The Cunning Craft
The Pips, Two through Nine — The Working World
The Aces name where the gift came from. The Tens name what it is all for. Between them sit thirty-two cards built from neither origin nor outcome, but from the day-to-day working life of the cunning folk themselves: the objects they carried, the methods they used, the cases that came through their door.
Most of these cards is a documented practice, a dated case, a specific object, or a more common magical object they’d encounter in their world.
The ranks rise in a fixed order, the same order in every suit: the Twos where things meet and change each other, the Threes as a minor charm, the Fours as foundation and consultation, the Fives as the wound or unwanted affliction, the Sixes as a remedy, the Sevens under the influence of the sacred, the Eights as the turning that transforms, and the Nines as the major practice, the largest claim any pip makes.
This is the cunning folk at work. Everything else in the deck explains where that work began or where it ended. This is the work itself.
The Twos — The Mixing
where things meet
2♥ The Love Potion · Attraction
Goodwife Swane of Kent boasted of a drink so powerful that any man given it would love her. John Prestall claimed five hundred gentlemen would stand between him and the gallows, so prized was his skill in love potions.
2♦ The Pestle & Mortar · Preparation
Stone against stone, root and seed crushed before they are ready for anything else. The work is not in the grinding. It is in knowing when to stop.
2♣ The Divining Rod · Finding
A forked hazel branch, cut fresh and held loose in both hands, that dips on its own toward whatever is genuinely hidden beneath the ground.
2♠ The Barrow · Spirit Counsel
An ancient mound of earth, entered at noon or at midnight, where the dead and the fairies kept court and answered what the living dared to ask.
The Threes — The Charm
the cunning craft as minor magic
3♥ The Love Charm · Rekindling
A Canterbury cunning man gave a woman a written charm to make her husband love her, and was paid six shillings eightpence, two half-kirtles, and a gold ring for it.
3♦ The Abracadabra Charm · Diminishing
A single word written eleven times, shrinking by a letter each line until it vanishes completely, folded shut and worn against the chest.
3♣ The Conjured Ring · Tipping the Odds
Henry, Lord Neville, paid the magician Wisdom for a ring worked through angel magic, promised to turn every game of chance his way. The day it was finished, he won thirty pounds outright.
3♠ The SATOR Charm · Warding
Five Latin words scratched into a wall, reading the same forwards, backwards, upward and downward, leaving nothing hostile a way back out.
The Fours — The Foundation
that which should be consulted
4♥ The Nativity Chart · Destiny
Twelve houses drawn for the moment of first breath, the planets pinned in place before the child had managed a single act of its own.
4♦ The Measuring Cord · Accuracy
A knotted cord measured from elbow to thumb, the same cubit every time, until the day it fell short and a fairy was found to be the cause.
4♣ The Almanac · The Right Day
Lucky days and unlucky days marked plainly in print, decades of consultations behind the marking, for whoever needed to know exactly when to act.
4♠ The Spell Book · Guidance
Charms, cures, and the names of spirits, set down in a cunning hand and kept close, meant for one apprentice eventually, and no one else.
The Fives — The Wound
the unwanted affliction
5♥ The Soured Churn · Disruption
Cream that had sat for hours, churned and churned, refusing to become butter, for no reason anyone in the house could name.
5♦ The Thunderstone · Affliction
A flint arrowhead turned up fresh by the plough, centuries old, named on the spot as elf-shot the moment it broke the soil.
5♣ The Lost Spoons · Entrapment
Mabel Gray had lost her precious spoons, the only valuables she owned. A cunning woman passed her to a cunning man, who took a shilling in coin and a shilling in drink, then led her himself, deeper still, to a third, in a den of thieves hiding from the law.
5♠ The Wax Figure · Manipulation
The same figure could promise a child or threaten a king. Margery Jourdemayne shaped one in wax for the Duchess of Gloucester, who wished only to quicken with child. The court read a plot against the king’s life, and burned her for it.
The Sixes — The Remedy
the cunning craft that sets right
6♥ The Cleansed Shirt · Peace
Ordinary linen, washed in water blessed rather than drawn from the well. Nothing changed that the eye could see, yet the man who wore it did. He grew quieter, kinder, easier to live beside, and never knew why.
6♦ The Drawn Breath · Relief
A sickness drawn whole out of one body and set down in another creature that was never ill before. Margaret Stothard took a child’s affliction into herself. She was paid a fleece of wool.
6♣ The Horseshoe · Expulsion
Joseph Blagrave prescribed two horseshoes: one quenched red-hot in the patient’s water and nailed heel-up at the threshold, the other boiled with nails and salt until it was gone.
6♠ The Pierced Heart · Repaid in Kind
Agnes Hill of Plymouth had the sufferer kill a cock over fasting water and ash, then drew out its heart and had it stuck with seven new pins, seven new needles and nine blackthorn prickles before it roasted at the fire.
The Sevens — The Sacred
the influence of the divine
7♥ The Psalm · Intercession
A single line of scripture, torn small enough to fit into the gap above a door. Whoever placed it there believed nothing hostile could cross the threshold beneath it again.
7♦ The Holy Well · Last Resort
A sick child carried at midnight to a well no map explained, because ordinary water, however clean, was never going to be enough.
7♣ The Bible & Key · Honesty
A name slipped into the barrel of a key, the key laid across a chosen verse, until book and key turned together of their own accord.
7♠ The Churchyard Herb · Persistence
Mary Catherine Murray told a desperate husband his ill-wished wife must gather certain herbs from the churchyard, by night, for twenty-one nights running, before any other remedy would take.
The Eights — The Turning
the cunning craft that changes
8♥ The Witch Cake · Reversal
Flour kneaded with the sufferer’s own water, baked at the hearth, split in two, sent walking the affliction home by the road it came on.
8♦ The Cast-Off Stone · Casting Off
An ordinary stone, chanted over until the sickness left the flesh and entered it instead, and from that hour too dangerous to keep in the house.
8♣ The Mirror · Revelation
A looking-glass on a nail showed an Essex man his thief’s face in 1578. James Murrell did the same two centuries on, claiming his glass could see straight through a wall.
8♠ The Hag Stone · True Sight
A stone pierced clean through by nothing but moving water, never by a chisel, held to one eye to see what was actually standing there.
The Nines — The Power
the major practice of the cunning craft
9♥ The Concealed Shoe · Protection
A shoe, worn thin at the heel, sealed inside a chimney breast since long before anyone living can remember. There are thousands like it hidden across England. Whoever placed them believed the house around it would stay safe for as long as the shoe stayed hidden.
9♦ The Witch Bottle · Permanent End
Pins, nails, hair and the sufferer’s own water, sealed into glass and buried upside down where the curse would arrive and simply never leave.
9♣ The Sieve & Shears · The Guilty Party
Shears driven into the rim of a sieve, balanced on two fingers, turning on its own toward whichever name spoken aloud was the truth.
9♠ The Toad Bone · Dominion
A small bone that bends any living will to its keeper’s own. Taken from running water at midnight, while something unseen and enormous closed in behind, daring its keeper to look back. They didn’t.