Would You Like to Play a Game of Chess?
In life we face choices. Choices have consequences.
When the new Yak king had challenged the Crystal Empire over control of the border passes, my wife could have chosen to yield before his threats of war. Instead, she chose to call King Basil XIV's bluff.
It turned out that yaks do not bluff.
So the Crystal Empire went to war. As a Prince Consort with a military background, I was then faced with several choices. I could have sat the thing out — which is what my wife wanted, of course. We fought about it, but in the end she agreed that if I wanted to fight she couldn’t stop me.
I could have pulled rank on Consuls Dress Parade and Fixed Fortifications and taken overall command of the war. Instead, I chose to respect their thousand-plus years of seniority and my lack of strategic experience and take command of a legion.
When battle was joined, the Consuls had a plan for me that involved leaving my legion isolated on the far flank of our army. I could have refused the mission. I could have disobeyed them and fallen back to protect my flanks. Instead, I followed orders. When my legion was surrounded by angry yaks, I could have commanded from the safety of my tent. Instead, I led from the front lines as — I’m not ashamed to admit — I always dreamed of doing.
One consequence of this was that I maintained the morale of my legion. We held our position with modest casualties and the Consuls were able to spring their trap, defeating the yaks in the first and only battle of the war. King Basil IVX, persuaded that ponies were not the soft weak pushovers they appeared to be, returned to the negotiating table where Cadence and Twilight worked out a plan with him for sharing control of the passes.
Another consequence of this was that I got my left hind leg torn off at the hip by a yak cannonball.
I was airlifted to Canterlot, where surgeons replaced my shattered femur with a rod of enchanted iron, regrew my ruined muscles, and reattached my leg. I have a big scar obscuring half my left cutie mark, but the doctors said I should be walking again in a year or so.
Three months into that year, I lay in a palace infirmary, reclining on my hospital bed. It was unnatural lying on my back all the time, but the position kept my weight off my leg and elevated it for better healing.
It was good that I was able to recover at home, but I missed sleeping in the same bed as Cadence and Flurry. Right now, my hospital bed was my whole world. A board across my bed served as a lap desk; I kept my typewriter and my research books on it most of the time. Cadence had said I could have a secretary to dictate my history to. I took her up on that when I needed someone to transcribe interviews — creatures talk faster than I can type. But I preferred to type for myself when drafting, to keep my magic strong and my mind sharp. Or at least as sharp as it could be, through the mental fog brought on by the pain and my healing potions.
I’d just now been going over what I’d written the past few days.
It was word salad, all but incomprehensible. I might as well not have bothered. “I feel useless,” I said, not aware anycreaure was listening.
“Your body’s been through a lot of trauma, honey,” said Cadence, sitting at my bedside with her forehooves crossed over my left foreleg. How long had she been there? “You need to rest.”
“I don’t like resting,” I said. “I need to be useful.”
“Shining. You are useful. You saved the Empire.”
“Everybody had a role to play,” I said. “I’m writing a book on it, you know. I’m an expert. There was a whole army involved. It wasn’t just me.”
“Yes, honey. I know. And your book is going to be great. A bestseller, I’m sure.”
I knitted my eyebrows. “I don’t need it to be a bestseller. I just want to write a book. My point is, I didn’t win the war by myself, and I still need to be useful.”
“You can be useful again,” said Cadence, “after you’ve healed.”
I sighed. At least she wasn’t saying she told me so. She had told me so. It had come up when we’d argued about going to war, that I might be wounded. ‘You’ll get your leg blown off!’ Cadence had warned, which in retrospect looked less like a hypothetical example and more like a premonition from the earth pony part of Cadence’s alicorn powers.
Twilight had once explained to me that every event has a range of possible outcomes and that every possible outcome creates a separate universe. There was a universe somewhere in which I’d never gone to war. One where the cannonball had missed me or hit me dead in the face, or where I’d bled out on the flight to Canterlot…
Had Twilight said that to me? It seemed very strange. Maybe it was a hallucination from all the pain potions.
“Is Flurry heart here?” I said, hoping Cadence was still there.
“She’s in school today.”
“I miss her. Bring her after?”
We talked a while longer, and then she left me so I could pretend to nap.
I thought about my need to feel useful; and how it had driven me to war in the first place. I would have felt like a coward if I’d stayed behind. Lazy and spoiled. ‘Prince Consort’? What was that? A pet. No royal duties except the ones I assigned to myself.
Well, I’d assigned myself a legion and I’d helped win the war. My role now was to rest and be ready in case the Crystal Empire ever needed me again.
I’d have to accept it. It wasn’t like I was going anywhere any time soon.
“Daddy.”
I opened my eyes. I must’ve actually fallen asleep somewhere in there. A curly blue and lavender maned head poked up over the edge of my bed.
“Daddy, wake up.”
“I’m awake, I’m awake.” I’d slid down in the bed when I was asleep; I tried to shift myself into a more comfortable position and was rewarded by a tearing pain through my left hip. “Ow! Augh!”
“Oh no!” said Flurry, flapping up over the edge of the bed on her disproportionately large wings. “Are you okay? Can I fix you?” Her horn began to glow ominously.
“I’m fine! I’m fine! Please don’t.” I reached out with my magic and rang the nurse’s bell.
“I bet I could come up with a spell to make you a new leg,” said Flurry, sounding sullen.
“Honey, what did Sunburst say about that?”
“No inventing new spells until I’m old enough,” she said, her voice like lemons. She dragged a stool over with her magic and laid down on it. “But Auntie Twilight said…”
“Auntie Twilight gets excited sometimes, honey.”
Flurry’s eyes narrowed in irritation. “You aren’t listening. Auntie Twilight said we need to listen to each other.”
“Right, right, she’s right about that. I’m sorry. Go on.”
“In Warrior Humans,” said Flurry Heart, apparently having forgotten what she was going to say about what Twilight had told her, “Briarhand got his leg bitten off by a bunyip. And it was really bad because humans only have two legs! He couldn’t walk at all! So Jayhand made him another leg out of metal. I ship Jayhand and Grassfoot because they’re both medicine humans, and Jayhand is blind so she can’t be a warrior. And Grassfoot was talking about making her new eyes with human technology. So that she could see.”
“Okay,” I said. “You know that’s just a novel, right? Humans aren’t real.”1
“I know,” said Flurry Heart, in a tone that suggested she didn’t believe that for a second. She took a deep breath. “I know mommy said we shouldn’t bother you too much. But remember how… before the bad things happened you were showing me how to play chess?”2
Teaching Flurry games was exhausting because she liked to make up her own rules while they were playing. But she seemed to respect chess more than average, perhaps because the antiquity and the formality of its rule set made it seem less like a game to her and more like magic. And as much trouble as it was to teach Flurry’s agile, distractible mind anything, I just really wanted someone to play with right now. “Do you want to play?” I said, trying not to sound too hopeful.
Flurry grinned and teleported her chessboard and the little wood box holding the pieces into the air next to her. My nurse arrived to help me up in the bed, and move my typewriter and reference books and papers away so that we could set up the board. She left a little bottle of pain potion on the lap desk next to it. I took a sip. “Do you remember how the pieces move?” I said.
“I don’t understand the wonderbolts,” said Flurry.
“Two spaces in one direction, and then one to either side. They jump over any piece they pass.”
“Oh,” said Flurry. “Because they’re pegasi.”
“Exactly.” I pushed the farmer in front of my harmony out two spaces. The Ray of Light opening was the only one I knew.
Flurry moved the farmer in front of her owl out two spaces. She had a fondness for the row-and-column dominating owls and liked to get them out as soon as possible. I moved my harmony-side wonderbolt out from behind the wall of farmers. We went several moves before I had to correct Flurry about anything.
“The farmers only move two spaces on their first move, Honey.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“And they only capture one space, diagonally. They can’t capture straight on.”
Flurry’s eyebrows knit. “Why not?”
“Because if they could, they’d all capture each other right away and they might as well not be in the game.”
“Okay, I guess that makes sense.” She lifted her princess and levitated it out diagonally several spaces.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” I said.
Flurry squinted at the board, eyes flicking back and forth. “She won’t get captured.”
“Put her down. I’ll show you what happens.”
Flurry eyed him suspiciously.
“Don’t worry, I’ll let you take the move back.”
She set down her princess. I moved one of my wonderbolts. “Now your harmony is in check. See? That’s what they call a wonderbolt fork. You can move your harmony to get it out of check, like this. But then my wonderbolt can take your owl.” I put everything back the way it was before Flurry’s move. “That’s the thing with chess. You have to think several moves ahead to win. It’s why if you study it at all you’ll be better than me. I tend to be a little impulsive.” I glanced meaningfully at my leg.
“So the princess protects harmony.”
“Every piece protects harmony. They all need to work together. But the princess is best at it.”
Flurry Heart huffed, and pushed her princess to a different, less immediately catastrophic square. “Why did mom let you get hurt?”
“She wasn’t at the battle, honey,” I said, advancing a farmer to protect my princess-side chancellor, which was threatened by her princess’s new position.
“But why wasn’t she at the battle? She could have beaten all the yaks, without getting hurt.”
I frowned. That was debatable; alicorns weren’t perfect and I’d seen each of them defeated more than once. But Flurry had a point — if Cadence had been willing to, she could have slaughtered yaks by the hundreds. Better find a more child-friendly way to frame that, though. “Do you think that would have been fair? A lot of those yak soldiers have little girls at home, too. How would those little girls feel if Cadence hurt them without giving them a chance to fight back?”
Flurry swallowed dryly. “She could have just scared them off.”
“Yaks don’t scare easily, honey. They wouldn’t have stopped unless she hurt a lot of them. Maybe killed a lot of them. And you know mom wouldn’t do that.”
Flurry shook her head. “She shouldn’t have let you get hurt. She should have watched you. She could have saved you.”
I smiled. “Watched over me every moment during the battle? And teleported me out of danger the moment she saw the cannonball flying at me?”3
“Yes! Exactly!”
“Well, for one thing — and this isn’t the most important thing — that wouldn’t have been fair to the other soldiers. Mom can’t watch over every soldier. Some ponies call alicorns goddesses, but they’re not. They’re just ordinary ponies with special powers. She can’t be everywhere and know everything like Harmony can. I’m glad I’m important to you, but those other soldiers are important to their families. I don’t deserve special privileges just because I’m a prince.”4
Flurry gave me a speculative look, perhaps because she grasped the fact that I’d undermined the foundation of the monarchy with that statement. I did have special privileges because I was a prince — like recovering at home, and not in a hospital — but Cadence saw to it all the soldiers wounded in the war had pensions and medical care out of the royal treasury. She tried to be fair, even if circumstances forced her to be an absolute ruler. “You said that wasn’t the most important thing,” Flurry said.
“Yes. The most important thing is that I chose to be in that battle. I wouldn’t have been very happy if my wife had come along to save me if I got into trouble. It was my choice, and I accepted the consequences. Your mother respected my freedom. Sometimes, we have to let the people we love get in trouble.”
Flurry wrinkled up her snout. “You don’t let me get in trouble.”
“We let you get in as much trouble as a filly your age can handle, and then we discipline you so you’ll know better next time. And before you say it, I let you take back moves so I can teach you something about the game, not to go easy on you. So. Take your move.”
Flurry pushed one of her farmers diagonally, taking my wonderbolt, as I had expected she would. I spent the next several turns disassembling her defenses. She took defeat well; she didn’t complain, didn’t cry, and she didn’t give up until I had her in checkmate. I felt very proud of her. When it was over, she wanted to play again.
The next game took longer — I was getting tired and I started making sloppy mistakes. I still won, but the game ended with my princess and my last owl hunting her harmony across the back of the board. I came very close to having to explain the concept of ‘stalemate’ to her — which honestly I’m not clear on the rules for. — before I finally lured her into range of a wonderbolt and checkmate.
“That was fun,” said Flurry, bouncing on her stool.
“Daddy’s getting tired, honey. My leg hurts, too. I think I need to take my potion and go to sleep for a while.”
“Okay. Can we play tomorrow?”
“We absolutely can.” She spread her forelegs and wings. “Air hug?”
“Air hug!”
Flurry trotted out of the room levitating her chess set behind her. I took a sip of a pain potion, closed my eyes, and drifted off into a nap.
Author's Note
A story so personal it verges on autobiographical; I hope you like it. And if you did, please, like, bookshelf, and (I guess) comment. Do that to any story you like; it helps us writers with the algorithm.
Also please let me know how the footnotes worked for you; I've never tried them before.
