DUSKBORN

"In other lands dragons are but a rumor. In the Horns, dragons are paid taxes."

Rule the first: never win the last hand before you leave town.

The trick to cheating at cards is not the dealing, though everyone thinks it is. The trick is losing. Lose the right hands — the ones they remember — and the mark will swear you came out behind even when your pockets sit heavier than when you pulled up a chair. Win too hard, they count. Win too soft, you wasted the candle. The art is the middle distance: take enough to eat, leave enough that nobody bothers counting.

I learned this at eight, on a dirt floor in a farmhouse my father was already losing. By twenty-one I could do it in my sleep. By twenty-one I had to.

The table that night was a dockside tavern called the Silt — three planks on barrels, tallow light, a back room that smelled of salt and old wagers. Four of us. A cooper who counted on his fingers between every bet. A ship's mate too drunk to read his own cards and too proud to fold them. And a Ruby apprentice in a collar too clean for the company, the kind of boy who announces his patron's name before he orders a drink. I had been skinning that particular boy twice a month for the better part of a year, and he still credited his losses to luck. Some men will pay to believe in a fair universe. The Ruby apprentice believed in one hard enough to finance my dinners.