The Great Chess Master: Lamb And Lion

"He could have had the world without the wood." That was the offer. It was made on the fortieth day of a fast, by someone who was not lying, who held every throne on the board and could hand them over, and whose price was one act of homage in a wilderness with nobody watching. Everything He had come for. By the wrong road. Four centuries after the last voice fell silent, a girl in a village of two hundred and forty people is mending a strap when something stands on her floor and asks her a question. She is sixteen. She works out exactly what saying yes will cost her, and she is right about all of it, and she says yes anyway. Nothing is ever said to her again. What follows is written from inside the ignorance of the people it happened to. The shepherds told first cannot testify in any court. The finest scholars in that country answer a frightened king correctly, in under a minute, and then go home rather than walk six miles down a good road. A Rhodarn officer works out the truth from the structure of a chain of command and is never mentioned again. A clerk builds a three-year file to destroy a man and does not notice, for fourteen years, that he has written the best case for Him that anybody ever made. And Ismar of Karioth, the ablest of the twelve, gives up more than any of them, is right about every fact for two years, and is wrong about one thing that is not a fact. Veyl scored this game as finished thirty years ago and has been standing beside the answer ever since. **Book Six of The Great Chess Master.** The volume the whole series has been walking down a staircase toward: a promise brought out of a garden, through an empire, off a throne, into a chest under a cloth in a village nobody had heard of, and at last to the lowest square on the board. Complete in itself, and heaviest read after the five before it.