The Tarot Lady Saw the Duke's Death and Would Not Leave novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Twenty-Four Days

The Duke refuses to hang her, names her his household seer, and at dawn her cards show the Tower and his own east stair.

They found the steward an hour later, hanging from a beam in the cold pantry.

The captain of the guard told the whole hall, standing very straight, with snow still melting on his shoulders.

"There's a note on the floor beneath him, Your Grace. It says he is sorry."

Liora stood in the middle of the great hall with two guards at her elbows.

Nobody had yet said whether those guards were there to protect her or to hold her.

"Then he's guilty and she's a witch," said the baron in the green coat. "Either way, the law is plain."

"The law is plain," said the Duke.

His name was Bastien Kaldmoor, and he had not sat down since the goblet fell.

He walked around the dead hound's wet patch on the flagstones and stopped in front of Liora.

"The law says a seer who foretells a lord's death unasked is a traitor," he said.

"I asked," said Bastien. "Before two hundred witnesses. You all heard me."

The baron in green opened his mouth and shut it.

"A seer in a duke's household, reading at her duke's command, is not a traitor. She is staff."

He looked at Liora as though she were a bill he had decided to pay.

"Lady Vennick, you will have a seer's wage, the room beside mine, and a guard at your door."

"I don't need a guard," said Liora.

"I do," said Bastien. "You're the only one in this castle who knows how I die."

The captain stepped forward. "Then let me put ten men on you as well, Your Grace."

"No guards on me," said Bastien, in the flat voice of a man who had said it a hundred times.

Her father rushed to her side and caught her hand.

"Liora, we're going home tonight. I'll take you out through the stable yard."

He was trembling, and she loved him, and she could not go.

"Papa, if I go home, I'll spend twenty-four days in Thistledown waiting for a bridge."

"You'll be alive."

"He won't."

Her father stared at her, and then at the Duke, and his eyes filled.

"Your grandmother did exactly this," he said. "Right before they exiled her."

"I know," said Liora. "I'm better at it."

Bastien said nothing, but the corner of his mouth moved.

Afterward a girl with brown curls and flour on her sleeve steered her up three flights of stairs.

"I'm Isaure," she said. "His sister. I run this place, and he runs the mines, and neither of us runs him."

She shoved a door open on a small round room with a bed and a window.

"The wall behind that bed is his bedroom," Isaure said. "Don't bang on it."

"I wasn't going to."

"You will. He doesn't sleep, you see. Nobody does who lives next to him."

She put a candle in Liora's hand.

"He's never asked anyone to stay since our parents' funeral," she said softly. "Not once."

Then she was gone.

Liora did not sleep either.

At dawn she found the Duke's study by following the ticking.

It was a long cold room with a desk, a hearth, and clocks on every wall, forty of them at least.

Only a few of them were running, and the rest stood stopped at different hours.

Bastien sat at the desk in his shirtsleeves, with a tiny brass wheel in his tweezers.

"You're early," he said.

"You said every dawn."

She had brought her tin cup and a pot of water from the kitchen, and she set the water on his hearth without asking.

When it steamed she made tea in the cup with the lid, because Gran said no card should be read on an empty stomach.

She held it out to him across the desk.

He took it, and his fingers closed over hers around the tin for a second longer than he needed.

"Warm," he said, surprised.

"That's what tea is."

"A card is a drawing," he said, nodding at her deck. "A clock is a fact."

"Then cut the drawing."

He cut it.

She laid one card, then two, and she did not like the second one.

It was the Tower, the same lightning, the same falling people, and her hands went cold.

The window opened.

She saw a stone stairwell lit by a torch.

She saw the Duke walking down it with a ledger under his arm, and she heard a sound like a tree splitting.

Then the steps went out from under him, and the whole stair came down in a roar of dust.

She came back to the study with her heart pounding.

"The ninth bell," she said. "Today. Which stair do you take down to the stables?"

"The east. I've used it twelve years."

"Don't."

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