SSCS 04: Installment 12 of 34
The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
This is Installment 12 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
(And the character list is here.)
Previously…
Below was…perhaps a ceremony, perhaps something else, but either way it seemed they had found the Moth Queen. Like the Gull Queen, she was not as expected. Though she moved about unerringly upon her raised alter-space, a fine linen bandage was wrapped across her eyes—blind.
…The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
Installment 12: 22.0322
***
“Would you like me to read the cards for you? In return, I will accept anything of value you care to offer.” Lot had laid out a line of cards in front of her, and now picked them up, carefully and deliberately, one at a time as she spoke, tucking them back into the deck beside her. She kept her eyes on the cards the whole while, and bade the tentacles of her hair to lie mostly still as she worked. She knew well that apparent indifference cast a better lure on most than any smiles or beseechments or dire warnings might do. And this wasn’t yet one of El’s chosen, so for the time being Lot would keep to her own methods.
“Do you claim to be a fortune-teller then, to know the future?”
It was a young man’s voice, haughty and disdainful, but not quite enough so to have walked away. Lot raised an eyebrow and raised her eyes to look at him.
“If I knew the future, why would I waste it in trade for trinkets from the likes of you?” She smiled, and cut the deck, placing the two piles now in front of her in offering. “If you offer something of value, choose a card.”
The young man frowned, brushing a dark curl of hair back over his ear and revealing the winking flash of an earring, gold not silver, as he did so. Lot had offered the two stacks of cards face up, so that one stack showed a stylized whale, which was sometimes mistaken for a boat, and the other held a half-veiled woman, a silver net in one hand, and a stack of coins in the other. Though, the man may have been frowning at their foreign design rather than their display; Lot had painted the cards herself, always the same, always the ones she had been taught in her very first life. “What, so I get to choose my fate, then?” But he selected the half-veiled woman (The Mercenary), drawing it from its pile and setting it to one side, placing a single copper coin beside it.
Lot looked away. “I said of value.”
He barked out a scoffing laugh at this, but there was a small clink, and when Lot looked back a silver coin had been laid atop the copper. The man had raised a mocking eyebrow. “So, you’ll at least have made back your entrance fee. As you can see, I’ve chosen a stack of money as my fate, so I can surely afford it.”
“Oh, I didn’t pay the fee in silver,” Lot answered, letting her voice shiver a bit as she tucked the coins away quick out of sight. Waste not, want not. “And that,” she continued, “is not your fate you’ve chosen, but the fate of your opponent. This is yours.” She lifted the card that had been beneath his choice and placed it beside The Mercenary. This one was a bloody spear, but painted with a hand gripping the shaft just below the blade, so that it was often mistaken for a dagger. The Sacrifice. When she looked up this time the man was pale. “Now choose two more.”
While he’d been staring at his ‘fate’, Lot had stacked and re-cut the deck now into four piles, still face up. It took the man rather longer to select his cards this time than it had for the first round. Ignorance, and The Long Journey. Though it was probable he thought he’d chosen a wounded man, and nakedness. This one was going to be fun to toy with.
And so Lot stretched her enjoyment out for a good ten minutes, learning in the process that the man was wealthy as his jewelry suggested, but not by his own labors, and that he’d recently come across a business opportunity, open to the lowest bidder, which Lot could guess was really a smuggling operation involving some as-yet-unproven risk. When she sent him off at last he had a fey light in his eyes, and El’s first (unknowing) conscript was waiting.
“I was told the lady wishes to speak with me.” The person who approached was non-descript, except that they had very dark, black skin that was actually a good match for El’s at present. Their clothes were simple but not at all tatty, a light grey so that here in the daylight they would probably look like pieces of shadow hovering against the granite blocks of the maze. Only their hands betrayed them, one glibly offering a black, coin-sized token they would have gotten from El from between their first two fingers, the other gripping tight to some talisman small enough to be tucked away in their palm, rubbing it surreptitiously, unconsciously, with their thumb.
“The lady does,” Lot answered, and accepted the black token, tucking it into her bodice. “Draw a card.” The Great Hunger, and The Mercenary were again placed on top. But this time when the patron reached for the cards, Lot reached out as well, scratching their wrist with the poisoned needle tucked into her palm. They flinched back at the pain, but then hesitated, and Lot shifted over, tugging them down to sit beside her. “But I am not the Lady, you see.
“Breathe,” she added. And El’s conscript inhaled and exhaled once in compliance.