Page 41 of Immortal Game

“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.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The day of the tournament’s second round dawned as gray and crisp as all the others that had come before. In the daylight, the tournament hall was more impressive than Shea remembered: wide and echoing, with a crumbling stone ceiling that let in wide slabs of light. Spectators filled the risers, and press—both mortal photographers and faerie portraitists—crowded the wings. But it was the chessboards Shea could not look away from. They stood in the center of the room, stately and imposing, like a row of marble statues.

The second phase of the tournament was a round-robin format, where each team would play one game per day. A win earned them one point, a draw half a point, and a loss zero points. Only the top-scoring teams would advance to the third round.

The fourteen remaining competitors had gathered in the antechamber of the tournament hall. Some of them stood stock-still; others paced. None of them spoke, and the silence pressed down on them like an oncoming storm.

Ciara jerked her chin toward the tournament hall andmurmured, low enough for only Shea to hear, “It’s odd, don’t you think?”

“What is?”

“There is no space,” she replied. “How are we meant to confer with one another like this? The other team will hear everything we say.”

“I don’t know.” Shea frowned. “I’m sure Midir has something planned.”

“Almost certainly.” Ciara shook her head. “I do not like this.”