Ash sat on the dusty floor of the stables, a chessboard laid out in front of him. Spot, a black and grey mare, leaned her head over her stable door, watching him. She’d tried to eat his shoulder once when he’d fallen asleep by accident, but bygones were bygones. He couldn’t blame her. She was a horse.

  He hugged his knees and moved the pieces, one after another, mapping out a war in black and white. His father had taught him how to play — but Kalytero hadn’t anticipated the fervor with which Ash adopted it. He played this game obsessively, even without an opponent. Tracking the movements. Over and over, what he could’ve done differently. One square skewed the entire result.

  His mind ran free, one train of thought constantly planning out the game, another babbling on and on about everything from horseshoes to international currency exchange. He’d done this, sitting in the laundry room of the family mansion rather than mingling as he should’ve. His mother had never much liked the game, but he’d played with his father, then Voutyro . . . now, just with himself.

  Spot sneezed, and he felt something wet land in his hair. He looked up at her and rubbed his hand over her muzzle. She wasn’t a patient horse by any means — the one time he’d tried to ride her in the past week, she’d thrown him off within five minutes. But she couldn’t conceive of status or bloodlines or birthrights, and if she thought he was a loser for playing chess alone in a stable, she didn’t say it. “What do you think?” he asked her. “Which piece should I move?”

  “Talking to horses?”

  He nearly leapt out of his skin.

  Zeid Pnevma leaned against one of the wooden beams supporting the ceiling, bottle green eyes glowing. “Sorry. Did I surprise you?”

  "What? Oh — hi. What are you doing here? I mean, what do you need? I mean, startle me? No. No, you didn't. I expected you completely." Shut up shut up — reign it in — shut up.

  "Cool. What's that?"

  "This?" Ash asked, glancing down at his chessboard. "Uh. Chess."

  He stepped over, hands in his pockets. “Doesn’t that need two people?”

  “Typically, yes.”

  “Were you playing with someone?”

  “Myself,” he said, before realizing how stupid that sounded. “I mean — no, not really.”

  "I don't know anything about chess, but I could be your player two," Zeid offered. "You'd have to teach me, though. And I'm a pretty terrible student."

  "I mean . . . if you're not too busy . . ."

  "I'm really not." He said it with a grin that made Ash suspect the statement wasn’t as innocent as it seemed.

  He wondered if he should question him about it, but Zeid sat down across from him and tapped the board.

  “So, how do you play this?”

  “Well, you usually start with a pawn . . .”

  Zeid picked up the rules pretty quickly, but seemed to have a harder time wrapping his head around strategy. He’d memorized the movement patterns of each piece after a single explanation — impressive in of itself — but played too defensively. He was always focused on saving every individual piece every turn, rather than the game.

  “You’re too afraid of losing your pawns,” Ash told him, an hour or so in. “It’s holding you back.”

  Zeid frowned. “A piece is a piece, isn’t it?”

  “Some are more useful than others.” He tapped his index finger on the queen. “Like this one. A pawn is disposable. They’re weak and in greater numbers than any other piece on the board.”

  “Huh. All right.”

  “Still, you learn extremely quickly. I don’t know what you meant when you called yourself a terrible student.”

  Zeid wrinkled his nose. “Tell that to my tutors.” He moved forward a rook. “‘Sides, you’d think I would’ve learned to read by now.”

  Ash blinked. “They aren’t helping with that?”

  “Oh, they’re trying. It’s not working. They put pages in front of me and I look at the black lines and look back at them, and they sigh and shake their heads.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  That sounds so awfully familiar. Ash remembered sitting at his desk, the clock too loud in his ears, the page blurring in front of him. Remembered the hurried feet of his classmates going up to deliver their papers, the slow onset of dread as he thought of arriving the next day to their rankings pasted on the door, their seats rearranged again. He’d be pushed further and further back, three seats at a time. Until he’d stepped out altogether. “That’s not your fault,” he said, indignant on his behalf. “If nobody’s been around to teach you, and if they aren’t doing their jobs — we can find a way to make this work.”

  “‘We’?” Zeid looked up, lips quirked in a small smile.

  Blood rushed to his head. “I mean — I don’t mean to impose,” he stammered. An hour of chess isn’t an invitation to insert yourself into his life, he scolded himself. “I just — I — I could help you with it? If you wanted? I mean, you’ve probably got this, I’m sorry —”

  “No,” Zeid said. “No, I’d appreciate that.”

  Ash blinked. “Oh,” he said, his voice higher than usual. “Okay.”

  “Also, I think you’ve got me in checkmate.”

  He looked down. “I do! Good job spotting that.”

  Zeid flicked over his king and gave Ash a dramatized bow, prompting both of them to laugh.

  “How about we go to the library now?” Ash suggested, cleaning the pieces off the board. “We can find something you’ll want to read.”

  “Sure thing,” Zeid said, standing. He offered him a hand. “Let’s go.”

  ?????

  Zeid hadn’t realized so many books existed. Leather spines stood tidily on dozens upon dozens of shelves, lined along the balconies that curved around the skylight at the top. The circular dome of glass was framed by geometric outlines of silver wire forming overlapping diamonds, mimicking the crown he’d seen on the statue in the throne room. Sunlight spilled through, glowing off the dark blue carpet.

  “Where do you want to start?” Ash asked, toweling off his freshly showered hair. “Books are organized alphabetically within categories. I think the categories are also alphabetical. Agriculture to Zoology.” He nodded to himself, satisfied with the organization.

  “I don’t know,” Zeid admitted, staring at it all. A group of scholars in deep blue robes rushed past, stacks of books in their arms as they whispered about a thesis. “Surprise me.”

  “Maybe we should start with the basics,” he mused, wrapping the towel around his neck. His hair stood up on one side of his head - the perpetual cowlick he determinedly combed flat every morning only to have it sticking up again by noon. “Grammar? Or we find something interesting . . . something simple . . .” He pointed a hand right, then a hand left, and began wandering up the stairs.

  Zeid followed him, running his hand over the mahogany railing, smooth and polished like everything else in the palace. Shiny enough to see his reflection, distorted in the ripple of the wood.

  They stopped at a shelf on the third balcony. Ash trailed his fingers over a series of black volumes, murmuring to himself.

  Zeid glanced at the shelf, the letters swimming in his vision. Even the titles had so many words. His eyes landed on a thinner book — on its spine, a single word. “What’s this?” he asked, pulling it out. “. . . Poons.”

  “Puns,” Ash corrected, the corners of his mouth twitching. “Uh, it’s — it’s kind of like . . . wordplay, where you take a word or a part of a word that sounds like a different word, and . . . it’s a form of humor, but it’s not really . . . uh, it’s not seen as a respectable . . . form . . . of humor . . . why was that shelved there . . .?”

  “Can we look through it?” Zeid asked, opening the book.

  “I — sure. Yeah. Let’s find somewhere to sit down, first . . .” He put a grammar book back on the shelf, and they went to one of the tables scattered around the first floor. “‘Puns . . . a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word or the fact that there are words which sound alike but have different meanings’. Basically, jokes based on connections between two words that may sound similar.” He was smiling now, a hand pressed over his mouth as though trying to hide it.

  Encouraged, Zeid looked down at the page. “‘Why . . . do . . . eggs . . . hat —’”

  “Hate.”

  “‘Why do eggs hate . . . jokes,” Zeid read, then squinted. “‘It . . .”

  “Always.” Ash had his hand over his mouth, so that what he said was starting to come out muffled. He was also starting to shake slightly, which meant he was either trying not to laugh or trying not to cry.

  “‘It always . . . cracks them up’,” he finished. “Oooh. Okay, I think I get it. You use certain words with a different tone to make things a little more . . . eggciting?”

  “Eggsactly,” Ash said, then started laughing almost uncontrollably. He looked more at ease than Zeid had ever seen him, doubling over because of a joke. His laugh was warm and dorky and infectious, and Zeid immediately decided he wanted to hear more of it. “Sorry, sorry,” he started, cutting himself off with an awkward cough. “Ack. I’m sorry.” He glanced around, as though worried someone would come arrest him for having fun or something.

  “Nobody can really hear you,” Zeid commented. He nodded towards one of the tables where a furious debate was taking place among three people dressed in robes. One of the robed people climbed atop of the table and started yelling, pointing their hand at the ceiling. “They’re caught up in their scholarly debates.”

  Ash leaned over to look past his shoulder at the yelling person, brown eyes wide, then cleared his throat. “Ehe . . . anyway. Um. Do you want to keep reading this one, or try to find something else . . .?”

  “Let’s keep going with this one.”

  “All right.”

  The afternoon somehow passed by in a flash of a second. He suddenly found himself with a book in his hands, and plans. Plans to string meatballs from the ceiling and paint a statue, plans to learn how to read . . . plans for living.

  He hadn’t realized that was possible.