“A wager?”
Scarlett studied The Other’s face closely as he offered Yamina a proposal similar to the one he had once offered her.
It was always these wagers with him.
Her attention returned to the younger Yamina.
Yamina pulled her eyes from the spellbook. She reminded herself where her attention ought to be, even as it kept dragging her back. She looked straight at the man across from her, at the calm smile resting on his face.
“A wager of…what?” she asked.
He tilted his head, turning a hand over idly. “Of odds. Of stakes. What are wagers ever of, if not the beautiful collision of chance and certainty? That is what makes them so compelling. The point where the ineffable becos tangible.” He touched a finger to the bridge of his nose, sothing quietly pleased in the gesture. “Few other things in this world produce a mont where the foresight of a man who knows what is coming is so roundly condemned by those who lost, and so readily celebrated by those who didn’t.”
“I am not keen on condemning or celebrating anyone,” Yamina said.
“No, and why would you be? Is there a wager you have ever lost?”The man chuckled softly. “Ah, but you said you have never bet once in your life.”
“I haven’t.”
“Those are the words of soone who wagers and never loses, young miss.”
The corners of Yamina’s mouth tightened slightly. She wasn’t fond of that framing, but she couldn’t honestly say there was nothing to it.
She shook her head, setting it aside. “It doesn’t matter. I have no interest in making a wager with you.”
“Not even for the spellbook?”
“…What would I stand to lose if I did?”
“That depends. What are you willing to put forward?”
Yamina reconsidered it, then reached into her robes and produced a small coin pouch, its dull weight shifting as she set it on the table. “We are in the empire, so — five hundred solars. That is all I have on .”
The man looked at the pouch with an expression of mild, almost fond amusent, clicking his tongue once. “No, no, no. I’m afraid that simply wouldn’t do.”
“Then I’m not interested.”
Yamina retrieved the pouch and made to stand. She wasn’t certain whether she actually should leave — whether leaving was even an option here. In her search for The Gentleman, she had prepared several contingencies, but this man was sothing else entirely, sothing she had very little frawork for. Walking into the traps of such an entity, even unintentionally, was not a risk she was eager to take.
The man watched her rise with patience, the gold coin having found its way back into his hand and moving over his knuckles in that sa unhurried roll.
“Suspicion and caution. These are not qualities I am unaccustod to. But were I the sort to deserve them, you would never have had the chance to feel them in the first place.”
Yamina paused, glancing at him. “Is that a threat?”
He offered her a mild smile. “No. I don’t particularly enjoy threats, so I make a point of not issuing them. Hurts business. But I would appreciate it if you reserved your wariness of until after I have actually earned it.”
Yamina studied him for a long mont. Then her gaze dropped to the spellbook.
He tapped the cover lightly. “I think you’ll find there is very little about this book to be wary of. I am a man of my word, and my word is my bond — and you have my word that this book offers you nothing but benefit.”
“You wouldn’t be here if you did not want sothing from ,” Yamina said slowly. “Which ans either the book is the danger, or what you intend to take from is.”
“Is that what you believe?”
“Yes.”
“Then tell — had you found The Gentleman here today instead of , did you intend to corner him into a position where he had nothing to gain and everything to lose?”
She hesitated. “No…”
The man crossed his arms. “Then why assu that my intentions towards you are any different? Rather uncharitable, don’t you think?”
Yamina said nothing.
He leaned back. “Since you remain so uncertain, I will extend you a courtesy I rarely offer. I will tell you plainly what it is I want from you, and why.” He gestured towards her vacant seat. “If you would sit back down, that is.”
Yamina considered him. She turned his words over, letting her gaze drift across the crowded tavern — the still faces, the frozen mid-gestures, the suspended mont of a whole room caught between one breath and the next. Her eyes passed over the barmaid leaning against the counter with a sidelong look in their direction, and the youth being thumped on the back by his elders while sneaking a glance of his own at that sa barmaid.
These were such very ordinary lives.
Ordinary lives held, without the faintest awareness of it, in the presence of sothing they couldn’t have begun to perceive, let alone comprehend.
Yamina felt…lonely among these people.
As she had since she was young enough to start understanding her place in the world.
And the spellbook sitting on that table—for so reason she couldn’t quite na, for so reason that had very little to do with the teachings of magic and the arcane she so often relied on to make sense of this world—felt as though it might hold an answer to not feeling that way any longer.
“Baroness, can you still hear us?” a voice broke in, nearly pulling Scarlett out of the quiet she had sunk into alongside the younger Yamina.
Scarlett looked between The Other and the girl across from him.
“I can,” she said. “Though earlier, I was not talking to you.”
A few seconds passed before the older Yamina responded. “I see. Then there is sothing I need to tell you before this continues.”
“And what is that?”
“Tails.”
“…Tails?”
Scarlett frowned. What was that supposed to an?
“That should be enough,” Yamina continued. “Now, don’t let distract you further. Oh, and I do apologise for my younger self’s theatrics. I was always told that I matured rather late.”
“Wait—” Scarlett began, but before she could finish, movent beside her drew her back into the scene.
When Yamina settled back into her seat, the small mole above the man’s lip shifted as his mouth curved upward.
“Thank you,” he said. He placed both hands on the table, lacing his fingers together, the gold coin resting beside them with the scholar face-up. “I find that you’re a compelling person, young miss. Do you know why that is?”
“I don’t.”
“Co now. I’m sure that you do.”
Yamina was quiet for a mont. “Perhaps. But I don’t know that you do find compelling.”
Stolen novel; please report.
“That is fair. It’s a lie, but it’s at least a fair lie.” The man nodded. “I say that you are a compelling person, young miss, because you are one of a kind. Unique in a way that belongs solely and irreducibly to you — and this would hold true even if you searched every corner of all the realms. What is perhaps most fascinating about this is that you are, despite all of it, remarkably ordinary.”
Yamina raised both eyebrows.
“Would you disagree?” he asked.
She dipped her head just slightly.“If you couldpoint to another who is as ‘ordinary’ as , I would be very interested to et them.”
The man let out a short laugh. “Don’t fret. I’m sure the ti will co. But in case you take issue with my choice of words, I don’t an to say that you are not extraordinary. A mortal child who was never ant to exist, shaped by Fate and burdened with a task that not even gods would shoulder. They have built myths around far lesser things.”
Yamina did not want to show it, but her hands had curled together in her lap beneath the table, and sothing moved through her that she didn’t have a na for. It was no surprise at this point that this man knew her. But she had never before t soone who seed to understand her.
“But that is precisely what also makes you so thoroughly, so stubbornly, ordinary — don’t you think?” the man asked. “I can tell you with certainty that there are many, many existences in this world with far greater power, far greater reach, far greater consequence. Many more yet to co. Maybe you’ll even et so of them in your lifeti, and then you will understand what I an when I say that you are, at your core, a very ordinary person.” He paused.“And despite that, you are special in ways they could only dream of.”
Yamina kept her voice level. “What is the purpose of saying all this?”
He considered her, then gestured idly. “Consider it a digressive preface. I’ll spare you the rest of it. Perhaps one day you’ll grow to appreciate that particular rhetorical habit.”
He knocked once on the wood in front of him, and, like a current passing through the room, the tavern ca back to life all at once. The youth flushed as the barmaid caught him looking, the minstrel shifted into a new tune as the mood of their small audience turned, and the general noise and press of the place resud as though it had never stopped. The return was so abrupt—so jarring against the eerie stillness that had held the room monts before—that Yamina needed a mont just to reorient herself.
“The reason I sought you out is as simple as genuine interest,” the man said. “I cultivate interests in things far and wide, and while many of those are ones I observe without any particular investnt—out of habit, or patience, or simple curiosity—people and their stories may be the ones I will never truly tire of. And among these, there will always be those rare few who catch my attention beyond the ordinary. Those rare few who embody the ineffable, the genuinely unpredictable, the kind of ergence that cannot be planned for or anticipated. The ones who may not occupy the climax of a narrative, or even its main body, but who would make for a remarkable foreword.”
Yamina’s brow furrowed slightly.
“Do you object to being described in such terms?” he asked.
She was silent at first, then shook her head. “No.”
It wasn’t wrong.
“Well then,” he went on, “that is the why of my being here. Next cos what I want from you.”
He pushed the spellbook slightly across the table, closer to Yamina. She glanced at it, then stilled at his next words.
“I do not want your success in your aim to kill Fate.”
Her eyes snapped back up to him.
He t them evenly.
“In fact,” he said, “your success would work directly against certain interests of mine.”
That cold, crawling sensation threatened to return — but then the man paused, and his gaze dropped briefly to the coin on the table, to the face of a scholar looking up from it.
The cold faded.
The man looked back at Yamina. “However, I recognise that certain erging processes ought not to be interfered with. Sotis they should even be encouraged, even when they chafe against one’s preferences. Chance placed you where you are today, young miss, and I have found myself wanting to see exactly where that chance leads. To see whether it ends in the release of an old friend of mine, or in a fate far worse. Whatever the outco, I will remain as I am.”
There was sothing very particular about his gaze. Sothing Yamina recognised only now. His eyes didn’t peer into you the way powerful things often did. It was more akin to looking into a pair of windows that opened onto sowhere very far away.
But she found nothing in either his expression or his bearing to tell her whether his words were true or false. She did not know whether the bindings and trappings of divinity could be applied to the man before her, but among both divine beings and Idols, the weight of one’s given word was a boundary not easily crossed. And the workings of Fate—its frawork and the fracture that lay at its heart—spoke of a similar rigidity, one where the ordinary rules of mortals didn’t apply, yet sothing even more unyielding sat in their place.
Paradoxically, all that she had learned seed to suggest that the more powerful an entity beca, the more restricted it tended to be.
There was a possibility that the being before her was a liar. An entity whose nature was woven entirely from misdirection, whose every word and gesture served so deeper act of manipulation. Were that the case, she had no confidence she could see through it, regardless of her thods.
But she also did not believe she would genuinely be allowed to leave this tavern, if so.
“Let revisit my earlier question,” the man said, tapping the spellbook. “What do you say to making a small wager with ? If you find it difficult to settle on what you ought to offer, let make a suggestion. Were you to win, you would take this spellbook. Were I to win, I would take…let’s say the mory of your first lesson.”
“My…first lesson?”
“Yes. Hardly sothing you need at this point, is it? An unfortunate loss, perhaps, but of roughly comnsurate value to the book. Sothing to make you want to win, and sothing to ensure I don’t walk away from this eting entirely empty-handed, even if you do.”
She studied him carefully. “One might assu from everything you’ve said up until now that you intend for to win regardless.”
“One would nearly be right. But not completely. The integrity of a wager is not sothing to be quietly arranged away. That would rather defeat the point.”
Yamina turned the offer over.
She couldn’t have said when her first lesson even was, or what losing the mory of it would truly an. But old tales of carelessly forged pacts nagged at her.
“Would the mory of the first disputation I attended be acceptable instead?” she asked.
It had been Grand Wizard Blakeshaw’s lecture on the phenonological grounding of transmutative theory. Hardly worth preserving, in her opinion. In fact, despite having been only eleven at the ti, Yamina had spent years quietly hoping that she and everyone else present might collectively forget so of her more fervently argued declarations during that session.
The man regarded her with an amused tilt of his head. “That would be acceptable as well.”
His hand moved across the table and smoothly picked the gold coin back up, running it over his knuckles before letting it co to rest in his open palm. “If you’re curious about the nature of the wager itself, I was thinking sothing simple. It should involve this coin, but I’ll let you devise the specific rules.”
Yamina blinked. “I can decide whatever rules I want?”
“We are conducting a wager, so I expect it to be as fair as a wager ought to be,” he said. “If you think you can give yourself a slight edge, I won’t stop you — but overreach has a way of becoming its own undoing. Sotis it is simply best to go with a straightforward heads or tails.”
Yamina eyed the coin. She touched the rim of her glasses, activating a light analytic divination spell, but found that the results offered her nothing of use.
So she couldn’t rely on magic here.
Her father had once told her that only fools gambled. The careless trusted their luck. And the smart made sure the odds were stacked in their favour.
There was a classical application of Arch Wizard Penric’s Paradox that fit this situation neatly. If she were free to set the rules as she pleased and stipulate that victory be determined by a freely chosen sequence of outcos across multiple flips, she could push her probability of winning arbitrarily close to certainty while still technically preserving the structure of a fair wager. It was a trivial construction, and the obvious move for any self-respecting wizard.
But that assud this would actually function as a ga of chance. Against this entity, there was no such guarantee. This was sothing that already seed to know her path, the people she hadn’t yet t, and where she might eventually end up.
…She loathed setting her father’s wisdom aside, but this felt like one of those rare occasions where the smarter play was to stop being smart about it and carelessly trust her luck.
Not the luck of a coin flip, though.
“I suggest a single condition,” she said. “You will flip the coin, and if either of us already knows the result before it is revealed, the other person wins.”
It didn’t matter how cleverly the rules were structured. If she were sitting across from sothing that could see what was coming, she would lose. The only winning move was to gamble properly, or make foreknowledge itself the liability.
The man looked at her for a long, asured mont. “Are you sure those are the rules you want?”
“Yes.”
Sothing shifted in his expression, and a laugh escaped him. His head tipped back slightly as he briefly closed his eyes.
“That is funny. It’ll take so ti before you fully appreciate exactly how funny. But I accept.” He settled, then leaned forward at once, the gold coin poised on his thumb. “The scholar is heads. The jester is tails. Shall we?”
“Go ahead.”
The coin spun into the air, catching the hearthlight as it turned over and over.
“I wonder what it’ll land on,” he remarked, watching it rise.
“It will land on tails,” Scarlett declared.
The coin ca down and struck the table, skipping once before rolling into a short, wobbling spin and going still.
The jester’s face looked up.
Sothing lurched in Yamina’s chest. Even if she hadn’t wagered anything of real significance, she realised that she did not want to lose.
Her eyes rose to the man across from her.
He t her eyes. A slow smile settled across his face.
“Congratulations. You win.”
Yamina paused, then relief broke through her. She had been right—
“One of your assumptions was wrong, however,” the man added. “I can’t tell whether a coin will land heads or tails before it lands.”
Yamina frowned. “Then how—”
“It’s much more interesting if you don’t know,” he cut her off. And then, for so reason, his gaze drifted from her and settled on the empty space just beside the table.
Scarlett held The Other’s gaze, her own frown deepening.
“You are very lucky, Yamina,” she said.
“I’m well aware,” ca the older Yamina’s voice.
“Was it worth it?”
“I would argue that it was.”
“Hmm.” Scarlett glanced back towards the girl sitting across from the man, taking in the spellbook on the table and the coin resting between them. “How long until your younger self leaves? I want to speak with The Other regarding that book of yours.”
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