It was some of the strangest imagery in the Tarot, which was saying something. But this card was even worse than the version I had back home, because it wasn’t from the modern Ryder-Waite deck. This was the far older Tarot of Marseilles, which had dialed the crazy up to eleven.

It made me smile, because people were always trying to attribute all kinds of meaning to the wheel riders. I’d heard everything from the dog guy being Anubis, the god of death, symbolizing rebirth, to the snake being Typhon, a monster who had tried to overthrow Zeus, symbolizing the dawn of a new order. Since Typhon had failed, I thought that theory was reaching, and it was one of the more halfway understandable ones.

I wondered what the theorists would make out of the imagery here. The Marseilles card still showed three riders, but this time they were… a skirt wearing monkey? A bat winged hell beast? A uniformed maybe rabbit? Or was that last one supposed to be a lion? I honestly couldn’t tell.

I also didn’t think it mattered. I’d always just assumed that it was three funky looking figures undergoing metamorphosis, which was what the card stood for: big change coming, for good or for bad. Good if read upright; bad if reversed.

So, what did it mean if it was found under a table?

On that, the card was silent.

A log popped loudly, and it seemed to shake Gertie out of her reverie. She looked at me. “Feeling better?”

“Yes.” I didn’t elaborate.

“Good. We need to take a trip.”

I glanced at the weather outside without enthusiasm. “Really? Where?”

“You tell me. Where did you dig up that bastard of a fey?”

Well, shit.

~~~

Half an hour later, instead of sitting down to a nice, hearty breakfast, I was shivering in a borrowed dress and a pashmina in the ruins of a Romanian castle.

It hardly deserved the term anymore, being just a pile of tumbled down stones on a windswept hillside, the whole covered by a thin layer of snow. There were vines and brown weeds scrawling over everything, and the only remnant of the great gate was a toothless arch, the fearsome portcullis now broken and mostly missing. I spied a few rusted and pitted teeth among the weeds, which the earth was busy reclaiming.

“This is where it happened?” Gertie didn’t look impressed.

“Well, it was a while ago,” I pointed out, because we were still in her era. Although even with that, the hillside was oddly bare. There didn’t appear to be enough ruins to account for the castle I’d seen. But maybe the locals had cannibalized them for their homes or churches.

After all, why carve out stones for yourself when you could just go pick them up?