Is Five of Swords a yes or a no?

This card leans no. It carries obstruction, ending or delay, and in a straight yes/no draw most readers take it negatively.

The Five is winning badly. The victory is real and it cost the relationship, the reputation, or the point.

The card asks whether being right was worth what being right did.

Golden Dawn called it Defeat, notably from the losers' perspective rather than the winner's. Smith inverted that: a smirking figure gathers the swords in the foreground while two others walk away with their backs turned and their heads down. He has all the weapons and nobody is left.

Yes/no readings are the most popular use of tarot and the one it is worst suited to. A seventy-eight card deck built to describe nuance is being asked for one bit of information, and most of what it knows is discarded in the process.

A more useful version of the same draw: read Five of Swords as what shape this takes, not whether it happens. Conflict won at too high a price. Hollow victory, hostility, somebody walking away.

Ask what you are actually trying to achieve, because it is probably not this. The card is not against conflict and does not counsel avoidance; it is against a particular way of finishing one.

In an advice position it asks what you will have when you have won, which is a question that answers itself in most of the situations this card describes.

Reversed, the lean weakens or inverts. Making amends, or refusing to. Ongoing resentment carried by everybody involved.

The best possible outcome the card offers is in the reversal: walking away from a fight you could win. The tradition rates that highly and is realistic that it is rare, because the winning is genuinely available and declining it feels like losing.

Also read for an apology that arrives late and matters anyway.