She nods thoughtfully.

This time, she abandons the standard opening she used in the previous games (she'd pretty clearly learned it by watching someone else without understanding the benefits) and attempts to trade pieces with him aggressively. She's not great at it and often ends up trading down (including a hasty queen-for-knight trade she winces at), but it's a much more straightforward goal than "don't make mistakes", and this handicap is pretty large... 

Yes, with a handicap this big it's to her advantage to try to do lots of trading! He is willing when it's his (only) knight for her queen but he will not willingly trade pawns straight across if he can avoid it. His rook winds up doing a lot of work this time.

Pesky thing! She attempts to chase it down with her two bishops.

Her one bishop.

Her... one bishop, yes.

"When did you start playing chess, Commander?"

"I learned when I was a child."

She nods and starts pushing her pawn line forward, and then looks at the pieces on the board thoughtfully. 

"Do you have any other wizardry?" she asks, a few moves later. 

Headshake.

"Huh. Well, it's definitely the cantrip to pick if you're only getting one, as much as I like some of the others." 

She's trying to do something tricky with her remaining knight, and even managed to have it be protected by a pawn in the process.

Guidance and Create Water are not wizard spells so yeah probably.

It's worth taking that knight, because she can't retaliate. If she moves the pawn, his rook has a clear path to the king.

She looks at her pawn, and then at his rook, and then at her king, and finally at Blai. "Ah."

From that point on she tries harder to make sure she can actually execute on her trades, which (when combined with the sizeable handicap) will get them into a non-trivial endgame (where she quickly loses her remaining pawns attempting to get them promoted too aggressively).

Pawns get vacuumed up steadily and then he has to chase her all over the board but can inevitably corner her.

She initially finds this process confusing, but her face lights up with understanding once she figures out the end-state (a few turns before it happens).

"Huh! Was there any way out of that for me after you took my last pawn?"

"You could have forced a draw, at one point."

"Oh huh. Show me how?"

"I'm not certain I will get the position exact, but -" He reassembles something strategically like what they had some dozen turns ago and demonstrates.

Neat! "Ah, I see." 

She considers the example board a bit longer. "I've never really gotten to that kind of mostly-empty board before. It plays so differently from the rest of the game..."

"It happens more when there are fewer pieces to begin with, especially since you were trying so hard to trade them."

She nods. "I thought that going for trades would work better since I started with more pieces than you, and I think it did, though obviously not well enough..."

"You were right, it was to your advantage to do it, at least in principle."

Oh good, she's glad that was reasonable in theory, if not well-executed.

Does he want to play again?

...the Light on his doodad expires before he can answer.

Northern forts don't have any windows.

Ooop! "Let me - " she casts Dancing Lights.

"Thank you. But I think the duration would make for a choppy game."

"And I might get distracted making them dance." She laughs. (...she does, in fact, enjoy a Dancing Lights show, but she expects the appeal would be lost on Artigas.)

"Thank you for the games, Commander, it was a pleasure. I'd be happy to do this again sometime."