Is Seven 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 Seven is getting around rather than through: strategy, evasion, deception, sometimes somebody else's and sometimes yours.

He is taking most of it and not all of it, which is its own kind of calculation: enough to be worth the risk, little enough to be argued away afterwards.

Golden Dawn called it Unstable Effort, and Waite's own reading includes "a plan that may fail". The card is not confident about the outcome of its own scheme, which is the note most modern readings drop.

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 Seven of Swords as what shape this takes, not whether it happens. Deception, cunning, acting alone. Somebody is not being straight.

Check whether it is you. That instruction is the card's whole contribution, because the reflex on drawing it is to look outward and the reflex is wrong about half the time.

It also covers legitimate strategy: knowing what to leave behind, moving without announcing it, choosing not to fight something head on. Not everything done quietly is done dishonestly.

Reversed, the lean weakens or inverts. Deception exposed, or a confession. Returning what was taken.

The confession reading is the good one and is frequently a relief to the person making it. Concealment is expensive to maintain, and the reversal is often somebody putting the weight down.

Sometimes getting away with it, and having to live with that, which the tradition treats as the worse outcome of the two and rarely gets read that way.