Free Corambis by Sarah Monette

head and raised an eyebrow at me. “You gonna do anything with ’em, or just stare at ’em all night?”
“I hadn’t decided,” I said. And then, defiantly, I reached out and turned over the center card.
The Spire.
“Shit,” Mildmay said, coming up on his elbow to look. “That ain’t a good card, right?”
“Not particularly, no.” It was the card of the scapegoat; of a fall from a great height— whether literal or meta phorical; the card of betrayal. I did not need an instructor to hold my hand through the myriad parallels to my current situation.
Grimly, because I’d started this and it would be both folly and cowardice to stop, I turned over the second card. That within myself which blocked me. The Three of Staves, reversed, and my fingers flinched back as if I’d been burned. Conceit was the meaning of that card. Third, the past, was the Nine of Swords, despair and madness and martyrdom, and I could feel the blush heating my face. Mildmay was watching solemnly; for all his professed disdain for “hocus stuff,” he didn’t seem remotely inclined to mock the cards.
Fourth was what supported me, and that was the Sibyl of Swords, a card which Mavortian and I had agreed represented me, but now, looking at all the aspects of myself I saw in the Spire and the reversed Three of Staves and the Nine of Swords, I realized that the Sibyl had to be my magic, my intellect— the things which gave me power even now. Malkar had taken them from me once, but the Sibyl following the Nine of Swords was a cogent reminder that he had not been able to keep them.
I hauled in a breath and met Mildmay’s eyes. “Are you following any of this?”
“D’you care if I am?”
“If you want to learn to read the cards, I’d be happy to teach you.”
I was surprised when he broke eye contact, more surprised when he muttered, “Reading cards ain’t no use to me.”
“Mildmay?”
He’d gone beautifully, painfully red, and said nothing.
“Mildmay? What do you want me to teach you to read?” Even as I said it, though, I knew, and was ashamed of myself.
“You’re just gonna make fun of me,” he muttered, lowering his head so that his hair obscured his face.
“I swear to you I won’t.” It was suddenly vital that I make him believe me. “I swear it. On anything you like.”
Cold green flicked at me and away. “I don’t know anything you care about enough for making promises on.”
That brought me up short. We were silent for some moments while I thought about what he’d said. “Do you believe that I . . . care about you?” I didn’t have any right to use the word “love.”
His turn to think, and I tried not to make lists of all the reasons he could give me why he believed no such thing. Finally, he said tiredly, “Yeah. I know you care. In your own way.”
The rider stung, as I was sure he meant it to, but I persevered: “You know I care about the . . . oh, the life of the intellect, for lack of a better term?”
“Book learning,” Mildmay suggested gravely, but I saw the faintest glimmer of laughter in the depths of his eyes.
“Yes,” I said, grinning back. “Book learning.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I got that part.”
“So if there’s one thing in the world I’d never make fun of anybody for, it’d be for wanting to learn to read. Does that make sense?”
He thought about that, and I didn’t try to rush him, knowing that it wasn’t that he was stupid— far from it— but that there were certain kinds of thinking he’d never had the chance to practice. And when he’d considered the idea carefully, he shook his hair out of his face and said, “Yeah. Yeah, I can see that.”
“So I won’t make fun of you. Q.E.D.”
That got me an eyebrow, severely skeptical. “Quod erat demonstrandum,” I said. “Kekropian mathematicians use it to signal that they’ve proved what they set out to. The phi los o phers have picked it up, and you know wizards. Where phi los o phers and mathematicians lead, how can