Lady Divert

It was a girl named Sprat who gave it a name.

Sprat was nine, and she sold very little at the market, which left her a great deal of time to watch other people. One market morning Divert came down from the tower with a small hand-bell — a practice bell, to test its tone — and rang it once near the cheese stall.

The cheese-seller, a nervous marten who guarded his best round of cheese with both paws, heard the bell and turned to look. Only for a moment. Only to see what was ringing.

In that moment a scruffy dog trotted up, took the cheese gently in its mouth, and left.

"Oh no," said Divert.

Sprat had watched the whole thing. She was laughing, but she was also thinking, which is the best way to laugh.

"You moved him," Sprat said. "You didn't touch the cheese. You didn't touch him. You just rang the bell, and he left the cheese to look — and then it was gone." She frowned, hunting for the word. "You... you drew him off. You diverted him."

Divert turned the word over. Diverted. To turn a thing aside from where it was going. From where it was guarding.

"I suppose I did," she said slowly. "I gave him somewhere he had to look. And the thing he was guarding fell."

She bought the marten a new round of cheese, because it seemed only fair. But that night, back in her tower, she took out a stub of chalk and wrote on the wall beside the bell-ropes a single word: DIVERT. Then, under it, smaller: move the guard, and the gate opens by itself.

After that, Divert saw it everywhere.

She saw a shout of "Fire!" pull the whole night-watch off the east wall, so that a fox slipped in over the east wall while they ran west. She saw a mother call one child's name and watch three children come running, the guarded jam-pot forgotten on the sill. She saw that the surest way past a guard was not to fight the guard at all — it was to give the guard something it could not ignore, somewhere else.

She filled the tower wall with chalk. Sprat visited on market days and added drawings.

Three summers passed this way. Then, one grey afternoon, the tower door opened at the bottom and a chunky, cheerful rook in a brass-buttoned waistcoat climbed all the way up — puffing, because it was a great many stairs — and stood in the bell-room looking at the chalk on the walls.

He said his name was Captain Castle. He said he ran an academy far to the south where children learned the shapes of the board. And he said he had come a long way because he had heard there was a bell-ringer in Marrow who could make a guard leave a post it did not want to leave.

Divert wiped the chalk from her hands.

"I only ring the bell," she said. "The guards do the rest. They always want to answer."

"Yes," said Captain Castle, beaming. "That is exactly the thing I need someone to teach."

The board, Divert found, was only a smaller town — with squares for streets and pieces for people, all of whom would answer a bell if you rang the right one.

She set up her first lesson slowly. A white rook, far off. A black knight standing watch over a square, and behind that square a black rook that could not be taken while the knight kept guard. And one white pawn, hungry, unable to reach the rook while the knight blocked the way.

"Look at this knight," said Divert. The children leaned in; even the fox with the green scarf, who had seen a great many lessons, leaned in. "It is a guard. As long as it stands here, we cannot take the rook behind it. If we simply charge the guard, it holds. Guards are stubborn."

"So we're stuck," said a small child in the front.

"We are not stuck," said Divert. "We ring a bell." She slid her white rook across the board until it threatened the knight's own queen — a thing the knight simply had to answer. "Now the knight has somewhere it must go. It cannot both save the queen and keep watch. It leaves its post — and the square it guarded is empty, and the rook behind it is ours."

The room went quiet. Then the fox with the green scarf said, very slowly, "You never pushed the guard. You just gave it somewhere it had to go."

Divert felt something warm move through her, the way it did up in the tower when the bell rang true.

"That's it," she said. "That's the whole of it."