Leaping Kei

Kei discovered both halves of her strange gift on the same crowded, terrible day, when the board was so jammed with pieces that nothing could move at all.

Every other piece stood frozen — blocked front, back, and sideways, hemmed in by the crush. The whole valley had ground to a halt. Kei's friends stood shoulder to shoulder, grumbling, utterly stuck.

And Kei, almost without thinking, jumped — sprang clean over three of them and landed in a pocket of open board behind the enemy's front line, the only piece on the whole crowded board that had gone anywhere at all.

For one shining moment she felt like the most powerful piece in the valley. Then she looked around at where she'd landed and realized, with a sinking feeling, that it was one of exactly two squares she'd been able to reach — and it happened to be a dead end. There was nothing useful here. She'd made the one leap no one else could make, and it had taken her nowhere worth going.

She sat in her useless corner and thought about it for a long while. "The jump isn't the hard part," she decided at last. "Where I jump is the hard part. I can only land in two places — so I'd better make sure that when I finally leap, one of those two places is somewhere that matters." She had spent her jump on the first open square she saw. Next time, she promised herself, she would wait until the right square was waiting for her.

When Kei arrived at the House of Study — arriving, of course, by jumping the last stretch of the path and startling a whole row of dignified pieces — the Head of the House studied her with interest.

"A jumper," she said. "The only one. But you can reach only two squares in all the world. What good is a leap you can barely aim?"

"On an empty board? Not much," Kei admitted. "But your students all play the same way — they get one look at a crowded, blocked-up mess and they give up, because they can only think about going around. I can teach them that when everyone else is stuck, there's almost always a way over. You just have to be the kind of piece that looks up instead of sideways." She grinned. "And you have to be patient enough to wait for the leap that lands somewhere real."

"Then teach patience," said the Head, "and you'll be worth ten clever sliders. Most of them have none."

Kei's student was a fidgety boy named Tomas who panicked the instant the board got crowded. When his pieces got tangled up, blocked in a jam, he would start making frantic little moves — shoving pieces sideways, undoing his own position, trying to unclog everything at once and only making the tangle worse.

"Stop wriggling," said Kei. "Look at the mess. Now — is there anything that can go over it?"

Tomas looked at his one jumping knight, sitting behind a wall of his own stuck pieces. "It... it can't get out. Everything's in the way."

"Everything's in the way for a piece that walks," said Kei. "Watch a piece that jumps." And she sprang — over the whole jammed wall — and landed, this time, not on the first square she could reach, but on the good one, the fork-square where her landing threatened two enemy pieces at once. "I waited," she told him. "Three turns, I waited, while the right square opened up. A jump to nowhere is worse than no jump at all. A jump to the right nowhere-anyone-else-can-reach — that wins games."

Tomas stopped his frantic wriggling. He looked at the crowded board with new eyes — not how do I clear this? but what can go over it, and where should it land? And he waited, twitching only a little, until his knight's good square appeared. Then he jumped.

"It landed somewhere that matters," he breathed.

"That," said Kei, "is the whole art of it."