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

visited with Leato back in Suilun, after the encounter with the Rook. Unlike the Talon and Trick, Breglian’s stood on the Upper Bank and served an upscale clientele. Instead of Vraszenian trappings, it boasted a facade of columns, an airy atrium, and a galleried rotunda inside. There were tables for public play, but none of the clamor of betting and carousing that resounded through most nytsa parlours. Most of the alcoves in the second-floor gallery were full, their curtains drawn shut for private play, but after a few quiet words and a bribe passed so subtly Renata almost missed it, they were led up the curving staircase to one that was conveniently—and rapidly—unoccupied.

The host swept a curtain aside for Renata to enter. As she glanced over her shoulder to make sure Vargo was behind her, she saw him falter on the last step, hand going to one of his knees as though to support it.

He made no comment about his stumble, and Renata didn’t, either. But she watched out of the corner of her eye as he tugged the curtains partway shut and sat, and saw that he took the majority of his weight on his right leg, sparing the left. As if that knee pained him.

Gossip around the city said the Vigil had chased the Rook out of the Shambles last night, and he’d escaped by leaping—or, according to his detractors, falling—off a rooftop.

Vargo tugged his gloves off and reached for the house deck. “Do you know how to play sixes? Or we could play nytsa instead.”

Sixes was a game of lies and risk. Nytsa was gentler, and worked best with two players—and it was a more traditional Vraszenian game. “I know the basics of nytsa. As I’m sure you’re quite aware; you’re a well-informed man.”

He didn’t respond to that, but she heard the soft huff of a suppressed laugh as he began to shuffle. Vargo handled the cards like a practiced gambler: no showy flourishes, but the simple dexterity of his scarred hands had its own beauty. Renata blinked away from watching them when he set the deck before her. “Cut?”

She removed her own gloves and did so, thanking the Faces that five months was long enough for her own hands to soften—and that she’d never been Letilia’s scullery maid. It wasn’t just the gambling that made card-playing a mildly scandalous pastime; it was the fact that shuffling a deck was nearly impossible with silk gloves on, and playing not much easier.

“I’m relieved Iridet agreed to reopen the amphitheatre.” The soft slap of cards on the table punctuated Vargo’s words. “It would have been a shame for you to miss out on a proper Veiled Waters your first year here.”

Renata picked up her cards and fanned them. If there was pattern in them, she couldn’t see it. She took Dawn and Dusk from her hand and matched it to Turtle in Her Shell on the table, claimed them both, then dealt a card from the stockpile to the table. No match, and so it became Vargo’s turn. “I thought a proper Veiled Waters only came every seven years.”

“That’s the Great Dream—which mostly matters if you’re Vraszenian.”

The man either had damnably good luck, or she should start checking his sleeves for additional cards, because in the second pass he laid down Sleeping Waters. Unaligned cards weren’t usually valuable on their own, but this one could form combinations with both The Face of Weaving and The Face of Stars—both of which he’d snagged in the previous pass.

If you’re Vraszenian. Did he mean that as a hint?

“Nytsa,” he said, and dealt another card to the table. Of course he would call for the hand to continue. She had only four cards in her bank, none of them useful to each other; she was a long way from assembling a combination of her own. She resigned herself to losing this hand.

“Then again,” he said, “if the rumblings I’m hearing are true, Veiled Waters might not be at its best this year.”

This time her luck was better, matching a card both from her hand and from the draw. If Ir Entrelke saw fit to give her one more unaligned card from the cut thread before Vargo made another combination, she might scrape through after all. There weren’t any on the table, though. “What rumblings? Should I be worried?”

Vargo discarded A Spiraling Fire, but she couldn’t claim it until he removed his fingers. They slid along the surface of the card, as if he was reconsidering his move. “After the Night of Hells, I think we all have reason to be worried. The Stadnem Anduske—Vraszenian radicals—they’re warning people away from the amphitheatre, and there’s talk of a protest at the Charterhouse.” He withdrew his hand swiftly, glancing down at his own cards rather than meeting her eyes. “So my people tell me. I have them keep an ear out for rumors; you never know what will interfere with business.”

She matched Storm Against Stone to the card Vargo had discarded and said, “Close.” Her combination was a short thread, worth only one point—doubled to two, since Vargo had called nytsa—but it deprived him of the eight points he would have gotten for his own combinations. Vargo conceded the hand with a philosophical sigh.

“We’re sliding back toward business again,” he said as she shuffled for the next hand. His expression took on a playful, wicked cast. “And I believe I promised you distraction.”

After that, he abandoned all pretense that their game wasn’t simply an excuse for flirtation. His kohl-rimmed eyes spent more time on her than on the hand, his voice sank from its usual controlled drawl to a more textured rumble, and when he laid a card down, it was often with a little flourish, or a teasing hesitation before he followed through.

At first she tried to ignore it. Sharps used tricks like that to hide their cheating; she’d done it herself, playing sixes against Leato’s friends. But she was playing honestly tonight, if badly,