Ebony’s mouth fell open.
For a mont nothing ca out of it at all.
She’d faced down the drowning weight of his magic, stared into those swirling white eyes and not flinched, told the lord of the dead to his face that he was a garbage boss — and this was the thing that finally short-circuited her.
"(A — a bride. He said bride. The thousand-year-old corpse-king who rots fruit by walking near it just proposed. To . Over dinner. With a dwarf watching.)"
"Y-you—" She pointed at him, found no words worth the gesture, and lowered the finger.
"It’s been centuries," the necromancer said pleasantly, settling onto the table’s edge amid the gray dust of his ruined feast as though it were a garden bench, "since I last t anyone with a temperant so agreeable.
I find I’d like to keep you near." He folded his pale hands. "And let’s be honest with each other — you won’t live very long.
Visitors almost never do. So I’d like to enjoy that delightful spirit of yours for whatever little ti you have left. Think of it as being sentintal."
"Sentintal." Ebony’s voice ca back sharp now, the shock burning off into indignation. "You make it sound like adopting a cat with a terminal illness."
"Mm. Close enough."
"I’m not a slab of at you can put up as a wager!"
"Everything in this world has a value." He said it without heat, simply correcting a child’s arithtic.
"It’s true that a life cannot be priced — I’ll grant you that, you argued it beautifully. But a life’s value? That can absolutely be asured. By how much weight it throws against the world. How much it can change — or how much it can shield its own from the things that would devour them." He gestured at her, almost gentle.
"Right now, for instance, your value is this: with an army at your back, you might save your friends. Without one — perhaps you simply watch them die. That’s a asurable difference. That’s worth a wager."
"I don’t need an army." Ebony lifted her chin. "I can do the job myself."
There was a long, pointed silence, and then Hrazfel coughed. It was not a subtle cough. It was the cough of a man trying to fold an entire argunt into a respiratory event.
"With an army," the dwarf said carefully, examining a spot on the table that did not require examining.
"We’d be far likelier to actually win. And — and I want to stress this part — far less likely to lose the very people we are marching in there to save. Which I’d have thought was the entire point of the exercise. Just a thought. From the dragon-rearing idiot. Whom nobody listens to."
"It doesn’t matter." Ebony didn’t hesitate. "I’d rather die than gamble away my own freedom."
"It doesn’t—" Hrazfel turned to her fully now, beard bristling.
"Girl. Girl. Listen to very slowly, because I am old and I have seen a great many fools die for a great many beautiful principles. Freedom is wonderful. Freedom is grand. You know what you can’t enjoy your freedom doing? Being dead in a ditch outside a mountain fortress."
He flung a hand toward the rotted feast. "He’s offering us soldiers. Free soldiers! Do you have any idea how rarely anyone offers a dwarf sothing for free? It goes against the natural order!"
"He’s offering us soldiers if I win," Ebony shot back. "And myself if I lose. You’re awfully comfortable spending stakes that aren’t yours, old man."
Hrazfel opened his mouth, considered this, and closed it again with the grudging air of a man who has located the flaw in his own enthusiasm and resents it deeply.
The king bead at the both of them.
He clapped, delighted, the sound flat and dead in the still air. "This. This is exactly what I an. That snapping, scrabbling, tooth-and-nail hunger to hold onto your own life — it’s admirable. It is so rare and so bright."
He leaned forward, white eyes drifting like clouds before a storm. "So yes. I truly do want us to make this wager. And I’ll even be generous about it." He tipped his wide-brimd hat toward the dwarf.
"Hrazfel may play at your side. Two of you against my one. Better odds. I do so love a guest who feels they had a fighting chance."
Ebony hesitated, and hated that she hesitated.
Every instinct she had was screaming walk away. Refuse, turn around, take her chances at the barrier and run until the red sky was behind her. But the cold arithtic crowded in anyway, the way it always did, uninvited and correct.
"(Whatever’s waiting on that mountain won’t be simple. An organization that swallows kingdoms one tower at a ti doesn’t keep a soft garrison. And they have hostages — Lucian, Daniel, Veronica. Every hour I waste is an hour closer to their minds getting scooped out and refilled with loyalty.)"
She thought of the monk’s hollow, horror-frozen face nailed to the tree.
"(And what do I have to do it with? No working shield. Three potions. Mana that taps out before a real fight is finished. A dragon that’s barely a day old and a princess unconscious on a dragon’s back.)"
"(He’s offering an army. Across a board ga. And the only thing I’m betting is that I’m not stupid.)"
She let out a long breath through her nose.
"Fine," she said. "I’ll play your ga."
"Wonderful." The king snapped his fingers, and absolute darkness swallowed the hall whole — not shadow, not a dimming, but the total black of a closed eye, the kind that made Ebony’s skin rember the porch.
Then it cleared, and they were outside.
Ebony and Hrazfel stood side by side at the top of a stone tower, more than ten ters above the ground, wind tugging at her hair.
And below them sprawled an enormous maze — a labyrinth of thorns grown dense with black roses, the hedges twisting outward in a vast circular pattern like the rings of a cut tree.
At the very center of it all, ringed by every one of those dark blooms, a single white rose grew from the middle of a giant silver chalice brimming with still, clear water.
It was, Ebony had to admit, a genuinely beautiful place to be threatened with marriage.
Across the garden, atop an identical tower on the far side, stood the king. Small with distance, but unmistakable, his black silhouette stark against the red sky.
His voice carried across the whole maze, smooth and amplified, as though he were murmuring directly into both their ears.
"The rules are simple. Each side has a single piece to move through the garden. On your turn, you roll the die, and your piece advances as many squares as it shows. The first to reach the center and pluck the white rose — wins. Win, and the army is yours. Lose..." She could hear the smile in it. "...and I’ll have a wedding to plan."
Ebony looked down and saw it now, what she’d missed at first: the maze floor was divided into a faint grid of squares, painted in pale lines across the stone between the hedges. A board. An actual board, the size of a courtyard.
Then five skeletons shimred into being in the air before her and the dwarf, turning slowly, waiting to be chosen like cuts of at in a butcher’s window.
One was lean and quick-looking, armored in nothing but boiled leather. One was huge — the picked-clean skeleton of sothing like a yeti, draped head to foot in heavy iron plate, easily three tis the size of the others.
One was middling: ordinary bones, a battered wooden shield on one arm, a rusted sword in the other hand, and absolutely nothing else to recomnd it.
The last two were unremarkable filler, and Ebony dismissed them on sight.
Hrazfel chose instantly, stabbing a thick finger at the iron giant. "That one. The big armored brute. Look at it! Nothing’s getting through that plate.
We send the tank, the tank walks to the middle, the tank takes the flower, I get my free soldiers, everyone goes ho. Done. Easiest gold I’ve never had to pay for."
Ebony did not choose so fast.
"(That’s the bait. The biggest, shiniest, most obviously-correct piece on the rack — in a ga this old crook designed himself, after offering us a suspiciously generous head start. No. Mobility. Balance. Options I can actually use.)"
She studied the lineup, and her eyes kept catching on the middling skeleton with the wooden shield and the rusted sword.
The cheap one. The one nobody respected. The one that tugged at a very, very old mory she couldn’t quite place yet.
"That one," she said, pointing. "Shield and sword."
Hrazfel stared at her. "The garbage one?"
"The balanced one."
"It has a rusty sword and a plank."
"It has options, you greedy raisin. Trust ."
"I have known you for one day," Hrazfel said, with feeling, "and you have already nearly gotten killed by a baby."
The two chosen skeletons appeared at the mouth of the labyrinth far below. A die and a small floating board materialized in the air before Ebony and the dwarf.
"Your turn!" the king called rrily.
They each took the die in turn and rolled. Both ca up one. Down in the maze, their soldiers shuffled a single square forward into the labyrinth’s throat.
"Tell you what," the king said, breezy as a man discussing the weather. "I’ll spot you a five-turn head start. Roll away. Take your ti."
Ebony’s eyes narrowed to slits. "(Nobody — nobody — hands you a five-turn lead in a ga they intend to win, unless the ga is rigged so thoroughly that a five-turn lead is a rounding error. This is a trap. The only question left is what kind.)"
So she asked the question that mattered, keeping her voice flat. "Can we combine our two rolls to move one piece farther?"
"Afraid not," the king replied. "One roll, one piece. However—" and she could hear that he was pleased she’d thought to ask "—you may freely trade rolls between yourselves. Swap them however you like, each turn."
Sothing clicked, hard, behind Ebony’s eyes.
She turned to Hrazfel and dropped her voice. "Roll first. And whatever number you get, do exactly what I tell you with it."
"That is a terrible sentence," the dwarf said. "That is the sentence that cos right before the screaming."
"Roll, Hrazfel."
Grumbling into his beard about ungrateful Visitors and the natural order, the dwarf rolled. A three. Ebony rolled next, and got a five.
"Good," she murmured. "Now move your big iron one five squares forward."
Hrazfel frowned down at the board. "That’s your five. And five’s more than three, so I’m hardly going to argue with free distance, but—"
"Just do it."
He did it.
And the iron giant lurched forward exactly two squares before grinding to a dead halt — and the square beneath its feet flared a sudden, vivid red.
From the rose-hedges on either side of the path, a volley of black thorns erupted, each as long as a spear, lancing across the gap to hamr into the giant’s iron plate.
The armor held. The thorns shattered against it in a spray of splinters, leaving scratches and nothing worse.
Hrazfel let out a bark of triumph. "Ha! See? Tank! Nothing gets through! I told you—"
"(There. There it is.)" Ebony wasn’t celebrating. Her mind was already three moves ahead and running cold.
"(If that had been the leather one — or my shield-bearer — it’d be a pincushion right now. Skewered. Out of the ga. So: there are trap squares, marked under those red roses, and they spit thorns. And the giant moved two, not five.)"
The skeleton stood frozen on its red square, refusing to advance another inch.
The king’s voice floated over the maze, positively dripping with false apology. "Oh — dear . Did I forget to ntion? Each piece costs a certain amount to move. That big fellow, for example — he’s simply so large that he requires a full two points just to shuffle forward a single square."
Hrazfel’s triumph curdled on his face.
"(So a five only carries the giant two squares,)" Ebony finished. "(... And parks him directly on a trap tile.)"
"(Beautiful. The whole thing’s rigged six ways from the start. Trade rolls — so you feel clever. Movent costs — so your good rolls beco short ones. Trap squares — tid so the ’best’ move dumps your strongest-looking piece onto the worst possible tile. He’s not playing to beat us. He’s playing to watch us beat ourselves and feel smart doing it.)"
"You said trust you!" Hrazfel rounded on her. "I trusted you! I moved the giant five and now he’s stuck on a murder-square taking thorns to the ribs!"
"He’s fine, he’s wearing half a forge—"
"That is not the point! The point is I listened to you, against my every instinct, and my instincts have kept alive for six hundred years!"
"Your instincts told you to fight a teenager who’d just survived an S-class dragon."
"One ti!"
And then Ebony smiled — slow, and certain, and just a little unkind — because the mory she’d been chasing finally surfaced whole and complete.
"(I know this ga.)" The grin spread.
"(This little nightmare was an optional miniga back in the original. A miserable, hair-pulling side puzzle that every player on every forum swore was impossible and rigged and cheating. And it was rigged.)"
"(That was the trick. You weren’t supposed to win it by moving well. You were supposed to win it by realizing you didn’t have to move at all.)"
"Ebony." Hrazfel was watching her face change. "Ebony, what is that look. I don’t like that look. The last ti you had that look a dragon was born."
She ignored him. She looked down at her middling skeleton — the cheap, balanced, disrespected piece with its wooden shield and rusted sword, the one she’d picked over a screaming red-flag tank — and she addressed it directly.
"Skeleton. Don’t move. Spend my movent points on an action instead."
Her eyes lifted, traveling past the giant, past the traps, past the twisting black hedges, all the way to the white rose standing in its silver cup at the heart of the maze.
"And cut down every last one of these stupid roses."
User Comments
0 comments from readers