The Court

He came dressed in black, and the Court was silent when he entered. Some things are so deeply forbidden no one need ever actually forbid them; but since no one had, he continued to walk in slow, measured steps to the throne. The King sat on it, listless, unmoving: the Bishops hovering about moved quickly, buzzing about to offer advice and keep others away.

They did not stop him, because he was beneath their notice.

The Queen looked down upon him and her smile was as brittle as the paint on her face. “Why are you here?” she said in her great and terrible voice that could be felt over the whole of the kingdom.

“I bring word from the front lines,” he said.

“The Knights do that,” she said.

“The Knights are dead,” he replied, and the court was hushes for a moment.

The King roused briefly to murmur something only his wife heard.

“All of them?” the Queen snapped.

“Yes.”

“And you, peasant; why do you come here in the colours of the enemy?”

“Black is also a colour of mourning,” he said.

“There are always more Knights; we can promote from the ranks,” she said casually.

“Not without cost,” the peasant said.

The Queen gazed down, her pale face gleaming in the light from the floor. “You have a problem, peasant?” she said, drawing up her office around her.

“The enemy slipped through our lines too easily, and left without being harmed,” he said, the words tumbling out in a spasm of guilt and desperation.

The Queen raised her pale eyebrows. “Sabotage?”

“Treason,” the peasant said. “Someone broke the laws, worked out a deal. Or was jealous,” he added, and knew himself damned.

“Jealous?” the Queen said.

“In all the land, there is only one Queen, and you are a Power of our land. You can do anything your bishops can do, even what the towers that guard the kingdom can; you see it all, but there is one thing a Queen cannot do.”

Her smile vanished, and her face was colder than winter as she stared at him.

“I am only a pawn in the games of the Court,” he said into the terrible hush that gripped the court. “But Knights can move in ways even the Queen cannot.”

“Guards,” the Queen said.

The peasant smiled then, mirthlessly. “I will not serve a kingdom whose honour has been tainted. I do not just wear the black!” he cried, and the court froze as he lunged towards the King and stabbed him once, in the heart.

For a moment, as only the peasants could, as only a pawn in the game could, he briefly was the queen and then the king, and the world fell away as the Queen screamed her rage down into the swirling void of white and black and silence that engulfed them all.