Chapter Text
Three months before Eldoran Saillune was lowered into his final earthly bed, the elderly king summoned Zelgadis Graywords to his chambers for a game of chess.
As a matter of significance, Zelgadis had never met Eldoran. Three years prior, as he knelt before Crown Prince Philionel and all of Saillune to accept the man’s trust as a regent and weary father, he’d caught a glimpse of the reclusive monarch seated high up in a loge. Eldoran was thin, even then — wizened and gifted with full, braided locks and pearly white beard. He’d been scarcely more than a name in all Zelgadis’s palace days since, and he might confess he’d go days without recalling the man yet lived.
He’d be less inclined to confess the blank stare with which he greeted the messenger on hearing of the King’s invitation.
“Who?”
“The… the King, Sir?” the page faltered, as the two guardsmen behind him exchanged subtly curled lips. Zelgadis rubbed at the crook of his stony brow and glanced down at his pajamas. The summer sun had nearly set, and Amelia’s schedule had favored the daytime of late (so his had, too).
But Zelgadis wasn’t one to refuse a King — even a King he’d forgotten about entirely.
“I’ll change,” he said, and shut the door.
His moderate entourage left him at the door, and Zelgadis stalled just inside it to glance about the King’s chambers. They were gently lit by many modest lamps, heavy curtains drawn and decor of blue grays and luscious teals. He supposed an ill man asked little in the way of luxury.
“Come on,” called a voice — not one nearly so old. The door shut behind him. Zelgadis squinted into the warm dim, then walked on.
Eldoran sat in a plush armchair with a pensive hand to his mouth, hunched over a game board and looking, all told, rather well. A mug of tea steamed at his side, more still laid out on a tray nearby. A tall, middle-aged courtier stood attending it. He met Zelgadis’s eye and nodded at the chair opposite Eldoran, perfectly set with a miniature army of hand-hewn ivory.
Zelgadis sat.
“You called for me?” It was all he could think to say. Hastily he added, “Your Majesty.”
“I did,” Eldoran croaked, stare fixed sternly on the board. Zelgadis realized at once this was a man for whom words were a precious (and generally frivolous) commodity. “White goes first.”
Zelgadis blinked, then looked down and felt a fool for not having strategized on his silent trek over. He reached out, hesitated, then plucked a silver-veined pawn from its marble perch.
The first time he lost to a member of Saillune’s royal line, Zelgadis had fallen a little bit in love.
He didn’t supposed this was par for course, as far as losing chess games went. Zelgadis hated to lose at almost anything. It would be offensively oversimple to say loving Amelia was a thing that happened all at once — surrendering his cranky, clumsy heart and little wooden King to her all in one fell swoop. He’d loved her as an ally, a friend, a confidant — a student and an equal, a comrade and a princess. He’d watched the light leave her eyes and felt it drag his own into the dark along with it; he’d sworn to Crown and Kingdom to die before it happened again.
But Amelia had never bested him before.
Zelgadis was an intelligent man — this, he prided himself on — but it wasn’t until he’d begun to spend more of their shared time around Amelia’s stomping grounds that he learned the same of her. The little princess was brilliant. Her lay of the law, decorum in diplomacy and cleverness with a quill filled in so many cracks and gaps in this picture of a woman he otherwise knew better than anyone left to him.
He loved her all the more dearly for it, and as Zelgadis grew properly into himself (twenty-seven was, he felt, a touch too far along to claim the ‘young’ before ‘man’), he found his manner of love expanding. This unsettled him, and most days he was grateful his miscalculated affections would never come to relevance.
“Check,” rasped Eldoran, and Zelgadis paused, open-mouthed, over his tea to survey the board. A midnight-stained bishop had emerged free of a clustered scuffle across the board, grinning madly at his cornered king.
No, he could take the pawn behind and — Fuck, no, the rook. He might maneuver his queen into the line of fire, but … ah, there.
Zelgadis set his jaw and moved his king to a tight, congested border.
Another pawn. A captured rook. A frantic queen. Then —
“Checkmate.”
Zelgadis sat up straight, flabbergasted. He quickly turned the past eight moves over in his mind, and realized he’d been beaten well before Eldoran said so. It was a dizzying pattern he’d grown familiar with in Amelia’s games of late (in that frustrating way of knowing, but not understanding).
“You play my granddaughter,” Eldoran spoke as his valet cleared the board. It wasn’t a question. Zelgadis met the King’s cataract-muddled gaze for the first time: it was a remarkably sharp thing. “Often, I should think.”
“ … Yes.” Zelgadis coughed mildly into his fist. “Has the Princess said as much?”
“No.” Eldoran sat up slowly, tapping gnarled knuckles along his armrest. “She’s taught you well.”
Amelia had little to say to this when Zelgadis mentioned it to her.
“Nobody wins their first game with Papa Eldoran,” she shrugged, flipping over slightly dated correspondence from Taforashia. “I’d say it was pretty good, lasting as long as you did.”
“Sure. It’s just a bit odd, isn’t it?”
“Odd?”
“It’s just … not what I expected out of a first meeting, I suppose.”
“He gets bored. Don’t worry too much about it. I think it means he likes you.”
Zelgadis was hard-pressed to call her wrong. Eldoran summoned him for games once a week henceforth, and most went the same way — tea, silence, and confoundingly sudden losses he never quite saw coming. But Zelgadis was a shrewd, efficient man — he liked a challenge, after all — and he did his best to learn from a master who said very little.
One night, Eldoran made what might pass for conversation.
“You are not native to Saillune,” he noted, thumbing his beard over a set of pawns. “From where do you hail?”
“North,” Zelgadis answered, watching Eldoran claim a baited pawn. He leaned forward. “Northeast, sometimes. We traveled a great deal when I was younger.”
“With your great-grandfather.”
Zelgadis’s jaw tightened. He inclined his head and reached for a rook. “With my great-grandfather.”
“And now?”
He glanced up. “Now?”
“From where do you hail, now?”
Zelgadis knew the answer, but he thought about it anyway. It was one thing to settle down somewhere against all conviction — it was another to acknowledge it.
“Saillune, I suppose.”
Eldoran nodded, milky stare following Zelgadis’s piece. “As Royal Sentinel. To the Princess.”
“Is that what it is?”
The King’s gaze — so deceptively unassuming, until some poor fool chanced to meet it — lifted. “Is it?”
Zelgadis swallowed, feeling oddly like a cornered cat. After a moment he released his pawn and rubbed at the back of his neck, glancing at Eldoran’s equally silent valet. “I’m not sure I … Your highness, am I meant to answer that?”
Eldoran didn’t say. He gave his attention to the board a long while, then reached for a bishop.
“Check.”
As the first autumn chills blew their ways past Saillune’s royal walls, Zelgadis demanded more and more chess games of his off-duty ward, and Amelia was happy to oblige.
“Is it Papa Eldoran?” she asked him one night, her tone light.
Zelgadis frowned and reached for a knight. “Sort of.”
“How isn’t it?”
“Well, for starters — ” Zelgadis faltered and smothered a groan, aborting his move after catching sight of her sneakily-placed pawn. “This. You’ve been so hard to beat lately — I think it must be me. It’s driving me mad.”
Amelia flicked her hand slyly at one of his bishops and cocked a brow. Zelgadis thinned his mouth dourly, then considered the piece with severity. “It isn’t really you,” she said, watching as he plucked it reluctantly from the board. “I promise.”
“And why are you so sure?”
“Because — no, I’ll have you in three turns that way.” She hid a smile as he growled into his palm. “He made me promise not to tell, but I think it’s a little unfair. On his last birthday, Papa Eldoran taught me his secret strategy.”
“Secret strategy!” Zelgadis exclaimed, setting his piece back down. “You can’t be implying he wins the same way every time.”
“Well, it’s a little more complicated than that.” Amelia cocked her head. “You are getting better.”
“Well, I’d certainly like to know how.” Zelgadis folded his arms, mulling this. “That’s another thing. I think he’s testing me, somehow.”
“Whatever for?”
“Beats me.” He sighed, then morosely scooted his Queen into the sturdy shadow of a rook. “Mettle, maybe.”
“By playing you in chess?”
“Yes. No.” He watched in dismay as Amelia claimed the Queen with her knight. “I’m not sure, but I think I’m failing.”
Amelia said nothing at first, studying the board as he hovered choosy fingers over various pieces, jaw stubbornly set. At length she made a small noise in her throat, and he glanced up in time to see her eyes double-back along a three-turn tumble towards her own jealously-guarded Queen. His pensive brow flew high, and a slow smile spread over her full, pretty mouth.
“You’re not,” she finally replied, observing him take the first move with what looked like pride. “He’d not keep inviting you back, otherwise."
A week before Eldoran’s funeral, Zelgadis captured his elder’s long-coveted King of star-studded ivory in a breathless battle of no less than seven motley rounds of check. It was a sweat-browed midnight match, carried out under the dim glow of four sconced lights and nary a watchful eye. Perhaps he ought to have sought answers for these — for the teal envelope slipped beneath his bedroom door, the lacking entourage, but Zelgadis had well learned by now that Eldoran didn’t really answer questions.
Still, what ran through his mind more than aught else next he heard of the man — woken near dawn a night and day later by smothered ruckus; stumbling through the halls half-asleep and half-armed until Amelia found him, threw her arms around his middle and cried — was that he should have known.
“Well done,” Eldoran had said that night, after studying the board for what seemed an age — tracing their game backwards, seeking any foolish misstep he might have made along the way before ceding the loss. He met Zelgadis’s nerve-steeled stare. “You’ve bested her, haven’t you?”
“Amelia?” Zelgadis smoothed a tangle of wiry hair back from his brow, exhaling. There were no platitudinous bushes to be beaten about here. “Last week. First time in months.” Eldoran hummed an assent, so he added, “She said you’d taught her your — uh — ”
“It is a formula,” Eldoran finished, leaning back in his armchair. “A set of principles. Hypotheticals. Hours, days, years of lessons.” He paused, wetting his old, cracked mouth. “Sir Graywords, I had three children, and three grandchildren. It is a sad fact that cleverness in war games may end poorly for its most devoted enthusiasts.”
Zelgadis flexed his fingers against the armrest, then curled them into a fist. He nodded.
“Philionel fell silly for a funny woman — a playactress and singer with a ready smile and wit to spin Christopher and Randionel both dumb.” Eldoran shut his eyes. “Philionel had not much a mind for the board. He taught dear Hestia Ctote so terribly she won their first game in its first hour, and lost ours in mere minutes. Stubborn girl that she was, we played again. And when she bested me, I won a daughter.”
“Your majesty,” Zelgadis managed, hoarse with anxiety and sleepless hours, “I — ”
“I pose you no prerequisites, Sir Graywords,” Eldoran interrupted, raising a weary hand. Zelgadis fell silent. “Do as you will. But should you do it at the side of what blood mine yet lingers, there is no teacher of its tongue. It only speaks.” He gestured veiny, tremoring fingers across the board. “Given no textbook, no quarter, no guarantee: will you learn?”
Zelgadis had turned these words over so tirelessly in his mind he’d forgotten how strange it was to hear them at all. Now, with the flags at half-mast, the mourners trudging home, and Amelia (exhausted, bruisy-eyed and dissonantly lovely in pitch-black gossamer) napping against him, Zelgadis stared outside the carriage window and thought — helplessly, pointlessly, but all the same — he should have known.
The carriage lurched to a halt as the palace gates cranked and creaked open slowly, and Zelgadis caught Amelia across the chest before she fell to momentum. She mumbled incoherently, the pale silk of her priestess outer vestments slipping from her shoulders to reveal a slope of dusky olive décolletage. He sucked in a breath through his teeth, then carefully adjusted them. A heavy thunk sounded beyond, and the carriage wheels picked up once more.
“Are we home?” Amelia yawned. She reached up to scrub the heel of her palm against the tear-smudged kohl streaking her cheeks.
“Somewhat,” Zelgadis muttered, bracing his palms on his knees as he tried not to think very hard of her neckline. He’d been a jumble of half-coherence these last few days, and so it was easy enough to forgive himself the temptation of simple, arresting distractions so long as he felt appropriately terrible for them.
A far off crescendo of horns drenched the outside air. Amelia hiccuped softly. Zelgadis shut his eyes, kneading knuckles into his brow.
A funeral.
A coronation.