Knight of Swords · Swords · Air

Pamela Colman Smith drew the Knight of Swords as pure velocity. The horse is pale grey, at full stretch, one foreleg thrown out ahead of it, mouth open against the bit, a plume rising off its browband and streaming back. The rider leans forward in steel armor, sword up, blade tipped high and forward. His visor is raised, his face bare in profile, the red plume of his helm and his crimson cloak flying behind in one line. The sky is pale blue, torn into long ragged cloud. Two thin dark trees at the lower left bend under the same wind. Ground is barely there: a strip of ochre and dark red at the bottom edge.

Everything moves, and the detail that most wants looking at is going past too fast to read: the horse’s blue saddle-cloth, worked with small yellow butterflies and red birds, air’s own creatures, embroidered onto a thing at a gallop. A red rosette sits on the cheek of the bridle.

He has the answer, and he is already three fields away with it.

Knight is the rank that rides, and air at a ride is wind. Swords is the suit of mind, so this is thought at a charge: an idea already a course of action before anyone finished the sentence.

Upright, the tradition reads nerve and directness, conviction, the sudden campaign, news carried at a gallop. He arrives with the point, in both senses of the word.

Reversed, the gallop keeps its speed and loses its target. Candor curdles into cruelty because it never slowed enough to look at the face in front of it. The horse runs either way. The card asks what is standing at the other end of the field.