Is Four of Swords a yes or a no?

This card does not answer cleanly either way. It points to something unresolved, unseen or still in motion, which in practice usually means "not yet" rather than "no".

The Four is enforced rest after the Three: retreat, recuperation, the mind put down.

It is the suit's one genuinely restorative card and it arrives precisely when it is needed. The knight lies in effigy on a tomb and he is not dead.

The composition is medieval funerary sculpture, which is why the card is so often misread as death. Waite was explicit that it means repose. One sword lies beneath him and three hang on the wall above: the conflict has been put down rather than resolved, and the stained glass behind shows a figure receiving a blessing.

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 Four of Swords as what shape this takes, not whether it happens. Rest, recovery, a deliberate pause. Withdraw and recuperate.

Not avoidance: convalescence. The distinction is that this rest has a reason behind it, and the card only appears after something has taken a toll.

In an advice position meditation and sleep are the literal instruction, and the card is unusually plain about wanting to be taken at face value. It is not a metaphor for reflection. It means lie down.

Reversed, the lean weakens or inverts. Rest resisted, burnout building.

Or coming out of a rest period and re-entering the world, which is the benign version and is often accompanied by more anxiety than the rest itself.

Also read for restlessness that will not let recovery finish: getting up too early, returning to work at sixty percent, treating convalescence as time to be made up. The card is clear that an interrupted recovery restarts rather than continues.