The Wishes
The Tens — The Four Wishes
The fifty other cards in this deck are built from the objects, practices and people of the English cunning folk tradition. But the four Tens are different. A Ten is not a documented incident, and it carries no named practitioner. It is the thing every spell was for in the first place: the wish, granted.
The domains each Wish serves are as follows: Hearts are Hearth & Home, Diamonds are Health & Healing, Clubs are Seeking & Finding, and Spades are Soul & Shadow.
No cunning person was ever recorded sitting quietly in a happy home, a healthy body, a full purse, or a settled soul. The record only ever shows the trouble and the spell that answered it — never the years afterward when nothing more needed doing. That silence isn’t a gap in the evidence. It’s the shape of what an outcome is: the point where the story, and the need for a practitioner, simply stops. The four Tens sit outside the incident-by-incident standard that governs every other card in this deck, the same way the four Aces do at the deck’s other end. Where the Aces ask where the power came from, the Tens ask what it was all for. Turn the Ten and the spell is over.
Ten of Hearts
Happiness
A fire banked low and steady, everyone who matters gathered under one roof. Nothing more is wanted. Nothing more is needed.
Contentment, simply arrived at. This is what was hoped for, finally here.
That is what Hearts wished for. The household, sealed in warmth, owing nothing further to fortune.
Ten of Diamonds
Health
A casement thrown wide, light and air moving freely through a room that no longer needs to be guarded. Strength has simply come back.
Vitality, returned in full. Whatever was weakened is strong again.
That is what Diamonds wished for. The body, restored past the point of needing a remedy at all.
Ten of Clubs
Wealth
A purse left open, coin spilling loose at its mouth, more than was ever asked for. This is windfall, not wage.
Abundance, arrived all at once. There is more than enough, and it is already here.
That is what Clubs wished for. The search, ended not by finding the thing looked for but by finding more.
Ten of Spades
Peace
A single flame, undisturbed, burning steady in a still room. Whatever troubled the soul has been quietly set down.
Peace, simply found. The soul rests, untroubled.
That is what Spades wished for. The ledger closed, nothing left owing on either side.