The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

a deep breath and stilled his wife’s hand as she reached for her mask. ‘No. Leave it.’

They walked up to the panels together and he pushed them aside for her to step through first.

He recognized the room they entered – the high square ceiling, the pale walls and stone floors, the two graceful statues on either side that represented the Navigator and the Captain, the founding colonists of Sept Lucochin.

He was home, standing outside his own Vineyards. This, he understood with a cold clench in his gut, was not proper etiquette.

Three Knights, holding buzzing, activated spears, surrounded a much shorter figure that stepped toward them. Sheer white cloth danced on the air, so thin he could see slender bare legs and small dark-tipped breasts through it. The Bishop’s full mask was elaborately painted with the crest of its Grandmaster, two diamonds inside a circle, a twin to the tattoo on a bare upper right arm.

‘Welcome home, Grandmaster Lucochin. You have been missed.’ The Bishop’s voice was smooth, light and monotone.

‘I find that difficult to believe as I was exiled,’ he replied. ‘Let us not waste time. Explain my summons.’

The Bishop’s mask tilted in his wife’s direction. ‘And who is this?’

‘My wife, as the Knight would have informed you.’

‘I had no opportunity to speak with the Knight. I have been directed by Grandmaster Kingston to escort you to your rooms.’

‘Kingston?’ He frowned, the coldness in his gut now ice. ‘Why does the Kingston give orders in a Septhold of Valencia?’

A pitying sigh escaped the pinhole speaker. ‘My apologies, Grandmaster. You’ve been gone a long time. You could not be expected to know.’

‘Know?’ He raised his eyebrows and waited.

‘Sept Lucochin has been dormant for many tempi.’

He turned his head and his wife met his gaze, but she could not see past the mask to the anguish that made his knees feel unsteady.

All those people.

His people.

Alexandar betrayed me?

No. It couldn’t be that. Never that.

‘But the Game? Our Game?’ he said, desperate not to believe.

‘It ended, shortly after you were exiled,’ the Bishop confirmed as though discussing the weather and not the clearing of a Board. The wholesale execution of a Grandmaster’s pieces – Pawns, Knights, Rooks – everyone. ‘With your return, a new Game has begun.’

*

He sat with his head in his hands for the longest while. Long enough for the golden evening outside to turn full dark. He’d thought no day could be harder than the day he’d been forced to leave Valencia knowing that either he would never be back, or worse, that he might one day have to return. But he’d been wrong. So very wrong.

Eva waited, allowing him his grief even though she couldn’t have fully understood the conversation he’d had with the Bishop. She sat at his feet, her head against his knee, her fingers intertwined with his and never once did she ask a question.

The lights in their bedchamber brightened as darkness fell. There was only the large carved bed, some chairs and two doors – one led to the dressing area and one to the baths. He’d refused the services of Sept Kingston’s servants, preferring to let them leave two trays of food on the only table in the room. The rooms had been aired, and the long hallways they walked still had dustnets over the little furniture that remained. Sept Kingston must have been directed by Sept Valencia to prepare for his arrival. With no people on the Lucochin estate, there would have been no one else.

He was lucky, he supposed, that he hadn’t been imprisoned on arrival, but he knew with certainty that had been deliberate.

It was a new Game. It would be up to him to figure out the objective. To know which of the many moves he’d planned would be necessary.

He stared at the grey masks on the table and sighed. She shifted and looked up at him, worry crinkling her eyes. Her free hand squeezed his thigh and he stroked her hair. He spoke aloud so he wouldn’t have to let go of her warm, comforting hand. ‘I’ll be okay. I just… need time.’

She leaned her head back on his knee, still looking up at him. ‘Tell me.’

He glanced out at the dark estate and the dancing rainbow colours of Valencia’s night sky – the light of the Vineyards reflected into the atmosphere, so beautiful now he saw it for the first time in many tempi.

‘This was my estate. They brought us directly here instead of the Greatwood.’

‘That’s bad?’

‘Almost certainly. The Bishop told me the Grandmaster Valencia would speak with me tomorrow. It’s odd Sept Kingston and Sept Valencia would go through all this trouble to find the exiled Grandmaster of a dormant Sept, and yet the new Grandmaster Valencia doesn’t meet with me on arrival.’

Understanding dawned in her eyes and she took a breath. Freeing her hand, she signed, ‘Your Valencia. Your Sept. Both gone?’

He closed his eyes for a moment, too bone-weary and heartsick to even nod. When he opened them, she had tears in hers. ‘My love, I’m so sorry. You tried. You let them exile you. It’s not your fault.’

He swallowed, the tightness in his throat and burning in his eyes making him pause to gather himself. ‘It was my fault we lost the Great Game. I set in motion the events that led to my Sept’s destruction. Sept Lucochin numbered over ten thousand when I left. Ten thousand souls. Executed. Including my King. And the previous Valencia.’

She knelt between his legs, facing him. ‘When?’

‘After I left.’ His hands faltered and she placed hers on either side of his face and kissed him, her mouth soft, sweet and fleeting.

He leaned against the padded headrest and stroked a finger over her lips. ‘They didn’t deserve that. I played the Game. I thought I’d won.’

‘You traded your life. Left those you loved behind.’

She kissed the tears on his cheeks, and his lips trembled as he spoke. ‘I love you. And I don’t deserve you. This… happiness. All this