I said, “Dworkin is no fool.”
“What matters is the person pictured on the card, not his clothing. Aber made these cards for me. Everyone knows he’s a bit of a prankster.”
Suddenly I had a new name to remember: Aber. Aber the prankster. I thought I might like him. And she seemed to assume I knew who he was.
“Turn another card,” she told me.
I did so. It depicted a younger man, fifteen or sixteen years old at most, dressed in yellows and browns. Without a doubt, he had to be another of Dworkin’s children—they shared the same eyes and strong chin. He wore a hat adorned with a set of preposterously large elk antlers and looked slightly bored, like he wanted to be off on adventures instead of having to sit for this miniature portrait. He held up a broadsword with both hands. It looked too long and too heavy for him. Somehow, he struck me as familiar, though I would have sworn we had never met—or had we?
Freda sucked in a surprised breath.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“Alanar,” she whispered.
Again, the name didn’t sound familiar, but I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling he and I had met somewhere before. I could half picture him lying in a pool of blood… but where? When?
“Maybe he’s coming back,” Freda said.
“No,” I said with certainty. “He’s dead.”
“How do you know?” she asked, searching my eyes with her own. “You haven’t met him.”
“I—don’t know.” I frowned, fumbling for the memory, finding it elusive. “Isn’t he dead?”
“He’s been missing for more than a year. Nobody’s heard from him or been able to contact him, even with his Trump. I thought he was dead. Everyone does. But none of us has any proof.”
Contact him… with his Trump? I looked down at the card, puzzling over that odd turn of phrase. Stranger and stranger, I thought.
“If you haven’t seen a body,” I said, trying to sound comforting though I knew it was a lie, knew that he was dead, “there is reason for hope.”
She shook her head. “Our enemies do not often leave bodies. If he is dead, we will never know it.”
I found myself agreeing. After battles, we had seldom been able to recover our dead comrades from lands the hell-creatures controlled. What they actually did with the corpses remained open to conjecture—and the guesses were never very pleasant.
Eyes distant, Freda shook her head sadly. I realized that she had cared deeply for young Alanar. We had something in common, then; I had lost Helda… she had lost her brother.
Swallowing, I reached out and gave her hand a sympathetic squeeze. “Best not to dwell on it,” I said softly. “These have been hard times for everyone.”
“You are right, of course.” Taking a deep breath, Freda placed Alanar’s card on the table, a little below Dworkin’s jester and to the right. Next to each other, their resemblance was even more striking. Clearly they were father and son.
“Pick again,” she said, indicating the Trumps.
Silently, I did so. It was another young man, this one dressed in browns and greens, with a wide pleasant version of Dworkin’s face. A faint dueling scar marked his left cheek, but he had a genial smile. He carried a bow in one hand and what looked like a wine flask in the other. A trickle of wine ran down his lips and beaded underneath his chin.
A young drunkard, the card seemed to suggest.
“Taine,” Freda announced, keeping her expression carefully neutral.
“I don’t know him,” I said.
“I think he is dead, too.”
“I’m sorry.”
We went through four more cards rapidly. Each showed a man between the ages of twenty and forty. Most bore some resemblance to Dworkin—either the eyes, the shapes of the faces, or the way in which they held themselves. His offspring almost certainly, I decided. It seemed he’d kept busy with a number of women over the years. How many children had he sired? And with such a large family, how had he still found so much time to spend with me during my own youth—all the while pretending to be unmarried? The next time I had him alone, I intended to ask.
Each of these cards Freda placed below Dworkin’s, circling the edge of the table. In all, counting Alanar and Taine, she thought four of Dworkin’s sons were dead. I didn’t recognize either of the other two.
Then I turned over a card that showed a man with my face, only his eyes were brown to my blue. He dressed all in dark browns and yellows, and he held a slightly crooked sword almost defiantly. I didn’t know if it was a private joke, but certainly the crooked sword seemed to imply one.
“Who is he?” I asked hesitantly. He looked familiar, too. Where had we met? And when?
“Do you know him?”
“He looks a lot like me…”
I held the card a minute, just staring at it, until she took it out of my hand and placed it below the others.
“Mattus,” she said. “His name is Mattus.”
“He’s dead, too,” I said numbly.
“How do you know?” she demanded, voice rising sharply.
I shrugged helplessly. “I don’t now. It’s like… like an old memory, distant and hazy. Or maybe a dream. I can almost see it, but not quite. I only know he was in it, though, and I saw him die.”
“What happened to him?” she went on. “How did he die?”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I can’t quite remember,” But I felt certain it hadn’t been pleasant, though I couldn’t bring myself to say so to Freda. I didn’t think she’d take the news well. Clearly she had cared for Mattus.
She sighed.
“Maybe it was only a dream,” I told her, trying to sound a little reassuring, a little hopeful, though deep inside I knew it for a lie. “Perhaps they are both still alive, somewhere.”
“Do not dismiss your dreams so easily. They are often powerful portents of the future. Over the years, I have had hundreds of dreams that proved to be true. If you say both Alanar and Mattus are dead, and you saw them die in a dream, it may very well be so.”
“It was only a dream.”
“Perhaps I believe because you saw it in a dream.”
“As you say,” I said with a small shrug. Most of the time, I put as little stock in dreams as in fortune-tellers.
Sitting back, I regarded her and her cards. It seemed she shared Dworkin’s strengths as well as his flaws. He had never been one to shy away from bad news, no matter how terrible. It was one lesson I had learned well from him.
I said, “Tell me about Mattus.”
“Like Alanar, he has been missing for about a year. Nobody has been able to contact him. He always had a quick temper, though, and one night he stormed off after a shouting match with Locke… and that was the last anyone heard of him.”
Locke was a disagreeable-looking, puffed-up man on one of the other Trumps I had drawn. She had mentioned him earlier, I recalled, with a disparaging note in her voice. Clearly they were at odds.
She added, “I had hoped Mattus would get over his sulk and simply show up one day, forgiving Locke and taking up where we had all left off, before…” She smiled wistfully and blinked back tears. “But that is not your concern right now, Oberon. Please, go on. Draw again.”
Quickly, I turned the next card.
“Aber,” she said. She added him to the other eight Tarot cards to form a circle around the top of the table.
I leaned forward for a better look at this prankster who painted cards so well. He was ruggedly handsome—at least as portrayed on the card—and he dressed all in deep reds, from his leggings to his tunic, from his gloves to his long, flowing cape. It was hard to tell, but I thought we looked about the same age. He had short brown hair, a close-cropped brown beard, and steady gray-green eyes. In his portrait he struck a valiant pose, but instead of a sword, he held a long paint brush. I gave a mental chuckle. Truly, he had a sense of humor that appealed to me.
I also saw a bit of Dworkin in him, the oddly whimsical side that only came out
on rare occasions, usually at high holidays or festivals when he had drunk too much wine. Then he would delight one and all with small tricks of the hand, making coins appear and disappear, or recite epic tales of ancient heroes and their adventures.
It must have been a trick of the light, but as I studied Aber’s card intently, I would have sworn that it took on an almost lifelike appearance. It seemed to me that the tiny image blinked and started to turn its head—but before anything more could happen, Freda reached out and covered it with her palm.
“Do not!” she said in a warning tone.
I raised my eyes to her face, which had suddenly gone cold and hard. Perhaps, I thought, there was more to her than I first suspected. This was no mere fortune-teller, but a strong woman who had suddenly moved to action and taken charge of the situation. I admired her for that; I had never found much to like in weak-willed females. A woman of fire and steel added extra passion to a love affair.
“Why?” I asked blankly.
“It is already cramped in here. We do not need his company right now. And Father would be quite annoyed with me if I let him drag you away.”
“Very well,” I said, confused. For now, I had to trust her to look out for my best interests. Leaning back, I folded my arms and gave her my most trustworthy look. “I wasn’t trying to cause you trouble.”
She sighed, her manner softening. “No, not… trouble. Aber can be a… a distraction. That’s a good word for it. And a distraction is not what we need right now.”
I tilted my head and studied her cards from what I hoped would prove a safe distance. The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that Aber’s picture had moved. But cards couldn’t come to life, could they?
After all the magic and wonders I had witnessed over the last few hours, suddenly I wasn’t so sure.
Chapter 5
I focused my attention on the pattern of cards around the table, trying to see them as Freda did. Was there a pattern? All the subjects were male, five probably dead, four definitely alive.
Somehow I had recognized two of the dead men—recognized them and knew without a doubt that they were dead. And yet I had never met them. Of the four still living, I knew only Dworkin. As I studied their features, I was fairly certain I had never seen Aber, Locke, or Fenn before.
“You’re the fortune-teller,” I said to Freda. “What do you make of this pattern?”
“I’m not sure.” She bit her lip, gazing from one miniature portrait to the next, not letting her gaze linger long. “It’s only people, thus no clues as to past, present, or future destinations. Clearly the whole family is tied up with you in events to come, but with war on the horizon, that may not be much of a surprise. Father and the others, dead or alive, all play a part in it—but what part?”
“You tell me.” Leaning back, I studied her.
She seemed truly puzzled. Her brow furrowed; she drummed her fingertips on the tabletop. Clearly she took her card reading quite seriously. Finally she leaned back with a sigh.
“I see more questions than answers,” she admitted.
“Do you want me to turn another card over?”
“Just one. That is more than I usually use for a personal reading, but in this case…”
I turned over the next Trump. This one showed a place I’d never been before—a gloomy keep half lost in night and storm, half illuminated by dazzling light. I say half because the sky seemed to be split almost in two, with star-pocked darkness to the left and a dazzling orange-yellow-red sky on the right, like a bottle of differently colored sands that had been shaken so that you could still see individual grains, but no one color ruled.
My palms itched. I could not look at it for more than a second or two without glancing away. I had the sensation that this mad picture was no artist’s whim, but an actual place… a place at once dark and light, night and day, cold and hot, without season, shapeless and changing. I did not like it.
“The Grand Plaza of the Courts of Chaos?” she said. “That is odd. It should not be there. I did not even know I had that particular card with me… I had not meant to bring it!”
There it was again—Chaos.
Wherever the Grand Plaza was, it didn’t look welcoming, I decided with a little shudder. The buildings, the lightning-shapes in the air, the very essence of the place—it all made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end and gooseflesh rise on my arms.
On impulse, I reached out and turned the card face down. The instant I no longer looked upon it, with its unnatural angles and weird geography, I began to feel better. I realized I’d begun to sweat all over just from having the Trump where I could see it.
“Why did you do that?” Freda asked. Luckily, she made no move to turn the card back over.
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “It felt like the right thing to do. Somehow, I didn’t want to look at it.”
I don’t think I could have looked at it any longer. Just thinking about it made my head ache.
“I see.” Again her brow furrowed. “Mattus felt the same way,” she said. “We had to all but drag him there when…”
“When what?”
She hesitated. “When he came of age.”
I gestured toward the face-down card. “Does it mean anything? My finding the Courts of Chaos?”
“Every action has meaning with the Trumps. They reflect the world around them.”
“What is the meaning this time?”
“I… cannot say.”
I swallowed, suddenly uneasy again. Cannot say—or won’t? Her choice of words left me wondering, and her suddenly nervous manner gave me the distinct impression that she hadn’t told me everything she’d seen.
An unsettling thought came to me. I tapped the back of the Chaos card.
“This isn’t where we’re headed, is it?”
“No, Juniper is about as far from the Courts of Chaos as you can get. Hopefully far enough to keep us safe.”
Safe from what? Hell-creatures? Someone or something else?
I bit back my questions, though—call it pride or my own obstinate nature, but I thought it prudent to watch and learn. I would keep my queries to a minimum, and try to make them brief and unassuming.
Freda scooped up her deck of Trumps and sorted through them, finally pulling out a card that showed a sleepy, moss-draped castle atop a distant hill. She passed the card across to me.
“This is Juniper,” she said. “At least, as it used to be. Aber painted it about two years ago.”
In front of the hill sat a small, peaceful looking village, with perhaps seventy or so brick-and-mortar buildings with yellow-thatched roofs. Before and beyond stretched verdant acres of farmland and rich pastures, dotted with houses and barns, small ponds and even a broad blue stream. Juniper looked like any of a dozen small keeps in Ilerium, and unlike the Courts of Chaos, it didn’t make my skin crawl. That alone made me feel a lot better.
“A lot can change in two years,” I said.
“It has.”
As I stared, the tiny cows, sheep, and horses sketched with unerring skill began to move across the fields. I swallowed and forced my attention back to Freda. She took the card when I offered it.
“What’s different now?” I asked.
“An armed camp surrounds it—Father’s troops, of course. Juniper is not under siege, at least not yet, but it has grown loud and dirty. I do not think it will ever be the same again.”
I nodded. Wars did that. A year of battling hell-creatures had forever changed Ilerium, and not for the good.
“Since Juniper has changed so much,” I said slowly, hoping to get another clue as to the nature of these mysterious Tarot cards, “will your Trump still work?”
“Yes… after a fashion. It just takes longer. The essence of the place remains the same even as the landscape changes.”
I handed back her Juniper card. With a sad little sigh, Freda put it with the rest of her cards, shuffled them once, and stashed them away in a small woode
n box. It looked like teak, inlaid with an intricate mother-of-pearl pattern of a lion.
“You said Aber made all your cards?” I asked. Might as well try to gather as much information as I could since she seemed to be in a more talkative mood now.
“Yes.” She smiled, eyes far off, and I could tell she liked her brother. “He is good at it, too… almost as good as Father, though Aber tends to make fun of everyone when he draws them.” She focused on me. “I wonder how he will draw you… nicely, I hope. I do think he will like you.”
I snorted. “Why should he bother drawing me?”
“Why not? He draws everyone and every place he thinks might be useful. He must have hundreds or even thousands of Trumps stashed away in his rooms by now. I do not know where he possibly keeps them all.”
I glanced out the window. Still rolling green hills, still a dozen odd horsemen with extra joints in their arms. We had to be nearing our destination, I thought, since the landscape hadn’t changed much. Either that, or Dworkin was now resting up from all his magics.
“Do you know how much longer we’ll be traveling?” I asked.
“Father did not tell you?”
“He was… vague.”
“It is wise to be careful when traveling,” she said with a slight incline of her head. “I am sure it is for our safety.”
“Then tell me more about Juniper.”
“What is there to tell? It is a remote Shadow. I think Father once hoped to retire there to a quiet life of study and reflection, but all these attacks have forced him to be a man of action. It is against his nature, but he can be a man of action… a hero… when he chooses. Or when he is forced to be.” She peeked out the window. “We are close now. I do recognize this land.”
“All things considered,” I said, “this has been one of the worst nights of my life.” Only my mother’s death seemed more terrible. “All told, I’d rather be home. At least I knew where I stood there… or thought I did.”
A look of profound sadness crossed her face as I said that, and I realized I’d unintentionally touched upon a sensitive topic—home.
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