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“Understand,” she said warningly to Cam, “I tell small fortunes only. No war, no politics, no harvests or famines; those are strictly for Seers with the greater vision, and I don’t deal in such things.”
“Would you mind stepping away, please? Fortune-reading is quite personal; I prefer that only those being read hear their fortunes, and they can choose whether or not to share it with others after.”
The western cities were only too well aware that their lesser wealth and distance from Margrave made them unimportant second sons in the eyes of the Crown, and, much like noble second sons are wont to do, channeled their resentment into a sloppy, nonchalant sort of degeneracy.
“Politics,” grunted Mash. “Easy to blame foreign folk for anything going wrong, when they’re not here to say otherwise. Easier still when they look and talk funny, and don’t pray to the Mother or her Sons.”
“People think they want true fortunes, but they don’t really. What they want are lies. Small lies, big lies, entertaining lies, comforting lies.
“I’m allergic to cats, too,” said the young man miserably. “All cats are slightly magical, don’t you know? It’s why they’re so smug all the time. But never mind that— Look, miss, I can feel your
“And I thought we could call them fortune cookies! So folk can buy a fortune cookie from me, and then go to your tent for a real fortune—and of course you’d get a cut of the sales, too. Do you think people will like them?”
I like cats, and new places, and unexpected kindnesses.
“You’re wrong. There’s no such thing as greater good—there’s just good, and the more of it we can do, the better.”
Tao paid no mind to any of this. In the vast nothingness that surrounded her, she searched again for what she had always sought to avoid: the heaviest threads of fate, thick and unbending; the loci of these threads that dragged like anchors at her mind. This time, she found them. She groped among them for a sense of conflict—of battle, of blood, of empires risen and fallen. One called to her like a summons—a clarion call, a battle cry, a howl—and she obeyed. She fought to allow herself to fall into its gravity—an effortful release—and at last, she saw, with blind eyes:
