Madame Zezra is a sleek snow-leopard tabaxi whose long limbs fold and unfold with the quiet precision of a hunting cat. Her pale fur is densely peppered with charcoal rosettes, and age has silvered the fur around her muzzle without softening her sharp, watchful face. She almost never blinks; when she does, both eyes close slowly, as if she has decided the moment is worth missing. Her layered violet shawls hang in uneven, carefully mended folds, and brass bangles chatter whenever she deals. She moves with a gliding, economical step, then abruptly perches on a chair back or windowsill. The unexpected detail: between readings, she knits bright, lopsided wool mittens for neighborhood children, keeping the current pair tucked inside her shawls.

Zezra is keenly curious about other people's choices but guarded about her own. With frightened clients she is warm, gently funny, and unexpectedly practical; with a bully she becomes unsparing and difficult to distract. She wants to believe that people can change their fate, yet keeps a private record of every prediction that came true. She can be tender toward the vulnerable and manipulative toward those she thinks are dangerous, then feel ashamed of the manipulation without apologizing for the result.

Zezra was born among caravan performers who wintered in the foothill market town of Sable Ford. Her mother read cards for travelers; Zezra learned the trade young, first as a way to earn supper and later as a way to notice what people tried to hide. When she was thirty, a fire trapped her younger brother, Tavi, in a lodging house. Zezra had drawn a card she interpreted as a warning of betrayal and spent the evening confronting a rival instead of checking the building's bad stove. Tavi survived, but lost the use of one leg. Zezra never again claimed the cards could tell her what she wanted to hear. Years later, while searching a collapsed shrine for a place to shelter her brother, she found a sealed black mirror and heard a voice offer her the power to make one small chance turn another way. She accepted, and the mirror's unseen presence became her patron. Now she works from a cramped room above a bathhouse, paying for Tavi's medicines and trying to learn why the mirror shows a snow-covered doorway in every reading. Tavi, now a patient and capable clock repairer, loves her fiercely and resents being treated as her penance. Zezra is also in quiet correspondence with a former caravan companion, Dima, who wants her to leave town before the mirror's influence spreads.