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

been around for much longer than one lifetime. Everyone assumed the role was handed from one person to the next, so who was to say the current Rook was the same one from her childhood? Was he someone who respected that limit? Or it could have been an accident. Either way— “Ah,” she said. “That explains Captain Serrado’s anger tonight. I expected any member of the Vigil would dislike such an outlaw… but it seemed rather more than that. I take it the fire was no accident?”

“The Rook does things like that—burns warehouses—to strike at the people who own them. Kolya… he was there the night it happened. So was the owner. Everyone assumes the owner was the Rook’s target, but they both died. Grey’s been hunting the Rook ever since.”

Leato’s tone was unexpectedly grim. Ren made a swift calculation—what Renata had seen; what she could plausibly guess at—and said, “I would expect you to cheer him on. From what the others said tonight, I gather this Rook fellow is a menace, one who should have been taken care of a long time ago.”

“That’s not the problem.” Leato lifted the glass, hesitated, and set it down again. “The problem is what it will do to Grey. My grandfather—yours too, I suppose—he used to say, revenge will make you whole. The way Grey’s been behaving… I’m afraid it will break him.”

It didn’t break me, she wanted to say. But that wasn’t entirely true. Coming back to Lacewater made that all too clear.

Before she could think of a Renata way to pry further into Leato’s concerns, he sighed and knocked back the rest of his wine. “I’m not in the mood for games yet. Are you interested in having your pattern read?”

She’d hoped he’d forgotten that part. The plan for this evening had always been risky; if the patterner had the true gift, Ren didn’t want the woman’s cards anywhere near her. But very few had the true gift, and she’d judged it worth the risk. Now she’d have to follow through.

She tucked her hand with its borrowed glove through the offered crook of Leato’s arm, smiling as if she had nothing to fear. “It sounds fascinating.”

“Most Liganti would tell you the future is only seen in the stars, not a stack of painted cards.” He led her between the tables to a back alcove warded off from the rest of the room. “But Nadežra isn’t Seste Ligante or Seteris. There’s magic here that northerners don’t understand.”

Leato’s eagerness sounded like more than a desire for distraction. He wasn’t behaving like a man who’d come here to enjoy himself, or even to forget his cares; the patterner was his real goal.

Ren’s step slowed when they approached a partition strung with thick wool threads. She recognized the shapes knotted into them; her mother’s shop had a divider just like it. Ren would sit and pluck at them for hours while her mother worked, pretending to be a heroine from the stories—Tsvetsa the Weaver or Pračeny the Traveling Player. Everything else in the Talon and Trick might be false, but the szorsa reading in the back was real.

Hopefully not too real. “If it truly is strange magic, I volunteer you to go first,” Renata said as Leato gestured her around the partition. “If your luck is good, then perhaps I’ll try.”

“Each person’s luck is their own, alta.” The Vraszenian woman at the table was of middling years, her black curls shot through with white and twisted into complicated braids. She passed a deck from hand to hand, shuffling smoothly without glancing down. Instead, her unblinking eyes studied Leato and Renata. “A szorsa neither gives nor takes it. We reveal the truth only.”

It clearly wasn’t the first time Leato had done this, because he knew not to hand payment to the patterner. Instead he went to the shrine at the side of the room, where there was an age-darkened statue of Ir Entrelke Nedje, the two-faced Vraszenian deity of luck. Removing his mask, he placed a decira in the shrine’s central bowl. “May I see the Face and not the Mask.”

Then he sat down in front of the szorsa. She began dealing, three lines of three cards each, the first closest to her, the last in front of Leato. Turning over the bottom row, she said, “This is your past, the good and the ill of it, and that which is neither.”

Ren stood behind Leato, grateful for the prismatium mask concealing her expression. How many times had she heard her mother say those words?

The three cards thus revealed were The Face of Weaving, The Laughing Crow, and A Brother Lost. The szorsa smiled at Leato, touching the first one. “From a good family you come—a strong family, strong as the River Dežera, with connections throughout Nadežra. But no strength is without its weakness. Vulnerability. Someone has lied to you or your people.” She tapped The Laughing Crow, then A Brother Lost. “This lie haunts you still, a worm at the heart of the peach. Until it is uncovered, it will continue to eat away.”

On second thought, perhaps letting her skepticism show would be perfectly in character for Renata. The Laughing Crow veiled didn’t indicate lies; that was the province of The Mask of Mirrors. It meant failures of communication: either people not talking, or someone not keeping their mouth shut when they should.

“Now I see my mistake,” Leato said, nodding with exaggerated gravity. He broke to grin up at Renata. “You’ll learn terrible things about our family and not want anything more to do with us.”

“You forget who my mother is,” Renata said dryly. “I sincerely doubt your registered kin are any worse than that.” From what she could tell, Letilia and Donaia had deserved each other.

Leato gestured for the szorsa to continue. “This is your present,” she said, “the good and the ill of it, and that which is neither.”

Orin and Orasz, The Welcoming Bowl, and Sword in Hand. Ren kept her breathing steady, but