Fortune Maker: Fantasy

[penthius]

Leave silver for the fortune teller, and it will bring you good fortune. Over the decades my auntie lived in Maplehill, the coins pressed into the mud-brick walls of her house and her yard became so thick and dense that anyone wanting to retrieve them would have to raze the house to the ground. Of course, nobody would want to do that. Bad fortune has a way of getting around back to whoever harmed a fortune maker, whether the person knew it or not, whether the fortune maker knew who did it or not. There's always a story, every year, about some horrible tragedy that befell a wealthy or famous family, and how when they called the seers and the record-finders in, they discovered that twenty (or so) years earlier, one of the family's scions splattered a fortune maker with mud (or some such). I would bet that most of the fortune makers were responsible for spreading such rumors themselves, if I hadn't thrown a rotten apple at my auntie when I was eleven, when she had no way of knowing it was me. I still blame that for the red stain that appeared on my palms the next year, when my menses came to me. My fair turnabout was to become a fortune maker myself, I suppose. So now I wear the red veil, and I apprenticed under an evil old woman who should have been named an ill-teller, and I inherited my auntie's house after she died. Peacefully, in case you were wondering, at a great age, with a smile on her face, looking up at the flowering apple blossoms above her.

Inspiration: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcrusty/8970014015/
Story potential: High.
Notes: This isn't the story, just the setting. And...I want to have this worldbuilding take a lot of its essence from something that is not the bog-standard European fantasy. India? I guess that's my default! See where the fortune teller traditions would fit in.