The dress was painfully ill-fitting, but Orinda had become used to such indignities in her months in the castle. She, who had been the belle of every major court in Europe in her day, was no better than a servant in Amber.
What had possessed her mother to bring her to this hostile place? Why had she lied about their relationship? Why hadn't she protested when King (her grandfather) had given her to his apparently-mad adviser? Why were the princes and princesses so hostile?
These were the larger questions, but there were several smaller ones that were of greater import to Orinda at the moment. Could she get the dress to stop protesting as if it were going to lose the back seam? And where could she find some cards suitable to read at the ball?
Orinda was sure Deirdre had requested--demanded--her presence as a means of humiliating her. Deirdre was like that; spoiled and unpleasant. Orinda liked to think she had never been so inconsiderate; she probably had, but at least she'd had the good grace to feel sorry about it later.
If Orinda had still believed the doctrines that the sisters had taught her in her youth, she might have considered Amber a punishment for such crimes. But nearly a century of youth had undermined her faith in traditional religion, if not her current faith in cosmic justice.
It had occurred to Orinda that the library of Castle Amber might contain the cards she needed; she thought she'd seen several decks in one of the glass cases. The case was locked, but Orinda had learned enough of locks to know that there were some you could force and others you could induce to yield their secrets. A hairpin had made her mistress of this particular lock, and now she sat at a table with the cards spread out before her: the thirty-six Fortunes.
And when Orinda had counted those out, a dozen or so cards yet remained. There was something about them, something she couldn't name, something that left her with the hair on the back of her neck standing on end. She might be trifling with another of the Things She Didn't Understand about Amber, but this one she could not leave alone.
Orinda picked up the first of the cards. It was cold as ice to the touch, and she almost dropped it. Its back was the same as the others of its set: a white unicorn rampant, dexter. But the front was a portrait of a dark-haired man she'd never seen before, dressed in black and silver, with a blade and rose-clasped cloak.
Orinda turned over the next card. A woman in grey and green, with green hair. Orinda could almost feel the moisture from the card, and wondered if it had something to do with Rebma. Had she understood incorrectly, or was Rebma really underwater? Orinda wasn't sure she believed it, but she wouldn't have believed in Amber had she not experienced it.
Distracted by the question of Rebma, she paid no attention to the next cold card until she had flipped its face up. Then she stopped with a painful gasp, for the man in the particolored doublet and hose that would have been centuries out of date on Earth but were timelessly fashionable in Amber was Random.
Orinda riffed through the remainder of the cold cards, recognizing Deirdre, Eric, Gerard, Caine, and her own mother, and tentatively assigning names to the rest based on the court gossip she had heard. They must be useful in divination; the royal family practiced it, based on the whispers she'd heard of a ghostly moonlit city over the water. But these cards were a secret that none of the servants had spoken of in her presence.
Random's card reclaimed her attention. Orinda found she was drawn to it; it was an exquisite likeness, and whoever had painted it had somehow captured the essence of him, the insouciant grin, the shock of blond hair, the laughter in his eyes.
She stared at the card for a long time; afterwards she could not have said how long. And it seemed to her that the figure of Random on the card moved somehow, even though she knew it was impossible. Against her will, she found her eyes brimming with tears. All of her being seemed bound up with a wordless yearning to see him again; he filled her field of vision.
The card spoke with Random's voice. "Who is it?"
"Random?" Orinda breathed.
"It is my Trump. Who did you expect? Corwin come back from the dead?" the card answered. Then, in a tone of real concern: "Who are you?"
And as she spoke her own name, a hand slammed down on the card, forcing it from her hand and sending it spinning out of her grasp onto the floor of the library, where it lay face down. Suddenly sluggish and confused, she looked up into the concerned face of her sometime charge, the kindly madman Dworkin. "You were talking to the card," he said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
Orinda blinked, owl-eyed. Mastery of her tongue, much less the rest of the world, had not yet returned to her.
Dworkin's next words were slow and clear. She recognized the voice; it was how the others spoke to him. She tried to treat him as if he understood everything she said, even though the servants had told her he didn't. There were times when Dworkin was quite lucid, and treating him as if he always enjoyed lucidity was her method of encouraging it. But now he was the clear one, and she was the one whose thoughts were clouded.
"What are you doing in the library?"
Orinda shook her head to clear it. "Princess Deirdre asked me to read the cards for her and some of her friends at the ball this evening. My deck is in bad shape; I thought I would be able to find some cards in the library to use. It wouldn't do to disappoint Princess Deirdre." A lame excuse.
Dworkin merely chuckled. "No, it wouldn't do to disappoint Princess Deirdre. But you seem a little overheated. Come to the window and clear your head." And he let her lean on him all the way over, as if he were the nurse and she the ill one. There was no frailty in him, none at all. How had she not seen this?
The coolness of the evening air restored at least a semblance of normality to Orinda. She gazed out the window over the waters for a time, feeling her head clear. When she glanced back at Dworkin, she realized that he was looking at her, not at the spectacular view.
"Where did you get the dress?" His voice was all neutral curiosity.
Self-conscious, Orinda straightened Deirdre's cast-off. "The Princess was aware that I had nothing fitting for the ball, and sent me this so I would have something that wouldn't disgrace her too much." She felt the back seam give slightly and prayed it would hold through the night.
Dworkin snorted. "Just like her. Well, it won't do, my girl. Come here." Orinda hesitated, and he beckoned her, as if she were a nervous cat. "Come here, let me take a look at it."
Orinda submitted to Dworkin's inspection nervously. He looked the dress over in detail, muttering to himself. Then he caught the peplum in both hands and YANKED.
Horrified, Orinda started to protest, but Dworkin's glare quelled her. Dworkin's efforts hadn't ripped the dress, nor was the TUGGING and PULLING and JERKING and even TEARING the dress damaging it in any way as far as she could tell. So she submitted, thinking that even if she felt better, whatever had happened to her was still affecting her, because he couldn't be doing that to the dress without destroying it. Could he?
After a few minutes, Dworkin seemed to feel he was finished with whatever he was doing. Looking Orinda up and down, his weathered face creased in a grin. Then he reached into a pocket of his robes and pulled out a box of cards. "Take these and go to the ball. You will read better tonight than you have ever read before. And stop worrying about that seam; it will hold, I promise you."
Realizing how late she must be, Orinda took the cards with quick thanks and hurried to the ball. Deirdre caught Orinda's gaze as she entered, then glared venomously at Orinda as she made her way across the hall to the knot of ladies who were waiting with the Amberite princess.
"Where did you get that dress?" Deirdre asked her, low and angry.
Confused, Orinda started to say, you sent it to me, but then she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the candlelit windows of the hall.
She was wearing a different dress.
Orinda couldn't help it; she smiled. "It was something Master Dworkin found for me, Your Highness." That stopped Deirdre cold, which was a good feeling, even if not as good as the feeling of hearing Random's voice again. Resolutely, Orinda ignored that thought, and turned to Deirdre's companions. "And which of you ladies would like your fortune told first?"
The next morning, Orinda intended to look at the dress more closely, but she had barely begun when Dworkin knocked at her door. The dress lay over her chair, awaiting her examination, as she returned his deck of cards with profuse thanks.
"Did you like it?" Dworkin asked innocently, gesturing at the dress.
"It looked lovely in the window, but I never got to look at it in the mirror," Orinda confessed.
Dworkin smiled again. "It looked lovely on you, child, but I can show you what you looked like." And from somewhere he palmed a card, an exquisitely painted card, showing a figure in a black dress--that black dress--holding a skull on her right hand and a candle in her left. Orinda didn't need to scrutinize the face; she already knew it was her own, and the card would be ice to the touch.
"Show me," Orinda said to Dworkin, her voice full of something fierce that she thought she'd lost after Vienna and never expected to find in Amber.
But it was in Dworkin's voice, too, when he answered her: "I will."
Jane Seymour is Orinda