Disclaimer: As this is not the finished version the author reserves the right to change this and any following chapters in full or part; including but not limited to grammatical, editorial, stylistic, or plot-related changes. The author does not expect, however, for this version to differ vastly from the version that will be published in the near future.

That being said, The Toymaker’s Opera is an alternative-world steampunk adventure. It is a story about a poor fortuneteller, a living automaton, a mad Baron, and a city that dreams. It is a story about the price of friendship and happiness, about legacy and talent, blood and luck. But most of all, it is a story about the things that have no price.

The Toymaker’s Opera

Chapter Two – The Fortuneteller

Moira

 

In the haggard, cliffside city of the Sheer it was impossible to get something for nothing. Payment didn’t have to be in coin. Favors would do. Or trinkets. Opera stars and famous artisans paid with silk and satin, or the right word to the right ear. Men of means traded in gold, merchants sold secrets with one hand and goods with the other, the destitute dragged out tattered ribbons and shorn locks of hair to stack against their hunger; and all who could steered clear of the Verandi gypsies, who charged more or less by their own counting and gave away magic and dreams that couldn’t be measured by any scale.

Everything in the Sheer, they said, had a price. Sometimes it depended on the buyer. Sometimes a wicked deed done in years past could tip the charges further toward the breaking point. Sometimes, if you were lucky, what was requested would be barely missed. And if you were very lucky you could keep what was most precious to you, whether it was your pride, your sanity, your eldest child, or your life.

Moira Mim was unlucky.

The match flared, its close heat nipping at Moira’s fingers. She guided it inside her paper lantern, the careful motion borne from habit. One became two as the wick caught alight. Withdrawing the match, she licked her fingers and pinched it out. The flame died with an ashy hiss.

Moira turned and crossed her reading room; touching, taking stock. Two narrow end tables hemmed the room, one against the back wall and one under the round window where the lantern hung just high enough for those outside to see it. The roughly-lacquered surfaces made long valleys and ridges underneath her fingers. From a smooth ceramic bowl she lifted several amplifying stones—tiger’s eye, obsidian, malachite, amethyst, and clear quartz—and placed them in a curving pattern across the surface of the back end table. When the quartz piece clicked into place a line of lavender light appeared between them, as thin as dust. It wasn’t much, and she never should have let herself be duped into buying the malachite in the first place, but the stones had been a gift to herself when she had had the means and she’d be damned if she wasn’t going to get some use out of them now.

She reached down for the smudge stick of cedar, being unable to justify the full cost of sage when the cedar had been on sale. Her fingers scraped against the splintering bottom of the basket. Confused, Moira knelt and pulled the basket closer. She patted it all over once, then twice. Only a few sprigs, hardly wider than the edge of her nails, brushed up against her skin.

“Damn,” she muttered and rose, adding cedar to the ever-growing list of supplies she’d have to go without.

One small round table stood in the center of the room, a soft cloth spread over it. On this she placed the Sangrine, her cards. She shuffled them every night whether customers came or not but under her hands their power felt thin and washed away. With no one to read for they had gone quiet.

This part couldn’t be rushed. Moira took her seat at the table, across from the door, and began to shuffle. The suits passed her fingers like old friends, each touch a faint, yet familiar voice in her mind. Rivers, Mountains, Forests, Flames, Gods and Goddesses, she knew them all. As she worked them up and down and in and out again their magic began to change, like water and flour becoming dough, becoming bread. The golden dust around them became a glow, which became a line, which thickened into thread. Each card had a special meaning, and when she read the thread would connect them and show her the shape of what had been, what was, and what might be. When the magic at last rolled smooth beneath her hands she stopped, gathering them all into a stack once more.

She would shuffle again once a customer arrived, but now that the cards were awake it would not take quite as long. There was no point laying out a spread before a question was asked, after all.

A scuffing from outside her front door announced the arrival of a customer, a promising start to the night. Moira sat straight at once, hoping to appear fresh and personable, and not dulled by hunger. “Good evening,” she called cheerfully as the heavy oaken door squeaked on its hinges. “How may I–”

“You may start by addressing me properly,” drawled a cultured male voice. “Or I shall find someone else.”

Moira stifled the urge to let her annoyance show. She nodded deeply in the direction of the speaker. “My Lord, please accept my apology for not recognizing your station. If it pleases you to sit, we may begin.”

“Indeed,” the man said after a moment, sniffing. His fine leather soles hushed across the threadbare carpet as he looked about him. “Is this all?”

Underneath the table her fists clenched. She bowed her head, keenly aware that her parlor-turned-reading room was not the most impressive. It was bare and spartan, hardly able to compare to the cloth-draped drawing rooms and crystal-studded workshops of the more prosperous seers in Medtown. “The truth does not require a silken gown, my Lord,” she retorted, trying to sound as gracious as possible.

He crossed the parlor in three long strides and threw himself down into the chair across from her. “Barshon the younger,” he said by way of introduction.

Underneath her hands the Sangrine’s magic curled back on itself. Moira hushed her cards by picking them up and beginning to shuffle.

“I haven’t asked my question,” Barshon said, voice pinching into a frown.

Moira gave him her hardest, brightest smile. “What would my Lord like to ask?”

Barshon tossed his head, the motion sending sullen sparks cracking across her second sight. “My father has made a great fortune entertaining the crowds at Il Susurrus and he is welcome to it. By family tradition the eldest child is named the primary inheritor as long as he assumes our father’s trade, while us younger siblings are sent away to convent or military service, with only a minuscule amount of forward capital, and pressed into making their own fortunes.” He leaned forward, his grip tugging slightly at the tablecloth. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to die at the savage ‘mercy’ of some indoctrinated Calmeran soldier; do you understand me?”

“Perfectly.” Moira’s hands stretched and curved as she dovetailed her cards together. All of the young man’s anger and indignation funneled into the Sangrine, swirling in a narrowing cyclone. She rode the grooves made by its passage, allowing the golden thread of the cards’ magic to decide when they had been shuffled enough.

Family feuds were among the most normal questions Moira received, with the topic of inheritance rising up more often than not. Love–unrequited or returned–made up the bulk of her business, however. Young gentlemen and ladies swooning over impossible fantasies or seeking confirmation that a jealous plot would follow through with its desired result were common; rarer were those asking after a lover with whom they had parted ways, whether on good terms or bad. After affairs of the heart and family business she usually entertained merchants or prospective shopkeepers concerned about certain investments, young folk without direction or too many to choose from looking to narrow their choices, and wistful people from all walks of life who wondered what prosperity the future might hold.

At last, when she reached to separate the stack into piles again, she felt the golden thread pull taut. Moira replaced the cards as they had been and dealt a spread of three off the top.

The middle card came first. Moira flipped it and instantly felt her heart sink. Watery and indistinct, the rippling of a lake’s silver surface in her second sight announced the card as Reflection.

“Well?” Barshon asked after a moment of silence. “What does it mean?”

Moira swallowed. Though the rest of her deck had been set to the side the magic in it seethed and curled. She couldn’t tell a false fortune; the Sangrine simply wouldn’t let her. And that was half the problem of her poverty; after all who wanted to pay for something they didn’t want to hear?

“Reflection has many meanings,” Moira began, attempting to soften the blow she knew was coming. She tapped the card gently. “In this place it explains your struggle; you do not want to give up your independence simply based on your family’s precedent.”

The chair across from her squeaked as Barshon shifted. “It doesn’t look like that’s what it says.”

“In most cases Reflection symbolizes a surrender of will, but each card has…layers.” Like sounding knots on an anchor every card had a central meaning, but there was always more than what met the eye. If the most obvious message of a particular card didn’t fit Moira would travel down the line until she found one that did. After reading the Sangrine for so long, though, the correct nuance naturally floated to the surface.

The second card, The Harvest, was all too happy to add to her misery. “You don’t want to force matters within your family,” she said, reaching for the third and final card. Its flipped face revealed a stand of seven mountains with a peaceful valley in between that wavered in her second sight. Moira’s stomach sank to the floor.

“Yes, and?” Barshon snapped when she took too long in continuing. His fingers drummed on the edge of the table.

“The Seven of Mountains calls for patience and peace,” she said. “Only by adhering to that path will you be able to find the fortune you seek.”

Barshon snarled. “That is not what I am asking you.” He slammed his fist against the wood, making her teeth rattle. “I’m asking how best to dispose of my brother so that his position of eldest child should then be mine! I am not going to wait and I am not going to be a soldier and I have been to five seers already this fortnight and they have all. been. wrong.” With each word he pounded the table harder, shouting at her despite the small distance between them.

Moira snatched her cards from the spread at once and shunted them back into the deck. “And no wonder,” she threw back just as nastily, temper and pride breaking in the same breath. “No seer would tell you a fortune of death even for all the riches of the Citadel. I have given you the answer to your woe, whether you will have it or not.”

“Tell it again,” he pressed, chair scraping back as he stood to loom over her. “Tell it again and tell it right.”

If she had been a fire cat she would have blazed up just as brightly as he was shining now. Moira leapt to her feet, angling her face as accurately toward his voice as she could manage. The loss of the kind of reading he could afford was only slightly less painful than the thought of any further bad luck stacking up against her. After all, he had to give her something, or risk the same scales tipping contrary to his favor.

“Get out,” Moira demanded, pointing at the door.

The sound of velvet whispering across a brocade waistcoat announced that he was at least digging for her payment. “Take it,” he spat, “and we shall see if your rivals across the street are not quite as stupid as you.”

Heavy and final, her front door slammed behind the pompous lordling as he made his grand exit. Moira was glad to be rid of him. She felt across the table with shaking fingers, searching frantically until they encountered the unmistakable six-sided Srir coin that was often in use farther up the city. When she was satisfied that it was the only payment he had left she sat down again, tucking the silver piece into a secret pocket along the lining of her bodice.

Hot stinging tears spilled down her face. Moira scrubbed her cheeks dry and slowly began shuffling again, chewing over the previous reading even though there was nothing more she could do. She consoled herself with the knowledge that she had done her best under the circumstances, even though her empty stomach growled painfully in disagreement.

Four full sets of shuffling later, when her cards had finally consented to lie quiet and forget Barshon the younger, no other customers had come to her door. Moira waited. Time turned in the rain-drenched street outside, blowing the storm up and beyond the Sheer, to the mountains in the west. Piping music and shouts from the performers beneath her window announced that Medtown was returning to its usual rowdy festival atmosphere. Moira sat, empty hands on the table, blind eyes staring into the dark, sipping on tasteless thrice-steeped tea for lack of a proper supper, waiting for the customers who never came.

~~~

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