It’s magic, real honest-to-God magic, that’s what I’m telling you.

Radegar tossed me his deck to shuffle and I gave him Pop’s. The cards had a weird energy to them, a fishy stink of swamp water and grit. They felt different than Pop’s did, made of coarser stuff. I wasn’t much good at shuffling, couldn’t do anything flashy like Pop, but I got the job done. We traded decks back and laid them on the stone table and it was decided that Radegar, being the one who issued the challenge and all, should draw the first card.

He flipped the Mountebank, first try. Radegar whistled real loud and all the house regulars took to chuckling. You could tell that was the card he wanted, the card he felt his heart most attached to.

But hold up a minute. I took a closer look at his card, and it didn’t seem a bit like any of the other Mountebank cards I’d ever seen. Sure the figure was there, a fellow in a top hat and suit, a little seedy-looking, hawking his wares and caught midgesture with a bottle of some sort, probably some miracle cure made out of old bathwater. But instead of being tall and lean with big owl eyes and thin cheeks, the Mountebank on this card was portly, red-faced, with a pair of muttonchops, big and bushy as Radegar’s. I remembered something Pop had said about how Parsnit cards bound themselves to a player, how they changed as he changed, how they came to be about him. You could almost hear the sweet lying words come tumbling right out of his mouth, you could feel the little tug of his lies begging you to buy, urging you on, pulling you toward this one little object that might change your life, that could open up worlds to you, that could make your pop love you for real and end all the curses on your blood and get you home safe and sound, that would make your life bearable forever.

Then I snapped out of it. Miss Arabella was smiling, and I knew this was a powerful Parsnit card indeed, truly one tied to Radegar’s own heart.

Radegar began to Orate. It went a little like this:

“Now welcome, ladies and gentlemen and other folk, to the most sad and lamentable tale of old Turnjack the Mountebank. A man persecuted beyond all others, pursued by ungrateful associates, hounded by unscrupulous lawyers, and dogged by impecunious masses . . .”

He droned on and on like that. Radegar wasn’t much of an Orator, and that was a fact. He could tell a good yarn, but he used too many words, he stumbled over himself, he kept distracting you from the card, from the story, from the heart of the man. That I knew very well. Even Miss Arabella had a hard time keeping track. I could see Turnjack the Mountebank quite well in my mind’s eye, I could see him wrangle his wares and argue with his wife, I could feel how wronged he felt by the world, how he felt there was no real place for him, but it didn’t break my heart any. Felt a bit to me like Turnjack deserved all he got.