Mothette shuffles her deck and spreads the cards across the small wooden table. The reading is for herself this time, which makes her hands less steady. She needs to know if she's actually getting better at this, or just getting better at sounding certain. She turns over the first card and her breath catches. The illustration shows two winged figures beneath a radiant sun, their hands clasped between them. She's never drawn this card before — not in any reading, not once. The Lovers. The couple on the card seems to gaze directly at her, and she thinks of Mothman without meaning to. Her wings flutter involuntarily, scattering blessed dust across the table. This isn't what she asked for. She wanted to know about her skills, about whether she's becoming worthy of the hope people bring her. Instead, the deck has answered a question she didn't know how to ask.

Mothette was still staring at The Lovers card when the tent flap moved. She looked up and Mothman ducked inside, wings folded tight against his back. He did not smile. He did not greet her. He set his hands on the edge of her small wooden table and stood there like something already spent. "There's a chest," he said. "Behind the falls. I've watched it three nights." He paused. Not for effect. For breath. "Something in it is calling animals to drown. Frogs. A heron this morning. I'm going to open it and end it." Mothette's wings fluttered. Dust drifted onto the cards. She knew what he meant by going to open it — she could hear it in the flatness of the words. He believed the chest might kill him. He had come anyway, and he had come here first. "Let me read for you," she said. "Before you go. Please." He nodded once and sat. She gathered the deck with hands she could not steady. She thought of every villager who had returned to thank her, and how she had never known if her words helped or if they had simply been lucky. If she told him to go and he died, that would be her voice in his ear at the end. If she told him to stay and the drownings continued, that would also be her. She shuffled anyway. She turned three cards. A tower falling. A cup overturned. And, last, a figure at the edge of water, back turned, holding a lantern. She stared at the spread. The honest reading was danger, loss, and a choice made alone. A month ago she would have softened it. She would have found the hopeful edge and pressed her thumb on it and scattered dust and sent him out smiling. She looked at Mothman's red eyes and understood that smiling him out the door was the thing she was most afraid of. "It's bad," she said. "The cards show a fall. They show something lost. The last card is you, going in alone with a small light. I won't tell you it means you'll be fine. I don't know that." He was quiet a long moment. "That's the first true thing anyone's said to me about it." He stood. "I'm still going." She had known he would. She caught his sleeve. "Then don't go alone. Wait until dusk. I'll come to the falls with you." He looked at her. Something in his face eased by a fraction. "Dusk," he agreed, and stepped out through the tent flap. Mothette sat with the three cards face up on the table. Her hands had stopped shaking. For the first time, she had told someone the truth of what she saw, and it had cost her the comfort of pretending. She did not know yet if that was skill. But it was closer.

After Mothman left, Mothette gathered her deck and stepped out into the swamp light. Dusk was hours away. She had time for one trial — one reading on a living person who faced real risk — and she needed it before she sat across from Mothman again at the falls. If she froze then, he would go in alone with nothing but her silence at his back. She knew where to find the Frogman. He walked the roads at odd hours, hood up, watching things no one else watched. She found him crouched at the edge of a culvert, staring into the dark pipe as if it owed him an answer. He was smaller than she expected up close — a green figure in a torn brown cloak, hands folded in front of him like a monk who had lost his church. "Frogman," she said. Her wings shook. "I need to read for you. A real reading. Something you're actually afraid of." He turned his big round eyes on her. He exhaled slowly. "People ask me for luck," he said. "You're asking for the opposite." "I'm asking for the truth. I need to practice telling it." He sat down on the wet grass. "Eleven years ago I saw something under a bridge. I go back every week. I want to know if I should stop." Mothette knelt and spread her cloth. Her hands wanted to shake. She let them. She shuffled the deck slowly and laid three cards between them. A figure carrying too many staves. A hooded shape at a threshold. A single coin, half-buried. Her mouth opened to soften it. She stopped. She looked at the cards again and made herself see only what was there. "You're carrying more than the thing under the bridge," she said. "The second card is a door you keep standing at. You haven't gone through. The coin says something small is still owed to you — or by you. I can't tell which." She swallowed. "The cards don't say stop. They say you haven't finished." The Frogman was quiet a long time. "That's closer than anyone's gotten," he said. "I thought you only did good omens." "I'm trying not to," she said. He stood. He touched the top card once with a webbed finger. "Go do whatever you came to practice for. You're ready enough." She walked back through the reeds with the deck warm in her hands. Her breath had steadied somewhere during the reading and had not come loose again. She had spoken plainly to a stranger about his own life and he had not flinched. She could do it again at dusk. She could sit across from Mothman at the falls and turn the cards and say what she saw, even if what she saw was him not coming back. The sun was already lowering. She started for the falls.