41: WHEN A CHICKEN IS NOT A CHICKEN
Tinker watched the chick walk across the paper-strewn table, pecking at crumbles dropped by the twins and Forge. (Apparently they had a working breakfast.)
Remember your chess moves.
She didn’t scream in frustration when Tristan relayed that, merely because people tended to get beheaded when she screamed.
What in the world was it supposed to mean?
She pulled out her datapad and called up the photos of the chessboard.
Tooloo knew that the oni spell was about to be triggered, so the Queen’s Gambit had nothing to do with saving the domana. If everything since Unbounded Brilliance breaking into Iron Mace’s spell-locked box had been Tooloo’s doing, then the chess game was a clue to Tooloo’s grand scheme. Or at least, what she was trying to manipulate Tinker into doing without knowing cause and effect.
Tinker had already played that game for most of the summer. She was sick of it.
Some of the symbols were obvious. The five Minnie Mouse and one Mickey Mouse figurines were literally the four babies and the twins. The monkeys were Chloe, her sisters, and maybe Lain’s two younger half brothers. It depended on how many sisters Chloe had.
Tinker had to assume that the real live chick that Tristan handed her was a reference to the two black rooks. Tooloo had set up chicken figurines in place of the game pieces. In terms of “chess moves” the rooks moved in a straight line or, under certain conditions, could be essentially “swapped” with the king. In exact terms, the king moved toward the rook two spaces and the rook “jumped” over the king to a protective flank position. One could quibble since they didn’t move to the exact same position that the other piece formerly occupied that it wasn’t a swap, but essentially it was. Anyone planning to attack the king would suddenly find themselves face-to-face with the rook instead.
But what and who was being swapped with what?
The black king on the game board was a bottle of Heinz ketchup. She had assumed that it represented the city of Pittsburgh. (She couldn’t imagine it being Windwolf. There was nothing ketchuplike about him.) Even if it was supposed to be the Heinz factory where the condiment was made, how did you “swap” that with a chicken? Especially since the presence of the chick seemed to indicate that Tooloo meant a literal chicken.
This exact chicken, or Box—who had been the literal chicken at the game board when Tooloo showed Tinker the layout?
Box was a huge, buff Orpington rooster, fifteen pounds of pure golden-orange fury. Tooloo had other Orpington chickens since Box was as randy as he was large and fearless. Nor was he the first Box. The first one that Tinker remembered had taken on a bear that attempted to raid Tooloo’s chicken coop when she was nine. While the rooster had chased off the bear, it had been wounded to death.
Tinker had been conflicted over the death of the original Box. She’d known him her entire life at that point. He had been like a faithful dog, loyal to Tooloo but less tolerant of Tinker. He was not above bullying her if he thought she’d stepped out of line.
A few days later, Tooloo picked out a newly hatched chick much like the one currently strutting about the tabletop and named it Box.
“Again?” Tinker had complained at the time. “How could you give his name away? And what kind of name is that for a rooster? Wouldn’t it be better to name it Sir Crowsalot? Or Duke? Or Grandpa?”
“I call him Box because he’s a box,” Tooloo said. “He holds an old fierce soul that routinely miscalculates what he can survive.”
There’s dead and then there’s dead when it comes to dragons.
Wait! Had the original Box somehow swapped his dead body for a living one?
Tooloo had a bed made of dragon bones. Esme had said that she had found Tooloo because of a dream of a female elf with a golden dragon the size of a mountain behind her. Stormsong had said that her grandmother Vision had been guarded by a golden dragon named Vigilance. The Skin Clan had sent Vigilance after Vision and neither had ever returned.
What if Vigilance had died but his spirit clung near to his bones, possessing one chicken after another, much like Providence possessed Jin Wong’s body when the tengu brought him to talk to Tinker? Chickens were, after all, little dinosaur descendants.
Was this entire chess riddle just to tell Tinker: Swap the bed and Box for one of the baby dragons?
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding!” Tinker shouted. “Why didn’t you just say it?”