Page 56 of Love Is A Draw
But the next few exchanges in the middle game moved without friction, a clean route from one of his ledgers, a line he’d memorized when he was sixteen. List may know the moves, but he didn’t understand Dmitry’s ideas hidden inside the quiet moves. Eventually, pawns slid forward to claim light and space, and Victor was close to making a new queen. Bishops breathed along their lines and withdrew. Knights tasted central squares, left their imprint, then vanished. Victor flattened the noise around him until even the cough of the onlookers became a mark on distant paper. Gail played only about five feet away from him. He knew where she was; he did not need to steal another look.
The position thinned into the endgame with only a few pieces left. He guided the trades he wanted, never before the moment ripened. Rooks left the board. The kings edged inward like generals who understood what their soldiers could not do for them. Dark squares anchored. Opposite-colored bishops came to stay. One outside passer waited like a coin at the bottom of clear water.
List played well—exactly as a man would who had memorized the right pages and believed the pages were the world. Yet when List’s last rook vanished, Victor felt the map align under his hands. A king move here to deny checks later. A bishop there to freeze two pawns by attending to neither. Then the small act that changed everything: List chose the safer of two good routes and, in safety, conceded precision.
He set his king on the square that mattered three moves ahead and watched the air change. The outside pawn gleamed.The bishop’s diagonal bit. The corridor to victory opened—narrow, bright, inevitable. But Victor knew that List was at the end of his wits. He could not hold both fronts as they stood on the board. If he resisted perfectly, stalemate traps could help him, but it was unlikely.
He set a fingertip to the bishop.
If he moved it to the only square that had been mapped out in the ledgers, Victor knew how to mate in two moves. But he’d never written it down, so List didn’t know.
He doesn’t have the depth to calculate the discovered checkmate on the next move.
List simply wouldn’t see it coming.
So he paused.
And waited.
The clock ran until time almost ran out.
Patience, Victor reprimanded himself. Waiting was part of the game.
Bootfalls announced themselves the way privilege always did—brisk, coordinated, expecting the path to part. A clerk in Parliament livery bent to the arbiter; paper whispered, a conspirator’s sound. The arbiter’s gaze slid toward the officers posted at the rear—the same men as the previous day, officers who bowed to List’s power rather than justice—and then returned to the parchment as if paper could bless what conscience would not.
No, Victor looked at the piece under his hand. Not yet.
But soon, he’d checkmate List.
The arbiter rose a fraction. “Gentlemen, there are concerns—irregularities in notation, disturbances among the players. For the order of the tour?—”
“For the order,” List finished, pleasant as carved ivory.
A choreographed spectacle.
The word moved through the chamber like a draft through an old house. Victor drew his hand away from the bishop before he crushed the grain into his skin.
“No adjournments anymore,” Victor said. “Those are the rules on the last day.”
The arbiter’s careful mouth thinned. His eyes found the officers again. One—square jaw, boots polished to a black river—then List gave the smallest, laziest nod.
“The game is suspended,” the arbiter announced. The hammer struck air. “Position recorded.”
“The game is almost finished,” Victor protested.
“Review to follow,” the arbiter said, immediately seeking List’s approving grin.
Victor heard Greg and Fave groan in the back, and Rachel Pearler left the room.
List’s chair eased back with less sound than a breath. He rose just enough to bring his face near, as if giving counsel. “You should have burned those notebooks when you fled,” he murmured.
“You should have learned to play without them,” Victor answered, and knew he had found his own calm again when the words came without heat.
The baron’s gaze traveled past him to the gallery, where women in pale silks stood in a line like weather. “A pity your friends intend to make a spectacle of the ladies,” he said lightly. “A draw is a poor shield for a bad player.”
“I’ve seen you use poorer.”
The cold-eyed smugness didn’t move. “You dislike stalemate; I find it useful. One may draw a match. One may draw a life indefinitely until a man learns to accept what is given. Lose, Mr. Romanov. Or leave.” He let the last phrase breathe. “Otherwise—accidents happen.”
