The Walahk shifted with impatience.
He picked up his blade and Rufio’s breath inhaled with a sharp hiss and her racing heart gained momentum anew. Her large eyes watched as he picked his nails with the deadly point, as it were a piece of grass. Silently the fortune-teller sent a prayer to all the gods she knew, simultaneously cussing her own reckless curiosity in chasing intriguing—dangerous—clientele.
Her fear was tempered by that same curiosity though—what was he thinking? The fortune-teller wished she knew more about that magic that lets one into other’s heads, which he spoke of. In a wobble of self-doubt, the fortune-teller wished fervently that she could divine dreams like Ferem, or Emry. No wonder Emry had an abundance of arrogance.
Here was Rufio, diligently clinging to her mother’s ways, trying to being herself closer to the memories. Eby'ln had been dead and gone for arcs now, why could Rufio not let her go?
She was startled, suddenly, by the introspective mood this foreigner had provoked in her, and the fortune-teller remembered herself. It was his thoughts and moods she was meant to be deciphering, not her own.
Rufio never meant to be a con. She believed in what she did. Wholeheartedly superstitious. Even if she had not the foreseeing gifts of her patrons, Rufio put her faith in the gods and goddesses, and in her cards and bones. Everything pulsed, she thought, everything had a heartbeat, even if no heart.
Like the way her father had described the Drykas webs to her one night. They glowed, they pulsed, though you cannot see it. This glow, pulse, vibration, attracted the right cards, or rippled into the way the bones would fall. Rufio read vibrations, and that did not require magic; only faith and insight. Rufio wanted to be a healer of the heart. So she gave readings to lift the depressed, soothe the anxious, give meaning to the lost, and guide the grief-stricken or heartbroken.
When Hansel sighed, Rufio knew the man did not find any of these things in her words. He needed no soothing, wanted none. "Make good. Tell me thing I know. Not god. Tell me thing I do not." His words made her smile, and she gestured in agreement with his huffing and his sighing. "Of course; you know where you have come from. The second card will tell you were you are." already known to you.
Patience she asked. “These will give us clues about the last card; the future.” She explained, knowing that clients sought that card eagerly. He waved the dagger and Rufio glanced at the blade dubiously, then reached and turned the second card.
“The fool.”
The fortune-teller felt a sardonic smile alight her freckles with amusement, agree. “Reversed like this, it means foolishness, risk-taking, recklessness.” Something shifted in Rufio and there was a matronly bit to her tone, “You have been brought here by your own folly way.” The fortune-teller started, clearly her tone surprised herself. The words already out her mouth, she hastily moved on to interpretation.
“The fool represents naivety too…” She mused, her frown giving away that she thought Hansel anything but naïve. Her ochre gaze rose to his scars and swept shyly away. Although, she reasoned, he does sit here in Jonas Pridesun horde. Keeping company with zealots who denounce all the gods that her people held dear.
That was foolish, she thought.
The Walahk had been found in the grasslands, half-dead, she had heard. The knives of his foe in his back, but his foe cut open and left for the buzzards on the grasses. Looking at the blade, Rufio recalled the strength in his arm, his ferocity, she blushed. He was a fearsome warrior. Fiercer than many Drykas she knew.
Who was the man that attacked him? Up on the open steppe a bandit would not dare an ambush. Was he a comrade? A fellow traveller?
Rufio sighed, as if she was impatient. Usually her readings sparked questions and questions in her clients, not in herself. She rolled her shoulders and put her waning confidence into her words.
“You have put your trust in people, and they have put knives in your back. You are here because you trusted someone, and they put a knife was in your back. Trust is a reckless thing to you, but now you must trust the Drykas.”
Her shoulders shifted up and down with a breath and she smiled with a happiness that seemed oddly misplaced.
“You have come from a dark torment, and have arrived to new beginnings.”
Her fingers drummed the cards in succession and she beamed.
“This card warns you not to take risks right now, but it says a good thing too. It advises you to embrace now; be spontaneous, be a fool sometimes.
It will set your spirit free.”
