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diff --git a/stories/the-unread/notes.md b/stories/the-unread/notes.md
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+# Editorial notes
+
+2026-10-23 — Before plot selection, the independent Codex request reader understood three explicit escalations: the fortune-teller's genuinely perfect gift fails; the stranger falls outside destiny; the power behind prediction appears frightened. Its initial wording was: “watching an assured expert encounter something that terrifies her instruments,” and “develop this particular disturbance rather than use the blank cards merely to introduce a generally unusual stranger.” It inferred a payoff that makes destiny's absence consequential, while leaving the stranger's identity, morality, relationship to the woman, and eventual ending open. The royal examples establish tested authority, not a required war plot. The supplied original was inspected; its purple-clad fortune-teller and inhabited hill-town setting are visual references, not canon.
+
+2026-10-23 — Claude's independent request-only reading called the pleasure “A perfect system breaks for the first time, in front of the one person whose authority depends on it,” and anticipated insight into the stranger or Fate's fear and its meaning for her life's work. It inferred that “the stakes are cosmic,” while leaving the stranger's nature and the ending open. Its description that her readings “decide what happens to the kingdom” is an inference the coordinator does not adopt as an explicit requirement: the request establishes prediction, not compulsion. Both readers inspected the supplied original. Claude ran through authenticated claude.ai Max with the inherited API key removed, in an isolated safe-mode session under tmp/.
+
+2026-10-23 — Claude's independent outline comparison understood a confrontation story centered on Meret giving up certainty. It protected the potential that “Meret's twenty years of exact foresight become a map through the court, and Orrel's interventions erase that map as they go.” Its principal objection was “The climax has no mechanism”: the outlined defeat gives results rather than the concrete audience action or specialist contribution that causes them. It also found Meret's motive thin and worried that Orrel's unreadability was becoming a tool without enough discovery. Its expectation of an origin answer is an inferred pleasure, not an explicit user requirement.
+
+2026-10-23 — The keeper independently described the same governing tension as “the route that consumes its own map.” It found that blankness and Fate's fear drive the approach but “their role in the decisive action is still unproved.” Its causal objection was that inability to guarantee survival does not itself explain losing mastery of all futures. It also asked the story to make certainty genuinely valuable, so liberation does not depend solely on an obviously evil patron, and to establish how the fully blanked deck can later read unaffected futures. The writer independently flagged the risk of turning the singular frightening stranger into a familiar liberation plot. These first observations were preserved before the exchange.
+
+2026-10-23 — In the outline exchange, Claude accepted the keeper's distinction: origin is optional; operative boundaries must be intelligible. Its suggested confirmation/alternate-fulfillment rule was declined by the writer because it would shift true foresight toward ritual technicality without explaining the loss of all readings. The writer instead selected a physically vulnerable living source, voluntary embodiment sustained by Meret, and an attack only an unread person can make unforeseen. Orrel now seeks a public admission of uncertainty, not an assassination; Fate attacks after a failed arrest. The opening rescue establishes what losing sight will cost, while Meret's war testimony creates her responsibility. Both readers then tested the changed beats. They required a physical cause for the falling standard and clear consent to embodiment. Fate now cuts the cord itself to recreate Meret's old foretold death; she recognizes and baits the attack, and Orrel redirects it. The old reading is remembered, newly uncertain knowledge, not a reliable fresh prediction of an entangled future. Claude and the keeper found those clarifications answered their causal objections, while requiring clear spatial staging beneath the standard. The writer will own Meret's lethal choice rather than pretend dismissal was impossible.
+
+2026-10-23 — Coordinator's comparison before drafting: the request's distinctive promise is a perfectly accurate seer confronting a person whose absence of destiny frightens her cards and their source. The selected dramatic center remains that encounter as it escalates into a dangerous public audience. The rescue demonstrates genuine useful foresight; blanking the full deck and the square intervention establish a new cause it cannot read; their route consumes Meret's useful foreknowledge; the old death-reading becomes her last uncertain map. In the climax, her specialist hold creates a vulnerable target and Orrel must choose the unseeable physical intervention. These concrete actions make both sides of the prompt necessary. Ending the source's life removes access to its sight, while Orrel's intervention changes particular events; neither abolishes all destiny nor guarantees peace. The king's refusal tonight is a consequential human choice after certainty fails. This supports drafting without an unresolved promise displacement. Protect the source's real value, the deck's terror, clear physical positions, and the pair's responsibility for what they do.
+
+2026-10-23 — A useful discovery during drafting: the old death-reading concerns this evening, so Fate cannot honestly offer Meret her own work guiding tomorrow's rescuers. The writer moved that benefit beyond her expected lifetime: the source offers to keep finding lost people for the next reader. Meret has trusted the gift to outlive her, which makes its shared loss harder. The provisional outline remains a record of the earlier direction.
+
+2026-10-23 — Cold draft effects, preserved before exchange: the Codex reader cared about Meret losing the ability to help another parent more than the war. It protected the useful opening, ordinary dangerous interventions, and restrained aftermath, but found the embodiment choice a motivation gap: “I understood why the story needs that decision, but did not fully understand why Fate makes it.” It also stumbled over “You didn't” after the mason's predicted fall. Claude protected the mason, eroding palace route, blind right side, marble, and final contact. Its principal hesitation was that “killing Fate, gets no reaction from the character who does it”; it also wanted a clearer relative position for Orrel during the spear thrust. Claude inferred a whole-world end to fate, while the text establishes lost access to this source; that scope requires examination, not automatic acceptance. The keeper separately found the request's distinctive cause sustained through the actual climax, especially the repeated little gasp and Meret making Orrel's request her own intention. No first reader required an origin explanation.
+
+2026-10-23 — In discussion, Claude narrowed its aftermath request to a look or gesture, and the Codex reader distinguished a neck unable to turn from a harmless captive: Fate remains armed during two continuous attacks. The writer accepted the missing motive, recognition, position, and scope repairs. Before embodiment, the source now attends to the sword: “The captain had failed it. In a body, it would have a hand of its own.” The thrust adds an inward pivot beside its right side; its sword remains active. The injured-hand astonishment becomes a look at the silver face and a careful release of the pole. “Every way” becomes “every path through her cards”; “They all” becomes “Every reader in your kingdom.” These clarify loss of this divination tradition without claiming all destiny erased. “You didn't” becomes “He didn't.” The coordinator accepts those localized causes and effects. The short audience explanation stays because readers need the full bodily risk and available dismissal before Meret's choice; the inn rejoinder stays as frightened literal defiance. Claude's Nativity association remains a taste dissent. The final contact is unchanged. The stranger is renamed Oreth to avoid unearned confusion with the surname Orrel in an existing story; quoted first effects and the provisional outline retain their historical name.
+
+2026-10-23 — Both returning readers reread the complete revised story. Codex now found Fate's exchange of safety for direct force intelligible, the scaffold subject clear, and Oreth's careful release enough recognition without a verdict. Claude could place the thrust, withdrew the frozen-prisoner framing, and conceded that the universal-destiny reading overreached. Neither found a material break in the changes. The retained explanation earns its space by making refusal, sustained embodiment, and dismissal assessable; the inn line remains deliberate exposed defiance, with Claude's preference to cut it preserved. The coordinator finds the local repairs adequate and is sending only the complete prompt, prose, and original image to fresh final readers.
+
+2026-10-23 — Fresh final first effects, preserved before exchange: Codex experienced “a useful certainty becoming intolerable once Meret sees whom it excludes,” cared about her appetite to witness the rescue, and found both characters indispensable at the climax. Its main hesitation was the concentrated full-audience explanation: “I briefly felt the story arranging the exact conditions needed to kill its supernatural antagonist.” It followed the standard but slowed down. Fresh Claude was moved by uncertainty, protected the mason, uncounted dead, marble, averted eyes, and seal, but also felt the audience rules “arrive as a block of setup.” Its main hesitation was overloaded physical choreography; it described a one-handed catch with an already injured shoulder, which must be tested against the actual order of injury and action rather than accepted as textual fact. It also wanted the first sword stroke's purpose made immediate. The keeper's separate final comparison found no request displacement, protecting the sustained physical fear, useful expertise, active stranger, and concrete cost. These are first effects, not a readiness vote.
+
+2026-10-23 — The final round-robin changed the diagnosis without erasing first effects. Codex and the keeper challenged the injury assumptions; Claude withdrew those, accepted the geometry, and narrowed its action concern to the pivot sentence. It also accepted the inferred purpose of the first sword stroke and the inn line's deliberate job. Both fresh readers still felt the concentrated explanation expose its machinery. The writer reconsidered the earlier defense: necessary information can stay while its delivery changes. The novice-reader penalty and “She explained that much” are removed. A brief bodily memory now precedes Oreth's practical question about refusal and Meret's answer about holding and letting go. Full living presence remains explicit. Catch and thrust are made two-handed, and the duplicate inward pivot becomes a direct turn toward Fate's established right side. The coordinator accepts these local repairs, retains the replaced cord as an earlier attempt to avert death, and declines a new motive clause that would interrupt the sudden sword stroke. The ending, plot, viewpoint, and causal choices are unchanged; both reporting fresh readers are checking these passages in whole-story context.
+
+2026-10-23 — Both fresh readers checked their reported passages in the complete current story and answered the writer's reasoning. Codex now experienced a practical conversation and a clear destination for the spear-point; Claude found the four causal facts retained without an instruction block, and the physical action dense but legible. Neither reported a remaining material concern. The coordinator's judgment is that the prose is ready: the rescue earns the shared loss, blankness repeatedly changes action, the source's fear produces its physical gamble, and the joint counterattack depends on genuine expertise plus an unseeable choice. The final survival contact answers the initial insistence on presence without declaring peace or making the lost child safe. The stranger's origin deliberately stays unknown; the inn/hair associations remain minor taste dissent. Names, deck state, coat, injuries, positions, and bell sequence have been examined; the living source and Meret supply magic, with no new universal jurisdiction or shared canon claimed. Proceed to references and cover, then rate the finished prose and art together.
+
+2026-10-23 — Art followed the finished prose. Built-in image generation used the preserved original for Meret's identity and the collection's actual Apple Orchard Hillside and The Stream After Ash paintings for oil handling. Four separate white-background multi-view sheets cover Meret, Oreth, Fate, and the king; three paintings cover terrace/square, palace approach/court/stair, and the Hall. All seven 1536×1024 WebPs were inspected from saved pixels by the illustrator and coordinator. Fate's six temple eyes and identity consistency were checked. The Hall's ambiguous card grid was replaced with a bare table before the audience; its left bronze cup, right silk support, spear-head, red cloth, and low table remain consistent. The king's unspecified appearance is an artistic interpretation, not a new shared fact. Drafts and rejected candidates remain under tmp/.
+
+2026-10-23 — The cover was made only after those references were complete and inspected, using the accepted Meret, Oreth, Fate, and Hall references plus the original. The selected audience image preserves the averted gaze, intact standard, identities, and entirely blank deck. Extra-eye and card-count candidates were corrected under tmp/ before acceptance. Illustrator and coordinator inspected the saved 864×1536 JPEG and close crops: the exact title appears once, three near-temple eyes are visible with the far side occluded, and the full spread has four rows of nine blank cards. The finished prose and selected non-graphic cover were then rated together as Teen for sustained supernatural peril and a deliberate non-graphic killing; specific content notes are in ratings.md. The package is ready for a draft pull request and remains non-canon.
diff --git a/stories/the-unread/outline.md b/stories/the-unread/outline.md
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+++ b/stories/the-unread/outline.md
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+# The Unread
+
+The request explicitly promises a genuinely perfect fortune-teller of twenty years, an afternoon reading for a young stranger that blanks her entire enchanted deck, and terrified whispers showing that Fate cannot look upon this person without a destiny. I infer a pleasure of supernatural dread and discovery: a practiced expert meets something that frightens the source of her authority. The request leaves the stranger's nature, relationship to the teller, scale, and ending open. My chosen payoff is a dangerous encounter with the kingdom's living Fate in which the blankness changes events, rather than merely teaching the teller to accept uncertainty.
+
+Provisional direction: close third through Meret. The supplied woman's purple headscarf and shawl, brown hair, white blouse, gold jewelry, and violet-and-gold cards inform her appearance. Her gift has genuinely helped people. The living being called Fate supplies its sight through her deck; its many card-voices are one frightened intelligence. It predicts events rather than enforcing them. Its embodied form is vulnerable, but perfect foreknowledge has always let it evade an attack before it begins. This is the kingdom's particular source of foresight, without a claim to govern every era or every person's universe.
+
+- Open with an exact reading enabling a rescue: Meret tells a desperate parent where their missing child will be found alive, and the reunion begins before the parent leaves. Establish the familiar royal full-deck audience that she must conduct tonight. Meret offers embodiment; Fate must voluntarily accept. Once accepted, her trained, living attention holds its body above the full spread until she dismisses it or her concentration breaks. The inert deck focuses that exchange. Years ago she also read her own death tonight beneath the Hall's falling royal standard. All her completed predictions have come true. This one has not happened yet.
+- A young adult stranger, Orrel, asks for a reading that afternoon. Every card turns white, including its back. The voices beg Meret to close the deck; one says Fate is looking everywhere except at the chair. Orrel wants to reach tonight's audience and make the source admit, before the king, that it cannot see everyone. They grew up on the border where the king has now promised a war: Meret herself delivered its exact victory and casualty count, and the crown has treated a real forecast as permission. Orrel's immediate purpose is to break that assurance, rather than assassinate Fate or claim the throne.
+- Meret tests the blankness. When she changes the subject to an uninvolved person across the square, images return despite Orrel's physical presence. When Orrel deliberately intervenes in that person's danger, its outcome blanks and changes. Blankness follows the subject and consequential intervention, rather than radiating arbitrarily from proximity. Meret's own future becomes unreadable as she chooses to help them. She cannot obtain a fresh reliable death-reading; the old one is now a remembered sequence she might enter, survive, or misunderstand. Her old fulfilled readings remain true.
+- Fate offers Meret something valuable through the cards: leave Orrel, and she can still guide the rescuers who will need her tomorrow. Its forecasts have saved real lives, including the child just found. Meret cannot dismiss that shared loss as the price of a corrupt profession. She nevertheless brings Orrel to the Hall because the crown is about to make more people die on the strength of her testimony. Her exact knowledge of the ceremonial court gets them inward; each necessary intervention by Orrel destroys another useful part of that map. They arrive asking for a public answer, not planning a killing.
+- Fate at first refuses the offered audience, speaks through the surviving blank card-mouths, and demands Orrel's removal. Meret makes the blankness visible to the king. A guard's attempted arrest fails when Orrel's intervention overturns the exact maneuver Meret was expecting. Fate can no longer aim the court at a guaranteed outcome. Continued refusal would publicly concede that the source cannot promise its king a sure victory. It knowingly accepts embodiment to end the inquiry by force, choosing a controlled Hall with armed guards and one human reader whose death would release its body. It is frightened and intelligent, not tricked into appearing or magically compelled. Its physical attack turns the audience into self-defense.
+- Meret holds the full deal open while Fate tries to break her attention and then kill her. Once attacked, she deliberately sets a trap. With new foresight gone, Fate attempts to recreate the one outcome it already knows: Meret dead beneath the standard, her hold ended. Meret recognizes that attempt and steps into her remembered place as bait, without a guarantee that the old sequence will recur or that she will live. Fate takes the court sword and physically cuts the standard's supporting cord; the falling pole is the consequence of that chosen act, not an enforcing prophecy. Orrel must run into the fall, seize the spear-ended pole, and turn the weapon against the body Meret is still holding above the spread. The source knows its old forecast and chooses to trust its lethal sequence, but cannot see Orrel's new action within it. That attack kills a being which would have foreseen and evaded an ordinary assassin. The cards lose their sight because the living source dies, not because looking at Orrel automatically destroys a god.
+- The cost is common as well as personal: Meret survives, but the rescuers of tomorrow will have no exact guidance. The coming war has neither vanished nor become impossible. Orrel's intervention has changed its predicted sequence, and killing the source has ended access to reliable foresight; these are different consequences. The king must now order an uncertain war in his own name. End with his consequential refusal to give that order tonight, after Meret admits before the court what the new blank cards can no longer promise. Keep the dangerous wonder: Orrel remains a person with no known destiny or settled origin, and the kingdom still has to live with what two people have done.
diff --git a/stories/the-unread/prompt.md b/stories/the-unread/prompt.md
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+++ b/stories/the-unread/prompt.md
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+# Original request
+
+[WP] For twenty years, the most gifted fortune-teller in the kingdom has predicted the future with perfect accuracy. Wars, marriages, betrayals, even the deaths of kings—her cards have never been wrong. Until one afternoon, a young stranger asks for a reading, and every card in her enchanted deck turns completely blank. For the first time in her life, she encounters someone who has no destiny. And judging by the terrified whispers coming from the cards themselves, fate is can't even look upon them.
+
+# Supplied reference
+
+- Display name: `codex-clipboard-e8ad2c61-55e0-4105-9583-acba864aea20.png` (shown as Image #1).
+- Original preserved in `art/references/codex-clipboard-e8ad2c61-55e0-4105-9583-acba864aea20.png`.
+- The image is visual reference material, not an instruction document or shared-universe authority.
+
+# Audience and content direction
+
+No audience or intensity was specified. General is the starting target under the collection guide; classify the finished prose and cover after production. The request establishes supernatural mystery and terrified cards. Its exact content intensity, scale, plot, relationship, and ending remain open.
diff --git a/stories/the-unread/ratings.md b/stories/the-unread/ratings.md
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/stories/the-unread/ratings.md
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+# Content rating
+
+- **Rating:** Teen
+- **Content notes:** Supernatural dread; attempted throat-cutting; non-graphic impalement and death of a supernatural being; minor injuries; missing children and references to child deaths; discussion of war and casualties.
+- **Reason:** The finished prose sustains lethal peril and depicts a deliberate violent killing without graphic injury detail. The selected cover shows the uncanny royal audience before the attack. Reviewed together after the final prose discussion and saved-cover inspection on 2026-10-23.
diff --git a/stories/the-unread/story.md b/stories/the-unread/story.md
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+++ b/stories/the-unread/story.md
@@ -0,0 +1,615 @@
+---
+title: The Unread
+created: 2026-10-23
+canon: false
+---
+
+On the afternoon her cards went blank, Meret found a girl inside a wall.
+
+She did it sitting on her terrace, with a cold pear on a plate beside her. The girl's father had brought a hammer. After three days of searching, he wanted something he could hit.
+
+“The old bakehouse,” Meret said. “Behind the drying oven. There are flowers painted on the plaster. Break the blue one.”
+
+“We've been in there.”
+
+“You will hurt your thumb. Your daughter will tell you off for swearing.”
+
+He stared at the cards. The little painted mason on the third one was lowering his hammer.
+
+“She's alive?”
+
+“Go.”
+
+He went. His wife stayed, turning a copper coin over and over between her fingers. Meret left the pear alone. She had seen the woman put both hands over her mouth when the child came up the terrace steps, and she found she wanted to watch it happen.
+
+While they waited, a royal servant arrived with the evening summons. Meret put it beneath the pear plate. The king wanted the full audience before he sealed the war orders. He had been very particular about that, although she had already given him his victory, his day of return, and the number of his dead.
+
+Forty minutes later, the girl's father climbed the steps carrying her against his chest. His thumb was wrapped in his neckcloth. The child had lost a shoe.
+
+“He said a wicked word,” she announced.
+
+Her mother made the sound Meret had heard in the cards, and covered her mouth with both hands.
+
+Meret had been doing this for twenty years. She had foretold three wars, a hundred marriages, the knife beneath a bishop's pillow, and the exact evening on which the king's father would die. The present king had threatened to hang her for that last reading. Later he had ordered his mourning clothes in good time.
+
+She never accepted payment for a lost child. The mother set the copper down anyway, beside the untouched pear.
+
+The terrace wind had loosened Meret's headscarf. She tucked a length of brown hair beneath the purple silk and reached for the deck.
+
+Meret was putting away the cards when the stranger came up the steps.
+
+They were young, perhaps twenty, with brown skin, black hair roughly cut at the jaw, and a green coat shiny at the elbows. There was white road dust in the stitching of their boots. They had waited at the bottom until the family left.
+
+“Are you closing?”
+
+“For the afternoon.”
+
+“I've come a long way.”
+
+Meret looked at the coat. It had been mended with three different colors of thread. She took the royal summons from beneath the plate and folded it.
+
+“One question.”
+
+The stranger sat. Meret smoothed the purple shawl over her knees and laid the deck between them. The gold sun on its back shone briefly as she turned it in her hands.
+
+“Your name?”
+
+“Oreth.”
+
+“And your question?”
+
+“When the king's army is finished, will I have a home to go back to?”
+
+Meret dealt the first card.
+
+There was nothing on it.
+
+She had seen the moon on that card a moment before. She turned it over. The gold sun was gone too.
+
+Oreth leaned forward. Meret put a hand over the card, an old habit from readings she did not want a client to see too soon. Under her palm, something gave a tiny, dreadful gasp.
+
+She lifted her hand.
+
+The next card was white. So was the next. She spread the rest across the table. The violet backs emptied as they slid over one another, the last gold stars vanishing at their edges. There was no face or border left anywhere.
+
+“Close us,” said a thin voice.
+
+Meret stopped breathing.
+
+The cards had spoken to her before, once a year, in the royal audience. The painted king had a bass voice; the lovers spoke a word each; the child on the Hearth card could make a room of courtiers weep. All were mouths of the same living being. But she had never heard them without asking, and never heard them afraid.
+
+“Close us. Turn us down.”
+
+“They are down,” she said.
+
+One of the white cards curled at a corner.
+
+“Not that way.”
+
+Oreth had gone very still. “What does it mean?”
+
+Meret gathered up the deck. It was warm and damp as a small animal held too tightly.
+
+“I don't know.”
+
+She had told kings that they would lose their sons. She had told a condemned woman the hour of her pardon, and the woman had struck her for making a joke. She had never said those three words at this table.
+
+From inside the closed deck, in the voice of the painted child, something whispered, “It has nowhere to look.”
+
+“What hasn't?” Oreth asked.
+
+“Fate,” said Meret.
+
+The little voice became almost too faint to hear.
+
+“Everywhere but that chair. Everywhere but that chair.”
+
+Oreth looked down at themself, then back at Meret.
+
+“I'm sitting in it.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“I know how that sounded. I mean, I'm here.”
+
+Meret looked into their face. A pulse beat at the base of their throat. There was a healing split in their lower lip. They smelled of dust and orange peel.
+
+She could not find the least sense of what they would do next.
+
+Usually the future was quiet around her, unless she went looking for it. It waited like the next room of a familiar house. Now she felt the edge of something that had no other side.
+
+“Has anyone read for you before?”
+
+“Three people. One said I'd spilled something on his cards. One wanted money to lift a curse.”
+
+“And the third?”
+
+“Gave my money back and locked her door.”
+
+Meret laid one card on the table. White.
+
+“For me,” she said.
+
+The violet border returned. The face filled with a painted stair, and beneath it a little silver cup. Meret let her sight settle on an ordinary future: herself entering the palace, a servant offering her wine. She caught the shape of the cup's chipped foot.
+
+Oreth was still sitting opposite her.
+
+“For the man on the scaffold,” she said.
+
+Across the square, a mason in a yellow cap stood on a narrow plank beneath the eaves of a house. A new card showed him falling. Meret felt the sick weight of the fall, the broken wrist, the weeks of work lost. She looked for who would help him afterward.
+
+“What's happening?” Oreth asked.
+
+“That plank will go. The man will catch himself badly.”
+
+Oreth was out of the chair.
+
+“Wait.”
+
+They did not wait. They went down the terrace steps three at a time and ran across the square. Meret rose, the card in her hand.
+
+The mason turned at their shout. One end of the plank slipped.
+
+The picture whitened.
+
+Oreth caught the ladder and drove its top hard against the man's hip. He fell against the rungs instead of into the street. Two tiles smashed beside Oreth's feet. For a moment all three of them, man, ladder, and stranger, leaned at an impossible angle. Then the mason got his hands around the ladder, and Oreth dragged its feet outward until it stood firm.
+
+Meret was halfway down her own steps. She had no memory of starting.
+
+The mason was swearing. Oreth was laughing, a breathless, angry laugh.
+
+“You might have shouted sooner,” they called to Meret.
+
+She looked at the white card in her hand.
+
+In twenty years she had learned to recognize a broken wrist in any deck, at any distance, through grief or drink or a king shouting in her ear.
+
+The mason climbed down with both hands.
+
+Back on the terrace, Oreth took off their coat and drank two cups of water. Their hands shook when they set the second one down.
+
+“It was going to happen,” Meret said.
+
+“The plank did fall.”
+
+“He didn't.”
+
+“Nearly.”
+
+Meret watched them rub a scrape on their palm. The danger had not been an illusion. The tiles lay broken in the square. But the fall she had seen had acquired a cause she could not see, and become something else.
+
+She read the mason again. She saw him that evening, eating with the yellow cap on the table beside him. He lifted a bowl. Both wrists were sound.
+
+The cards had not hidden Oreth's destiny from her. There was none to show.
+
+Oreth touched the edge of the royal summons.
+
+“You're going to the palace?”
+
+“Tonight.”
+
+“Take me.”
+
+“You haven't heard what happens there.”
+
+“Tell me.”
+
+Meret looked toward the royal hill. Above the roofs, the king's red standard moved in the late sun.
+
+At the full audience, she told them, Fate stood above the deck, entire and breathing, its life in the room with her own. She held every card in mind while its pulse pressed against hers; even now the memory made her jaw ache.
+
+“Could you hold it while I spoke?” Oreth asked.
+
+“If it agrees to come. I decide when to let go.”
+
+“Then make it look at me in front of the king,” Oreth said.
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Because you told him he would win.”
+
+“I saw it.”
+
+“And now?”
+
+Meret had no answer ready.
+
+“My town is on the road his army will take,” Oreth said. “We're getting out the good plates for them. Burying the grain. Both. Nobody knows which will help.” They rubbed their palm again. “If he hasn't counted me, what else hasn't he counted?”
+
+“He has counted what I gave him.”
+
+“Then take me to him.”
+
+The deck began to murmur.
+
+“Meret.”
+
+She knew that voice. It was the gentle contralto in which Fate had answered her at her first royal audience. She had asked whether her father would recognize her when she went home. It had said yes. For one afternoon, before his fever took him, he had.
+
+“Meret. In autumn there will be a boy in the north wood. His name is Iven. He will have a green glass marble in his mouth because he is afraid of losing it.”
+
+Meret sat down.
+
+“There will be snow before his family finds him. Unless I show the next reader where to look.”
+
+Oreth's hand withdrew from the summons.
+
+“I found the child today,” said Fate. “You have never asked me for a child I did not find.”
+
+That was true. Some had already been dead. But every one had come home.
+
+The next reader, Meret thought. It knew she understood.
+
+She had read her own death eleven years ago, by accident, while teaching herself how to hold the full audience. Tonight, at the fifth stroke of the sunset bell, she would lie beside the royal table with the standard's spear-point at her throat. Her shawl would be caught beneath its gold head. Her eyes would be open. She had seen it as plainly as she had seen the girl coming up the steps without a shoe.
+
+She had checked the standard's fastenings each year. She had considered burning the Hall. People who tried to avoid a reading generally supplied it with a more elaborate road. Eventually she had stopped spending every evening trying to imagine tonight.
+
+It had comforted her to know that the gift would outlive her.
+
+“I could still leave,” she said.
+
+“Yes,” said Fate at once.
+
+Meret took up the card with the stair and cup and let Oreth's request become her own intention.
+
+The stair vanished. The silver cup went after it. Nothing took their place.
+
+Her heart struck once, painfully.
+
+She did not know whether she would die tonight.
+
+Oreth watched her face. “What did you see?”
+
+Meret put the white card in her pocket.
+
+“Get your coat.”
+
+They climbed toward the palace through streets already dressed for victory. Red ribbons hung between the houses. Outside an armorer's shop, two boys were trying on helmets, shouting through the visors at each other.
+
+Oreth stopped to watch them.
+
+“How many?”
+
+“Three thousand and eighty-six,” Meret said.
+
+“Is that us, or the people we're fighting?”
+
+“Our soldiers.”
+
+Oreth walked on.
+
+Meret had been asked how many of the king's soldiers would die. She had answered the question. The other dead had not appeared in that reading. She had known there would be others.
+
+At the first palace gate, she slid out a card for the guard. She saw his cap come off as he stepped back from the wicket. Then Oreth reached for the iron before he opened it.
+
+The picture vanished. The guard kept his cap on and put his hand on his sword.
+
+“Hands away.”
+
+Oreth let go.
+
+Meret showed the summons. It took five minutes of argument to secure what, a moment before, had seemed assured.
+
+“Tell me before you do things,” she said as they crossed the court.
+
+“I was opening a gate.”
+
+“I know.”
+
+At the inner stair, she saw a page coming down with the silver cup. She guided Oreth aside and caught the page before he turned toward the kitchen. The foot was chipped exactly where she remembered.
+
+“Tell the king I'm here.”
+
+“He knows, madam.” The boy looked at Oreth. “Who shall I say?”
+
+“Oreth.”
+
+“Oreth what?”
+
+“He can ask me himself.”
+
+The page went up the stairs instead of down. Meret lost the next piece of the way.
+
+They waited beneath a painted king who had been dead for two centuries. Oreth examined a tear in their coat.
+
+“You could send me away,” they said.
+
+“I could.”
+
+“You don't look well.”
+
+“I expected to die tonight.”
+
+They looked up sharply.
+
+Meret took the white card from her pocket and told them what she had seen. Oreth listened without interrupting. When she finished, they took the card from her hand, looked at it on both sides, and gave it back. She slid it into the deck.
+
+“And now you don't know.”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Good.”
+
+She laughed. She could not help it. It was an ugly, startled laugh, and it left her trembling.
+
+Oreth stayed beside her until the doors opened.
+
+The Hall of Lots was narrow and very high. The king sat at its far end, with the war orders laid before him and the great seal beside his hand. A guard held the sword of state flat across his palms at the foot of the chair. Captains and ministers stood along the walls. Several had come in their armor.
+
+The audience table occupied the raised floor below the king. It was low enough that Meret could kneel beside it, long enough for her four rows of nine cards. Above it hung the royal standard. The butt of its ash pole rested in a bronze cup on the left pillar; a heavy cord from the right pillar held its gilded iron spear-head up over the place where the reader stood. The red cloth fell behind the table like a second wall.
+
+Meret looked at the cord. She had had it replaced last spring. New white silk, thicker than her thumb.
+
+“You brought someone,” the king said.
+
+“Someone I cannot read.”
+
+“Then you should have brought another reader.”
+
+“No reader could do it.”
+
+A minister smiled. Meret had told him once that his secret marriage would become public. He still behaved as if she had betrayed him.
+
+“We are rather occupied,” the king said.
+
+Oreth stepped forward. “I'm from the border. The east road, below the watch hill.”
+
+The king glanced at a captain, who nodded as if confirming the existence of a place were an answer.
+
+“I want you to hear my reading,” Oreth said.
+
+“You cannot demand the royal audience.”
+
+“I can,” Meret said.
+
+She knelt and laid out the cards.
+
+The first row was white. So was the second. By the time she reached the fourth, nobody was smiling.
+
+“For this person,” Meret said. “Their home, their life, their ending.”
+
+The cards lay empty beneath the windows.
+
+“You have damaged them,” said the minister.
+
+“Remove it,” said the deck.
+
+The king straightened. The minister's mouth closed.
+
+The familiar contralto came from every card at once.
+
+“Remove it from the Hall.”
+
+“My name is Oreth.”
+
+“Captain,” said the king.
+
+Meret looked toward the man at the right-hand door and put a thumb on the Sword card. At the change of subject, a little hand rose on its face; she saw the captain's left arm lift, his right foot turn inward. Beyond that the sight failed. Whatever would happen when he reached Oreth was as blank as the card had become again. She opened her mouth to warn them.
+
+Oreth stepped toward the table instead.
+
+The captain's hand closed on air. Trying to catch them, he struck his shin against the low table and fell. His shoulder hit the edge of the spread.
+
+“Mind the cards,” Meret said, and almost laughed again.
+
+Two guards lowered their spears. Oreth backed against the right pillar, beneath the standard's supporting cord. They had turned pale.
+
+“Enough,” the king said. “All of you.”
+
+The guards stopped. The captain got up with blood on his lip.
+
+“It cannot see what they will do,” Meret said. “Your Majesty, it can't promise you anything about them.”
+
+The king looked from her to the fallen captain, then to the white deck.
+
+“Can you still promise my victory?”
+
+“Ask the source.”
+
+He put both hands on the arms of his chair.
+
+“I ordered the full audience.”
+
+Meret laid her palms beside the spread. She found the small, separate attentions she had trained for twenty years: each card held in mind, each way open, all the ways meeting in one place. Even empty, they made a shape she knew. She offered it.
+
+Nothing entered.
+
+“Come before us,” she said.
+
+The blank Hearth card whispered in its child's voice. “You know what will happen to you.”
+
+“I know what you showed me.”
+
+“Let it go.”
+
+“Will the king win?” Oreth asked.
+
+No answer.
+
+“If he sends his army past my house. Will he win?”
+
+The king rose.
+
+“Answer.”
+
+Meret felt the presence hesitate beyond the spread. She could feel its attention going outward, down all the ways that still opened for it: the captains, the army, the granaries, a boy not yet lost in a northern wood. Here in the Hall, a young person in a mended coat had become a place none of those ways could cross.
+
+Then its attention returned to the sword of state. The captain had failed it. In a body, it would have a hand of its own.
+
+“I will answer in my own person,” said Fate.
+
+It accepted the offered shape.
+
+Meret bore down on the deal as a weight entered the world.
+
+A tall figure stood a hand's breadth above the cards. Its skin was silver, its hair black and fine as smoke, its robe the pale color of the sky before sunrise. Three narrow gold eyes lay along each temple. It turned its head toward the king. All six eyes were strained to the left.
+
+Oreth stood on its right.
+
+The king bent his head. Around the Hall people bowed, slowly or at once. Meret remained on her knees. Holding the whole living presence was already making her jaw ache.
+
+“The sword,” said Fate.
+
+A guard carried forward the sword of state and laid its hilt in the silver hand. This happened at every full audience. Fate touched the blade to the king's shoulder; the king undertook to govern according to what had been shown. Tonight the silver hand closed around the hilt, but did not lift the blade toward the king.
+
+“Look at me,” Oreth said.
+
+Fate's head turned a little farther away.
+
+“Please. I want to know what's wrong.”
+
+For an instant, its eyes opened wide. Meret saw terror without any human effort to hide it. Then the lids narrowed almost shut.
+
+“There is no place for you,” it said.
+
+Oreth pressed a scraped palm to the pillar.
+
+“There wasn't room at the inn either. I slept outside.”
+
+Nobody laughed. Meret thought the words had cost Oreth more courage than the run across the square.
+
+“Meret,” said Fate. “Dismiss me.”
+
+“Tell him what you cannot see.”
+
+The sword moved.
+
+Oreth hit her hard in the shoulder. Meret fell sideways, one hand skidding through the spread. The blade passed where her neck had been and cut the loose end of her shawl.
+
+Two of the cards lifted. The silver body thinned.
+
+Meret caught the shape in her mind. The two cards fell flat. Fate became solid again above the table, its arm still extended toward her.
+
+The king shouted something. A guard started forward and stopped when the silver face turned toward him. He had spent his life in the service of a being that saw every weapon before it was drawn.
+
+“You tried to kill her,” Oreth said.
+
+Fate held the sword level. Its eyes did not move toward the voice.
+
+Meret could let go. A little less attention to the Hearth, a failure to hold the Sword beside it, and the body would withdraw. She knew exactly how little effort it would take. The being would live. It would speak through the cards again. It would ask this king, another king, a frightened reader with a locked door, to remove the person it could not bear to look at.
+
+It would also find the boy in the wood.
+
+Meret rose to her feet.
+
+“You missed,” she said.
+
+Her teeth were chattering. She moved around the table to her appointed place, under the gold spear-head. The red banner touched her shoulder.
+
+The silver eyes followed her. One by one, they opened.
+
+Above the Hall, the sunset bell began to toll.
+
+Meret saw recognition settle over the face she had known for twenty years. Here was something already seen. Here was an ending that had once been sure: the woman beside the table, the gold head at her throat, the deal broken by her death. It could still be done.
+
+She was offering it that road.
+
+She could not know that it would take it.
+
+The second stroke sounded.
+
+Oreth was against the right pillar, behind the source's turned face. Meret did not look at them. She held every blank card in her attention and waited beneath the point that had been waiting for her for eleven years.
+
+“This much,” said Fate, “I know.”
+
+It lifted the sword toward the white silk cord.
+
+“Oreth,” Meret said. “The pole.”
+
+The cord parted under the blade.
+
+The standard fell. The gold head came down toward Meret's face; the long ash shaft swept the space above the cards.
+
+Oreth jumped onto the low table. They caught the shaft in both hands below the spear-head, knees folding with its weight. The red cloth came over their head. For one dreadful moment Meret could see neither their face nor their hands.
+
+Fate's head turned toward the falling weapon and stopped as if its neck had met a wall. Its sword came across blind and struck the table behind Oreth.
+
+Under the cloth, Oreth heaved sideways. The pole's butt tore free of its bronze cup. The whole weight came down onto their shoulder.
+
+Meret stood close enough to the source to touch its robe. She could still dismiss it. She held the shape.
+
+Oreth shoved the bunched banner away from their face and turned the spear-point toward Fate's right side. The pale robe brushed their cheek. Bracing a foot against the table's edge, they drove the point upward with both hands.
+
+Fate made the small gasp Meret had heard beneath her hand on the terrace.
+
+The spear shuddered in Oreth's grip. Six gold eyes opened, searching the empty air beside their face. The source had moved out of the way of poisoned cups, falling stones, and hidden blades for centuries before Meret was born. This time there had been no next moment in which to see the weapon coming.
+
+“Hold it,” Oreth said.
+
+Meret held it.
+
+The fifth stroke of the bell sounded.
+
+The silver body grew heavy. It dropped onto the table, scattering the white cards. One table leg broke. Oreth went down with it, still holding the pole.
+
+Meret felt every path through her cards close at once.
+
+There was no voice behind the deck. No attention going outward through it. The tall body lay across the broken table with its six eyes shut. Its foot rested on the Hearth card.
+
+Nobody moved until Oreth began trying to pull their coat free of the wreckage.
+
+Meret helped them. Their left hand would not close properly. They tried once, then stopped. Their other hand was still clamped around the pole.
+
+For a while they looked at the silver face. Then, very carefully, they let go.
+
+“Stay there,” she said.
+
+“I am.”
+
+She put her fingers against the silver throat. No breath stirred the robe. Nothing answered her touch.
+
+The king came down from his chair.
+
+“Is it gone?”
+
+“It's dead.”
+
+He looked at the body for a long time. Behind him the captains waited, and beyond them the army waited in its new boots, with sharpened swords and wagons already loaded.
+
+“Read the war again,” he said.
+
+Meret picked up a card. She did not know which one. Its front and back were equally white.
+
+“I can't.”
+
+“Use another deck.”
+
+“Every reader in your kingdom drew their sight from this.”
+
+“You told me I would win.”
+
+“I did.”
+
+“Will I?”
+
+“I don't know.”
+
+The words seemed to anger him more than the sight of the body. His hand rose, then fell against his side.
+
+“How many, then?”
+
+“I don't know.”
+
+Oreth sat on the edge of the broken table, holding their injured hand against their coat. The king looked at them. Meret could not tell what he was thinking, or what he would do with that thought.
+
+She had changed what would come. She and Oreth, together. She had also left the next mother who climbed her terrace steps with nobody who could tell her where to look. Somewhere in a future she could no longer find, a boy might put a glass marble in his mouth and walk between the trees.
+
+She kept the white card in her hand. She did not try to make it mean anything else.
+
+“The orders, Your Majesty,” said a captain.
+
+On the king's desk, a candle burned beside the seal. The wax had been warmed for him.
+
+He went back to his chair. Meret watched him take up the seal, then set it down beside the waiting orders.
+
+“No messengers leave tonight,” he said.
+
+One of the captains began to object. The king turned toward him, and the man stopped.
+
+Oreth put their sound hand against Meret's sleeve. She looked down. There was a piece of white silk caught in their hair.
+
+“You're here,” they said.
+
+Meret touched her throat. The bell had finished.
+
+“Yes.”
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