The Tarot Lady Saw the Duke's Death and Would Not Leave novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Death Card
At the Muster feast Liora turns the Death card for the Duke of Kaldmoor, names the Longest Night and the Frost Bridge before two hundred guests, and knocks a poisoned goblet from his hand.
The Death card landed face up on the Duke's tablecloth, and the great hall went quiet.
Liora Vennick stared at the skeleton knight on his pale horse, and her stomach dropped into her slippers.
She had not meant to turn that one.
Ten minutes earlier she had been standing behind her father's chair at the Winter Muster feast, hoping nobody would notice her gown.
Then the Duke of Kaldmoor had said over the roast, "I'm told the Baron's daughter reads cards."
Her father had gone the color of candle wax.
"Only for the servants, Your Grace," he said. "Only for fun."
"Then she can read for fun," said the Duke, and he held out his hand down the long table.
He was the tallest man in the hall, with short silver-blond hair and eyes the pale grey of river ice.
His left hand lay on the cloth, and the last two fingers were missing.
He looked bored.
You did not say no to the Duke of the North in his own castle, with two hundred barons watching.
So Liora sat down across from him and took her grandmother's deck out of her pocket.
Gran had painted every card herself, and the corners were soft as cloth.
She had taught Liora one rule before anything else.
A reader cannot read her own cards, because she only ever sees herself as a stranger.
Her grandmother's tin cup with the lid hung at her belt on a cord, because she took it everywhere.
Her father had begged her to leave it in their room.
She had forgotten, and it knocked against the table leg now.
"Cut the deck, Your Grace," she said.
He cut it with his three-fingered hand, and she laid the first card.
Death.
A few barons laughed nervously, because everyone knows the Death card rarely means death.
Liora knew better.
Her cards had never once lied to her, and they were not lying now.
She laid the second card, and it was the Tower, a stone tower split by lightning with people falling from its windows.
She laid the third card, and it was the Queen of Cups.
A crowned woman sat on a throne by the sea, holding a cup with a lid.
Then the cards opened.
It happened the way it always did.
She stood in falling snow on a white stone bridge over a gorge, and the cold was real on her face.
The Duke knelt on the stones in front of her with a crossbow bolt in his chest.
His breath smoked, and his eyes were open.
Beside him stood a woman in a dark hooded cloak, her back half turned, holding a cup with a lid.
Liora could not see her face.
Then the bridge was gone, and she was sitting in the warm hall, and her hands were shaking.
"Well, reader?" the Duke said.
Her father was mouthing something at her from his chair.
It was a game, say it was a game.
But Gran had left her one more rule on her deathbed.
Never lie to a card.
"You die on the Longest Night," Liora said.
She said it loudly enough for the whole table to hear.
"On the Frost Bridge, in the snow, with a crossbow bolt in you, twenty-four days from tonight."
A baron dropped his fork.
Somewhere a woman gasped, and a man in a green coat shouted, "That's treason!"
Everyone knew the law of Arvenne.
To foretell the death of a peer meant the rope.
The Duke's cousin Hadrian, a big sandy-haired man beside him, rose with his hands spread and a smile on his face.
"My dear girl," he said, "you've frightened the whole room."
"Who kills me?" the Duke asked.
He had not moved.
"I don't know," said Liora. "A woman is with you, holding a cup."
At that moment the steward came up behind the Duke's chair with the wine.
He set the gold goblet down by the Duke's hand, and the wine rang against the rim because his hands shook so hard.
He would not look at anyone.
Liora looked at the cup in the card, and then at the goblet.
The Duke reached for it.
"Don't," she said.
He lifted it anyway, and she reached across the table and slapped it out of his fingers.
The goblet clanged on the flagstones and the wine ran red across the floor.
A grey kitchen hound slunk out from under the table and licked it.
It lifted its head once and its legs went out from under it.
Then it shook, and then it was still.
Nobody in the hall made a sound.
The Duke looked at the dog for a long moment.
Then his hand closed around Liora's wrist, warm and hard, and his thumb pressed her pulse.
"Where is the steward?" he said.
The place behind his chair was empty, and the steward was already gone from the hall.
The Duke did not let go of her.
"Pack your cards, Lady Vennick," he said. "You'll read for me every dawn."
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