Is Six of Swords a yes or a no?

This card leans yes. It carries forward movement, and in a straight yes/no draw most readers take it affirmatively.

The Six is the crossing: leaving difficulty for somewhere calmer, carrying what you cannot put down.

Not triumphant. The card is quiet, sad, and moving in the right direction, which is a combination the deck does not offer often.

Nobody removes the swords. They stand upright in the hull and cross the water with the passengers, and that is the detail readers return to. The water is choppy behind and flat ahead, and the card explicitly does not promise you leave the pain behind.

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 Six of Swords as what shape this takes, not whether it happens. Transition, moving on, gradual improvement. Travel, often literal.

You are taking your history with you and going anyway, which is the correct order of operations. The card does not ask anybody to be healed before they are allowed to leave, and that is its most useful permission.

In an advice position it favours the move itself over the preparation for it, and it is realistic about pace: this is a boat being poled across a river rather than an escape.

Reversed, the lean weakens or inverts. Unable to leave. Stuck between where you were and where you are going.

Or a departure that solves nothing, because what needed leaving came along. That is the sharper reading and it is not a reason to stay; it is a reason to expect the work to continue on the far bank.

Also read for a crossing that has taken far longer than anybody expected, which is common and is usually mistaken for failure.