Meg stared at the cards and realized two designs were missing. She rushed to the drawer where she’d kept the decks. The nature deck was still there in the back of the drawer. She pulled it out, removed the cards from their box, and shuffled them in with all the others scattered over the table.

Shuffled all of them in, including the cards with the drawings Jester had warned her to keep a secret.

After making a space at the top of the table, Meg closed her eyes and ran her hands lightly over the backs of the cards. Dozens of cards. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of combinations. Wasn’t that always true with prophecy? Thousands of learned images and sounds and smells still came down to the particular images and sounds and smells that answered the question the blood prophet was expected to answer.

She didn’t have a question, didn’t know why she was fiddling with the cards instead of sorting them back into their decks and getting on with her work. She just felt odd today and made a decision to see what she might see.

Three sets of three, she thought as she selected cards based on the severity of the pins-and-needles feeling that stabbed her hands, her legs, her chest. Three sets of three. Subject, action, result.

She opened her eyes and flipped over the first set of three—and realized the prickling along the right side of her jaw increased as each card was revealed.

Bison. Rifle. Tombstone—a thing that still existed in some parts of Thaisia from a time when cremation wasn’t required to conserve space in city burial grounds.

She flipped the next set of cards.

Wolf. Knife. Hooded figure with a scythe.

“No,” she whispered as she turned over the last set.

City skyline. A montage of Elemental forces—tornado, tidal wave, fire. And the last card...

Put them in with the nature cards and hope you never see any of them again. That’s what Jester had said. But there was one of those cards representing the result of something that was going to happen.

The prickling along her jaw became a buzz.

“Where?” Meg cried in frustration. “When? How will I know?”

“Arroo?” An idle, conversational query from Nathan, who was snoozing in the front room.

Her right hand buzzed. The index finger burned. Meg turned over the card beneath that finger.

A communication card—drawings of a telephone and a telegraph key.

Breathing hard, Meg looked at the phone on the counter.

“I’ll get a call.”

“Arroo?” No longer an idle query.

“It’s nothing.” Meg raised her voice enough to carry to Nathan. “I’m just talking to myself.”

That would stall him for a minute, maybe two. Then the watch Wolf would come into the sorting room to have a look around.

The prickling faded in her hands, in her jaw.