The only thing that gave him pause was the ivory box he always carried in a silk sling beneath his robes. What the Deck had given, the Deck could take away. Horn still had two more draws, though now he wished he’d stopped at one. Was he supposed to just hold onto the deck like this? Or should he have simply drawn the three cards in a fan?
No answers came to him, and life was good, so Horn tried not to worry overmuch. He lived at the villa for several years. The weather was kind. Ships called at his dock just often enough to bring news and goods. Horn sent for his wealth, stashed in banks and strongrooms scattered across a dozen ports, and from time to time considered either hiring himself out or going adventuring.
It should have been boring, but was not. Rather, the villa was pleasing to the eye and soul. He eventually grew accustomed to the well-earned rest from his labors.
One day a cockleshell boat with an ivory hull and a single lateen sail the color of a dead man’s eyes made his dock. Horn watched it a while from the patio, a slim stemware glass of wine in his hand. He did not recognize the ship but felt vaguely disturbed by its color and form. Eventually Moneo his majordomo approached him.
“Sir, you have a visitor.” After a pause, the man added, “A lady, sir.”
Horn knew his staff would have approved if he’d taken a wife and become a true lord of the estate. This stretch of coast along the Bight of Winds was a wild country, dotted with a few small fishing villages. No king or prince extended a writ along these particular waters or shores. The villa itself was safe largely in its isolation-there was not sufficient trade here to attract pirates or bandits. He could have raised a flag, bred some strong sons, and founded his own ruling line. Raiders might have been a problem for his grandsons.
So a woman caller was of interest to Moneo and the other servants. A woman caller was worrying to Horn, however.
“Show her in,” he said. “I will receive my guest here on the patio. And tell Cook to lay on a feast fit for a prodigal.” He had an uneasy notion just who was come to visit.
She came walking out, short and thick-bodied in the manner of the people of the coast here, but her eyes were the color of the inside of a lime, and her robes were dyed in patterns, colored purple, dark blue, and black.
Horn knew her immediately. “You came to me once, when I was sick unto dying in a distant port.”
“Yes.” She nodded, and he felt wind upon his back and buzzing in his ears. “You seek what does not belong to you.” Despite her appearance, the woman once more spoke the hillman’s language of Horn’s birth.
“Not a sending,” he said, remembering their conversation before. “Always present.”
“Always.” She cocked her head, and he had never seen a more beautiful woman, for all her common looks. “Yet you tempt me.” A blunt finger tapped at his chest, clicking against the ivory box beneath his own robes.
“It is time for me to draw another card, is it not?”
“Far past time.” She smiled, and he felt the stars shift in their courses. “With age comes wisdom. Or at least experience.”
Realizing he would not be a guest at his own feast that evening, Horn took out the ivory box. He tugged open the tiny drawer to turn another card from the center of the deck.
The world changed.
Ruin
The tavern bench creaked beneath Horn like a ship under sail. He swayed, listening to the wood pop and snap, knowing if he were afloat, he’d be leaking.
He realized he’d had that thought before. His memory was playing tricks. Or the scrumpy was.
Which was the point here.
He stared up at the barmaid as she swished past. Her skirt was made in dark, muted colors-had it been so earlier? The woman favored him with a sidelong glance, her expression somewhere between wise and malicious. He turned his head to watch her tend to a pair of tables by the fire.
Finally she made it back over to him. “Out of money yet?”
“I don’t know,” he answered with unfortunate honesty. “Out of scrumpy yet?”
Her laugh held a curious edge. “We’ll never run out of scrumpy when there’s the likes of you in the world.”
“I wanted… more.” He wasn’t sure if he meant more than scrumpy, or more than what life had given him in the world. The mansions of memory had grown crowded in his head, haunted by regrets.
“You seek what does not belong to you.”
Those words, so familiar. And had she just spoken Kyrie, or another tongue from too long ago when he was young and the world was colored with hope?
Horn peered closer. Her eyes were green. The color of the inside of a lime. “It’s you,” he said. “You healed me once. You threatened me once.”
Now her smile bordered on joy. Around them, the reeking, smoky tavern seemed to recede into abstract distance. “And I have come for that which I have been cheated of.”
Horn slipped his hand inside his vest, touching the ivory card box in its silk sling. He drew that box out for the first time in… how long? There wasn’t any way to be sure. The path of his decay had been as gradual as it had been inexorable, since drawing the second card.
The ivory card box lay in his hand. Malevolent. Powerful. The old monk’s great joke played upon him.
Fate.
“This was always yours, was it not?”
With a nod, she said, “And you have held it far beyond your time.”
He extended his hand. “Here. Take it.”
“Three times you said you’d draw. Three cards to chart a path through life.” She leaned close, her eyes sparking. “Draw the third, little man, and return to your life.”
Horn could hear the click of the dice that made up the multiverse. Beneath the struggles of gods and men and monsters, behind the powers of magic and prayer and bared blade, chance governed all.
The box came open easily enough. The cards slipped into his hand. The pasteboard again seemed slick and heavy. Horn considered simply tossing them into the air, as if they might fly away like little birds. Instead, vaguely aware of the clink of tankards and the murmur of voices, he thumbed a third card from the middle.
Conclusions
Horn had grown into an old man of no little power and persuasion. The hills of his birth suited him fine these days. Like Feather had so long ago, he picked a boy every few years who showed a certain, special spark and took the child aside for training. The tribe traded in sellswords raised to the purpose, but their true power was in the quiet thread of wizards spawned down the generations.
Some nights he sat vigil in the high caverns. Some days he hunted alongside the young men with their tagalong brothers and cousins, for the sheer joy of the chase and the kill. Some evenings he found a high rock and looked down upon the plains that led toward the coast, and recalled Purpure, High Canton, the Lost Island of Ee, and so many other places his feet had touched.
But always he went back to his hut. There Margaine, his green-eyed foreign wife, awaited him after her own days of seeing to the sick or wounded, and teaching the little girls.
It was enough.
As for the card he’d never turned, it hung on the wall of his hut in a leather bag. Some nights it twitched, or even glowed-magic trying to escape. If he’d not been a wizard of some power in his own right, he would have been overwhelmed years before.
The barmaid had laughed when he’d palmed the card and slipped it into his vest. Then she’d left with him. The ivory card box remained behind, innocent trap for the next man. Nothing more had been said about cheating, or what belonged to whom. He was never sure if she retained the aspect of the Raven Queen, but Margaine’s eyes always sparkled that curious color.
Some day he would turn the card. Some day he would know what fate he had removed from the Deck of Many Things.
Just not today.
Today, his path was his own. Today, the mansions of his memory gleamed once more. Today, he would not flip the last card.
