AN: My first work posted for the King Arthur fandom, though I've read in it for a while. I don't own the game Othello, but Matel does, or at least so says the game I have. This is just a one-shot I've had sitting around for a while. Enjoy!
Elisabet sat at her usual table outside the tavern, eight-by-eight grid chalked onto the wooden surface, a leather bag of wooden chips to the side. Each round chip was burned black on one side and plain on the other, and Elisabet idly twiddled the chip between her fingers as she deliberated between each move. She was there each evening, playing her game by herself. Tristan watched her often, trying to understand why she played such a seemingly simple game again and again. She would place a chip, flip a line of chips between her placed chip and a correspondingly colored chip, pause, and do the same for the opposite color. When the board was filled, Elisabet counted her colors, cleared the board, and began again. It seemed like the sort of game two people should play, but few ever played with her. A villager would occasionally approach and ask to play, she would explain, they would begin, and by the time they finished the board would be almost entirely Elisabet's color, meaning her victory.
She always won. A Roman General once sat down to play with her, laughing with his soldiers, but she beat him by a large margin. The General rose suddenly, and Tristan tensed, preparing to jump up and defend the girl, but he merely thanked her and stormed away. No trouble came to her.
The scout wondered, once, why Lancelot never joined her for a game. The other knight was fond of competing and gambling...but perhaps that was why Elisabet's game was unattractive to him. Rather than a game of chance, it looked to be a game of strategy, however simple it was. There were no stakes, though Tristan didn't see why stakes couldn't be set.
Early one evening, just after the sun had set, when the light still glowed orange, Tristan decided on a whim to seat himself across the table from Elisabet. Her hand paused in midair, chip held lightly between her fingers, before she carefully placed the piece and began to flip a long line to the opposite color.
"May I help you, sir knight?" she asked, voice low and rough, not at all what Tristan had expected her to sound like.
"Teach me your game," he answered.
She nodded once and began to clear the board, separating the wooden chips into two equal piles. "Othello is a simple game of strategy," she began. "It starts with four pieces in the center." Elisabet placed four chips in the center spaces of the grid, two black and two white, opposite corners the same. "The first player takes their chosen color, and moves like so, so that a piece of the opposite color is between two of the player's. The pieces in the line directly between are flipped," she continued, placing a black chip next to a white one, and flipping the white chip. "The game proceeds in that manner, back and forth between the two players. Players may move in straight or diagonal lines, but the piece must line up with a piece of the same color. The game ends when neither player can make any possible move, or when the board is filled, whichever comes first. The winner is the player with the most pieces of their color on the board. Understand?" Tristan nodded. Elisabet smiled. "Good. Your turn."
Tristan and Elisabet played out the game, and with each turn Tristan seemed more and more doomed until finally Elisabet came out victorious. The scout stared down at the board, brow furrowed, until she began to clear the pieces. So it was not as simple as he had first thought. The moves, of course, were easy to learn and uncomplicated, and yet...
"Again," he growled, and Elisabet smiled, nodded, and obligingly set up the four beginning chips.
During their third game, Dagonet came to stand off to Tristan's side, watching as Elisabet beat Tristan again, but by a narrower margin than the previous two games. Galahad and Gawain wandered over as Elisabet was setting up the next round. She won again, but only by two chips. Elisabet proceeded to completely annihilate Tristan in the fifth game, causing him to curse in frustration, greatly amusing the spectating knights. Galahad ducked inside the tavern to call over Bors and Lancelot, who arrived just in time to watch Tristan lose, again. The loss was by one chip, and Tristan wasted no time in helping to clear the board in preparation of the next game.
Two more games followed, the second of which Tristan won. As the opponents set up another game at the scout's insistence, Lancelot set two coins on the table. "Elisabet wins this game," he bet, winking as he caught the woman's surprised eyes.
"Tristan'll win this one," Galahad said, shaking his head. He dug around in his pockets before producing the money to match Lancelot's bet.
Elisabet's eyes flicked between to two knights for a moment before moving down to meet with Tristan's. He shifted in a tiny, nearly nonexistent shrug before nodding to the grid. And so the game played out. Elisabet won, and by extension, Lancelot won.
Eventually Vanora came to boot the knights all out of her tavern, defending her actions by reminding them of their routine duties the next morning. The knights grumbled, almost sulked, and shuffled away towards their quarters like a group of scraggly, overgrown children that had stayed up hours past their bedtime. Tristan, of course, helped Elisabet clean up her game before stalking away.
As for the woman, she tucked her hair behind her ear and started off towards her own home, grinning, pleased that someone wanted to play her Othello in the first place, and even more pleased that Tristan had continued playing. He might never even glance in her direction again, but at least she had been able to play against him all night. And she was also pleased, though more secretly, that she had triumphed as often as she did after his first win. Lancelot had her to thank for finding his gambling money doubled.