Fleur hid behind her mothers legs, clutching her pants in tiny fists, afraid to look up at the other woman.
“Welcome child,” a raspy voice said. Appoline stepped forward and Fleur followed with a squeak, too afraid to lose her hiding spot.
“Grandmother,” her mother greeted softly, reverently, and Fleur could not understand why.
She regretted ever telling her mother about the dreams. Regretted ever telling anyone. Things had only gotten worse over the summer, everyone treated her differently, and the dreams hadn’t stopped anyway.
“Fleur honey,” her mother pulled her from her anxious thoughts with a soft voice and gentle hand on her head.
She squeezed her eyes shut, buried her face more fully into her mother’s leg, and shook her head. Appoline sighed, and then Fleur felt herself being lifted off her feet. The sudden action, and the inability to resist it, finally freed the tears she’d been holding back valiantly.
She managed to contain the breaking of the dam to a few stifled sobs as she was plopped down on a cushion. She cracked her eyes open, silent tears leaking out, to peer through her fingers under the guise of wiping her face.
The woman across from her was scary.
She had creased reddish-brown skin, and familiar bright silver hair, but she was wrinkled with age and stooped over the table. She had feathers in her hair, poking out from the strands at odd places, and her fingers were capped in curved talons.
Fleur shrank back as one of those clawed hands reached toward her, but it was not aimed at her. The ancient Veela woman hovered over a ball of cloudy crystal in the center of the table and spoke in her raspy voice: “Look, little chick, and tell me what you see.”
She didn’t want to, but her mother was standing behind her and she felt soft fingers tease and brush at her hair. It comforted her enough to pull her eyes up from the tablecloth and look at the crystal ball. At first nothing happened, but the longer she stared the more it seemed as if the woman’s hand above the device was stirring the misty fog inside. Seconds or minutes passed, Fleur could not say, before the contents shifted.
A hole opened, like the eye of a storm, and widened until the ball was perfectly clear.
Inside was Fleur’s mother. She walked toward Fleur, but without surroundings in the image it was hard to tell if she were getting any closer. The longer she looked the less certain she was that it was her mother she was seeing. The woman was Veela to be sure, and very similar in appearance to her mother or older cousins, but not quite the same.
Fleur did not know how long she watched the figure walk through an empty landscape within the orb, but she jumped when her captivation was interrupted.
“What do you see, little chick?” the old Veela asked.
“Nothing,” Fleur lied, unsure why, but afraid to admit to anything abnormal.
“Hmm,” the crone hummed, “Appoline, leave us.”
“No!” Fleur wanted to run, she wanted to leave or beg her mother not to, but she was silenced by a hand smoothing out her hair.
“It’s okay baby,” she twisted on her cushion to send a pleading look to her mother but Appoline just smiled and brushed a hand along her cheek.
Then she was gone.
Fleur watched her retreat until the door clicked shut behind her and turned back with a whole new well of fear inside her. The older woman was up from her cushion, and the ball was once again opaque and inert. The fortune teller returned from a chest of drawers with a small leather pouch in her hand and struggled back into a seated position across from her. . “There is no need to be afraid,” she said, and if Fleur wasn’t so afraid the words might’ve even been kind. “The Sight is nothing to fear, it is a gift.”
She dumped the contents of the bag into her hand and Fleur saw a pile of small white bones, etched with symbols she had never seen before.
“Both hands now, like this,” she demonstrated, and Fleur cupped her hands and held them out reluctantly. The bones were placed there gently, barely contained in her small palms, and she closed her fingers over them as instructed. “Good, now throw them.”
Fleur did so, without much vigor, and they landed on the table in a jumble. The withered old vulture leaned forward with a sigh and studied the pile intently for several long minutes.
Fleur became aware that something was wrong almost immediately. The woman’s tufty white brows pinched together, she made small noises of contemplation, surprise, and confusion, but still she did not speak. The longer it took, the more Fleur sank into herself, and she was terrified again by the time the woman stood.
She said nothing to Fleur, just retrieved a cane from its spot leaning against the table, and tottered over to the door Fleur’s mother had exited.
“What is it madam?” Her mother’s voice calmed her, if only a bit, and she pivoted to send her a look that begged to be taken home.
“Curious,” was the Veela’s only response.
The two women joined her and the bones were recollected by their owner. Old hands shook them once with a rattle and dropped them on the table, where they fell into a similar pile.
“The runes and their placement tell a story,” she said, “it takes much study to learn the language of fate, but the process is simple enough, now you child.”
Fleur looked to her mother, wanting to be relieved of the responsibility, but Appoline simply smiled at her and nodded. Reluctantly she picked up the bones again, scooping them together and collecting them in her hands with some difficulty.
She cast them down onto the table, and her mother gasped. Fleur flinched, hating every second of it. “What does it mean?”
Fleur looked down at the bones as well, something she’d been avoiding, and after a moment she saw what it was that the adults were shocked by.
The bones had collected into two piles, connected by a single bone resting under the others. The more she stared the more she thought that was certainly too many bones. The two piles on the table each seemed to be about the size of the bones she’d cupped in her hands, there was no way she could hold so many in her hands.
The fortune teller scooped them up, and the dual pile almost exceeded the capacity of her own taloned hands. She shook them once again and dropped them, and the pile that resulted was back to the original size, surely half as many as had been picked up.
"I don't know..."