A stately certificate hung in an ornate frame on the wall told Marda that he was sitting in the parlour of an Ino Province-certified matchmaker. “The Occupational Licencing Administration of Ino Province hereby certifies that LÍNDA NUVO BAŽNABI is duly licenced and certified to practise the ancient customary arts of divination, fortune telling, and matchmaking within the bounds of the Province of Ino…” he read from the wall, unsure of why the certificate of all things in the room had hooked his attention. It might have been the frame, which was a garish, tacky sort of thing done in a faux Classical Tavari style with stylistic carvings of parrots and toucans that didn’t exactly mesh with the feel of a government document. But the frame was only one of a seemingly infinite number of kitschy, great-aunt-like interior design choices in the room, every square ímoštonai of which was full-to-bursting with knick-knacks and decorations. The very chair he was sitting in was an overly plush, overly pink velvet cushion on spindly, intricately carved wooden legs that absolutely did not match with any of the other half-dozen or so plush-cushioned chairs in the room. The massive square table in the centre of the room was stark black ebony and entirely unornamented, but it was draped in at least three delicate, frilly tablecloths of vibrant colours and stacked with dozens of tiny candleholders, all different shapes and sizes, not to mention the hundred lacquered and shiny divining cards laid in a perfect grid atop it.
Even the air was excessively perfumed. It may have just been that the candles on the table were scented, but they must have been a dozen different scents. They were certainly all different colours, and the more Marda looked around the room, the more he began to think that the garishness of it all had to be intentional. It had to mean something. Everything meant something when you were a fortune teller. All the little figurines, all the pretty flower pots and candle holders, all the chimes and bells hanging from the ceiling, all of the curtains and cords on the walls, each one was certain to have some special meaning, or something about it that the matchmaker used to speak with the spirits. He tried to find some theme to them, something that they all had in common, but the only thing really was that they were all, each and every one of them, noticeably different. The beautiful purple rosewood table next to him, octagonal with dramatically curving wooden feet, was a style Marda was pretty sure was called Queen Melora, but the stained glass-and-brass lamp sitting on it was Art Deco, the tiny porcelain planter occupied by a tinier little cactus had a painting of a sailing ship on it, and the pewter cow figurine was so ancient, Marda didn’t even know what era it could be.
Distantly came the sound of clinking drinkware and a faintly tinkling bell, and Marda knew the matchmaker was on her way back. It was the bell that Marda saw first, or rather, the resplendent jungle cat that wore a bell on its collar. Long, gracile legs and a shining, spotted coat marked the handsome feline that walked ahead of its owner, seeming to peer around the room and ensure there were no enemies within before allowing her to proceed. The matchmaker, Línda, did indeed seem to wait for her cat to do a quick circuit of the room before stepping in and setting a cup on the Queen Melora table text to Marda. She smelled of fresh cut fruit, but that was likely just the juice. Marda had asked for coffee, but she had smiled and shaken her head. “Hot drinks are no good for matchmaking, the heart races enough as it is. We drink cold drinks,” she had said, and offered him juice. That was all she had said so far, and already, Marda was terrified.
Though her matchmaker’s licence clearly stated she was a Nuvo, Línda was the very image of one of the ancient western matriarchs. The chiefs of the east—the likes of Nuvo and Nevran, Oren and Išdašt—had always simply fought among one another and variously declared themselves the liege lords of the others, but in the west, the chiefs were all tempered by the influence of the matriarchs, the big, rich, powerful women who owned the shrines. A western matriarch had a big sitting room where she brought all the chiefs to compete with one another for her attention as they all sought her counsel and wealth, and as Marda watched Línda take her seat at the big table in the centre of the room, it occurred to him that you could fit a fair few chiefs in this tacky parlour in Ino Province. Línda was indeed a very big woman, the biggest woman Marda had ever seen. She was the very image of classical Tavari beauty, which was to say, she was simply huge. She was tall, she was wide, and most importantly, she was fat. The gravity with which her arm fell upon the table as she sat, the roundness of her face and of her entire form seated there at the head of the table, the inherent ability to overtake any situation simply by virtue of her physical presence, all of these were fundamentally enviable, fundamentally attractive things. She was an older woman, probably in her forties or fifties, which meant she was old enough to demand respect in just about any room, and she wore her age with pride. Her hair was greying and unpretentiously styled in the simple braid of a working mother, and she wore a simple poncho and a sleeveless dress in a rich, Nuvo purple. There were no rings on her fingers, just bright yellow paint on her nails, but there were golden rings on each of her tusks and a pair of golden chains around her neck, both with feathery pendants that, like all the decorations in her room, clashed terribly. This was a woman who knew what she liked, who knew she did not need to draw attention with flashy styles, and who demanded your compliance with her, not one who formed herself to match anyone else’s expectations. This was not a match-finder, this was a match-maker.
But her voice did not reflect her tremendous power. Her voice was gentle and sweet. “Marda,” she said, remembering his name from his having only mumbled it at her once several minutes ago. “You have come a long way to see me.” She looked directly at him, expectantly and knowingly, in a way that was at once comforting and terrifying. This was a woman whose entire job was to judge, was to comb through a person’s entire being to pick out every trait, every flaw, every little tiny thing so she could find a way to fit you into the exact space within someone else’s heart. Every word he chose, every gesture he made, every tone he spoke in, every way he looked, all of these were to be watched, noted, and silently commented upon, and he knew that this was a woman who could absolutely destroy him in a moment if she chose. So far, though, she did seem quite nice.
Marda had indeed come a long way to see Línda Nuvo Bažnabi, at least farther than most did to see a matchmaker, though it wasn’t so far that he had a different accent than people did here, so he wondered how she could tell. Maybe it was just that she didn’t recognize him at all—he had driven a ways north to Štebai, a small town in Ino Province that was just about the edge of suburban civilization in southeast Tavaris. It had become famous in the 1970s because it was given the area code 144, a magically important number in Tavari numerology, and it was that more than anything that had made Marda pick Štebai’s matchmaker. It was that and her name—Bažnabi was very clearly from bažnabet tazen: “matchmaker,” or literally “family-maker.” This woman’s family had been doing this so long, and presumably so well, that they made it their name. It was all the better that Línda was a Nuvo—in the old days, only Nuvos were permitted to do matchmaking, unless you went to a special school and got a licence from the King. The bland bureaucratic certificate hanging on the wall behind him was what remained of that tradition, but while they let anyone in any Line take a few courses on recognizing abuse and relationship counselling these days, the Nuvos had been doing it the longest. Here was a Nuvo whose name was matchmaker. Surely, this had to be the best matchmaker in all Tavaris.
“Well what other matchmaker should I go to, other than the one whose name is-”
Booming, whooping laughter erupted from the head of the table, such that the cat, ears firmly shunted backward, got up and left the room. Flames from a dozen candles danced as the table beneath them shook. “Ahaha! Ohohoho! My mother ran a factory!” Línda was grinning wildly. A factory, a kõvobažna. “A factory that manufactured machine components used by other factories. She was a maker of making things!” A maker of making things, a bažnabet bašdõbažnabeti. Hence, the family name Bažnabi. “Oh, Marda! Oh, don’t leave! I hope I haven’t disappointed you! Ahaha!”
“Ah,” Marda found himself saying. “So, you and your family haven’t been, like, doing this for countless generations?”
“I went to university for supply chain management! Ohoho!” She was gleefully rocking forward and backward in her chair, snickering to no end. “Oh, you came all this way! All this way to meet the matchmaker named maker!”
“You know, I’m only from, like, Nakaš,” Marda said sheepishly.
As if a switch had flipped, Línda immediately snapped back into silence and looked Marda up and down, narrow-eyed and deep in thought. “Not Nevran,” she said eventually, though more to herself than anyone. “Novar,” she said finally.
Marda could only nod, quite impressed. He was indeed a Novar.
A smile spread again across the matchmaker’s face. “Marda of Novar,” said Línda in an appreciative tone. “And your family name?”
Novar’s family name was also occupational, but not as creative as Línda’s. “I am Marda Novar Teldaret.” Teldaret was an old way of saying lumberjack; It meant something like “tree person.” There were also Novar Teldaríls, Novar Teldets, Novar Teldaranis, and Novar Teldaravis, and those were just the families he knew of. Línda seemed impressed, though. “Marda Novar Teldaret,” she said, weighing the words in her mouth and feeling their rhythm. “A good Tavari name.”
“I’m sure you say that to everyone.”
Línda smiled wryly. “I do not,” she said simply. “So. Marda.” She was still smiling, and still speaking gently, but there was a light in her eyes that put Marda on edge. He got the sense she was about to say something he didn’t want to hear. “When most people go to see the matchmaker, they see the one in the town they live in.”
Marda felt himself blush. He did, of course, live in his own small town that had its own small town matchmaker. Most Tavari towns still did, though people really went to see them for more general fortune telling these days—arranged marriages had gone out of fashion years ago. But his town being as small as it was, everyone knew everyone else, and everyone gossiped. He hadn’t had the courage to see the matchmaker in town because his place was literally right on the town square and his wife had been Marda’s favourite history teacher in school. He couldn’t bear the idea of someone he knew seeing him walk into the “I don’t know how to get a girlfriend” building, or the idea of his parents running into his old teacher and getting into gossipping about what Marda had been up to lately. But then, of course, as he sat there and thought about what Línda said, it was immediately, blatantly obvious that that was precisely what matchmakers counted on: connections. Knowing your family and friends, knowing who in town might be a good fit. “You have no idea who I am or anything about me,” Marda said. “How could you possibly-”
“Oh, Marda. You’re a smart boy.” She nodded to the elegant cup of juice sitting on the table next to him. “But have a drink and stay and chat for a minute. You came all this way.”
The young man dutifully did as he was told. The juice was mango, which somehow felt strange to be drinking out of such a fancy cup. A faint jingling told Marda that the cat had returned, striding back into the room and curling up on the floor in front of the open door to the outside patio. It was a beautiful day with just the faintest breeze, causing the bottoms of some of the many, many curtains in the room to billow and sway. He was unsure of what to do with the silence—he had presumed that the matchmaker would lead the conversation, that she would pepper him with questions, but she seemed content to watch him drink juice. “So,” he finally said, “if you wanted to go for supply chain management, how did you end up here?”
“Well I couldn’t fit all this junk in a cubicle, now could I?” She threw her head back and whooped her thunderous laugh again. The cat once lifted its head a moment and stared in Línda’s direction, but apparently decided it was a losing battle and put its head back down again. “Oh, it was crushing. It was just so… grey, all the time. Grey and brown. I need colour, I need pretty things. And I’m a gossip with good attention to detail, so match-making felt like a good fit. You know, I’m not from around here either. I just moved here to get a 144 phone number! Ohoho!” She laughed and laughed, thumping her hand on the table so much that some of the cards came misaligned from their grid. Immediately she noticed and readjusted them, so fast Marda almost missed it.
“Oh, where are you from?”
Linda grinned. “Guess,” she said.
Línda definitely did not have an accent, so she couldn’t have come from too far away from the southeast. She might be from Nuvrenon, but that would be too easy a guess for a Nuvo. Perhaps she was from one of the islands, there were dozens of them and they all tended to have their own quirks, but the people who were from the more rural islands had a funny way of talking, aggressively monotonal and with a bunch of weird, old words no one else used. She could discern a Novar from a Nevran by sight, which seemed an eastern thing to do, but it was just so hard to deny the fundamental essence of westernness about her.
“Nandrat,” he said, deciding to split the difference and pick the approximate middle.
“Olara,” she said with just a touch of disappointment, but just as everything else Línda said, it immediately made perfect sense to Marda once she had said it. Olara was an eastern city, but for several decades after the Great War it had, not uncontroversially, been administratively placed in a west coast province. It was one of the cookie cutter inland cities—Olara, Odai, Dela and Eštakai could all more or less be replaced with one another to no real effect—with little enough culture of its own that one couldn’t be blamed for seeking their fortune elsewhere.
“You have a westernness about you,” Marda found himself admitting. “But you don’t talk like it.”
Línda’s eyes lit up with excitement, every trace of her previous disappointment gone. “My father was from Crystal Coast,” she said gleefully. “He was a Rundra, through and through. He was big, he was loud, he was always two hours late to everything, as western as could be. Ahaha!” She stared at Marda for a moment. “It says a lot about a person to notice the things they notice. You notice accents and affectations, you think about the places people are from, don’t you? Perhaps your family is classically-minded?”
“My parents vote Liberal, yes,” quipped Marda.
The cat could tolerate the laughter no more and got up again, fleeing with great haste as Línda had to get up from her chair so she could double over. A flock of birds flew out of the trees in the far emerald distance behind her. “Ohoho! I meant- I meant- Ahahaha! I meant that you were raised to think in terms of… oh, I guess it is the same thing, isn’t it?” She sat back down and gave Marda another look up-and-down. “Your parents vote Liberal, but you seek new experiences, new people. Liberals don’t drive two hours to see a matchmaker.” Marda took in a breath but Línda quickly raised a hand. “Don’t tell me who you voted for. My point is that you take with you your understanding of the world, your views on what different places and different peoples are like, but you take in new information and change your approach when you find it isn’t right. Someone more stubborn than you would have told me ‘you can’t be from Olara!’ Someone more accommodating than you would have said ‘yes, of course, Olara!’ You stood your ground a bit. You, Marda, are right in the middle. The Nandrat of people.”
“Well I don’t know what I ever did to deserve that,” said Marda, putting on just a little show of offence.
“Ahaha! Now, now! There’s nothing wrong with the middle! It’s easier to fit you somewhere when you’re in the middle. But, speaking of Nandrat, that’s the realm of the Šonais, and these are Shonai divining cards.” With a beaming smile, somehow a different smile than the twelve dozen she had already worn today, she gestured over the immaculate grid of divining cards laid on the table. “I may have only been doing this for two dozen years or so, but I got these cards from the matchmaker here before me when he retired. They’re a hundred years old. Now, Marda, you should know that you almost certainly will not walk out of here with a wife today, but these are good cards, and I think they have a lot they can tell you.”
Marda looked down at his shoes. “I guess I didn’t actually know what to expect. Do… is it common to walk out of a matchmaker’s house with a wife?”
Línda chuckled. “No, not these days. That sort of thing was all gone by the 1950s. Really, arranged marriages lasted longer than they had any right to in this country, there wasn’t any real point to it after they got rid of chiefs. But the wealthy and powerful people had always gone to matchmakers to set up their marriages, and the commoners wanted to act like wealthy people, so they all wanted to go to matchmakers too. And, I mean, parents like to try and keep a hold on their children. A good Tavari mother never lets go of her children, so it was natural to try and keep things arranged. It wasn’t until the Great War taught everyone how valuable life really is that people realised life is too short to marry whoever your mother tells you to, and even that took a generation to stick. No, I don’t set people up to get married. I set people up to go on dates. Or, really, I read cards and try and help people understand what the spirits are telling them. So what you can expect, Marda, is for us to keep chatting just like this, but at the end of it, since you’re a nice young man, maybe I’ll make a phone call for you.” She smirked. “Now. You are Marda of Novar. What are your parents’ names?”
“Harda and Bevra. Of Novar.”
“Do they walk on the Urth or in the sky?”
It took Marda a moment to realise what she was asking. “Oh, they’re both still alive.”
“And who were their parents?”
“My mother’s parents were Šarda and… Devri, of Novar, and they walk in the sky. My father’s parents were Balandi and Moštar of Ovrošt, and they also walk in the sky these days.”
“It is a sad thing when all of one’s grandparents have passed on, but for our purposes it is helpful, because it means all of their spirits can be here to help us. All of my grandparents walk in the sky these days too, and they are also here.” Línda gestured at the candles. “These are how I speak with them. Or rather, how they speak with me. I can read the patterns in the fire.”
“They teach that in supply chain management, eh?”
“Ohoho! It was a correspondence course! Ahaha! Goodness, Marda. Anyway, between us we have eight spirits, but we need twelve. So the first thing I need you to do is tap on—do not turn it over—four of these cards. Just touch four of them. Pick them however you please. I absolutely cannot assist or direct you in any way.” She was grinning deviously, almost hungrily, as she peered across her table of cards toward Marda. Clearly, she had been looking forward to seeing which cards he would pick.
The cards were arranged in ten rows of ten. Each one was the same brilliant shade of scarlet, with intricate little spirals of black and white. They were heavily lacquered to the point of being starkly rigid to the touch—no wonder they had lasted for a century already. There was an audible clicking sound as Marda’s fingernail tapped on four cards at random. He wondered how Línda would respond but she said nothing, only picking each card up without looking at it and replacing each one with another identical card. She placed the four cards in a straight row to the side of the main grid of cards. “So now we have twelve spirits. Twelve is the number of perfection and completeness. However, twelve is a lot of people to talk to at once. In this house, I speak with ten spirits at once.” She nodded at the cards. “Ten rows of ten.”
“Interesting,” said Marda. “So if there are twelve-”
Línda giggled. “Tap two more cards,” she said gleefully. Marda complied, and Línda dutifully picked them up without turning them, replaced them, and set the two cards just above the two cards at the beginning and end of the row of four she had placed earlier. “So,” she said, her voice laden with genuine excitement. “We have here six cards. Two of them here in the middle are alone, they don’t have another card above them. Would you please turn those cards over?”
It was hard to silence the voice in his head that told him the cards were too fragile to touch, or perhaps even too magical, but he did as he was told and gasped. The cards he had flipped were the Jaguar, a beautiful drawing of a spotted cat prowling in the jungle, and the Treasury at Xoi, his very favourite of all the cards. The Treasury at Xoi had been a massive fortified building in Vakani Dalar under Tavari rule with multiple dramatically crenellated walls, two moats, and some of the most striking examples of stonemasonry in the gulf islands. It was a famous ancient building that the Tavari had burned down during the Crisis of 1792, and while there had been much to do about the card being insensitive to and disrespectful of the history of the Tavari oppression of Xoigovoi, their government had actually protested efforts to remove the card because they viewed it as the Tavari trying to brush that history under the rug. He had no idea what it meant for fortune telling, but it was certainly a cool story, and the art on the card was so skilled one could almost forget the building had burned down more than a hundred years before this card was ever made. “The Treasury at Xoi is my fa-”
“Do not place your preconceptions upon the cards,” Línda cautioned. Her voice was still gentle but she raised her eyebrows and held her gaze on Marda for a moment in a way that made him feel, just for the barest hint of a moment, very small. But then she smiled. “We must love all the cards today. We want them to bring us good news, of course. So, the ten spirits we have with us today are your four grandparents, my four grandparents, and the spirits of the Jaguar and the Treasury at Xoi. Now, how well do you know your history? Do you know Nonatalu, Prince of Xoigovoi?”
Marda blinked. Prince Nonatalu had been executed for treason in a brutal display of a public execution put on by Queen Tínara II. The shock and outrage over it eventually boiled over into the Crisis of 1792 that earned Vakani Dalar’s independence, led to the Abolition of the Chiefs and the dawn of constitutional, parliamentary government. He was a martyr to the Xoigovoi and a hero of Xoigovoi nationalists, a rallying symbol for half a dozen coups by now. Certainly quite a ghost to help you find a girlfriend. “Yeah, the last Prince of Xoigovoi under Tavaris. And who is the Jag-”
“Ahaha! Prince Nonatalu is the Jaguar!” Línda had a smile that would make a jaguar jealous. “The Treasury at Xoi is Ilara Nevran Lendreaž, the 12th Matron of the Church of Akrona.”
Marda felt like he had been punched in the gut. Generations of Rodokans had gone to prison for trying to tear down the statue of Matron Ilara in Lantaž, it was like a rite of passage. The architect of two years of war on Rodoka because a Rodokan High Chief mildly offended her, the reason alcohol was banned for sale on the island for centuries, and the primary driving force behind the most militant, most violent Akronist doctrine that bore her name to this day and inspired some of the terrorism of the Division Crisis, Ilara Nevran Lendreaž was just about the last person Marda wanted to help him with anything at all.
“Ilara Nevran Lendreaž is going to help me find a girlfriend?” Marda asked.
“Yes,” Línda said simply. “And we are glad that she is here.”
Marda decided to keep his mouth shut.
As if he had not spoken at all, Línda continued. “Now, the spirits of these other cards will not be helping us today. But they still have something important to tell us. So, please turn over the other two cards in this row of four.”
Hoping for fewer imperialists, Marda turned over the two cards and revealed the numbers Four and Nine. Most of the cards in a traditional Tavari deck had some animal or person on them, or at least something that had a picture, but twelve of them were just plain numbers. He wondered who the spirit of the number four was. How could any one person be such a thing?
“Now, the last two cards?”
The card above the number four was Vishara, the city at the southern tip of Tavaris, and the card above the number nine was The Mirror, which in this deck, was drawn not as a hand mirror but as an entire vanity cabinet, just the sort of thing the fashionable person of the 1920s would have loved to sit at and apply their radium lipstick and asbestos makeup or whatever was popular back then.
“Two numbers, four and nine, would have helped you if not for coming first and last in your selection. But the last two cards you picked tell us how these two cards are dismissed, and since you’re a smart young man who likes to know things, I will tell you how I know what I know. Vishara is the second card of the tenth suit, those are both even numbers. The Mirror is the ninth card of the tenth suit, odd then even. We place Vishara atop Four, which is the fourth card of the eleventh suit, even then odd. We place The Mirror atop Nine, which is the ninth card of the eleventh suit, odd then odd. Now, Marda, this is very auspicious. This is all very orderly, even odd, even even, odd odd, odd even. All the perspectives get to be heard. This is a calm and rational discussion between all the spirits involved and they have come to a very collegial and respectful agreement on who gets to help us today. Because all four combinations of odds and evens are represented, we simply wash our hands of these spirits and they go on doing whatever else they were going to do. Had you made other choices, say, your two new cards were both even-even, then I would have had to adjust the results of the other cards we see today to restore a balance between even and odd.”
“Fascinating. Who would have been-”
“Those spirits are gone now, so we don’t want to make them come back by invoking them.”
“Fair enough,” said Marda.
“So, we have your four grandparents, my four grandparents, Prince Nonatalu of Xoigovoi, and Matron Ilara. We have ten rows of ten cards. You are going to pick one card from each row, but this time, I may—or may not—pick a different card from the row for some reason known to me, but it’s very important you understand that whether I do change your selection or don’t, it doesn’t mean you made the ‘wrong’ selection. I may be responding to something our helper spirits have told me. You always want to be welcoming of their advice, because they are here with us. Speak of them as though you are speaking to them. We are respectful in my house.” She paused. “Not that you wouldn’t be. But please, tap on a card in this first row.”
Marda picked the third from the left, but Línda picked the third from the right and flipped it over. “The Tree Owner,” she said in a reverent, excited tone of voice. It was the same tone Marda had used when he had been about to tell Línda his favourite card was the Treasury at Xoi, he noted, but it seemed she caught him smiling. “I loved his story when I was a little girl,” she admitted. “Such a silly thing. The dumb old lumberjack goes out to fell a tree and a monkey ghost pops out and tells him ‘You can’t cut this down, I own this tree by ancient right!’ and they quibble about it until sunset.” She pitched her voice up into a ridiculous squeal when she quoted the Tree Owner story and then seemed to giggle at her own impression of it. “As a card, though, the Tree Owner is a sign of caution. His story tells us that we should be cautious of the motivations people present to us. Just as the lumberjack ought to have stopped and considered that a monkey, and especially not a dead one, cannot lawfully own a tree, before letting himself become distracted by the monkey’s story, one should stop and consider the real meaning of what others tell us when they speak to us. So now is a great time for me to ask you, Marda Novar Teldaret: why are you here?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Nothing could be less obvious.”
Marda stared at his feet. “Well, I mean, I guess… Well, I’m 22 now. I know that’s still pretty young, but I’ve never even… had a girlfriend or anything like that. My dad says if I don’t have a kid by 25 then my-”
Línda quickly raised a hand. “Nothing falls off of you if you don’t have a kid by 25, I hear that silly myth all the time, and nothing dries up, nothing withers, it- it- you don’t become infertile that early, it would be extraordinarily rare and if so, something completely outside your control anyway. Ino Province requires me to remind you that I am not a medical doctor and cannot provide medical advice, but it, I cannot emphasise enough, that silly rumour about age 25…” She stopped herself. “But you’re a smart young man, Marda. I’m sure you had your suspicions that wasn’t literally true. But you are here because you have come under the impression that you are too old to be single. That’s a very common anxiety. Like most anxieties, it isn’t true. I know that because it’s never true, you’re never too old. What the Tree Owner is telling us, is telling you, is to set aside that first impression. Look through and beyond the fear and find the real truth.” She gestured at the table. “Pick a card from the second row.”
He tapped on the sixth card from the right, and that was the one that Línda flipped over. On the card was a vast school of tiny little fish: the Anchovy. This was from the order of boring cards, if Marda remembered correctly, or more politely, “Worldly.” “Now, all of our ten spirits can talk to me at any time, but when we have all eight of our grandparents represented at a Seeing—a matchmaking—we say that the first row of cards is given by the Seer’s mother’s mother, and then the second is the client’s mother’s mother. So tell me of the spirit who has given us this important Word, what was her name, what was she like?”
“My mother’s mother was Šarda Novar Teldaret.”
“She was born a Novar?”
“Yes. I think our family name thing—Marda, Harda, Šarda—goes back at least one more generation, maybe more. It goes to the eldest Novar Teldaret child of a given generation. Grandma Novar ran a dairy farm, it was the family business.”
“Thank you, Grandma Novar,” said Línda to the candles. It might have been a little strange for Línda to call her that, but he appreciated that she used his name for her. “It sounds like your grandmother knew the value of hard work and had a respect for tradition. The Anchovy is from the eleventh order, the Worldly Order, which reminds us that appreciating the most ordinary, ever-present things can provide a real foundation for a grounded, stable life, so someone who got up every day to milk the cows because that was what her parents did is someone who knows the lessons the Worldly Order can teach. The Anchovy in particular teaches that there is stability, security, and prosperity in numbers. Alone we are small, together we are a force to be reckoned with. The Anchovy teaches us to look to our community, our school, for guidance.” She was quiet for a moment and looked almost sheepishly at Marda before adding “Such as the community one lives in.”
“Oh, I didn’t want people I know to see me walk into the ‘I can’t get a girlfriend’ shop,” moaned Marda with drooping shoulders. He had been hoping for another big laugh, but one didn’t come. Línda kept talking in that especially gentle voice, but the sheepishness was gone from her eyes as she peered right into his soul.
“You know, Marda… if one doesn’t have the courage to admit they want a girlfriend, they will find it impossible to find one. One cannot enter a relationship without taking the risk of vulnerability. You do have to… put yourself out there. The gossip is part of how it’s meant to work, you know. When it becomes known someone is visiting the matchmaker, well, people who had been sitting on the fence about you might be inspired to make their move. The notion that you might be off the market soon could spur someone into action.”
“If I knew a girl I liked was visiting the matchmaker it would just make me miserable,” said Marda, feeling quite miserable just sitting at the table under Línda’s gently agonising gaze.
“Is there a girl you like?”
“No.” Marda drooped his shoulders even lower. “There never has been. That’s why I’m here. There must be something wrong with me.”
“I think you are a very smart young man,” Línda said in a voice that was gentle in a different way. She was still looking into his eyes but her face had softened some. “Why don’t you pick a card from the third row?”
Marda picked the very first card, but Línda picked the second. “My mother’s father gives us the message of… the Featherer,” she said as she turned the card over. The picture was of an impeccably dressed fancy gentleman wearing a coat-tailed suit and a top hat, all of which were absolutely covered in big, striking feathers. He stood in a shop in between a pair of preposterously feathery fancy dress hats on display and clearly looked proud of his work. Tailor shops just for feathery clothing were definitely a pre-Great War Tavari affectation, but feathers were still common in festival clothes and the very most formal styles. When Marda looked back up from the card, Línda was leaning forward in anticipation. “Would you like to know the wisdom of the Featherer?”
“I welcome the wisdom of the Featherer,” said Marda earnestly.
“Now, a Featherer is not just a tailor, or just a milliner, or just a belt-and-harness-maker. A Featherer is the best of the best, skilled in the finest, most intricate, most magical of clothing. Young people these days don’t really know it because they don’t really have Featherers anymore, but when these cards were made, absolutely everyone would have understood fundamentally that you go to a Featherer for all your finest sewing needs, your good lace, your sheer things. Fishers would go to them to repair their nets. Your Featherer always had the odds-and-ends and bits and bobs for finishing things, for adding the gilt and the frills. A Featherer does not just do beautiful work, they do skilled work, precise work, they perform a service that everyone needs, but only rarely. You went to see the Featherer a few times a year. The Featherer is telling us that you should to try to seek out that which is special, that which is uniquely valuable, perhaps something that you don’t always seek.”
Marda chuckled. “All these cards so far have been telling me about me. When do they start telling you about-” But Línda’s face had taken on that knowing look again, that softness with just a hint of pain in the eyes.
“Oh, Marda. You’re a smart boy,” she said.
A very slow realisation crawled onto Marda’s chest and curled up on it like a particularly heavy sleeping cat—not unwelcome, but impossible to ignore and weighty in its silence. “All the cards tell me about me, don’t they?”
“Oh, sweet boy. That’s all the cards can do, is tell me about you. The cards don’t… there wouldn’t be a card to tell me ‘look for a tall girl with light brown eyes’ or ‘look for a girl from Eštakai.’ If matchmakers did that, all it would ever do is make lonely, desperate people obsessed with harassing every girl in town with brown eyes. Now, we could sit here and have you flip over all ten cards and I could tell you all about them, but what’s important isn’t the cards, sweet boy, it’s what you say about them. It’s what you tell me about yourself in the chit-chat in between. And, and, I… I mean, all my clients, after the Seeing, what I tell them is to think about the lessons the cards taught them and to meet with me again in two weeks. And if you were from town, if I knew your family and what other folks around town said about you, if I knew who your friends were and the company you liked to keep, I’d have called around, but I couldn’t really do that for you. I, I mean… I don’t usually have to ask my clients to tell me about their grandparents because I already knew them. Oh, sweet thing, you drove eighty vonai to a town where no one’s ever heard of you to tell a matchmaker that in 22 years there has never been a girl you liked? You… you’re a smart boy. But you… you’re hurting inside, aren’t you?” It was then that Línda’s voice finally cracked. Her chin had been wobbling dangerously for some time, but it was only then that her eyes began to sparkle.
“My p- my parents are… traditional,” Marda said in a very small voice. “They vote for Liberals. They… they…” His eyes were sparkling too, and they burned like candles as he clenched them tight. There was just a faint sound as the table shook when Línda stood up from it, curtains billowing in the breeze she kicked up, as she rushed over to Marda and wrapped him in a tight embrace. It had been a humid day and the skin of her arms was sticky, but there was still a tiny hint of the smell of fresh cut mango as she surrounded him with love.
“Sweet, precious boy, you came all this way because you were sure that I could find you the girl, the one who fixed you, the one who made you act like they tell you boys should act… you came all this way… but you’re smart, you’re a smart young man…” She squeezed him as tight as she could. “There isn’t a right girl out there for you, is there sweetheart?”
“My dad says gay people are selfish,” Marda croaked into Línda’s chest. “They’re greedy. They, they… he says a man should have children, that so many orcs are infertile and the birth rate is low, that Tavari society will end if… I… I… my friend, his boyfriend broke up with him, and he was devastated, just so upset, and I was telling my parents about it, and my dad said… my dad said good. He said a man needs to grow up and raise a family with a woman like it’s always been done… that he was too old to be playing around with boys… I thought… I thought if I went to a match-maker…”
“I cannot fix you because you are not broken, Marda! There is nothing wrong with you!” That booming, powerful voice of Línda’s could only sob, and it shook Marda down to his immortal soul. “They are lying to you! When they say there is something wrong with how you feel, they are lying! Don’t listen to them! You are smart! You know they are lying! You drove all this way… all this way because you wanted to be fixed… you are not broken. They are lying to you. This was never our way. This… this is a foreign tradition that has become adopted by- oh, I shouldn’t say ‘foreign’ like that, but…” Her thunderous voice had faded to a desperate whisper, laden with pleading, earnest pain, as she held him tightly. “Sweet boy. Precious boy. Do you even want to date at all?”
“I… I don’t know," he admitted to himself. "I can’t even imagine it. I’m not sure I ever thought it was even really an option. But I haven’t even finished uni, how am I supposed to figure myself out and handle someone else?”
“You don’t have to,” she whispered. “You don’t have to. Your life has meaning without anyone else. The spirits are the matchmakers, Marda. They will lead you to someone when the time is right, and the person is right. Their spirits will lead them to you. You don’t need to force yourself to do this just because it seems to be what others do, you can focus on being your own person, on leading your own life. And you know, you can decide to find someone else later. At any time. But you can just be.”
Marda chuckled through his tears. “Be alone? What about the Anch-”
“To narasq with the Anchovy. Oh, precious boy.” She pulled away from him and gently ran a thumb down the side of his face. "You know, I did promise I would make a phone call for you,” she said finally.
“No you didn’t,” Marda said, “You only said maybe, you don’t have to-”
“I… I never do this, and, I mean, you said you weren’t sure but I… well… I wasn’t just being nice, you really do seem smart. You really keep me on my toes. Do you like history, Marda? You know about Prince Nonatalu and the Treasury at Xoi…”
“I like history,” Marda answered honestly, not quite sure of where Línda was going.
“I have a son who is a history major. I wouldn’t… I mean, ordinarily a matchmaker never matches their own children, but… he is at the University of Nakaš, where did you say you lived?”
“Uh, it’s Arni, which you’ve never heard of because it has like twelve people, but it’s just one exit up the T3 from North Nakaš where the University is. They just built a new stadium or something not too far from me, I think it’s for-”
“My son plays rugby,” said Línda with a flash of recognition. A smile slowly crept across her face and, with just the barest hint of ceremony, she produced a cell phone from somewhere under her poncho. “Here he is,” she said, showing him the picture on her lock screen. On Línda’s phone was the largest man Marda had ever seen, with an arm like a tree trunk wrapped around his mother, who looked positively waifish in comparison. He had gleaming, brilliant tusks and the most dazzling, enormous smile. His bald head gleamed in the sunlight. In the picture, he and his mother seemed to be laughing, and just as his mother had done several times that day, the man in the picture was leaning back to laugh with his whole chest. There was just the barest hint of green playing at the bottom of his shirt as his gorgeous, beautiful stomach threatened to burst out of it. The lightness in Marda’s chest, the glee and adrenaline and rapture playing in the back of his mind, the desire to be close to him, to feel the warmth and the weight, the substance of him, told him that the only place in the universe Marda needed to be was as close to this man as possible. That wherever this man was, that was the right place to be. And feeling that feeling was the right thing to feel.
When he looked up again, Línda once again had that devious look in her eyes, the one that told him she knew exactly what to do and she could not wait for him to do it. “In two weeks’ time, you are going to drive back up here, and on this table there will be a great big dinner and the two of you will eat every bite of it, and you will talk of Xoi and Matron Ilara, and whatever else in history or anything else you want to talk about, and I am sure you will talk for hours and hours, and, and… now, now I can’t promise… I mean, he makes his own decisions, we all make our own decisions, and it’s just one little date. You mustn’t… I- I mean, think of it as coming to see me. In a fortnight’s time, you will come back here to have dinner with me, and my son will also be here. And you can tell your Liberal father that, that…”
Marda got up from his chair and threw his arms around Línda. “Thank you for doing all this for someone from some other town you just met. I… I’ve never had anyone to… talk about stuff like this with. My parents… let me stay with them for free, so I… try not to rock the boat.”
“A boat that does not rock is not sailing,” said Línda with a punch of finality. “So. Do you think you can make it back in a fortnight?”
There was a syrupy, cloying sort of happiness bubbling up inside him, an anticipation, a validation that he had never felt before. “Yes,” Marda squeaked delightedly.
“Then I will see you then, precious boy.” Línda pulled away from him but quickly pulled him back in for another hug.
“But… what about the other…”
“I believe we have learned all we need to learn today. Like I said, dear boy, the point of the Seeing is the conversation between us, not the cards.”
“I know, I know, but… I guess… I guess I really was just curious what sort of wisdom Ilara Nevran Lendreaž of all people could give me.”
“Ohhhhhh… well… Hers is certainly a spirit we don’t want to offend. Alright, go ahead, pick a card from the last row.”
Since she was a Matron of the Elders, it felt appropriate to pick the seventh card. Marda dutifully tapped on it and Línda flipped it over to reveal… the number Seven. The two of them stared at it for a moment, silent and blinking. “You know, I don’t even use the seventh order cards for matchmaking, they’re called the Wicked order. That card isn’t even sup- Are you an Akronist, Marda?” Línda asked.
“Uh, no,” said Marda.
“You are now. Congratulations.” She clapped a hand on Marda’s back. “You’re a gift. See you in two weeks.”
Her boisterous, exuberant laughter echoed in Marda’s ears for his entire drive home.