Archive of Our Own

The first one that stands out to her, a subtle thing, the smallest shift in sensation, is coarse like rope and Jester feels her heart clench. She doesn’t want to pull it, actually, because it hadn’t occurred to her until now that maybe, maybe she doesn’t want to know, maybe what she finds out isn’t going to be good at all.

Her fingers close on the card.

Jester isn’t sure that she has entire control of this anymore.

The card is placed onto the mat, and Jester blinks. Leans over it. Tarot don’t have obvious meanings, always, so maybe—maybe this isn’t so bad? She brushes her fingers over the filagree and examines the scene, the rather androgynous figure hanging by the foot from a gnarled tree. There’s something about the face, though, something familiar. Very familiar. Jester drags her fingers over it and sees—just for a moment—a flurry of images: Beau handing the knife of locking off to Nott and running back in for Fjord; Beau moving up to a blank-eyed Yasha; Beau stepping in front of Jester again, and again; Beau nodding to Yasha; Beau pushing Jester’s healing toward Fjord; Beau standing in front of an unfamiliar building with a tall redwood door, eyes staring, jaw clenched, hand shaking as she closes it into a fist and knocks.

The images fade, receding with the incense that billows out as Jester sighs. When she looks again, Jester sees only a man hanging from a tree and he wears a face that looks nothing like Beau’s.

Jester’s hand moves to the next card. She has enough time to think maybe this was a really bad idea to try alone before her fingertips close on another. This one fills her senses with the tang of iron, the sharp of a blade threatening to slice at her fingertips. She can’t drop it fast enough and it lands overlapping with the hanging man.

Nine of Swords.

‘I don’t know.’

What do you think it means?

‘Well. There’s nine swords so...maybe it just means us,’ she offers, a little hesitantly. Despite how funny it always is, the number isn’t really their name but she doesn’t think that it discludes it.

Perhaps. But the card isn’t just swords, Jester. Look again.

She does. The cards background has been painted a deep purple and red, like sunset. Standing upon a bridge is a young woman, or someone wearing a dress, and the nine swords stand four to each side of them, tips pointed down. The ninth hangs directly above the figures head, its tip dangerously close to piercing their scalp.

As Jester watches, the prying, curious incense drifts across the table. Cloaks the silvers and the candles and the bowls with their curled packets of incense slowly turning to so much ash, orange embers wandering along the curls and frills of long dried flowers. And there on the bridge, Jester sees Beau in a yellow dress. To her left, she sees the jagged, rusted edge of Skin Gouger, held in a big hand. She sees a winding road and red eyes black with blood and a glaive. She sees a rising tower, fractured halfway up its height like a broken blade, fragments shattering out from it, and upon its hilt at the very top is a familiar twelve-sided shape embedded like a shining jewel. And closest to Beau’s left, Jester sees a moustached man whose features are largely in the haze. He holds his sword tight in his arms, cradling it; the edges of it slice into soft fingers and he bleeds freely from the cuts, smiling all the while. To the right, Jester sees four bladed knights—the steel plated knight who had stood at Dwendal’s shoulder, gleaming armour and no eyes within the slit of the helmet. Then Dairon in their armour of beaded brocade, eyes closed. Too pale, and the sunset bleeds redder behind her. Next, the pale, dark-haired man in Ikithon’s research chamber, his smile a cruel slice across his face like a wound. And fourth, another faceless and helmeted knight whose shoulders are spiked in the cruel lines of the Kryn armour.

And above Beau’s head—no. Beau is holding the threatening sword now, her expression thoughtful and pained and stern. She holds her sword not by the hilt but by the blade and rivulets of red course down her arms, tracing the wired muscles and pooling into the crook of bent elbows. So much like her father. But unlike him, Jester knows Beau can see it. See the wounds, the injury, and holds it all the more tightly.

Well?

‘I don’t know,’ Jester whispers again. ‘But I don’t think it’s good.’

The Traveller’s hand moves over her shoulder in a comforting circle, a whisper of a touch. Keep going, he urges her.

‘This is not what I thought it would be like, this is really shitty,’ Jester announces, aiming for cranky. This is not how her first reading should have gone. It doesn’t quite hit cranky, though, because a deep sadness pulls it down. If this is real, if this is right, if Beau really is thinking all of this stuff, how come she didn’t know?

The next card feels different immediately. There is a weight to it that Jester cannot fathom, not that it resists being pulled exactly but like she can’t quite get a grip on it. Like trying to excavate something well and truly buried from the hard-packed ground and she has only a small fragment upon which to pull.

A naked woman. Wreathed, her and the card both, in leaves and flowers of such delicate and tender care in their painting that Jester feels the breath rush from her. There is something tender and beautiful and private about it, sacred really, and Jester feels her skin prickle all over.

The World, the Traveller whispers. The keeper of dreams, of plans, of hopes. What might your Beauregard be looking for, I wonder? Quickly now, pull the others, he tells her, and there is something gleaming, something golden in his voice, like joy like delight that sends Jester’s fingers dancing.

One, two, three cards.

And then her hands fold up the rest and set them aside and she realises that is it, the extent of the reading, the extent of the divination, once these cards are set and seen.

The three lay below the woman, the world, connected to her.

The Fool. That one Jester knows. Molly had called it The Jester once and when he had, Jester had planted her hands on the table and told him, delighted, ‘That’s my name!’ Molly had just laughed.

The High Priestess.

The King of Cups.

My my, how fascinating. The Traveller seems as absorbed in the reading as Jester is, fingers tracing different cards, and for a moment as the magic lingers and connects them, she can feel him doing it, as though she is in two places at once, as though she is a part of him and him her.

‘So you do know tarot,’ she accuses.

The Traveller chuckles. Maybe a little, he admits. What do you think they mean?

‘You’re a god, you tell me!’

That isn’t how this works, I’m afraid.

Jester pouts. Folds her arms on the edge of the table and drops her chin down onto them, staring forward at the tiered reading.

‘The Fool,’

The Jester, the Traveller murmurs, laughter on his tongue like an ember.

Jester rolls her eyes. ‘Tarot isn’t about obvious stuff,’ she tells him firmly. ‘The Fool, Molly told me about this one a lot. It’s all about new beginnings and faith and stuff.’ She moves on without touching it, though she feels the Traveller’s attention linger—on her or on the card she isn’t quite sure. She drags her fingers over the Priestess, and this one really does look like Beau—the blue draping robes look very similar to the monk robes, as though the painter based them on the Cobalt Soul originally—and she picks it up. ‘Secrets,’ she says, and the voice is her own but the words are not. ‘And insight and skill and wisdom.’

That certainly sounds like your Beauregard, the Traveller agrees. And the King?

She hadn’t gotten to the suit cards with Molly, isn’t so familiar with them, but as she examines the card, she can hear the water all around her and see the way the diamond cast light reflects off the endless expanse of blue, and feel the calm that comes with it. For a moment she is afraid that there is something beyond it, a gathering storm to threaten it, and without being touched the card almost seems to turn, but then it settles again and all is peaceful once more. The King isn’t Dwendal, and Jester wonders again who might have painted these cards. At first, the face belongs simply to some crowned man but when Jester blinks the curling mist from the waters surface has disguised him and when it parts Jester sees Dairon again. Hale and healthy, stern yet direct. Proud. Forceful as ever. She holds in one hand a scroll and in the other, a cup. And in the mirrored reflection of that face in the cup, Jester sees Beau. Serene and stern. Eyes of the clearest blue.

As quick as the incense smoke had risen and over taken Jester’s senses, it leaves her. She comes back to the empty room and the flat cards, painted prettily but largely common. Her thoughts swirl in her mind and refuse to settle, except for a moment when the Traveller rests his hand on her head and, with an apologetic smile, fades.

‘You’re not even going to stay and talk about it? I just divined for the first time and you leave? You motherfucker!’

She is left with his laughter and the cards, and Jester packs them up before anyone can come into the room—Nott with her questions, or Yasha to read, or Beau—and worries at her bottom lip, and at the new images that won’t leave her.