Chapter one
Jaidur is annoyed“Do you bare the throat?”
“Aye, my love. I bare the throat.”
The brightly painted pieces were swept up and returned to the silver-bound box. I had been comprehensively defeated. The game had been protracted and cunning and fiercely contested, filled with shifts and stratagems on Delia’s part that wrecked my cleverest schemes. I leaned over the board awkwardly from the bed and picked up my right-wing Chuktar. He was the only piece of high value my remorseless antagonist had failed to take.
“You held him back too long,” she said, decisively, her face half-laughing and yet filled with concern for the instinctive wince I failed to quell as that dratted wound stabbed my neck.
“I did.”
He was a marvelously fashioned playing piece, a Chuktar of the Khibil race o
