“If this is what I think it is, you’ve got a major irony problem.”
“Hush, or I shall come and blow your house down.”
“That’s a different story.”
“I’m beginning to see why your last girlfriend left you to die.”
That should have hurt more than it did. I took it as a sign I was healing, or coming as close to it as I could manage. “Wow. Low.”
“Well it was your fault for being difficult. Shall I continue?”
“Do. I’ll be good, I promise.”
“Once she gave her a little cap of red velvet, which suited her so well that she would never wear anything else. So she was always called 'little red-cap.'”
It wasn’t quite the version of the story I was used to, and part of me thought it was an odd pick since it wasn’t exactly wolf-friendly, but I wasn’t complaining. Tara’s voice washed over me like that pretentious hot chocolate you pay far too much for in Whittard’s, and I drifted off to sleep.
19
Visions & Leads
In an unreal city, trees grew through the pavements and I heard the barking of dogs on the wind. This was no street that I recognised, an alley filled with rats and the peeling paper of old theatre posters curling from walls.
I walked towards the barking of the dogs. Somewhere in another world I heard the edges of a voice telling me a story.
Through the trees and down the road, past the sign of a boarded-up pub and a row of rusted-out cars all abandoned in the forest-street, I saw a giraffe walking serenely away from me. Cautiously, I followed it.
The creature loped through the woodland, along the side of a motorway now cracked and pitted and all but impassable. I followed it to a flyover where thick ivy wound up concrete pillars and a great grey ash rose from the road below to split the road above, dust and asphalt raining down the canopy and mingling with its roots.
A swing hung from the overpass, one of those overgrown floral ones you sometimes saw in fancy houses. It was a strange swing, made of thin red cords that didn’t look like they could really take anybody’s weight. Nimue sat in it, smiling.
“It’s good to see you.”
I wasn’t sure how I should play this. The giraffe was throwing me off my game. “You too,” I tried. Then I went for: “Look I don’t mean to be rude, but what the fuck is happening here? I’ve had her with the green eyes showing up in my front room and weird old women waving playing cards at me, and now there’s dogs barking in my ears and I’m following a large hoofed mammal through a weird forest apocalypse to find you sitting here like the creepy child in a Victorian ghost story. I know this is all magic shit, but it got three steps too weird for me about nine steps ago.”
By some trick of dream-logic, or some magic of Nimue’s, there was a chessboard between us resting on the weathered stump of a pillar. “Shall we play?” despite her tone, I didn’t think it was a suggestion.
If I hadn’t been bizarrely pleased to see her despite the circumstances, I’d have slapped her. “In what world is that an answer?”
“In what world are we?”
“Nim, you know I fucking love you in so many ways. But I kind of hate you right now.”
But I didn’t really have a choice. She played white, moving her queen’s pawn to the fourth rank. I mirrored her—I suck at chess and my usual strategy is to copy what the other person does for as long as possible.
She brought up her queen’s bishop’s pawn to threaten mine. It stood there alone and undefended—I’d be able to take it easily but perhaps that was exactly what she wanted.
“Is this a trap?” I asked.
“A sacrifice.”
I really, really didn’t get chess. “I don’t understand.”
“Sometimes you must lose a little to gain much. A pawn for the centre of the board. An eye for wisdom. A life for a throne.”
“None of those seem worth it.”
“Perhaps. But appearances deceive.”
“You still haven’t told me what’s going on.”
“I have told you everything you need to be told.”
I took the pawn, and she smiled.
“The right move,” she said. “But too late. You killed the queen of coins and now she thwarts me. You listened to the queen of wands, but forgot that her card was reversed.”
That seemed deeply unfair. “So what do you want me to do?