Tanhkmet stumbled into the infirmary, wiping tears from his eyes.

  Lycera hadn’t been mistaken: it really was him. It really was his Virgil.

  He’d aged twenty-five years, or more, in the ten they had been apart. He lay then on the infirmary cot, pale, eyes half-open, unable to move.

  But it was him. However weak, he even managed a faint smile, when he recognized in turn who stood by his side.

  Tanhkmet fell to his knees beside the bed, greaves clattering against stone. Wary of Virgil’s injuries, he thought better of an embrace. Instead, he tore off a gauntlet, contenting himself with just a gentle brush of his cheek. Virgil basked in the caress, taking Tanhkmet's hand in his own, and pressing it closer.

  What memories hadn’t yet returned at first sight, came then, with touch, warmth and scent. Memories of bitterly transient joy. But the good old days, nonetheless.

  Despite all the horrors of those last weeks, Virgil was alive. Virgil was there. Death, which had encircled him on all sides in sudden ambush, had not yet been total in its victory.

  But then the medic returned. She explained it would be best if Virgil had some distance from others as he convalesced. A crown of orange flame alit above her head, and she resumed imbuing vis energy into Virgil with her totem, the form of surgeon’s scissors.

  With a sigh, Tanhkmet retreated. Virgil’s hand came with him as he rose, and he pressed a kiss onto its clammy fingers before setting it back down with care.

  As he stepped back, for the first time he noticed another figure by Virgil’s side: a young woman sitting watch on the next cot.

  “You must be one of the Dromos junior officers,” he prompted.

  “Yes sir.” She stood and saluted, eyes at once wide like dinner plates.

  Tanhkmet was used to intimidating people unintentionally, with just his mere presence. But she seemed struck worse than most.

  “At ease, officer. Please, sit,” he said. Her uniform’s rank chevrons were almost caked-over with dust “What’s your name, then... sergeant?”

  “Master Sergeant Kerauna Iumatar, Dromos precinct, sir.”

  “Well I’m in your debt, Iumatar. Thank you.” He extended a hand.

  She hesitated, then shook it

  “She saved my life,” rasped Virgil. “Kept me going until we were out of range, after I got hit. Then navigated the way here… she’s something special, Thut. Take care of her…”

  “Well then you don’t have to tell me twice. Mind if I join you for a bit, will you, sergeant?”

  “Of course not, sir.”

  He found it strange that she wouldn’t meet his eyes for more than a couple seconds at a time, for some reason.

  “Say… ‘Iumatar.’ That name’s familiar. You wouldn’t happen to be related to Astrapes, would you?”

  “Astrapes Iumatar is my mother, sir.”

  Silence settled between them. Tanhkmet thought of where Astrapes must’ve been, when Atum-Ra had been destroyed.

  Astrapes was her mother, he thought. Was.

  * * *

  Roskvir remained patient.

  He’d little time before his redeployment into Thjali’s platoon, behind enemy lines. And the shogun had made clear his desire for faster progress.

  But at last, Roskvir and the princess could speak the same language. So he was starting to feel like he understood her, more than just in a literal sense.

  And as far as he could tell, she was getting cabin fever.

  Children were easy to read, it seemed. Even strange, high-born children from foreign lands. Her immense intelligence made no difference; the emotional tact required to be cautious or secretive in that way came from life experience, he reasoned. Or perhaps just a full-grown head.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  And reading her as best he could, Roskvir could tell she was growing bored. She continued to rebuff the amenities they offered, but that left her with little at all to do. At least after she’d mastered Albian, which had taken her less than a week.

  So Roskvir remained patient, biding his time, awaiting another opening. In the end, he didn’t have to wait long.

  Just two days after the shogun had informed him of his upcoming redeployment, the princess requested for an item to be retrieved for her. She described to him a sort of game called ‘Cheket.’

  Roskvir seized the opportunity. Before the day’s end, he’d found a gameboard and its pieces in one of the Tanngnjostr’s many treasure holds, taken aboard as loot in Hilomnos. The set was cast in bejeweled silver and gold, otherwise destined to be sent back to Albion and melted down into ingots.

  She was far too sharp to ever forget his ulterior motives. But even still, he thought he’d detected a hint of pleasant surprise, when he’d honored her request so quickly.

  She taught him the rules that afternoon, and then they played one another. She won every match with ease, of course. But apparently it was possible to play the game alone as a form of puzzle solitaire, and so Roskvir took it as another small victory that she’d even bothered to teach him to play at all.

  The next day, he took a risk.

  After getting a feel for the game, Roskvir realized that Cheket was reminiscent of the Albian game of Sjak. At least, regarding the intellectual skills involved. They both simulated some vague abstraction of war, or a battle, or something along those lines.

  The next day, he brought a Sjak set to her quarters, and offered to teach her to play. He even felt decent confidence in his skills at the game. He’d always been one of the better players in the officers’ friendly tournaments, at least.

  At first she’d said nothing for a long moment. But then at last, she’d shrugged, and agreed to allow him to teach her the rules, and Roskvir had breathed a sigh of relief.

  He won the first game of Sjak they played. It made sense to him that his odds were better at a game from his own culture. Experience aside, the game was just designed to suit the way Albians strategized, he supposed.

  So he supposed. For a few brief moments.

  She won their next match, and it wasn’t even close.

  And then she won every game of Sjak they played after that, without fail.

  After weathering his initial embarrassment for assuming he’d be able to best a child in a game of wits, Roskvir’s defeats at the very least stopped being so pathetically one-sided.

  During their Cheket matches, he’d noticed a tell: she would fidget, rocking from one foot to the other while executing the key moves of strategies she considered exciting. Catching on to that helped him stay afloat a little longer in some of their future matches, in both games.

  But even equipped with advantages like that, he would always lose.

  As they played each other dozens of times over the next few days, Roskvir began to realize that her strategies weren’t just effective. They were beautiful.

  Moves that seemed at first harmless would be revealed twenty steps later as lethal traps, their danger multiplied by how he’d been forced to construct defenses just to maneuver around the threats he could see a mere five steps ahead. She sacrificed powerful pieces without hesitation, often beating him with half the matériel he still had on the board.

  In time, defeat grew monotonous. It was boring to go through the motions of playing, when he hadn’t the slightest chance of winning. She was so much better than him that he couldn’t even learn much from his losses.

  In place of the games themselves, his focus gravitated instead toward her.

  “Did you play Cheket often, in your estates?” he at last worked up the courage to ask, sensing opportunity halfway through yet another of his crushing defeats. “You’re quite good at these types of games.” So engrossed in her strategizing, he thought he just might have a chance to get an answer in from her edgewise.

  “Yeah,” she said absently.

  “A lot, or a little?”

  “A lot.”

  She rubbed her lips as she looked over the board. Selecting a piece, she held it in the air to make sure of herself, then moved it deep into Roskvir’s territory. He accepted the offered sacrifice, knowing she’d probably made a move that pre-determined her victory ten steps ago, anyway.

  “Did you usually win, in your Cheket games?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Her next move was subtle. Roskvir hadn’t a clue of the eventual purpose it could have in her strategy. It was those moves he’d come to learn were her most dangerous.

  “The Cheket games you played… did you usually play against other children, or grown-ups?”

  She looked up from the gameboard at last, leveling him with an unimpressed frown, before her focus returned to the game.

  Damn.

  Just when he was getting somewhere, too. She played her next move, and with it her impending victory became obvious.

  “You won’t talk to me, at all? I fetched you the game, as you asked. Can’t you help me out a little, too?”

  “I already said… I’m not going to help you. You’re not being nice to me. Not really.”

  There was a plea between her words, as if she wished for a way to explain herself that would at last have Roskvir abandon his efforts to get through to her. He felt a sudden strange shame for even asking the question in the first place.

  “You’re not being nice to me… you’re just doing it to trick me,” she finished.

  He sighed. He’d no idea what the shogun would say. Just, that he wouldn’t be pleased.

  But surely, his lord would have no right to be angry with him, would he? He was a soldier, not a governess, after all. And her ladies-in-waiting, like the two present, then, watching their game, fared only worse with the girl. Surely the shogun would understand that it was the princess who was the difficult case, to no fault of their own.

  She’d already resumed her study of the game’s position, he saw.

  He had to admit: he respected her strength.

  She was aboard the Tanngnjostr, for the gods’ sakes. She’d seen it from the outside. She knew what she was up against.

  And yet, there they still were.

  "In chess, a queen sacrifice is a move that sacrifices a queen. It is the rarest and most tactically significant sacrifice possible, as the queen is the most powerful piece and requires an exceptional tactical, material, or positional advantage in compensation."

  Wikipedia