Chuckling, Roland lets go. “No need to be so jumpy. What are you scared of?”
He leaves without waiting for an answer. Folly leans against the draped table, filled more with dread than relief. Roland’s gone for now, and he never pushes too far.
He just never stops.
Days like today, Folly wishes he had never reassured Roland that his golden eye was harmless. Folly was just so desperate for a job. The eye had lost him opportunities with superstitious employers before.
Two years later, Folly would rather be scary than pathetic.
Distant laughter jolts Folly from his self-pity. He smooths out his flowing blue-green robe, the pockets hanging with his handfuls of iron nails. Just to make him feel better. The robe isworn and often-mended, but the patches don’t show in the dim light. Folly buttons the cuffs tight around his wrists. Can’t let the baggy sleeves fall in the magic bowl.
The bowl was Folly’s idea, and it doesn’t look quite as magical as he’d hoped. Customers still seem more impressed with his eye. It’s just a ceramic bowl painted with nonsense symbols on the outside, filled with water and glass beads. Broken bottles, their edges smoothed out. The bowl’s bottom is glass too, and it sits on a stand that conceals a lantern. As the flame flickers, the light refracts and dances through the glass and water.
Folly settles into his chair and turns up the lantern. He’s just closed the grate as the first customers pass the cashier guard. The woman looks a few years older than Folly, and the boy must be six or seven. Mother and son, probably, with similar dark hair and round features, though Folly won’t say so until he’s certain. They could always be siblings, or aunt and nephew.
“Come closer, welcome,” Folly calls out, his spirits lifting. “Dare you learn your fortune from the Great Folarius?”
Not his real name, which is even stupider.
“Can we, Mama?” the boy asks, which answers that assumption.
“We already paid, so we’d better,” the woman says, clearly a skeptic. But even skeptical clients pause at their first glimpse of Folly’s golden eye.
He revels in this moment—when customers first see him as a wonder. Not a freak. When they step into the sphere of his performance.
Folly controls this space, with scarves and chicken bones and dried flowers rustling overhead, lanterns flickering in green and blue glass shades. A charlatan’s throne room. His eye gleams even brighter against the dark powder.
Not every customer falls under his spell. There are the cheerful, tipsy couples who just want to hear someone say they’llbe together forever and ever. The groups of friends competing to get the best fortune. Folly likes those customers too, and he’s happy to invent specific, ridiculous claims.
But right now, Folly faces a child and a skeptic. He lifts his hands over the bowl. “It’s a shame the guard insists on such mundane financial matters. The future is priceless. Come closer, now. Let the Great Folarius find your futures with his magical eye.”
The boy darts ahead. “Is your eye real?”
“Don’t touch anything,” the woman says, and the boy yanks his hands away from the table.
Folly winks. “Do you think my eye is real?”
Someday, when the boy is thirteen or sixteen and thinks he knows everything, he’ll remember getting swindled by the charlatan fortuneteller. But for now, the boy stares, entranced.
“I’ve seen the fates of kings and paupers,” Folly continues, watching the boy’s reactions. “Adventurous sailors and brilliant scholars. Talented bards and the great warriors those bards sing about.” There. The boy’s eyes light up. “Farmers and priests and boys just like you. Now, let’s see what you are.”
Folly waves his hand slowly above the bowl. Light ripples beneath his palm.
“The vision is bright.” Folly’s brow furrows, as if concentrating. “So bright I can hardly see past its glory. I see a sword…” He gasps. His eyes roll up, and his hand trembles above the water. Then he relaxes with a showy exhalation. “Your long years of training will pay off. You will be the greatest warrior of your kin, and the bards will sing of your deeds. Yet be cautious. Your greatest challenge will not be on the battlefield.”
Folly likes to end the warrior fortunes on a careful note. Just in case the kids take them too seriously.
“Do I slay a dragon?” the boy asks eagerly.
As far as Folly knows, dragons aren’t real. “Dragons are too magical. Many of them are also fortunetellers, and I can’t see another fortuneteller’s fate.”
“What about me?” the woman asks. At least she’s the amused sort of skeptic, not the angry kind. “Am I destined for great deeds too?”
Folly sits back. He doesn’t need the arm waving for this. “You’ve already accomplished great deeds, my lady. Whether or not anyone has noticed.” When she flinches slightly, Folly stares directly into her eyes. “You will accomplish many more if you pay more heed to those who notice than those who don’t.”
She looks stunned by the vague advice. Or by the intensity of Folly’s gaze. Either way, she’s quiet as she tugs her chattering son away.
The next customers follow quickly: a group of teenage girls, each more excited than the last. Then a drunk, happy pair of sisters. As the hours go by, Folly feels drunk on joy himself. On attention. On that rarest of magics—confidence. Whether entrancing believers or entertaining skeptics, Folly feels far less afraid and far more himself.
