by Hilari Bell
“You can slip me the money after the game breaks up,” I said. “I’ll go after the losers and give back their stakes, in exchange for their promise not to tell Stint we did it.”
“And they’ll promptly return to the tavern, and beat the crap out of me for cheating,” said Fisk. “Moon’s Bane players take the game seriously.”
“By then, you and Professor Stint will be gone,” I said. “You can offer to set up a payment schedule, and discuss it as you walk him home. If he’s played deep, he’ll be interested. I’ll catch up with you as soon as I’ve restored the other players’ money.”
“All right,” said Fisk, who didn’t really care about the other players anyway. “That takes care of Stint’s partner. What about mine?”
“I’ll partner you,” Kathy said. “I’ve played at court enough to be pretty good.”
Benton and Kathy had gotten back too late last night for much discussion, though they did report that the jeweler had settled in reasonably well. The farm family welcomed the money and Kathy, who’d shelled out that money, agreed with Benton that they’d be kind. Now we were eating breakfast together, while Michael told them how little we’d accomplished yesterday. Including the elimination of my best suspects.
The morning sun that was so warm on my back made Kathy’s fair skin look almost translucent. Her innocence shone even brighter. Which might be a useful, in a con.
On the other hand, when things go wrong in a con they tend to go fast and bad. The memory of that club swinging toward her still made me cringe, whenever I thought of it.
“The question isn’t ‘can you play?’” I told her. “It’s ‘can you cheat?’”
The answer was plain on her disappointed face, but she wasn’t a quitter. “Then teach me! We’ve got till tomorrow night — two full days. And you have to admit, I’d be less suspicious sending you signals than Michael would.”
“It takes more than two days to teach someone to cheat at cards,” I said. “A lot more.”
“Two days is all we have,” Michael said firmly. “Stint plays on Scaledays. With the final applicant on his way to town, we can’t waste over a week before we strike.”
“I’ve almost got my notes ready for Stint,” Benton said hopefully. “Mayhap you could use those to bribe him, instead of—”
“Don’t bother,” I said. “You won’t talk Michael out of it. I tried.”
There are two ways to cheat at Moon’s Bane. It’s played with a partner, and most of the arguments afterward aren’t between losers and winners, but between the two winners about who really carried the team. Even if Kathy was a good estimator, which she might be, or could count how many royal cards had fallen, which most couldn’t, I had no doubt that I’d be carrying Kathy.
She’d been watching my face too. “Oh, good! Benton and Michael can make up a table so we can practice. Though we’d better keep Benton out of the tavern. Stint’s bound to recognize him, even across the room with his hat pulled down.”
“And what will I be doing in the tavern?” Michael sounded resigned. “Across the room with my hat pulled down. Which will look curst suspicious, indoors.”
Mistress Katherine waved this quibble aside. “Fisk will disguise you. And you’ll be sitting by the door, so when we get caught and have to run for it you can trip our pursuers.”
“Hey! Have a little faith,” I said, stung.
If it came to that, I could distract everyone into chasing me while Michael got her out. But if I was competent, it wouldn’t come to that.
“I do have faith,” said Kathy. “In backup plans. I’ve got four older brothers. There’s no way this isn’t going to fall apart.”
Moon’s Bane is a trick-taking game. If you’re playing honestly, most of the game consists of correctly estimating your likely points. You bet the number of fracts you think you’ll score that hand, and whoever’s score is closest to his bet wins two-thirds of the pot, with the other third going to his partner.
Of course not everyone is playing honestly.
The simplest way to cheat is for one partner to send the other signals about what’s in his hand. But it’s also the easiest cheat to catch, as I explained to Kathy when she demanded I teach her signals.
“How can you be sure of winning if we don’t cheat?”
“Watch. Closely.” I said it with more confidence than I felt, for I was years out of practice. And the subtler forms of cheating require practice. But I’d learned them in a hard school, and over the next two days, as Kathy and I learned to judge each other’s play — and Michael’s and Benton’s, too — I slowly, steadily, and with increasing frequency, won.
And not one of the Sevensons detected the slight roughness that thickened the edges of the royal cards.
At first I only marked the long side of the green cards, and the short side of gold. But as my fingers remembered the moves, I was able to mark all four suits in different places, and read the markings when I dealt. It was a slight advantage, but over a long night’s play, it would be enough.
After luncheon on Scaleday I called a halt to give my hands a rest. Michael took the dog and promptly vanished to exercise the horses. Benton, who was a lousy player, went back to putting his research together for Professor Stint. He was almost finished, and claimed he’d be glad to be done with it.
But that was a lie. His face was alight with absorbed contentment, as he thumbed through books and notes with ink all over his fingers.
Michael and Kathy were right. If we couldn’t restore him to some academic position… Well, saying he’d never be happy again was an exaggeration. But he’d go through the rest of his life knowing this was what he was meant to do, and that he wasn’t doing it.
As my father had.
“You’re awfully somber.” Kathy had remained at the table with me, running the deck from hand to hand. And she still hadn’t noticed those roughened sides. I’d marked six decks in the last day and a half, and though I’d seen all of them looking at the backs of the cards for marks, none of them had thought to feel the edges.
“You’re really not going to tell me how you do it?”
“If I don’t tell you, you’re less likely to give the game away. And the problem with signals isn’t just that it’s easy to catch someone at it.”
I left it there, curious to see if she’d figure it out.
“All right, I yield. I don’t know what you’re fishing for.”
“What does Benton do when he has a good hand?” A child would have picked up on that one.
“He pinches his lower lip to keep from smiling. And Michael’s expression goes blank, which wouldn’t be so bad expect that he only does it when his hand is good. I haven’t seen any tells from you, though.”
My tell had been to click the edge of a good card with my fingernail. Jack had brought a switch to the card table and put a welt on the back of my hand whenever I did it. I had no tells now, at least none Jack could see.
Kathy’s was a rather adorable quirk of one brow, followed by pushing her spectacles up. I saw no need to warn her about it.
“But those are tells,” she went on. “I still don’t see… Oh. Dear. Really?”
“Tells only let you know if they’ve got a good hand, or a bad one. After a few hours watching someone signal, you’ll know as much about their hand as their partner does. You have to let a fair number of hands play out, before you’re sure that when they’re strong in horns they tug an ear, or rounds is patting a pocket. But once you get their signals down, they’re all yours.”
“And they’d never have been that vulnerable if they hadn’t tried to cheat,” Kathy said. “I find that satisfying.”
She was Michael’s sister, after all.
“So that’s why I won’t teach you signals. But I can teach you what to look for.”
Michael departed for the Fighting Fish half an hour ahead of us, to get a table near the door and establish his presence before we arrived.
I’d disguised him by the simple exped
ients of a few days stubble, pulling his hair into a short queue, and darkening the hollows under his eyes, which made him look not only tired, but several years older. Combined with rough, dirty clothes, and keeping his mouth shut so no one would hear his accent … well, it wouldn’t confuse someone who knew him. But someone who’d only met him once, in a different setting and circumstance, wasn’t likely to recognize him. People almost always see what they expect to see.
Lady Katherine, currently wearing what was probably a modest afternoon dress for court, had demanded a disguise too. Instead, I’d come up with the cover story of a wicked friend of her brother’s, taking an innocent maid out for a moderate adventure on the rough side of town.
Kathy pointed out that that was true. But being true is what makes the best lies stick. The way her eyes widened as we stepped into the tavern, boisterous with deep male voices and a few shrill female ones, couldn’t have been bettered. But I didn’t want her to be too intimidated. Not even if it was good for our cover.
“What’s the difference between a bandit and a gambler?”
“I don’t know,” she said automatically. “What?”
“A gambler gives you a good game while he takes your money.”
She relaxed into laughter, and was still snickering as we passed Michael. I had to give her credit — her gaze swept over her brother as if he was part of the furniture.
He’d found a seat at a table by the door and was picking at his dinner. He looked sufficiently rough and surly to keep people from wanting to join him, but a long card game might tax his ability to drink slowly enough that he could stay sober. I hoped we wouldn’t need him.
Kathy had tucked a hand in my arm and was crossing the room boldly … until she stepped onto the slightly sticky floor, and pulled her skirts aside to see why her soles made that popping sound.
I gave her a grin that felt as authentic as her reactions, and put a reassuring arm around her. The limber body under her stiffened bodice almost distracted me from scoping out the potential players.
One large round table was already set up, but people there were playing Fox Hunt — which was probably why Stint, and an older man with spectacles thicker than Kathy’s, were sitting at a smaller table with a pot of tea between them. Not drinking as you play is the mark of a serious gambler. I made a mental note to order ale when I sat down … and then to drink it very slowly.
There was no point in dallying, and it would have been out of character, so I went straight up to the tapster.
“I’ve promised to show my young friend here how Moon’s Bane is meant to be played, and I’m told this is a good place to pick up a game. Any chance of that tonight?”
“Why, yes sir, there’s a pretty good chance. Master Stint and Master Carmichael were just hoping another pair of players would happen along. They’re over at that table by the wall.”
They both introduced themselves as “Master,” and I noted that Stint wasn’t a professor tonight and wondered if Carmichael might be one too. The thick spectacles gave him an otherworldly air, but the eyes behind them were keen.
We agreed to play for brass points — a modest stake, though it would add up as the play went on — and settled ourselves around the table with partners opposite each other. My ale and Kathy’s tea pot arrived. Stint claimed he’d rather be drinking ale, but it troubled his digestion. Carmichael, with a dry twinkle, said that he simply preferred tea.
Then the tapster brought us a new deck … and another pair of players.
“Do you folk mind playing six?”
Most Moon’s Bane players prefer six. It’s the same number of points in a round, but with six cards in the trick you go through the deck faster, so over time more money changes hands. But looking at the couple who followed the tapster, I considered objecting — I’ve never seen a more obvious Pig and Squirrel.
The con is named after an old fable, where the pig chases off a boy who’s gathering nuts, and the squirrel picks them up and then splits them with the pig when the boy is gone. It’s only supposed to be used if a cheat gets caught, to recover as much of the stake as you can before you make a getaway — which not only assured me that these two intended to cheat, but that if worse came to worst they were likely to get away with it.
The man towered over the tapster, who was about my height, glowering in a way that made it clear ‘terrifying’ was his default expression.
“We’ll play for silver,” he decreed.
“But brother,” the small woman beside him murmured. “Maybe these people would fear to play so—”
He spun on her with startling speed, and she flinched visibly as he barked, “Silver!”
Kathy was frowning at the pair, her expression shuffling between anger at the bully and sympathy for his target.
“We’d agreed to play for brass,” she said, with a pleasant firmness she’d probably learned in court.
“But we don’t mind upping the stakes,” I said quickly. “Unless these gentlemen object.”
It was a good thing we were prepared to play high. The purses Kathy had provided to stake the game would cover silver points, as long as our luck wasn’t too dismal — outside of court or a nobleman’s party, no one played for gold.
Stint and his partner had come to gamble, and they cheerfully agreed to the raise in stakes.
“You.” The big man gave his sister a shove. “Sit there.”
She ducked her head and seated herself between Kathy and Stint, and Kathy’s outrage deepened. Me, I’d have put money on her being the brains behind the team, and him being a first rate actor — though he was good enough that he might be the brains. They were both brilliant actors.
As he growled at her for losing a vital trick in the first round, and she tearfully protested that she didn’t have any higher horns, they almost distracted even me from the fact that they were signaling each other like crazy.
Mind you, they were pretty deft at it. I spotted their signals, but only because I knew what I was looking for.
Kathy, who’d missed all the cues, gave me a “why don’t you stand up for the poor thing” look, and I rubbed one eyebrow in the most obvious signal I could manage.
Her brows came together in puzzlement, then rose sharply, and her eyes darted from the woman to her brother and back again.
I decided never to partner her in a game that required bluffing, and scraped one side of the knave of leaves against the edge of the table. That’s harder to do, without calling attention to yourself, than you might think, but part of the secret is not to try to mark all your cards — or even any, in the first few hands. The bickering between Pig and Squirrel let me do it faster than I normally could, and still left me with time to observe the marks we’d come for.
They weren’t flashy about it, but the fact that they’d brought enough money to play for silver points told me they were good.
As hand followed hand, I saw that whenever Pig rubbed his belly, he was strong in rounds. Horns was a touch to his nose. Squirrel nervously nibbled her fingernails, only sometimes she bit the second finger, sometimes the third, sometimes the first. When her fist clenched, she had nothing in that suit.
Now that she was looking Kathy caught the signals fairly quickly, so we were able to hold our own against the cheaters. It was a lot harder to keep our coin out of Stint and Carmichael’s hands … because, as I slowly realized, they were both counting cards.
Most people track the fall of royals and moons in the suits they have. Better players can track all the royals. But Stint, and particularly Carmichael, were counting a lot deeper than that, and they seemed to be tracking all four suits as well.
Despite all their cheating, the piles of coin in front of Pig and Squirrel slowly shrank and the piles in front of Stint and Carmichael stayed about the same. But we were cheating better, and as several hours passed, the piles in front of Kathy and me began to grow.
I had all the royals marked in the first forty minutes, but that only gave us an advantage when it
was my turn to deal — one hand in six. Since I wasn’t nearly practiced enough to pull the cards I wanted out of the deck as I dealt, it only let me know who held what high cards. It was enough that we were winning, but at this rate we’d be here all night. And while we’d take all of Squirrel and Pig’s money, Stint and Carmichael were holding their own.
The death of one plan should hatch another, and I was never going to win enough of Stint’s money to matter. On the other hand, I might be able to earn his gratitude … and maybe a few answers with it? It might not work, but it was better than nothing, which was what we had now.
I gave up a couple of tricks I should have taken, throwing several pots into Stint’s hands. We all agreed, amiably, that the luck seemed to be turning — except for Pig, who growled. Squirrel begged him not to let it upset him. Kathy assumed a sympathetic expression, but her misty eyes were sharp and bright.
When Stint rose, complaining about how fast tea went though you, I said that ale did the same and followed him out. The privy was in the yard behind the tavern, and while I’ve seen and smelled better, I’ve also seen worse. I waited till he’d come out, buttoning up the front of his britches, before I spoke.
“I think our friends are signaling.”
“What, the bully and that poor little mouse? She’s so fearful, she’d… Hm. But they’re losing.”
I shrugged. “What can I tell you? He pats his stomach, he has all the rounds in the deck, practically. If it’s horns he rubs his nose. When she plays with her necklace, she’s long on leaves.”
Then I went into the privy, leaving him to do what he willed with this. When I came back into the warm, beery fug of the tavern, Stint was speaking to the tapster. And the fresh pot of tea that followed him back to our table could have accounted for it.
But it didn’t surprise me that the tapster, and the two maids who passed through the room serving the other tables, were now paying more attention to our game.
Master Stint should be kindly inclined toward someone who’d exposed a cheat. Maybe even kindly enough to answer a few questions, though if he played like this all the time, it was no wonder his landlady said he won more than lost. If he needed money he could pick it up at the card table. He had no need to accept any bribe, or sabotage—