“Well,” said Radegar, looking anywhere but right at my face, “not bad for your first try, I suppose. It ain’t like Parsnit runs in the blood. Not like luck, anyhow. Who knows? Maybe your daddy ain’t all he’s cracked up to be either. He whooped me solid when we first met, but that might have been a fluke. Regardless, it was nice to Orate a little bit. It was nice to see my words float up and become something, you know what I mean?”

I packed up my cards and put them back in the knapsack. I was so ashamed I could hardly bear it. Tally gave me a little pat on the back, like nice try, and that somehow made me feel even worse.

“Sorry,” I said. “I guess I messed it up pretty bad, huh?”

“Everyone’s got a first duel,” said Radegar. “Put her there.”

He reached his hand across the table and I shook it, even if his palm was hot and clammy. The Parsnit players all clapped. It was the end of the duel, and I’d blown it royally. I only hoped Pop wouldn’t hear of it, wherever he was.

Slowly everyone filed out of the room except for Miss Arabella. She walked over to me and Tally and sat beside us. She put her hand on my neck and it felt soft and cool, like a breeze on the hottest summer day. It put me at ease a little bit.

“Can I tell you a secret?” she said.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “Though secrets ain’t been a whole lot of help to me lately.”

“Would you like to know what Parsnit cards really do?” she said. “Why witches make them?”

“I sure would,” said Tally. “I been wondering that my whole life.”

“Parsnit is much older than this game here,” she said. “The cards are, anyway. They were made by witches and artists—who frankly aren’t all that different, if you want to know the truth about it—ages and ages ago. They were a means of telling a story.”

“Not to be rude,” I said, “but that ain’t hardly a secret. Everybody knows that. And witches gave the Parsnit cards to regular folks so they could have a taste of magic themselves, right?”

“It also gives witches a way to make money,” said Tally. “Err, not that you would need that.”

“All true, yes,” said Miss Arabella. “But that isn’t the point. These cards show people and places, images and symbols. They’re the stuff of dreams. So often a Parsnit player will use the cards to tell a story that’s really just her own story as she best sees it. She’ll tell the story of her dreams. It’s her own legend she’s spinning. Take care to remember that each legend is just one person’s truth in a whole bunch of other truths that whirl and swirl around each other. Sometimes the truths agree, and other times they don’t. Be careful not to take one single person’s truth as the final say in the matter.”