By Richard Alan Lawson

Taggart McCrevin sat on the old stone wall with his boots dangling over the edge, nursing the dregs of a mug that had gone cold an hour earlier.

The market below was alive with noise. A fishwife loudly accused a baker of palming off yesterday’s loaf. Three children chased one another between the stalls with wooden swords. An old hound, wise enough to know opportunity when it smelled it, patiently shadowed a butcher's apprentice carrying a basket far too full. Taggart watched all of it with the expression of a man who had nowhere else in the world to be.

A passing merchant caught his eye and offered a polite nod. Taggart nodded back, his eye catching the man’s purse on a freshly repaired strap - and the butcher’s apprentice eyeing it twice. He also spotted his sister, Aisling, pretending to look anywhere else. He smiled into his mug.

The world was always telling stories to those patient enough to listen.

Clouds rolled across the afternoon sky, dark and swollen. Somewhere in the distance, thunder grumbled with all the subtlety of Taranis announcing himself. Taggart glanced upward.

"Oh, bugger off."

The thunder seemed to answer.

He stood and wandered three lazy paces to inspect an entirely unremarkable cabbage. Behind him, lightning shattered the very stones where he'd just been sitting.

Nobody screamed. The market simply paused for a heartbeat before everyone looked from the smoking wall to Taggart, who was now thoughtfully poking the cabbage.

"Hm." He looked at the farmer. "How much?"

The farmer swallowed. "For... for the cabbage?"

"No. The lightning. The cabbage comes with it."

The silence lasted exactly long enough for a single nervous laugh. Then the whole market resumed as if this sort of thing happened every Tuesday.

Taggart let his gaze drift across the crowd once more. A druid who wasn't really a druid. A beggar with soldiers' boots. A courier riding too quickly and trying too hard not to look hurried.

The Fidchell board was filling. Every piece thought itself free. Every piece believed it had chosen its own square. Taggart knew better.

Somebody was playing. Perhaps Lugh. Perhaps Crom. Perhaps Taranis in one of his foul moods. Or perhaps Gofannon, who still hadn't forgiven Taggart for whatever had happened at the forge. Or perhaps all of the gods, their hands crossing over the same board until nobody - not even the gods themselves - remembered whose game it had been to begin with.

He set his empty mug aside and smiled. There was still one piece no one had quite managed to place.

Gods included.