The third case, three days later, was the one that finally taught Faust what his seal was actually good for.
The "witch" this time was a young woman found bathing at odd hours in a millpond the local children swore was haunted. The water, they said, was cold but never froze, even in deep winter, and a woman's shape could sometimes be glimpsed beneath the surface, with hair too long and too green to be entirely human.
Faust knew what she was within a minute of scanning the millpond with his good eye, unbandaged and alone, well before the tribunal ever convened.
A kind mavka.
Harmless, by every account he'd ever read. A water spirit tied to a place rather than a soul, mourning some drowning long since forgotten by the village that now wanted to burn her for the crime of still existing.
The trouble was that a tribunal expecting a demon did not take kindly to being told there was nothing to condemn.
"An exorcism, then," the Dean insisted when Faust tried the honest approach first. "The creature must be seen to be driven out, Doctor, or the village will simply drown her themselves the moment we're gone."
Which left Faust with exactly one honest option: give them a show and use it to actually save her.
He drew the deck that evening behind the mill, alone, fingers moving through the cold cards until one came up warm beneath his touch on the very first try. An unusually good omen, he thought, though he'd learned not to trust omens where this particular relic was concerned.
Magician.
'Of course.'
He should have expected nothing less from a card that had never once resisted being useful for exactly this kind of lie.
The performance the next morning was, even by his own generous standards, magnificent.
He waded into the millpond in full ceremonial black, Latin phrases half-remembered from a hundred real exorcisms he'd witnessed and mocked in his youth. At the appointed moment, cards fanned dramatically over the water, he pressed his palm flat against a smooth grey stone at the pond's shallow edge.
'Become a bone,' he asked it silently, the way the Magician's trick demanded: an object made briefly, symbolically, into something else entirely.
The stone paled, roughened, and took on the unmistakable ivory sheen of an old, weathered femur beneath the water's surface.
It lasted exactly long enough for a horrified gasp to ripple through the assembled villagers and for Faust to lift it, dripping, above his head like a trophy.
"The spirit's anchor," he intoned in the same borrowed-Hierophant cadence he'd used in Erfurt, though this time the card in his box stayed quiet. He needed only the voice, not the true weight or authority, and had learned the difference well enough now to spare himself the cost. "Bound, and cast beyond these waters."
He flung the false bone into the trees.
The villagers cheered.
The Dean wept with genuine relief.
And that same night, while the village slept off its celebration, Faust returned alone to the millpond and knelt at its edge, speaking, really speaking this time, with no illusion in it at all, to whatever quiet, green-haired sorrow lived beneath the surface.
"They think you're gone," he told the water. "I'd advise you to let them keep thinking it. Find a river with fewer superstitious neighbors, if you can. I hear the Elbe is lovely this time of year, and considerably less likely to be dredged by frightened men with torches."
Something pale shifted beneath the surface.
Not quite a face, not quite a hand, but close enough to both that Faust chose, deliberately, to read it as gratitude rather than examine it too closely.
He walked back to the inn with wet boots and a lighter heart than he'd carried in weeks. He did not tell Isfrid until the boy asked directly the next morning that the exorcism had been theater from beginning to end.
A fraud, kind deception in service of mercy, which Faust was beginning to suspect was simply what an honest lie looked like when dressed in a Hierophant's borrowed robes.