Calling such a small re-raise is overdetermined no matter what cards she has. Shiro adds the requisite 190 chips, bringing the pot to 2140.

The rest of the players lean in as they show their cards. A few people from neighboring tables turn around to watch.

"Run it once," she tells the dealer.

Top pair versus a drawing hand favors her, but not by as much as she'd like. He has a 31.21% chance of improving to beat her, which is closer to a coin flip than is strictly wise for this early in the tournament. Ideally she would let him have pots like this and wait to punish him from a stronger position, but what's done is done. Her range was ahead of his, it was the right call given the information she had, and even if she loses she's confident she can claw her chips back. Running it twice would reduce the variance, but it also reduces the number of hands Shiro can play – and the more she can play, the better her odds on the long run.

The dealer turns over the seven of hearts…

… and the eight of spades…

… missing the flush draw, the straight draw, and the other aces.

"A pair of jacks," says the dealer, signalling the end of the hand. A few people clap politely.

The other gambler stares at her in disbelief. It is not the disbelief of someone who has lost a showdown he was unlikely to win in the first place – it is the disbelief of someone who is just now realizing that he will not be king after all.

"How old are you?"

"I'm—"

Shiro pauses.

"I don't know how to answer that right now. I still haven't read any astronomy textbooks."

There are four players remaining, and one of them is a monster disguised as a little girl. The rest of the table is going to take that as their cue to leave. Most of them are immediately re-seated by the staff, but Shiro is going to check in with Sora first. She's sitting at just under 15,000 chips, an M-ratio of 66.6, which gives her the latitude to target good players who haven't dominated their first opponents as thoroughly as Shiro did. The fewer good players make it past the middle of the tournament, the easier the final table will be.

Sora might take a moment to notice her arrival, because he's succeeding almost as much as she is.

It turns out that hosting a gambling event to allocate power attracts two kinds of people: ones who want power, and ones who really like gambling. The hijack from Zell's table was interested in making a side bet, as were nine other people in line to pick up lunch. Sora has his hands full with bookmaking, and is now devoting a substantial fraction of his attention towards remembering where each of them put their money. The discussion has gotten fairly loud, which isn't helping matters, and the people vying for his attention are being more incessant than usual.

"Hey. Hey, Sora! First table was fun! Were you watching?"

What? He looks over his shoulder at his sister.

"That's great," he replies. "Do you want to grab a bite before going back?"

"Later."

Sora doesn't think any of the current games stand out, so she allows herself to be pulled over to a brand new table by one of the maids. Four of the other players have dramatically fewer chips than her – the fifth is sitting at what looks like ten thousand.

They draw cards to pick the first dealer, the blinds are raised to 100/200, and then it's off to the races.

The instant Chloe's chips are off the table, Fiel excuses herself and makes a beeline for a distant boudoir on the second floor. She shuts the door, leans against it to prevent anyone from barging in, and casts her mind adrift.

Reading minds is not like reading books. Skilled wizards can peer into sensory registers and surface thoughts to experience them as though eavesdropping on a nearby conversation, but explicit memories that aren't at the forefront of the mind are harder to reach. Engrams are not indexed and searchable for the convenience of snooping telepaths. The trick, which is challenging even by the standards of mind-reading spells, is to use the host mind to traverse the grey matter network, hunting down stored memories on behalf of the mind-reader and bringing them bubbling up to the top.

This presents something of a problem: Fiel can tell in an instant what any given castle inhabitant is thinking of, but pushing for more information on the plot against her and Chloe will cause anyone who is not currently thinking about it to consider it briefly. This is a famous tell for whether one is having their mind read, of the sort that even people with no training in resisting telepaths are very likely to have heard before. While the vast majority of the humans in this castle have never been actively scanned, anyone who is focused intently on something else (such as, for example, a game of poker) will notice at once if their thoughts are being nudged by an external force.

So she starts with a passive scan, hoping to get lucky.

Nothing immediately jumps out.

The first thing Fiel notices is that she cannot get away with actively scanning this venue. Nearly everyone is deep in concentration; even one active scan is more likely to be noticed than not. It's just as well that passive scanning is undetectable without mage-sense, or else this whole scheme wouldn't work in the first place.

Obvious targets first. Princess Stephanie's mind is warded against intrusion, which prevents her from lifting the details directly from the one person bound to be thinking about them, but a quick once-over of the staff interacting with her reveals that most of them don't know what's going on: she's added herself to the roster under a pseudonym, and her disguise is apparently good enough to fool her own employees. The non-humans in the room are equally opaque – Bragi and Maria are shielding themselves and werebeasts are immune to mind-affecting magic – but Fiel doesn't think any of them are conspiring against her.

Her current theory is that Stephanie is gathering evidence to present to an unwitting accomplice, someone selected in advance to level the accusation at an opportune moment, and it needs to be someone reasonably competent. Someone who understands poker well enough to develop a justified belief that Chloe Zell has been cheating after reading a notebook full of her play history. That narrows the field considerably.

Fiel is no card sharp (that's her partner's job), but she can make educated guesses. Her attention flits from skull to skull, keeping track of players who stand out. The ones who think of nothing but numbers, the ones looking for tells, the ones paying attention to the hands they aren't playing, the ones whose minds are shielded from view. She passes their names and faces to Chloe while she works, although she refrains from providing any commentary. No more cheating, at least until they're no longer doing damage control.

Of the members of the audience whose thoughts are visible, only one is more absorbed in the tournament than he is in the conversation he's leading.

This is enough to warrant observation, but it's only when Fiel gets a look at his face through Chloe's eyes that she makes the connection.

:That one was at the Railbird's Perch yesterday.:

Chloe's eyes dart towards Sora.

:He booked a room just before we left. I saw him talking to the concierge.:

:And went upstairs right as your stud game with the princess ended.:

She catches the drift.

:Was he watching me?:

:Then, yes. Today, unclear. He's thinking about player performance by table, not cheating. I want to take a closer look, but—:

:I can—:

:Be cautious.: