"One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear.
(I have decided that because mercedes lackey wasn't interested in need's past and that one cryptic reference to others like her that it's up to me and now she's a 'lykeblade', from a variant of 'lich'; this was a thing in her time and now it's just her and that Sword That Sings from rethwellan, who's very asleep, and everyone's forgotten)