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expensive ones.” He shrugged. “I spend so much time handling them, I figure I might as well enjoy looking at them.”
    “So are there—five different kinds? No. Six. Seven?”
    He neatened the piles and turned them to face her. “Five suits. One to match each elemental trait. Fish for coru, skulls for hunti, roses for torz. Horseshoes for sweela, though that’s always seemed the weakest connection to me. I suppose because horseshoes are shaped in the fire.” With a little flourish, he pushed the last pile closer to her hand. “And for your own element, flutes.”
    “What about all those other cards?”
    “Three wildcards. Think of them as random blessings. Depending on the game, they can be more or less valuable to hold in your hand.”
    “And those?”
    “Trumps. Nine of them. I don’t know how they relate to the general blessings, but three times three is a lucky number.”
    “And you can play more than one kind of game with these same cards?”
    “Dozens. Hundreds.”
    “Teach me one,” she said. “Something simple.”
    He laughed. It was so unexpected that he should have expected it. This girl might be all elay, but she had a little of the coru element of surprise running through her veins. “All right. This is a game that even children can play. Trumps become their own suit, and the nine of trumps becomes the fourth wildcard. So all you have to do is match six of a kind . . .”
    She was a quick study, mastering two easy games so rapidly that he taught her penta, since it had a subtlety that made it enjoyable whether the player was a novice or a professional. She even agreed to play for money—“as long as we keep it to quint-coppers and you don’t cheat”—and laughed in delight the first time she won a hand. By that time, of course, she’d already lost a whole pile of quint-coppers, though he doubted they amounted to much more than a quint-silver. Hardly enough to cover the price of the extra loaf of bread Samson had sent to his room.
    “I see how this could become addictive,” she observed. “I keep thinking if I play just one more hand, I’ll finally get the right cards.”
    “And that kind of attitude is exactly what keeps me employed,” he answered.
    She folded her hands and studied him. “So how does one become a professional card player?” she asked. “What road do you start down that winds up here?”
    She didn’t say it as if she pitied him or wanted to convince him of the error of his ways. Merely, she sounded curious. Elay women were creatures not only of air, but also of spirit. He had the sense she was trying to fix in her mind the precise pattern of his soul.
    He gathered up the cards, since his hands felt empty without them, and began to idly shuffle and cut them, shuffle and cut. “My mother met an attractive man and found herself with a baby on her hands,” he said.
    “A common enough occurrence,” Josie observed.
    He nodded. “I get the feeling life wasn’t very easy for her until she met my stepfather when I was a few years old. He’d come to Chialto for the work, but he was a country man at heart. All torz. He missed the land. When his sister asked him back to help run the family farm, he was glad to go, and my mother was glad to go with him. A couple years later they had a son, my brother, Steff. A couple years after that, my mother died.”
    He shrugged, a silent way of conveying what a time of pain and confusion that had been. All these years later, and he felt like he could still remember every day of that first awful year after his mother’s death. “I hadn’t liked farm life much to begin with, and pretty soon I couldn’t wait to get away,” he went on. “I wanted to get someplace where there was life and chaos and music . I wanted to go to the city. I left the first chance I could.”
    “How old were you?”
    “Seventeen. Came to Chialto, drifted around, took odd jobs. Headed down to the harbor to work on the docks. Didn’t like that,