Noah nearly walked into him.
"What now?"
Arik ignored Noah entirely. He was drawn to a stall that looked like it couldn't be built - a leaning patchwork of velvet curtains and old wood tucked into a corner where the ether-lanterns' light didn't quite reach.
It was a fortune teller's den.
"Arik?" Noah asked, his voice low and wary. "The drone is a minute out. We should keep moving."
"Wait," Arik said.
He found himself staring at a woman sitting behind a table draped in star charts that were centuries out of date. She was old, but not the elegant, ether-extended old of the Agaron courts, but rather the kind of old that appeared to have been carved out of the city's foundation.
Her gaze was pinned on him. Not on his clothes, not on the hidden brooch beneath his collar, but directly on his eyes.
"Mezos," Arik murmured, his hand coming up to touch his earpiece. "What do you have on the stall at coordinates 44-9?"
"Checking," Mezos replied, the sound of rapid data-scrubbing clicking in the background. "Registered to one Madam Valeska. Licensed for 'traditional intuitive services.' It's a tax haven for small-time grifters, Arik. In a world where we can map the ether-soul and predict weather patterns with 99% accuracy, she's selling cardboard and hope."
Arik didn't look away. "She's staring at me like she knows exactly how many layers of restraint I'm wearing."
"That's the grift," Mezos said. "It's called cold reading. Step away."
But the woman spoke, her voice like dry paper rubbing together. "The gold in your eyes wasn't put there by a surgeon, was it, boy?"
Noah stiffened. The golden eyes of the Agaron royalty were a biological byproduct of the trial of Ether and a mark of the Ether's Chosen. In Wrohan, they were a legend; here in the mud of the night market, they were a target.
"It's a contact lens," Noah said smoothly, stepping half-interfering. "Common fashion in the capital."
The woman ignored him, her eyes, milky with cataracts but sharp as needles, locked on Arik. "It's a mark of ruin. You've come back from a place where the light doesn't reach. Would you like to see if you brought anything back with you?"
She gestured to a deck of cards. They were thick, hand-painted, and looked like they hadn't been shuffled since the last dynasty fell.
Arik felt a strange, cold pull in his chest, a vibration in the ruined channels of his soul that he forgot existed. He stepped forward, ignoring Noah's quiet hiss of protest.
"Tarot," Arik said, his voice dripping with aristocratic disdain. "An archaic practice for a world that lacked the math to explain its own misery. Why would I want a reading from a woman who couldn't even predict the installation of the ether grid that's currently leaking ozone onto her roof?"
"Because the grid tells you how the world works," she rasped, a toothless grin stretching her face. "The cards tell you why it hates you."
Arik's mouth curved. The challenge was refreshing. "You want to play games of chance with a man who has nothing to lose? Very well."
He reached for his left wrist. With a practiced, elegant motion, he unbuckled his watch. It was a masterpiece of Agaron engineering with a platinum casing, gears fueled by stabilized ether crystals, and a face of polished obsidian.
"This watch is valued at approximately three million crowns," Arik said, laying it on the velvet table. The heavy thud of the metal seemed to silence the immediate area. "If you tell me something I don't already know, something your 'intuitive services' can't find in a public record, it's yours."
The old woman's eyes widened, the greed momentarily flickering behind the cataracts.
"Arik, stop," Noah whispered. "That watch could fund a small militia."
The old woman did not touch the watch.
That, more than the widening of her eyes, caught Arik's attention.
Most people, when confronted with wealth placed directly in front of them, revealed themselves in the first breath. Greed, fear, calculation, and maybe reverence, if they were especially dull.
She revealed an appetite, yes, but Arik could easily see that it was the game itself, not the watch.
Her gaze lifted from the watch to his face and stayed there.
"No," she said at last, her voice dry as old paper. "Not like that."
Noah let out a short breath. "Wonderful. Even the scammer has standards."
She ignored him like she had done many times before. Her fingers came to rest over the deck instead, not touching the top card, just hovering above it as if the air itself had memory.
"Three stages," she said.
Arik's brow rose slightly.
The old woman smiled again, this time with purpose.
"Three truths, if truth is what you want." Her gaze sharpened. "First, I read the past. If I am right, we continue. Then the present. If I remain right, only then do I look at the future."
Her hand finally settled on the deck.
"Three cards for each."
Noah folded his arms. "How economical of fate."
Arik's eyes dropped to the cards, then to her hand, then briefly to the watch sitting between them like an insult to common sense.
"And if you fail at the first?"
"Then I give you back your evening, and you keep your toy."
Noah muttered, "I like her use of the word 'toy' significantly less than I expected."
The old woman still did not look at him.
Arik considered her.
Three stages.
Past. Present. Future.
A childish structure, perhaps. Or a clever one. He could already see the plan: the first draw would capture attention, the second would anchor belief, and the third would license invention.
Elegant, in its way.
"You assume I care enough about the future to pay for all three," Arik said.
The old woman's mouth twitched.
"No," she said. "I assume a man like you would never leave halfway through a challenge."
That made Noah shut his eyes for a moment.
"Why," he asked the air at large, "is every manipulative stranger in this kingdom immediately right about him?"
Mezos's voice came low through the line, threaded with static and dry amusement. "Because he looks exactly like a man who'd fight prophecy out of professional pride."
Arik ignored both of them.
His gold gaze remained on the woman.
"And if you are right at each stage?"
"Then the watch is mine."
"Only the watch?"
That finally made her laugh.
A rough, small sound. Real.
"You've already started calculating how I'd liquidate it."
Noah's head turned sharply toward Arik. "You have."
"Of course he has," Mezos said.
Arik did not deny it.
The woman looked pleased by that. Not charmed. Pleased, as though she had just confirmed a private suspicion.
"So tell me," she said, "if I win something worth three million crowns, will you leave me to be robbed before dawn, or will the empire's chosen prince solve the inconvenience he created?"
Arik's gaze flicked once across the square.
The plaza was not large. Not by Agaron's standards. Four permanent vendor anchors at the corners. Temporary stalls filling the center.
Two upper balconies overlooking the market from the older buildings. Mixed-use property rights, likely fragmented and irritating. Three visible security lenses in the near line of sight, all cheap.
The plaza itself could absolutely be purchased, or at the very least controlled, if one moved through the right layers of debt, leaseholds, and commercial nuisance law. Selling the watch would be easy enough. Selling it quietly would require more care, but not much.
He looked back at her.
"If you win," he said, "I'll have it sold correctly."
Noah gave him a flat stare. "You say that like you're offering tea."
"I'm offering logistics."
The old woman inclined her head. "Good. Then we understand each other."
Her hand moved to the deck at last.
Slowly, ceremonially enough to irritate, but not so much that it felt forced.
"First," she said, "the past."