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Tharja's mother kept an old pack of cards in a hollowed-out tome. These were no longer slippery but worn and rough, and ideal for stacking on tables. At the end of each day she would lay them out in a pattern—crown-shaped, devised by her grandmother's grandmother—and tell fortunes, not the children's kind told for fun elsewhere, but ones to be taken seriously. When it came Tharja's turn she would reveal the same cards each time: a dark horse, a myrtle flower, a veined stone.
The cards too were devised by some venerable ancestress, and Tharja only knew the meanings of the cards her sisters and cousins would get: the bee-eater for beauty, a flute for devotion, a letter in the old language for industry. Of her own cards her mother would only sigh and say, "oh, my dear," and then would have an aunt mix for her a tincture to ward off bad luck, jade-coloured and foul-smelling and which would make her vomit if mixed too strong.
Her aunts were not as good at such things as her mother, who could be counted on in times like these to be stone-hearted in the face of any disaster, bad luck or otherwise. In other times, though, she would sing in the old language, which on the cards was flowing but on the tongue was dry-rustling, and fitting for desert songs about thirst and circling birds.
She and her cousin liked to visit the family crypts when the sand grew too hot. Here was where the bones of their long-dead ancestors were laid out (and some not so long-dead—a baby sister, for instance, whose skeleton was soft and small, and an uncle whose skull was porous) their heads crowned, finger bones circled with rings. This was the birthright of a dynasty of sorcerers, their grandmother would tell them; they just wanted to look at the jewels and exchange secrets where their whispers would echo.
"In Ylisse they tell stories of bone collectors with horns growing out of their heads," her cousin told her once, swinging a gold-foiled thigh-bone like a sword. These bones were imbued with magic as much as any tome, their grandmother told them, and it could be felt if one concentrated hard enough. She had made them silk pouches in which to carry knuckle-bones, but so far they only served as dead weight.
"They're telling stories about us, you know. To scare their children into behaving."
Plegian boogeymen were nothing so fantastic. They were white-winged horses whose feathers blotted out the sun, and a yellow-haired king crowned by a halo; they were hunger, and dry wells, and skies that promised no rain for months.
In these times other families melted down their gold into bullion and sold it, but Tharja's mother told her that blood and pride were everything, and would not be pawned for cakes or dates or honey. Their crypt remained undisturbed, save for when her cousin was caught prizing the ruby from their great-great-grandfather's necklace and earned a slap across the face.
That night Tharja borrowed her mother's looking-glass, and parted her hair to check for growing horns.
Noire is born in Ylisse after the war, when Tharja is well past the usual birthing age. It's been a long time since she's set foot on Plegian soil, but she performs the usual ritual for her: a prick of the finger, anointing with oil. She finishes by opening her mother's tome (carried with her all this time, but unused since her mother went blind in her old age) and reads the cards: a pomegranate for wealth, a dagger for shrewdness, and the same veined stone she remembers from childhood. Sorrow. That is what it means; her mother, now a pile of gold-ringed bones, said so after her last reading. The myrtle, the horse and the stone again. Strife, deprivation, sorrow. Oh, my dear.
When Noire is asleep Tharja rummages through her stores of ingredients—dried cactus flowers, rabbit's feet, bundles of hair tied with ribbon—and finally finds the pouch of manakete claws Nowi gave her, now years ago. These were scarce in times of war, unheard of in her childhood, but now they are plentiful, and she will use them.
She tosses them, and as they fall, this is what she sees: when her skull is lying crowned in the family crypt (a circlet, she sees, with gilt horns) her daughter will be queen of a dynasty of sorcerers.