In other words, a choice. It was pretty pitiful stuff, as well it might be, given how little she had to work with, but the woman gave a grudging nod.

“I will shuffle the cards,” Hal said. She opened the lacquered box where she kept her work cards and shuffled them briefly, then spread them out on the table in a long arc. “Now, hold the question you came to consult me about in your mind, and indicate a card to me. Don’t touch, just point with your finger to the card that calls to you.”

The woman’s jaw was clamped, and Hal sensed a turmoil in her out of all proportion. Whatever had driven her here tonight was no ordinary question; she had come against her will, turning to something she believed in spite of herself. When she leaned forwards, a cross glinted out from behind her buttoned-up cardigan, and she gestured jerkily at a card, almost as if she suspected a trap.

“This one?” Hal said, pushing it out from the deck, and the woman nodded.

Hal placed it facedown in the center of the table and glanced discreetly at the clock positioned behind the woman’s back. Usually she did the Celtic Cross, but she was damned if she’d spend half an hour with this woman when she was tired and cold and her stomach was rumbling. A three-card spread was the very most she was going to do.

“This card”—Hal touched the card the woman had chosen—“represents the current situation, the problem you have come to consult me about. Now choose another.”

The woman flicked her finger towards a second card, and Hal placed it alongside the first, facedown again.

“This card represents the obstacle you face. Now choose one final card.”

The woman hesitated, and then pointed at the first card in the deck, to the far left of the spread. It was one people rarely chose—most people picked towards the middle in a fairly even spread, choosing the cards closest to them, while a very few, the most suggestible types, picked up on the implicit instruction in final and chose a card towards the right of the spread, at the bottom of the original pack.

To pick the first card was unusual, and Hal was surprised. She should have known, she thought. This was someone perverse and contrary, someone who would do the opposite of what they thought you wanted.

“This final card represents the advice the cards are giving you,” Hal said.

She turned the first card, and from the other side of the table she heard a choking sound, as the woman’s hand went to her face, to cover her mouth and smother a name. Looking up, Hal saw that the woman’s eyes were wide and harrowed, and full of tears, and suddenly she knew. She knew why the woman was here, and she knew what the image on the card meant to the woman sitting opposite.

The young man setting out with his pack into the sunshine was handsome and smiling, turning his dark face to the sun, and only the cliff edge at his feet gave a clue to the deeper, darker meanings of the card—impetuosity, naïveté, impulsiveness.

“This card is called the Fool,” Hal said softly, and when the woman gave a little broken sob and a nod, almost in spite of herself, she went on, “but tarot isn’t about simple meanings. The Fool, though he can symbolize foolishness, doesn’t always mean that. Sometimes this card means new beginnings, sometimes it means doing things without thinking about the path ahead, without considering the future.”

The woman gave another dry, choking sob, and said something that sounded like “His future!” in a tone of such bitter disbelief that Hal could not help herself—she put out her hand.

“I . . . forgive me, but . . . is your question about your son?”

The woman began to cry at that, broken and in earnest, and as she wept she nodded, and Hal heard words tumbling out—names of drugs, of treatment centers she recognized in Brighton, needle exchanges, of money stolen from handbags, of treasured heirlooms sold and pawned, of sleepless nights waiting for a call that didn’t come. The story between the racking sobs was plain enough—a desperate struggle to save a son who did not want to be saved.

A choice, the woman had said, and Hal knew what that choice was, and she wished now that she had not opened the door.

With a feeling of foreboding, Hal turned the second card. It was the Wheel, reversed.

“The second card you chose represents the obstacle you and your son face together. This is the Wheel of Fortune, or the Wheel of Life. It symbolizes fortune and renewal and the cycle of life, and shows that you and your son have come to a turning point”—a little, reluctant nod, as the woman swiped fiercely at her eyes—“but here it’s reversed—that’s what we call it when the card is upside down like this. The Wheel reversed represents bad luck. This is the obstacle that has come into your life. There are negative forces here that are out of your control, but they are not always completely external—they come about as the result of choices we’ve made in the past, your choices and your son’s, of course.”

“His choices,” the woman said bitterly. “His choices, not mine. He was a good boy, until he took up with those boys at his school and started dealing. What was I supposed to do—stand by and watch him sink into depravity?”

Her eyes were bleak holes in her skull, and as she waited for Hal’s response she bit at the chapped skin of her lips, pulling at it with her teeth until a bead of blood appeared. Hal shook her head. Suddenly she wanted this to be over very much indeed.

“The last card represents a possible course of action, but”—the hunger in the woman’s eyes made her add hastily—“it’s important to know that it is not a prescription. The cards don’t predict the future—they don’t give a fail-safe course. They simply tell you what could, on a given day, be one outcome to your problem. Some situations have no simple resolution; all we can do is steer the course that causes the least harm.”

She turned the card, and the High Priestess turned her serene face up to the dim, flickering light. From outside there was a gust of wind, and in the distance Hal heard a seagull’s scream.

“What does it mean?” the woman demanded, all her skepticism gone, subsumed by desperation for answers. She stared down at the figure on the card, seated on her throne, her hands spread like a benediction. “Who is she—some kind of heathen goddess?”

“In a way,” Hal said slowly. “Some call her Persephone, some say she is Artemis, goddess of the hunt. Some call her even older names. In French she’s called la Papesse.”

“But what does she mean?” the woman said again, more urgently. Her fingers closed like claws on Hal’s wrist, painfully tight, and Hal had to fight the urge to pull away.

“She means intuition,” Hal said shortly. She disengaged herself from the woman’s grip under pretense of rearranging the cards into a single pile, the Priestess on top. “She symbolizes the unknown—both the unknown within ourselves, and the future. She means that life is changing, that the future is always uncertain, no matter how much information we can gather.”

“So what should I do?” the woman cried. “I can’t go through this over and over, but if I throw him out, what kind of mother does that make me?”

“I believe . . .” Hal stopped, and swallowed. She hated this part. Hated the way they came to her asking for answers she couldn’t give. She thought carefully, and then began again. “Look, this is a very unusual spread.” She turned the rest of the pack over and spread them out, showing the woman the ratio of major to minor cards, the fact that the vast majority of the pack were numbered pip cards. “These cards—these numbered ones, with the suits on them—these are what we call minor cards. They have their own meanings, of course, but they are more . . . mutable, perhaps. More open to interpretation. But these others”—she touched the cards the woman had chosen, and the rest of the trumps, dotted through the spread—“these symbolic cards are called the major arcana, or trumps. To have a spread that’s completely composed of trump cards, as you had, that’s statistically very unusual. There just aren’t that many of these cards in the deck. And the point is that in tarot, these cards represent the strong winds of fate—the turning points in our lives—and when you get a large number of them in a reading, it can mean that the situation is largely out of your hands, that it will play out as the fates intend.”