Chapter 12: The Reader's Reader

The old woman would not sit in the study, or the great hall, or the chapel.

She wanted the kitchen, and she wanted the scarred oak table by the bread oven, and she wanted everyone else out of it.

"A spread has one reader and one listener," she said. "Out, boy."

Bastien had stood in the doorway with his arms folded for a full minute, and then he went.

He looked back once at Liora, and she nodded.

Isaure took her tea out to the yard with a very bad grace.

The cook banged a pot and retreated into the pantry.

The old woman lowered herself onto the bench with a grunt and held out a hand.

"Your grandmother's deck."

Liora gave it to her.

The old woman turned the cards over in her fingers, one by one, with tender familiarity.

"She painted these in the year of the long frost," she said. "I held the brush for the blue."

"You knew my grandmother?"

"We learned from the same woman. She was always better than me with the Cups."

She tapped the Queen.

"Now sit. Cut with your left hand."

Liora cut.

The old woman laid three cards in a row on the oak.

Death.

The Tower.

The Queen of Cups.

Her stomach clenched.

"I've already read these," she said. "For him."

"I know. Everyone in the north knows. You shouted it over a roast."

The old woman looked up with her bright black eyes.

"You never read these for you."

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