Frustrated with this reading material, I glanced toward the door, wondering if someone would come to visit me. No one did. Not even Vinna.
Saddened and disappointed, I examined the other books Nurse Loretta had left on the night table. There were ten of them, which made me wonder how long she intended to keep me here, slowly dying of tedium.
I examined the books carefully, reading a bit of each, trying to decide which one suited my mood better.
She’d provided me with a fair variety of titles. A few works of fiction that would have pleased Talyssa to no end, two books of poems that I found extremely depressing, a detailed history of Acedrex (no, thank you, I had enough of those already), two books on horse care, a gardening almanac that would have been useful if planting flowers were still my pastime and, finally, a old, ragged tome which I couldn’t decide if it was a work of fiction or fact.
The old tome’s pages were yellowed and torn in places. The binding had loose threads that made me fear the book would fall apart, and I would have to face Nurse Loretta’s wrath for my carelessness.
I carefully laid it on my lap and turned its pages as if they were moth wings.
It began as a fairytale.
Once there was a young girl...
But as I read further, I found myself wondering if the girl in the book had actually once existed. The story enthralled me, and I found my boredom morphing into intense curiosity.
For the next five days, that book kept me sane between lazy naps, leg ministrations, and exercises, embarrassing and unnecessary sponge baths, and rushed meals. Even when Aurora brought my meals, they sat ignored, growing cold, until Nurse Loretta would force me to close the book to eat. At which times, I shoveled food into my mouth, forgetting all manners, to quickly return to the story.
The young protagonist’s name was Florea. She lived in a small town in a beautiful valley surrounded by mountains. She had a father, a mother, and two younger sisters. Her father ran a small inn, which had a few rooms for weary travelers and a small tavern where foreigners and locals could enjoy a warm meal and a tankard of ale.
Florea had been old enough to work in the diner during the day, helping her mother serve customers, spooning stew into bowls, placing rolls in the stone oven, running errands to fetch ingredients for the next meal.
At night, however, she was sent to bed with her younger sisters, even against her wishes and protests that she was old enough to stay up and help with their late night customers. She was only sixteen, and her parents’ rules were not unreasonable, compared to what others demanded of their young daughters. What Florea found quite puzzling was that she and her sisters were locked in their rooms from dusk until dawn.
Their rooms were at the back, past the kitchen. Normally, sounds drifted through the old building: chatter, song, laughter, sometimes even screams from drunken customers and the occasional uproar of a brawl. When she’d been younger, the latter had scared Florea. She worried about her parents being caught in the middle of a dispute, though, with time, she’d grown used to the sporadic ruckus and learned that her father—a tall, broad man of sizable musculature—always kept things under control.
There was, however, a nighttime event Florea never grew used to that scared her to her very core. It didn’t happen often but, when it did, it left her feeling apprehensive for days—an emotion made worse by the stoic expressions her parents wore the following morning.
It was silly or should have been, for what scared her was something that shouldn’t have.
It was silence.
On those nights, when the quiet came, it fell over the inn like a snuffer over a candle, reducing every sound to nothing. Chatter, song, and laughter stopped abruptly. There was no scrape of chairs across the wooden floor, no metal tankards slammed against tables, and, definitely, no brawls.
Instead, the inn—the whole town, even—seemed to morph into a vast graveyard, cold and inert and soundless as if no one dared to breathe for fear of disturbing the dead.
Florea’s sisters slept, unaware of the eerie stillness, their breaths only apparent by the rise and fall of their little chests. They dreamed as Florea must have dreamed when she was their age, ignorant of the strange happenings.
When I’d gotten to this spooky part of the story, the door to the infirmary opened and I glanced up, startled away from the fragile pages. Nurse Loretta stood at the door, her eyes darting from the book on my lap to my face.
She walked to my cot and took the book away. I nearly snatched it back but managed to control myself.
“I need to check your knee,” she said, setting the book on the night table. “You can read after that and only if you eat your supper.”
I breathed a sigh of relief as the silly idea that she would take the book away had suddenly entered my mind. Reading that story somehow felt forbidden even though Nurse Loretta, herself, had provided it.
As she tended to my purple and yellow leg, I bore her nursing with clenched teeth and no complaints. And when Aurora brought my supper, I upheld my end of the bargain and proceeded to eat every last nauseating morsel. I would have preferred only the bread and chamomile tea, which tasted amazing to my tea-deprived palate.
When I was done, I read on.
CHAPTER 6
As she got older, Florea grew curious and her parents’ protectiveness caused her irritation. At seventeen, she was definitely old enough to be free from her room at night. Gods, she was even old enough to get married. Why must they treat her this way? Hadn’t she proved herself to be responsible? She wasn’t one of her baby sisters.
Besides, she wanted to help them. Mother was always so tired, and Father always promised to get extra help, but there was never enough money for that.
Florea tried to convince them. She even managed to stay calm as she listed the advantages of letting her work the night shift every once in a while, just enough to give her mother a break, so she might get a full night of sleep to recover from all the hard work. She deserved it.
Still, no matter how reasonable and tempered she laid out her arguments, they didn’t sway her parents one bit. Under no circumstances was she to work during the night. A tavern, at night, was not the place for a young girl—not if she wanted to remain respectable.
Deep inside, Florea knew her parents’ objections had nothing to do with those reasons. It was those occasional eerie nights that were the cause of this reluctance. She knew it. She could tell by the wary glances her parents exchanged any time Florea brushed the subject.
She thought of simply asking them about those strange nights and offering to work on evenings when drunken brawls were the only trouble, but she knew they wouldn’t agree to that either.
Because there was no pattern to the silence.
It came, it seemed, on a whim. Sometimes weeks or even months apart. Sometimes two or three days in a row. Sometimes every other day on alternating weeks. There was no rhyme or reason. No way of guessing when a particular night might be plagued by the absence of all sound.
This much Florea noticed, at first, and the puzzle occupied her imagination relentlessly. Day and night, she daydreamed of possible scenarios, but everything she came up with seemed stupid—not to mention that her musings were limited by her lack of worldly experience and reading. She was only the daughter of innkeepers, after all.
Asking her neighbors proved as useless as asking her parents. All the adults were tight-lipped, and those her age were as ignorant as she was.
Finally, her frustration and curiosity grew to such an extent that Florea decided to take matters into her own hands. She was tired of being kept in the dark. If they didn’t want to tell her, she would figure out a way to escape from her room and find out the truth.
CHAPTER 7
I turned the page and nearly wept. The rest of the story was missing.
There was a gap in the bookbinding where I was able to see loose thread and hardened glue on the back of the spine. Then, a completely different story commenced on the next
available page. Something about an ugly duckling, a story I vaguely recalled from my childhood readings with my mother.
I searched the rest of the book hoping the pages had been tucked in the back, but there was nothing.
How cruel of Nurse Loretta to give me this book!
I looked up to demand where the rest was and found the white-clad nurse peering intently at me from behind her table.
Setting the book down as calmly as possible, I gave Nurse Loretta a pleasant smile. “It seems there are pages missing from this book.”
“Indeed there are,” she said, a slight smile gracing her lips. There seemed to be a certain satisfaction in her voice as if she were glad I had gotten pulled into that particular story and not one of the others.
“Well,” I said, irritation creeping into my voice, “do you happen to have the rest somewhere?” I gestured toward the side door from where she got her nursing implements and everything else she’d brought to my bedside thus far.
“I’m afraid not,” she said.
“Perhaps another copy of the book, then,” I asked.
She shook her head. “My selection is limited. You may go back to your own studies if nothing else pleases you.”
I wanted to scold her and call her inconsiderate. She should have removed the book from her pile as soon as she realized there were pages missing. She was supposed to make her patients better, not torture them.
With a huff, I stared at the ceiling for the millionth time and, like Florea, tried to imagine the cause for those silent nights in her town. I was older than her by two years and had read quite a few works of fiction where fantastic things happened. Cataclysms, tornadoes, plagues, wars, and a number of such things that didn’t occur in Acedrex, but I still couldn’t think of anything that would make a town go silent for an entire night.
Our own nights in Acedrex were filled with revelry more often than not, and when a party did not cause unrest, there were always other sounds: carriages clattering down cobblestone roads, dogs barking, raving drunken men staggering down the street, and all manner of sounds that must be natural in any place where people live clustered together.
I pouted for a long time before I realized I was acting like a child. It was probably a side effect of being convalescent and bored. My current state seemed to bring back the Bianca who had grown pampered, her every whim fulfilled by Papa, Talyssa, or the servants.
I remembered one morning when I’d awakened with a headache and a terrible mood to boot, and I had demanded raspberry pie from Eveline’s, my favorite bakery located on Square G7.
Louisa had kindly offered to bake me one for dinner, but I still threw a tantrum insisting—no, screaming—that I needed one “Now!”
Flustered by my outburst, Papa had sent our footman to purchase the pie at all cost. Never mind that the bakery was all the way across Acedrex, five squares west and five north from our house. In the end, the pie had ended up costing three times its regular price since the last one available had been consigned by someone else.
Shame descended over me at the memory. Looking back, I didn’t recognize myself. Had I really been that spoiled? What had I been thinking?! I’d been nothing special then, just as I wasn’t anything special now.
I heaved a sigh and decided to stop acting like a spoiled girl and to be nicer to Nurse Loretta. So, doing my best to forget Florea’s story, I read about the ugly duckling.
CHAPTER 8
After five days, when Nurse Loretta finally released me from her care, she gave strict instructions to keep an appointment with her every day and postpone going back to training until she gave her approval.
She gave me a walking stick and, limping out through the infirmary door, I breathed a sigh of relief. The boredom of being in bed that long had almost killed me.
To reduce Aurora’s workload, the nurse released me right before lunch. My stomach was rumbling with a strong appetite, which seemed to have been renewed by the sight of blue skies and the sun’s warmth on my skin.
As I entered the dining hall, heads turned in my direction. While I’d been resting, the Pawn emblem had been embroidered on the sleeve of my jacket, which I now wore feeling a measure of pride. I had no right to feel so. Even if I’d beaten Skender fairly, I’d paid Alben to lose, which meant I hadn’t really earned the rank.
Was that another sign of a spoiled nature? Was I so used to getting things served to me on a platter?
I clenched my teeth and walked to my seat, holding my head high. I’d done what I’d needed to do. With my skills as they were, I would have never been able to beat Alben. And that was simply not an option. I had a plan that went beyond my own inclinations. Paying Alben had been a necessity. And spoiled or not, from here on out, every fight would be real. I hadn’t any more money to pay anyone off.
I sat across from Vinna who slurped her soup and regarded me with indifference.
“Hello,” I said shyly, noting the empty space beside her, where Alben used to sit.
“How’s the leg?” she asked, tilting her spoon down and letting the liquid dribble back into the bowl.
“Still sore,” I said. “I can’t get back to training just yet and, I never thought I would say this, but I’m restless for it.”
She huffed as if she didn’t believe it, then said no more.
As I served myself a bowl of soup, I sensed the other Pawns in my Quadrant, Breen, and Petru, watching me with cold, hateful eyes. I could now challenge any of them once I felt ready. Did they think I had a chance to beat them? Were they worried?
I almost rolled my eyes. They couldn’t be worried, and even if they were, it would be unfounded. I’d paid for my rank. Alben was an excellent sword fighter and his rank had been lower than theirs.
Hungry for a buttered roll, I went to grab one, the last in the basket, but noticing me, Breen hurried to snatch it first. Slicing it in half with a knife, she gave me a crooked smirk, then smeared a large dab of butter on it, without taking her eyes off me.
I glanced away and focused on the table across the hall where the members of Knight Ferko’s Quadrant sat. With Costin gone, there were two Challenger’s left, so eight people sat at the table, including the four Pawns, Rook Neculai, the Decapitator herself.
They were all intent on their own meals, except for Rook Neculai, who was looking in my direction. He was a man in his late forties, of medium height and weight. His hair was gray with a patch missing at the crown. He had a big nose, a reddened face, and thin, almost non-existent lips. For a Rook, he was slight, I thought. Nothing like Daciana, our own Rook, who was tall and athletic with a shaved head and a brutal look in her gray eyes. And definitely nothing like the two Black Rooks: Datcu and Sanda.
I broke eye contact and focused on my soup, but when I glanced up a few minutes later, Rook Neculai was still watching me. This time he smiled, his lips totally disappearing as he did so. A chill went down my spine as he winked at me.
It was appalling. What did he mean by it?
Flirtations were forbidden between Challengers and Pawns. It was part of the contract. Just the reason why Breen and Skender had been so upset when I found out about their relationship. Was it not the same for those in higher ranks?
Determined not to glance in his direction again, I acted as if he didn’t exist. I had enough worries already. I would not allow him to become yet another. My focus now was to figure out how to become First Pawn.
CHAPTER 9
For the next week, I kept my appointments with Nurse Loretta. She applied her poultice to my leg each time and tried to offer me more of her befuddling powder for pain. I refused, of course, though I was grateful for the poultice, as it did wonders for the swelling and helped me recover faster than I would have otherwise.
So, with her blessing, I went back to training, for which I was more relieved than I could have ever imagined.
The first few days had been hard. Running, sword practice, and riding my horse caused some additional pain, but it resolved itself once
I reminded my body there was more to life than lying around in bed doing nothing.
I had just returned from a hard, extended ride on my mare and felt exhilarated. The others had finished their training and had gone for a short break, and it’d been nice having the track all to myself.
My body felt energized as I walked the mare to the water trough and let her drink. When she was done, I pulled her toward the back fence where she could nibble on some grass while I brushed her mane and tail.
She nuzzled me fondly, pressing her velvet-soft snout to my head, searching for a treat.
“I don’t have anything today, horse,” I said with a smile as I brushed a nasty tangle off her long mane. “I’ll try to get you an apple tomorrow.”
I still hadn’t given her a name. None of the names I came up with sounded good when I tried them on her. But I had to do better than horse, before she decided I wasn’t good enough for her.
Once finished, I put her away in her stall and went back outside to take care of my saddle, which I’d left perched on the fence. When I got there, I found a folded piece of paper sitting on top of it. It was sealed with red wax, the symbol of a Rook stamped on it.
Frowning, I broke the seal and read the letter.
Dear Bianca:
Meet me in the woods behind the palace at seven tonight. There is something I wish to tell you, which requires the utmost privacy. I promise you won’t regret it.
Rook Neculai.
Anger burst in my chest in an instant. Foolish man! I crumpled the letter, my gaze drifting toward the woods where this cad expected me to meet him. If he thought his obtuse, vague letter would fool me, he was mistaken. I knew exactly what he wanted, and I would have no part of it.
I cleaned my saddle, cursing under my breath the entire time. No gentleman should try to lure a lady to some backwoods. But what did I expect? These creatures were savages. His Quadrant leader decapitated people, so, clearly, there was some basic decency missing amongst the lot.
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