She picked up the deck and shuffled it, the cards making a soft, dry sound like leaves as they touched each other. It made it hard to think, but Ledger tried to focus. Whatever else she was, Madame Persephone was not a fake.
“The cards can sense your fear,” she said as she laid one card in the middle of the table. “They can see the danger, but they always see beyond it.”
Ledger knew tarot cards. Enough to check it had the full arcana before he put a bid in at an auction on a deck. So he should know what the card on the table was, but he couldn’t quite pin it down in his head. Between the exhaustion and the soft, lulling murmur of Madame Persephone’s voice, it was hard to keep his focus on the battered rectangles of cardboard.
Gold paint and gray, saturated indigo and a thin, ink-washed red, like glass—all scratched and stained. A hooded man, a clasped pair of lovers, and a figure on a horrible throne, haloed in blood and bone.
The Devil.
The tent suddenly snapped back into focus as Madame Persephone set that card down firmly on the table. Faded paint picked out a dead forest and a man in running gear just leaving the frame, and hidden behind the bare branches, a pale, hungry man with ivy-wrapped horns.
“He is hungry, and he’s cold,” Madame Persephone said. “If we could pity him, we’d be kind. But he’d rather take what we have than share. He repeats. He takes, and he repeats, because that is all he is.”
Ledger reached out to touch the card. One of the dead people had died on a run, hadn’t they? Or afterward. Before he could touch the paint, Madame Persephone slid it away.
“You can give him what he wants,” she said. “It will solve tomorrow’s problem, but not forever. He will come full circle. It is all he knows.”
“If I don’t solve tomorrow’s problem,” Ledger said, “I’ll not have to worry about anything else.”
“You know better than to believe he would be that kind,” Madame Persephone said. The next card was doubled, ripped in half lengthwise and taped together in a Frankenstein Arcana.
On one side, Death stood with a book in the hand he still had and a dead goat under one bony foot. On the other, reversed, the Lover leaned against the edge of the card like a wall, but his head turned away. The shadows of smoky wings stained the paper.
“The cards say that you already know the answer,” Madame Persephone said. She picked up the card and ripped it back into two halves. Then she put it on the table, a finger on each. “You have to choose. Love or Death.”
Ledger reached out and picked up both, pulling them from under her touch. “Both,” he said, his voice dry as it scratched out of his throat.
Madame Persephone looked surprised. Maybe. It passed quickly.
“It is your fortune,” she said. “But most people wouldn’t expect to have love and death.”
The ripped cards were warm under Ledger’s fingers and felt sooty, although they didn’t leave any marks on his hands. He shuffled them together and closed his fingers around them.
“Most people haven’t met my lover,” he said. “Thank you.”
She tilted her head to the side and looked… tired. Or older. Her face was hard to read. “Do you have your answers?”
“No,” Ledger said. Then he tightened his grip on the cards and felt the edges scratch at his palm. “Or maybe. I don’t know yet.”
It wassomething. He could feel it just out of reach, like something that had slipped through the cracks. It felt like when he’d been a teenager, desperately not wanting to think about the basement in his house, when he’d filled his head with everything butthat.Except no matter how much noise he made, it was always there, eating away at the drywall of his mind.
“Good luck, Mr. Conroy,” Madame Persephone said. She gathered her cards and tapped them back into a neat pile, her hands confident as she smoothed the stray card edges into a seamless block. “And please remember they’re still here.”
Ledger rubbed the back of his neck. “Do you know what that means?”
Madame Persephone shook her head as she slid the deck back into its box. “Like I said, it’s your fortune.”
He gave her a brief nod of thanks and let himself out.
The flurry and noise and salty-sweetstinkof the carnival hit Ledger all at once. He felt sick to his stomach and staggered, almost tripping over his own feet. The doorman grabbed his arm to prop him up.
“You OK?” he muttered out of the corner of his mouth. “You got a real one, huh?”
Ledger squeezed his eyes shut and reminded his knack that it had smelled this before. Fried milk. Salted caramel sauce. It helped. He straightened up and slid out of the doorman’s tattooed grip.
“I’m fine. It’s just warm in there.” He brushed his hair back from his face, forgetting the scraps of card, and dropped them. The two pieces of card fluttered toward the ground before Ledger grabbed them and tucked them back in his pocket. “Did you see where my boyfriend went?”
The doorman raised an eyebrow. “No.” Then he gave Ledger a friendly slap on the shoulder and turned back to the handful of waiting customers.
