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

on top when she drew. The card of truth and revelations… and also the card from his reading at the Talon and Trick back in Suilun, the part of his future that was neither good nor ill. By the look on his face, he hadn’t forgotten.

“All right,” Leato muttered, half to himself. “Why not.”

She led him out of the main flow of traffic, then whipped her shawl from her shoulders and laid it on the ground with a partitioned bowl on top. A surreptitious glance around as Leato dropped several centiras into the middle compartment showed her no hawks watching this time—and definitely no Grey Serrado.

Leato shifted from one foot to the other as she shuffled and laid out the cards. Most streetside patterners carried a stool for their clients to sit on. It kept them in one place and their faces at eye level for easier reading. But Leato had made his offering; he wasn’t going to bolt over a bit of discomfort.

Arenza gave the cards an honest shuffle this time. She’d debated trying to stack them like she’d done with Nikory, but she didn’t have a sure enough sense of what Leato was doing to know what cards would be best. Better to lay them true, and see if that did her any good.

She didn’t attempt a full spread for him, though. That was usually reserved for card parlours and pattern shops, where it was easier to spend the necessary time interpreting everything—with less risk of the wind blowing something away. Instead she laid a three-card line, debating with herself. All at once, or one at a time? The former made lying easier, but the latter hooked the client more firmly.

One at a time. She flipped the first card and leaned forward slightly, forcing Leato to crane to see the image on it. Her cheap street deck was only woodblock-printed in black on white, so wavering lines across the eyeless face represented the warping effect of The Mask of Mirrors.

“Lies,” Arenza mused, pitching her voice almost too quiet to be heard over the traffic. “The card I drew for you, it was The Face of Glass. Hlai Oslit Rvarin, the deity of truth and lies. This is their Mask. You seek the former, but in the latter you are mired.”

He stopped shifting. “That’s a strange way to begin a reading, szorsa. Are you calling me a liar?”

Crossed arms, direct eye contact, his feet angling to walk away—all signs of a liar. Giuna was right. “We lie for many reasons, altan,” Arenza said gently. “Sometimes for good reason. Often to protect those we care about, because we know the truth would worry them.”

His gaze dropped, and she went on. “But other people lie also. And not for such good reasons.”

The leaning and the soft voice did their job. Leato gave in and crouched in front of her, balancing so he didn’t have to touch his knee to the cobblestones. “I don’t need a patterner to tell me that. You just described most of Nadežra.”

He was nibbling at the hook, but not yet biting down. Fortunately, she had some bait ready to hand. “You have already gone to great effort, and spent much money—perhaps more than you can afford—to gain information,” she said. “But it has not brought you what you seek. And so you ask yourself, in this city, can I trust anyone? Have those I’ve spoken to told me anything of use? Or have I for nothing emptied my purse?”

He cast a look at the bowl and the centiras he’d placed in it, mouth twisting into a sardonic smile. His world-weary sigh was nothing like the laughing, carefree man he pretended to be when others were looking. “You understand the people of this city well. For all the good that does me. Unless…”

She met his searching look as though she knew nothing of secrets and lies. “Unless?”

His gaze dropped to the cards. One finger idly traced a curl of embroidery on her shawl. “Not that all you people know each other, but—I don’t suppose you know where I can find a Vraszenian laundress named Idusza.”

He was going to all this effort for a Vraszenian laundress? She studied him through her eyelashes. Leato didn’t show any of the signs of a man hunting for a former or future lover. Which meant Idusza had something to do with his actual goal: the Rook, if Giuna was right, or something else.

“For a Vraszenian woman, Idusza is a common name,” she said, which was true enough. “But the second card is the path you must follow to find what you seek. Let us see what it has to say.”

She almost cackled when she turned it over. The Mask of Hollows: not an amusing card normally, as the starving shape represented poverty and loss. But on the heels of what she’d said about Leato spending money, it was all too fitting.

And it gave her an excellent opening. Arenza held up one hand before Leato could make any comment; he clearly knew pattern well enough to recognize the card’s general meaning. “In seeking your Vraszenian woman, altan, throw not good money after bad. When three cards are laid, there is no good and ill and that which is neither; each card may to any of those things speak. Your path is not bankrupting yourself.”

“Bit late for that,” he muttered, his knee touching down onto the dirty cobbles. She hid a smile of triumph. Hooked. “Well, go on. Where does my path lead, if not the poorhouse?”

“All cards contain their virtues as well as their pains. The Vraszenian woman you seek, Idusza—this card tells me she is a poor woman, one who works hard for what she has, in common jobs barely putting food on the table. A street-seller, or someone of that kind—a maid, perhaps, or a laundress.”

She paced the flood of words carefully, keeping Leato in her peripheral vision. There was an art to this, feeding people information they’d already given so it