“No. Benjamin will not be far from Lublin,” Ysabeau insisted. “The witches we interrogated when Philippe was found said the creature who tortured him had long-standing ties to that region. We assumed they were talking about a local Nazi recruit.”
“What else did the witches say?” I asked.
“Only that Philippe’s captor had tortured the witches of Chelm before turning his attentions to my husband,” Ysabeau said. “They called him ‘the Devil.’”
Chelm. Within seconds I found the city. Chelm was just to the east of Lublin. My witch’s sixth sense told me that Benjamin would be there—or very close. “That’s where we should start looking,” I said, touching the city on the map as though somehow Matthew could feel my fingers. On the video feed, I saw that he had been left alone with a dead child.
His lips were still moving, still singing . . . to a girl who would never hear anything again.
“Why are you so sure?” Hamish asked.
“Because a witch I met in sixteenth-century Prague was born there. The witch was a weaver—like me.” As I spoke, names and family lineages emerged on my hands and arms, the marks as black as any tattoo. They appeared for only a moment before fading into invisibility, but I knew what they signaled:
Abraham ben Elijah was probably not the first—nor the last—weaver in the city. Chelm was where Benjamin had started his mad attempts to breed a child.
On the screen, Matthew looked down at his right hand. It was spasming, the index finger tapping irregularly on the arm of the chair.
“It looks as though the nerves in his hand have been damaged,” Marcus said, watching his father’s fingers twitch.
“That’s not involuntary movement.” Gallowglass bent until his chin practically rested on the keyboard. “That’s Morse code.”
“What is he saying?” I was frantic at the thought that we might already have missed part of the message.
“D. Four. D. Five. C. Four.” Gallowglass spelled out each letter in turn. “Christ. Matthew’s making no sense at all. D. X—”
“C4,” Hamish said, his voice rising. “DXC4.” He whooped in excitement. “Matthew didn’t walk into a trap. He sprang it deliberately.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“D4 and D5 are the first two moves of the Queen’s Gambit—it’s one of the classic openings in chess.” Hamish went to the fire, where a heavy chess set waited on a table. He moved two pawns, one white and then one black. “White’s next move forces Black to either put his key pieces in jeopardy and gain greater freedom or play it safe and limit his maneuverability.” Hamish moved another white pawn next to the first.
“But when Matthew is White, he never initiates the Queen’s Gambit, and when he’s Black, he declines it. Matthew always plays it safe and protects his queen,” Baldwin said, crossing his arms over his chest. “He defends her at all costs.”
“I know. That’s why he loses. But not this time.” Hamish picked up the black pawn and knocked over the white pawn that was diagonal to it in the center of the board. “DXC4. Queen’s Gambit accepted.”
“I thought Diana was the white queen,” Sarah said, studying board. “But you’re making it sound like Matthew is playing Black.”
“He is,” Hamish said. “I think he’s telling us the child was Benjamin’s white pawn—the player he sacrificed, believing that it would give him an advantage over Matthew. Over us.”
“Does it?” I asked.
“That depends on what we do next,” Hamish said. “In chess, Black would either continue to attack pawns to gain an advantage in the endgame or get more aggressive and move in his knights.”