She took them anyway.
Brath scoffed loudly as he sat down on his bed. “Are you seriously going to play cards right now? While the Nest is going through an orc invasion?”
It took all of Alex’s self-control to speak in an even tone to Brath. She was terrified, but sitting in a room thinking about how scared she was wasn’t going to help anyone.
Even if Brath didn’t want to admit it, Alex could tell he was afraid too. All his pacing and sitting and standing were dead giveaways. Gill was the only one in the room who didn’t seem worried about the orcs.
Alex sat down across from Brath and looked at the cards. She looked at them, and even never having seen playing cards before, she knew this wasn’t an Earth card deck. The images were too… She struggled for a word before settling on “fantastical.”
She handed them to Brath. “Do you know what these are?”
Brath snatched the cards from Alex’s hands and sighed loudly. He thumbed through the cards before handing them back to Alex. “Of course, I do,” he said. “These are drow Fate cards.”
“What are those?”
Brath looked taken aback by Alex’s asking for more details. For a moment, he forgot about the orcish invasion and was more concerned with trying to understand why she would be interested in the cards.
Alex took the cards back from Brath as he started to explain, “It’s an elvish thing. All kinds of elves get these when they’re born. Every elf gets their own specific deck—someone makes it for them or something—but they use them to tell the future. Usually their own future.”
Alex nodded to show that she understood. They weren’t much different from Tarot cards then. She needed to do something to wake these guys up. Jollies was in full panic mode, and Brath wasn’t far behind.
Panic meant being stupid.
She shook her head. “I’m going to show you some human magic now. I’m going to read your fate.”
Brath scoffed. “Humans don’t have magic.”
“That’s not true. We humans have magic. Maybe not blow-‘em-up-with-a-fireball magic, but we are powerful divinators.”
Gill looked up and stared at Alex for a moment before going back to checking the camera feeds.
Brath laughed before realizing he was making noise and covering his mouth. “You didn’t even know what those were a minute ago,” he growled. “Why do you think you’re going to suddenly know how to read my cards and my future with your human magic?”
Alex thought back to her Aunt Maisy, who used to read fortunes for fun. Maisy would read Alex’s future, vividly describing the cards to her as she turned them over. When she was in Middang3ard’s VR world, Alex had looked them up, wanting to know what Aunt Maisy had been doing. It was incredible how good Aunt Maisy’s descriptions had been.
And how fun her tarot card readings had been.
Maisy had said that the most important thing with divination was confidence. You could say anything you wanted, all you had to do was sell it. Brath hadn’t challenged her on the divination part, so she had a chance.
As she shuffled the cards, she did her best to channel her Aunt Maisy. She thought about how, when Maisy spoke, it sounded as if there was no doubt in her mind. “Yeah, I am going to read your fate. I used to be quite the card reader on Earth.”
“How did you learn when you can’t see?”
Alex looked up from the cards for a moment. She couldn’t tell if Brath had said that with the intention of hurting her or if she was just sensitive due to all the prior teasing. “Special cards with ridges,” Alex lied. “Just because I was blind, it didn’t mean I was helpless.”
“So, you read with ridges?”
“Yeah, same as with books. You get that I know how to read, right?”
Brath shrugged as he tried to look uninterested. “I hadn’t thought about it,” he muttered.
Alex cut the cards and then shuffled them again. “On Earth, we have a special written language called Braille. It’s just for blind people. It’s a series of raised dots that mean certain letters or words, and I had cards with that.”
Alex watched something she had never seen before. She couldn’t have put it into words even if she wanted to. Brath’s face had changed slightly. It wasn’t as if he had raised his eyebrows or smiled, but as she spoke, Alex saw Brath’s eyes soften a little bit and his face loosen up.
Alex passed Brath the deck of cards. “All right, choose three cards,” she instructed. “Any three cards you feel drawn to.”
Jollies floated down and took a seat next to Alex’s foot.
Brath chose three cards from the top of the deck and handed them to Alex, who took them and put them on the floor. Alex looked over her shoulder at Gill, who was watching. She winked at him before turning back to the cards.
Alex flipped the three cards and leaned over them as she clasped her hands together, her chin on her knuckles.
The first card was a raven, the second a burning building. And the third was a black circle.
Alex nodded theatrically as she picked up the first card and stared at it, pretending to draw some meaning from it. “This right here represents your past,” she said mysteriously. “It looks as if your past was filled with anger. Anger about things you couldn’t control.”
Next, Alex picked up the card depicting the burning building. “But something changed,” she went on. “There was a sudden shift, and everything fell apart. You had to start asking questions, inspecting the foundation, figuring out why things had collapsed.”
Alex looked up to check if Brath was buying it.
The gnome was silent, and his brooding eyes peered out from behind his scruffy beard.
Alex took up the last card. She stared at it for some time, drawing out the anticipation. “Ah. The sacred ring
