The Cartomancer of the Border Town

In the border town of Marész, which the river and the wire had cut in two so long ago that the children on either side no longer remembered it had ever been one town, Zora the cartomancer laid cards for the desperate, and her cards always came true. This was not a thing she advertised; in Marész, where the Service watched everything and trusted nothing it could not predict, a woman whose predictions were never wrong was a woman who lived a few questions away from the cells. But the town knew. The town came to her by the back lane after dark, the smugglers and the bereaved and the mothers of conscripts, and laid their coins on her oilcloth, and asked her to look; and she looked, and she told them, and what she told them came to pass, every time, with the patient inevitability of water finding the sea.

She had hated the gift since she was a girl. People imagined that to see the future was to hold a kind of power, and it was the opposite; it was the most complete powerlessness she knew, for she had learned, in thirty years of laying the cards, the one bitter law that governed them: that she could see a fate, and she could not change it. She had tried. God knew she had tried, in the early years, before the trying broke her of trying — had warned a man his brother would betray him and watched the warning become the very quarrel that turned the brother; had told a girl to stay home on a certain night and watched the telling drive her, in fear of staying, out into the road where the thing waited. The cards did not show what might happen. They showed what would, and every motion Zora made to bend the line of it was already, she came to understand, a part of the line; the future she read was a future that had already taken her reading into account. She was not a prophet who could alter destinies. She was a witness to them, condemned to see the wreck before the ship had left the harbour, and to know that nothing she said could keep it off the rocks.

So she had made a hard peace with the gift. She read for others because they begged her to and because the coins kept her fed, and she told them the truth, gently where she could, because the truth was coming whether she softened it or not and a person ought at least to be allowed to meet it with their eyes open. She did not read for herself. That was the one rule she kept absolutely, in thirty years: never her own cards, never her own fate, because the one mercy left to a woman who cannot change what she foresees is not to foresee her own end, to be allowed to live, like everyone else, in the kindly fog of not-knowing what the next turn of the lane will bring.