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

might mean for Renata. The effort made her head hurt. “Are you suggesting my mother ran away for the benefit of her kin?” She dismissed the question with a wave of her hand. “Never mind; you don’t know my mother, and it isn’t her fate being read here.”

“Our fates are often linked.” The szorsa flipped the next line. All unaligned cards: A Brother Lost, A Spiraling Fire, and Drowning Breath. “That loss is healing. But just as someone injured must begin pushing herself, using the wounded limb, and yet not push too quickly, so it is with you. Favor not what has been hurt, but hurt yourself not in trying.”

Leato had managed to hold his tongue during the first part of the spread, but now he blurted, “Perhaps that refers to Mother. She didn’t care for Aunt Letilia, but anyone can see you’re nothing like her. Be patient. She’ll come around.”

Renata gave him an uncertain smile, reaching up to take his bare left hand with the glove he’d loaned her. “Thank you.”

Then the future. Ren was glad she had let go of Leato’s hand before the cards turned; otherwise he would have felt her fingers tensing. But The Mask of Mirrors was revealed, not veiled; that meant lies told for a good reason, rather than to bring harm.

“More duality,” the szorsa mused, looking at Orin and Orasz in the central position. “Though not as strongly as for the altan. The Mask of Fools, veiled, warns you not to ignore what is in front of you. A time will come when you must see both sides of the situation, the good and the bad. Exercise caution in which parts you reveal; it may be that you need more understanding than others.”

She sounded dissatisfied, as well she might. There was neither true insight in what she said, nor a persuasive imitation of it. Ren wondered if her masquerade was somehow confusing the lines of pattern—if that was even possible. More likely that the szorsa just isn’t very good.

At least it justified her not offering as large a gift as Leato had. Renata thanked the patterner and rose to deposit another decira in the bowl for the Face. Watching the money leave her hand, it crossed her mind that it would be easy to palm one of the coins already there… but that was one blasphemy she’d never committed. Stealing from a szorsa invited the curse of the deities themselves.

She’d blasphemed badly enough for one lifetime when she poisoned Ondrakja.

Out in the main room, Leato seemed preoccupied. Whatever he’d hoped to get from the szorsa, he hadn’t received it—but he hadn’t been disappointed, either. “Would you like to return home?” Renata asked. “This isn’t the night either of us had planned.”

“What? No.” Leato dredged up a smile from somewhere, but he couldn’t hide the heaviness that weighed his shoulders down. “I promised you good memories to sleep on.”

Snagging two more glasses of wine, he scanned the open card tables in the main room. “I should have asked, do they play any pattern games in Seteris? Did Aunt Letilia ever teach you sixes? Probably not; Father once said she was hopeless. No patience and no restraint.”

Renata had to swallow a laugh. Pretending to be ignorant of a game was the oldest trick in the book, and Leato was lying down in the path of it. “No, I’ve never heard of it. But I’d love to learn.”

Setting a warm hand at her back to guide her through the maze of players, Leato said, “Then let’s find a low-stakes table, and I’ll teach you.”

Isla Prišta, Westbridge: Suilun 4

Ren’s purse dropped onto the kitchen table with a satisfying thunk.

Tess stared at it, then up at her. “What’s this, then?”

“My winnings. Worry not; Leato saw nothing.”

Tess set aside the Gloria underdress she was dismantling and reached eagerly for the purse, even as she frowned at Ren. “Cheating? Are you certain that’s wise? You’re the one who’s always going on about breaking character. Or is Alta Renata the sort of woman who cheats?”

“We must pay for all of this somehow,” Ren pointed out, stripping off her gloves.

The clink of coins being sorted into piles died when Tess saw the mismatched pair. “Where’s your other glove?” Her narrow-eyed gaze flicked up. “What did you do, Ren?”

The beginning of the night seemed years in the past, but at Tess’s question, memory came bubbling up like the Wellspring of Ažerais. Ren sank onto the bench, leaned in close, and whispered, “I met the Rook.”

Coins spilled as Tess’s hip jostled the table. Clutching Ren’s hands, she gasped, “You didn’t!”

Through a grin so wide she could barely speak, Ren recounted the whole story. They’d both grown up on tales of the Rook: how he humiliated proud nobles, defended shopkeepers against corrupt hawks, stole and destroyed the evidence used to blackmail people.

There were darker stories, too. Judges who sentenced too harshly found themselves sailing away on their own penal ships. Inscriptors who sold ineffective numinata to the ill and dying got their hands shattered for it; clerks and hawks who took bribes and then failed to look the other way might land on the Charterhouse steps one morning missing an eye, or choking on blood from a cloven tongue. Common punishments by Nadežran law, but visited on people who were usually above it. Many found that frightening, but for kids on the street, the Rook might as well have been a god.

“And he has your glove? I made that glove!” Tess tilted her head with a wistful sigh, staring up into the dancing shadows of the cellar rafters. “Sedge would have been so jealous. Him always going on about that one time he saw the Rook on a rooftop.”

Her words were gentle, as they always were when she mentioned their brother. She mourned him—they both did—but she knew full well that Ren’s grief was mixed with guilt. It was Ren, not Tess, who got Sedge killed.

But Tess’s role in