Page 95 of Immortal Game

It was almost worse, somehow. No distractions, nononsense. 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 althoughshe’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 wasnot 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 wasMidirthat 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. Itwascoming 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.

Ciara had always been right about her. Shea was too afraid of losing to play to her full potential. She couldn’t help smiling. She was going to lose if she made the wrong move, and she wasgoing to lose if she made no move at all. What did it matter what she did, then?

Her cheeks ached where her fists were pressing into them. Shea opened her eyes to find Midir watching her. As always, it struck her how little resemblance Ciara bore to him. He had no freckles, no warmth to his skin, no humanity at all. Shea wondered, fleetingly, which of their parents he took after. How strange that she knew so little about him. Once, he must have been a formidable player in his own right. He’d had to defeat his first grandmaster, after all, to claim their ability for his own.

That was what made it worse, somehow. He’d possessed some talent of his own and squandered it. It occurred to her for the first time that the whole thing was a little sad. Here was a man—no, an immortal being—just as afraid of losing as she was.

Shea looked down at the board and saw it anew. This time, she picked out not only the disasters real and imagined but the reality of what they’d wrought together. It was true that this far into the game, she was beginning to feel the material imbalance. It was also true that she had compensation in the form of piece activity. Moreover, she had familiarity with this intricate, beautiful mess with all its tactical complications. As bad as it looked, this was what she’d wanted. He had not made a mistake, and he likely would not—at least, not until she dragged him into the mud of a time scramble, an endgame where it was not the best player who won but the one who best held their nerve.

Getting there meant presenting him with constant threats and problems to solve. He had no confidence to play byhimself; he’d agonize over every single choice. Steeling herself, she moved her bishop onto the long diagonal.

By the thirtieth move, her moves came instantaneously, and he spent precious seconds considering each one. His two-toned eyes studied the position hungrily, thoroughly. He was burning his clock, wrestling for the best move while she played simple, practical chess. She squeezed him into a fifteen-second lead. Then thirty. Then forty-five. Each time he blinked, his left eye changed color—too quickly to be of any use, surely. Hope bloomed within her, as vicious and stubborn as a weed.

She was alone, maybe, but so was he.

With no more than a minute on the clock each, they both leaned over the board, practically rising out of their seats. They moved frenetically. Their hands flew out to make their moves, nearly knocking over all the pieces in the process. Sweat glistened on Midir’s brow. Shea’s every muscle was coiled tight, every motion jerky and painful. But she felt alive. With no space for thought, no space for fear, she played on pure instinct. The tension burning in her body dissipated and all that remained was a heady, bloodthirsty exhilaration.

Five seconds remained, and Shea checked his king with her remaining rook.