The Mask of Mirrors by M. Carrick; (lightest ebook reader txt) 📗

went into the unused dining room on the floor above and folded aside the dustcloth on the table, uncovering a corner where she could work.

She exhaled slowly, turning her focus inward, holding the deck in her hands and the Rook in her thoughts: A black-coated whirlwind in Lacewater, his mocking voice demanding her glove as a forfeit. A gleaming blade in the darkness of Mettore’s office, and then a warm body behind her in the hidden closet—a reminder of the real person beneath the shadows. An ambush in her kitchen, his fury driving her to breakdown, but then fading to patience and even a touch of kindness. A shawl full of knives and an invitation to assist him.

A thread in the darkness, when everything was lost. A hand reaching down to draw her back from death.

The Rook. A mystery wrapped inside an enigma wrapped inside a coat she dearly wanted to rip off—to lay him open the same way he’d done to her. Not to expose him to others; just to know. To restore some kind of balance between them, so she didn’t have to rely on his word alone.

Ren’s hands began to move. Shuffling the cards, cutting them, lips murmuring the prayers Ivrina had taught her so many years ago. Prayers she hadn’t used since her mother’s death, except in her nightmare. But the pattern was sacred, and if she wanted the gods and the clan ancestors to grant her their blessings, she owed them respect.

By the light of the candle, she laid out the Rook’s pattern, then turned over the lowest row of cards.

Ash had given her thoughts horrific clarity, a twisted version of what some szorsas chased by drugging themselves with aža. This was different. Pattern wasn’t a matter of predictability; it was intuition, a sense of the connections between things. In the stillness of her mind, Ren could feel the threads thrumming: spinning for Jump at the Sun, woven for The Laughing Crow, cut for Reeds Unbroken.

She’d hoped the pattern would show her the person beneath the hood, but so far, no—this was for the Rook himself.

There was something there, beyond an imbued disguise; the Rook was more than the men and women who had borne that name. Someone had made him, had taken an enormous risk to create the Rook. And succeeded… though not without cost. The snapped stalks at the feet of the figure in Reeds Unbroken told Ren that more than a few Rooks had died for the burden they carried. The role was greater than any one person and made the bearers stronger than they would otherwise be; the concealment of the hood was only a small part of what the disguise did for whoever wore it. But it didn’t make them invulnerable.

It wasn’t accurate to say that no one had ever uncovered the identity of the Rook. There were two birds depicted in The Laughing Crow, and the role had to pass on somehow. But the bearers didn’t keep the secret only because they chose to. The Rook himself, whatever he was—ghost, spirit, something unique—pushed them toward silence. And that too carried a toll.

Onward to his present, the good and the ill of it, and that which was—

A spike of pain drilled through her skull as she turned over the middle card, and Ren’s vision blurred. She tried to squint, to force her eyes to focus, but she couldn’t make out the image or the words, and the pain worsened until finally she slapped the card back facedown and sat there, panting.

Idiot.

Of course something protected the Rook against having his identity uncovered. In her arrogance she’d thought her own gift might be enough to overcome that.

She focused on her breathing, both to dull the throbbing behind her eyes and to regain her clarity, that place of stillness where she could feel the threads of the pattern. Ren eyed the back of the card, wondering if she could identify it by the small marks of wear that had accumulated over the years. Or I could go through the rest of the deck and see what isn’t there.

No. She’d courted enough danger already. The Rook would keep his secret.

But it was bad luck to abandon a pattern halfway through, and the other two cards in the present line didn’t hurt when she looked at them. The ledger discarded by the figure on Ten Coins Sing reminded her of the printing frame she’d found in the drawer. Generosity. The Rook kept his identity hidden, but that didn’t mean he never had allies. What he’d done tonight, working alongside her… that was a good thing, even if it didn’t last.

On the other side of the facedown card, The Mask of Fools.

That card had occupied the same position in Mettore’s pattern. Like him, the Rook was missing some piece of important information. For Mettore, that had meant Ren herself: a woman conceived on the night of the Great Dream, and whatever he needed her for. That wasn’t the case here… but she felt some kind of connection anyway, too faint for her to tease it out. Something dangerous. Something extending past the current Rook to those who had come before, and those who would come after.

If she could have seen the central card, she might have been able to say. As it was, she had no choice but to move on.

The Mask of Worms had always been her least favorite card, long before illness killed her mother. The squirming creatures that made up its shape turned her stomach, haunting her childhood nightmares. Now she felt them squirming through Nadežra, a poison eating away at the city.

Not a new poison, for all that it lay in the future. No, its position in the center of the line—that which was neither good nor ill; sometimes, that which was both—told her something about it was going to change. This had to do with why the Rook existed at all. Everyone knew him as the enemy of the nobility, a