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And now Rory’s worried. And if Rory’s worried, then we may as well pack up and go home. Lochkelvin, then, has already fallen.
Danny checks my king, and I react instinctively, barely analyzing the board as I defend it with my queen. And then somehow I’m threateninghisking. He moves his knight to block it, dismayed by the slip-up, before I realize something. I’m staring at the board with a sense of surprise, a low thrum of excitement building from within as I calculate and recalculate to make sure I have this correct. I slide my pawn to the back row, where it’s promoted to another queen — and it’s this queen that checkmates Danny’s king.
In quick succession, Danny pinches the bridge of his nose and rubs the corners of his eyes. “Excuse me?” he says, looking astonished, as he retraces my moves with his fingertips. “No. What? This isn’t on.” He stares at me, watching the grin that’s slowly spreading across my face, and he releases a soft, disbelieving laugh. “Wow.” He amenably extends his hand across the board, still looking utterly perplexed, and for the first time in hundreds of games, I grasp his hand with sheer exhilaration. “I didnotsee that one coming. Well done, Jessa.”
Finlay and Luke notice my bright beam. “You won?” Luke asks, and I nod, because speaking is too much right now. Something’s shocking, unnerving, about losing, losing, losing all the time, as a constant — in being a good loser, the perfect loser — to the world flipping and one day waking up as its unexpected winner. It must be what lottery winners experience. And even on a much smaller scale, I feel dizzy with it. I want to drink up this emotion forever.
Victory.
Yeah, I could get addicted to that…
Danny still looks stunned as he drags the board across to his side of the table, resolutely playing himself and rewinding to see where he went wrong. I’m still basking in bliss, observing the world in my high, when one of the gremlins approaches Luke. He’s carrying an open white envelope with the Lochkelvin address printed on it.
“We’ve checked it out,” the gremlin says in a grim voice, “but I think you should see for yourself.”
All at once, my happy high crashes, as though sky-diving straight off a cliff-face and plummeting into the choppy seawater below. Luke thanks the gremlin by name and takes the envelope, a small frown knitting his brows together. The table has fallen to a tense hush, with all of us watching the letter in Luke’s hands.
“It feels wrong doing this without Rory here,” Luke comments in a calm, casual voice. He peels out the letter and unfurls it. At once, I see it’s typed — not from modern tech, as there’s a strange old-fashionedness to it, but from a typewriter.
Luke’s expression doesn’t alter but the hands that hold the letter tighten. The paper tautens between his fingers. Finlay cocks his head to the side, reading it, andhisexpression blasts open into one of sheer outrage. He looks apoplectic, his face reddening, his eyes narrowing as he snatches up the envelope and scours it for an address.
“Whit the actual fuck?” he snaps, turning to the gremlin who presented it at the other table. “Postmark says it’s from London. Who sent this?”
The gremlin shakes his head. “I don’t know. It was in the postbag.”
He plucks the letter from Luke’s fingers. With one last, furious scan, he passes the letter across to me. I hold it so that Danny can read at the same time, and with every line, I find myself glancing up to check for Luke’s genuine reaction.
‘Seems you’ve gone silent, sweetie. What happened? Trying to keep a low profile after your fake abdication plot? Never mind. We know where you’re hiding. What you’re planning. We also know where your mother and sister are holed up. Don’t worry. We’ll make the effort to keep them in the loop and send them a letter of their own.’ A small smiley face is hand-drawn beside this.
‘You need to apologise, bonny prince,andmake a public statement about what a liar you are,andalsodonate £100,000 to Antiro. We understand this one will hurt the most — it would break your heart, if you had one. It’s why we added it. We want you to pay for being a hate-filled, intolerant, backwards political terrorist, using your will to bad-mouth King James. And if you refuse? Then we increase the donation every time.’
Fraying, I think distantly to myself as I scour the letter for traces of humanity.Tapestries fraying.
