is a gift."

She turned her eyes up to him.

"That is why I crushed you at the exhibition. You asked a good question. I had already read the answer."

"That’s brutal."

"It is accurate."

"You said it kindly."

"I did not."

"You did a little."

She considered that.

"A little." she allowed.

The pipes shifted.

A bird outside tried something and gave up.

Seth looked at the single pawn that had ended his attack.

It looked so small to have done that.

"How did you know?" he asked.

"To close it there. It could have gone three places."

"It could."

"So why that one?"

"Because it was the one."

"But why?"

She opened her mouth.

Nothing came.

She tried again, slowly, like someone searching for a word in a drawer she had never needed.

"It was the shape," she said.

"Of what?"

"The position."

"What shape?"

Her gaze dropped to her own hand, resting on the table.

"I cannot tell you," she said.

"It has never been asked."

Seth went very quiet.

"I was asked to win," she said.

"That is all anyone ever asked. No one asked me how."

She said it plainly.

Not wounded.

Not offering it to him.

Just a fact set down on a table where they could both see it.

He knew that voice.

It was the one she used for the truest things.

Something in his chest turned over, quietly.

Like a sleeper rolling away from the light.

His hand found the bottle cap in his pocket.

Warm.

Chipped crown against his thumb.

Then she leaned forward.

It was not quite a lean.

She reached across the board.

To straighten his stranded queen.

Because it had come to rest slightly off-center, and her sleeve stopped half a centimeter short of his wrist.

He could feel the gap.

Two inches of height and half an inch of air.

And neither one named.

She noticed too.

She set the queen square on its square, and sat back.

"You are looking at the knight," she said.

He was.

"The knight is gone."

"I know."

"Then look at what is in front of you."

He looked.

A board. A queen, alone.

A small pawn that was somehow the end of the story.

"In chess as in life," Astrid said, and her voice did not rise, "what matters more is not your mistake."

She paused.

"It is your next move."

Then she was quiet, and so was he.

She had said it to the board.

Perhaps she had not said it only to the board.

The light had warmed a little.

It lay across the table in a single pale stripe.

Over his hand, over hers.

Over the place where the knight used to be.

For a while, neither of them touched anything.

? ? ?

"Okay..." Seth said finally.

He breathed in.

He did not reach for the queen.

He didn’t reach for anything flashy. He looked at the position as if it were a face.

What does it want?

The queen wanted to go home.

The bishop wanted to be asked.

And her pawn, the small one, the one that had closed the door.

Sat still, and he understood that it was not guarding the king.

It was the only square where nobody had to be alone.

"It wasn’t the only move," he said slowly.

"There were three. But that was the only one where they could all still see each other."

Astrid went still.

Not the way she had last night.

Not a lake freezing over from the edges.

This was smaller.

One breath, held a half-second past its time.

"All of them," Seth went on because it was coming.

And he could not stop it.

"The rook, and the bishop, and the king. If it had gone anywhere else, somebody would have been facing the board by themselves. You didn’t want that."

His ears went red.

"I think that’s what you meant by shape. Maybe."

He looked up.

She was not looking at the board.

She was looking at him.

"That is not,"

She began.

In the voice of a woman who had explained things before.

And had always known where the sentence went.

"That is not how I would have put it. The pawn goes there because the—"

She stopped.

Her eyes moved to the pawn.

To the rook.

To the bishop, and the king behind his door.

One by one, as if she were counting them and had never noticed she was doing it.

Each piece, seeing the next.

Something crossed her face.

Not quite surprise.

Not quite fear.

Closer to the look of someone who has heard her own name spoken in a room she thought was empty.

Seth waited.

The stripe of light had crept across the board and was resting on her hand.

She did not finish the sentence.