Her Grandmother Rosier had taught them to weave. She'd been a Black before marriage, another lovely example of the interbreeding her family often partook in, and she'd been the only one pleased when Druella'd had three daughters.
Walburga bemoaned, and Cygnus kept a political sort of quiet that was even louder, and their mother's gaze seemed to become more and more fanatical with each sharp edge sharpened and each round curve rounded until she looked downright insane and her daughters were polished to an apparent perfection that trembled when not watched.
(It was almost always watched.)
Grandmother Rosier just clucked but then, she clucked at anything. She clucked disappointedly when she saw Sirius, and pitifully when she saw Regulus, and she received the three of them in her folds with a kind of affectionate clucking Druella disapproved of and called coddling.
It wasn't coddling. It was another primordial goddess to please, another altar to bleed on, just another relative set apart from the rest by the simple reason she rejoiced in seeing them.
(It wasn't, Narcissa told herself after kissing Draco's skinned knees and cuddling him to sleep, anything close to coddling.)
Grandmother Rosier hexed, lightly at first, harder the more mistakes they made, and jabbed sharp fingers between their ribs, and pinched the skin of their arms where it was softer, and she instructed them in the arts.
In between, she told stories. She knew the family tree by heart, back to Merlin and back to times Merlin was not even a thought, back to the time before they'd left the old country.
She had ideas.
"Blacks got their magic for the Moirai," she'd say and she'd tap her wand on Bellatrix's cheek when she became sloppy – and Bella often did – and a bruise would blossom there, the same pain behind it as if it were gifted the old, abject Muggle way.
(Grandmother Rosier never hit them outright. None of their family members did. That was crass. Wands, they said, existed for a reason.)
"That's why we weave," and she'd slice open the tip of Andromeda's fingers.
"You're a full circle," and Narcissa's throat would tighten nd tighten.
When the woman died, they didn't mourn. Narcissa put her threads away with the old stories and focused on pleasing the titans that remained.
She got them out years later when the War ended and she needed them again.