Authors: Sarah Monette
I’d been playing cards for money since we hit Clerval, along of not having had the balls to ask Lord Giancarlo for what Felix was due on his stipend before we left. So our money’d run out, and Felix wasn’t good for nothing, and even if he hadn’t been wrapped in that black cloud, I wasn’t sure I could’ve talked him into reading the Sibylline for money the way Mavortian von Heber’d used to. And, you know, I’m a good pickpocket and everything, but that ain’t no reliable way to earn a living, especially not traveling. Besides which, I’d only have to fuck up once, and, well, depending on where we were, I might end up in jail for Kethe knows how long, or missing a hand, or dead. And I hated the fuck out of the first two options, thanks all the same, and if I got my stupid self killed, I wasn’t kidding myself about how long it’d be before Felix followed. I was mostly working on trying to keep him from leading, if you get me.
I’d been a cardsharp on and off since I had a septad and three, so it wasn’t like this was no new thing. And hating it wasn’t no new thing, either. So I gritted my teeth and played nice and careful and no cheating, because again that’s a good way to end up dead, and mostly I was the best player at the table by a septad- mile or so, and I never bet much and I never bet hard and I never pushed people to keep playing when they decided to fold, and so far nobody’d got pissed at me and so far I’d been able to keep a step ahead of the hotel bills.
So far.
In Arbalest, the game they liked was Horned Menelan, insane fucking thing with rules up one side and down the other, like where you sat and what
color
you were, for fuck’s sake. I could play it, but I didn’t like it none.
Don’t have to like it, Milly- Fox. Just have to win.
If I squinted at them, the cracks in the ceiling of our room made the shape of a tree, blasted by lightning— and certainly dead, for it was nothing but cracks in dry and ancient plaster. The Dead Tree, the eigh teenth trump of the Sibylline, that which offered neither shelter nor pity. The aftermath of betrayal, the cold and merciless light of truth: the full moon rose behind the Dead Tree and flooded the world with its heatless light.
So what does the moon show you, Felix Harrowgate, thief, murderer, traitor, whore?
Nothing I want to see.
I rolled over, but after a moment, I flopped onto my back again. Having the Dead Tree behind me was worse than staring at it. The moon was the governor of dreams, and I had carefully avoided thinking about my dreams all day long. But I couldn’t deny something was wrong, and with the Dead Tree glaring down at me, I couldn’t deny I needed to figure out what it was.
And I couldn’t deny, much as I might want to, that I knew where to start.
I sat up long enough to take my shoes off, then lay down again, making myself as comfortable as I could given the lumps in the mattress and the knots of tension in my shoulders. It took a significant effort of will to close my eyes and several minutes before I was able to find the discipline and concentration necessary to summon my construct- Mélusine.
The briars were still there, exactly as I had dreamed them. I stayed carefully to the center of the clear space; I didn’t want to know if their ability to move, their aggression were real, too.
Insofar as any of this was “real,” of course, a question that was so far from having a satisfactory answer that I wasn’t even sure it had a satisfactory
question
.
But looking at them now, I thought I recognized these briars. They were nothing native to the swamps and farmlands surrounding Mélusine, and for a moment I couldn’t place them, beyond that nagging sense of familiarity. But then I leaned, very cautiously, just close enough to see the red cast to the vines, and I knew where I’d seen them before: in the Khloïdanikos, in a ring around an enormous and ancient oak, where I’d put Malkar’s rubies for reasons that . . . had seemed compelling at the time. And although Horn Gate, the doorway between this construct and the Khloïdanikos, was closed, the briars were here, shutting me in as effectively as would walls of brick. Yes, something was definitely wrong, and why was I not surprised to find Malkar at the root of it? So to speak.
I thought I saw a wisp of smoke rising lazily from the briars around Chalcedony Gate, but when I turned my head, there was nothing there.
I realized my heart was hammering against my ribs; I’d spooked myself, and given the nature of oneiromancy and dream- constructs, there was every chance that if I stayed, I would start a fire simply by being afraid of one.
I broke my trance with no little relief and sat up. I wasn’t going to find an answer that way; the allegories of dreaming were too overwhelming— like trying to solve a maze from inside it and while being pursued by wild alligators to boot. “Wild allegories,” I said under my breath and almost managed to smile at the conceit. On the other hand, I had no objection to allegories as long as I had some control over them. I stood up and got the Sibylline out of the box in my coat pocket.
I settled myself cross- legged on the bed and shuffled the cards until their energy cleared, then cut the deck and laid out a proper nine- card spread on the quilt. I mostly didn’t bother, not caring for the divinatory properties Mavortian von Heber had so greatly valued, but to night the ritual might be as much help as the cards themselves. Asking what was wrong with my dreams was essentially the same as asking what was wrong with me, and I knew more answers to that than I wanted to. I hoped structuring the reading might give some structure to what it told me.
Nine cards in a spiral, working widdershins out from the center, all facedown. That last wasn’t part of Mavortian’s teaching, but something I’d picked up from reading about the diviners of Imar Elchevar, who used bone tablets engraved with runes.
I was staring at the backs of the Sibylline cards, half laughing at myself for being so afraid of them and half just trying to work up the courage to turn over the center card, when the door opened and Mildmay came in.
“Oh, it’s you. Much luck?”
He shrugged. “Enough.”
“Do you cheat?”
“Don’t have to.”
He tugged the black hair ribbon free; unraveling from its braid, his hair hung in kinked russet strands to the middle of his back. My fingers yearned to touch it, but I kept them still. He took off his coat, his waistcoat, his cravat, placing them neatly over mine. He sat down on the other side of the bed and took off his boots and socks, then lay down on his back, his hands laced behind his head. “So,” he said, “you got Mavortian’s cards out.”
An unnecessary observation: Mildmay’s way of saying he forgave me for our altercation.
He turned his head and raised an eyebrow at me. “You gonna do anything with ’em, or just stare at ’em all night?”
“I hadn’t decided,” I said. And then, defiantly, I reached out and turned over the center card.
The Spire.
“Shit,” Mildmay said, coming up on his elbow to look. “That ain’t a good card, right?”
“Not particularly, no.” It was the card of the scapegoat; of a fall from a great height— whether literal or meta phorical; the card of betrayal. I did not need an instructor to hold my hand through the myriad parallels to my current situation.
Grimly, because I’d started this and it would be both folly and cowardice to stop, I turned over the second card. That within myself which blocked me. The Three of Staves, reversed, and my fingers flinched back as if I’d been burned. Conceit was the meaning of that card. Third, the past, was the Nine of Swords, despair and madness and martyrdom, and I could feel the blush heating my face. Mildmay was watching solemnly; for all his professed disdain for “hocus stuff,” he didn’t seem remotely inclined to mock the cards.
Fourth was what supported me, and that was the Sibyl of Swords, a card which Mavortian and I had agreed represented me, but now, looking at all the aspects of myself I saw in the Spire and the reversed Three of Staves and the Nine of Swords, I realized that the Sibyl had to be my magic, my intellect— the things which gave me power even now. Malkar had taken them from me once, but the Sibyl following the Nine of Swords was a cogent reminder that he had not been able to keep them.
I hauled in a breath and met Mildmay’s eyes. “Are you following any of this?”
“D’you care if I am?”
“If you want to learn to read the cards, I’d be happy to teach you.”
I was surprised when he broke eye contact, more surprised when he muttered, “Reading
cards
ain’t no use to me.”
“Mildmay?”
He’d gone beautifully, painfully red, and said nothing.
“Mildmay? What do you want me to teach you to read?” Even as I said it, though, I knew, and was ashamed of myself.
“You’re just gonna make fun of me,” he muttered, lowering his head so that his hair obscured his face.
“I swear to you I won’t.” It was suddenly vital that I make him believe me. “I
swear
it. On anything you like.”
Cold green flicked at me and away. “I don’t know anything you care about enough for making promises on.”
That brought me up short. We were silent for some moments while I thought about what he’d said. “Do you believe that I . . . care about you?” I didn’t have any right to use the word “love.”
His turn to think, and I tried not to make lists of all the reasons he could give me why he believed no such thing. Finally, he said tiredly, “Yeah. I know you care. In your own way.”
The rider stung, as I was sure he meant it to, but I persevered: “You know I care about the . . . oh, the life of the intellect, for lack of a better term?”
“Book learning,” Mildmay suggested gravely, but I saw the faintest glimmer of laughter in the depths of his eyes.
“Yes,” I said, grinning back. “Book learning.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I got that part.”
“So if there’s one thing in the world I’d never make fun of
anybody
for, it’d be for wanting to learn to read. Does that make sense?”
He thought about that, and I didn’t try to rush him, knowing that it wasn’t that he was stupid— far from it— but that there were certain kinds of thinking he’d never had the chance to practice. And when he’d considered the idea carefully, he shook his hair out of his face and said, “Yeah. Yeah, I can see that.”
“So I won’t make fun of you. Q.E.D.”
That got me an eyebrow, severely skeptical.
“Quod erat demonstrandum,”
I said. “Kekropian mathematicians use it to signal that they’ve proved what they set out to. The phi los o phers have picked it up, and you know wizards. Where phi los o phers and mathematicians lead, how can we possibly resist following?”
“Y’all are batfuck,” he said, but I saw the unscarred corner of his mouth twitch. “Finish with your cards, and we can go to sleep.”
It was a withdrawal, and I honored it, reaching to turn over the fifth card: the Hermaphrodite. The fifth card was the future, or the solution to the problem, and what the Hermaphrodite had to do with any of it, I had no idea.
Of course, if I knew the answers, I wouldn’t be trying to read the cards.
I glowered at the Hermaphrodite and moved on to the outer circle, external influences and forces. The sixth card was that which blocked, and I was unhappy, but not surprised, to see the Unreal City. The Khloïdanikos. The briars. The seventh card was Death, and I was surprised into laughing when Mildmay muttered, “Tell us something we don’t know.” The past was full of death, death upon death upon grief and guilt and regret, and death, too, was Malkar, who was dead and who had brought death to everything he touched.
The eighth card, support and anchor, was the Two of Wands. Alliance. The cooperation of complementary powers. Mildmay. Tell me something I don’t know, I thought, and flipped over the ninth and last card.
The Dog. Loyalty, savagery, the dark beast brooding in the depths of every civilized soul. I’d done readings where the Dog was associated with Mildmay, but Mildmay was the Two of Wands, and in any event, I understood that I had asked Mildmay to solve enough of my problems already. This was not Mildmay’s problem, neither cause nor solution. It was mine. Mine and . . . My eyes went back to Death, to the Spire, to the Nine of Swords. Mine and Malkar’s, insofar as what I was came from what Malkar had made of me, and if ever there was a dark beast in human form, Malkar was that beast. He wasn’t a solution. He was a quite literal dead end.
“Well, that was of remarkably little use,” I said, gathering the nine cards back into the deck and shuffling to disperse the pattern.
“I never saw as how the cards did Mavortian much good,” Mildmay said, watching as I returned the cards to their box and the box to my coat. “I mean, unless he was actually doing magic with ’em. And that ain’t what you were doing, right?”
The possibility clearly made him ner vous. “No magic,” I said. “Just looking for patterns.” I pulled the covers back. The sheets were old and thin and had childishly straggling darns, but they were clean. I crawled into bed, curling up so my feet wouldn’t hang over the end. “Are you ready to sleep?”
Mildmay sighed and tilted his head sharply, first one way, then the other, making at least one vertebra crack. “Gonna go clean up,” he said. Except for the muted tapping of his cane, he moved silently as he left the room; I knew he would rather have done without the cane and its awkwardness and noise, but his lame leg was only dubiously reliable.
I lay and thought about the Sibylline, despite my best efforts not to. The Spire, the Three of Staves reversed, the Nine of Swords, the Sibyl of Swords, the Hermaphrodite, the Unreal City, Death, the Two of Wands, the Dog. The Three of Staves reversed, the Unreal City . . . The Hermaphrodite, the Dog . . . The Unreal City, the Dog, the Beehive . . .
I jerked entirely, coldly awake, only realizing as I did so that I’d started to drift into sleep. The Beehive. The rubies. That was what connected the Dog and the Unreal City, that was what brought the briars into my constructMélusine. I had done it myself, put them in the Khloïdanikos to keep them from contaminating the Mirador, to keep anyone else from finding them. To keep Isaac Garamond from finding them, although I hadn’t known then that it was he. Hadn’t known that he was the weasel who’d found Malkar’s workroom and was continuing Malkar’s work.
And before I’d found out, before I’d done anything more than put the rubies in the Khloïdanikos, I’d lost it, lost my concentration, lost the structure.
Lost it in an argument with Thamuris, and how transparent an excuse had I thought I needed?
I heard Mildmay’s cane in the corridor. I rolled over, shut my eyes, and pretended as hard as I could to be asleep. After a very long time, it became true.