I talked about the Malachite Maid way back in the major arcana – she’s woven all through this story, though she never directly appears (except in disguise as the traveler). It’s a long one, so I’m not going to try to summarize the whole thing – you can read it here. The extremely incomplete run down – a malachite miner and his wife have three children, two boys and a girl who is mysteriously beautiful, with black hair and green eyes. When the miner dies, he leaves behind a malachite casket full of amazing gems, but his wife can’t seem to wear them without great discomfort. Their daughter, Tanyushka, though, loves them and feels her father’s warmth when she plays with them. A mysterious woman eventually turns up begging for a place to stay for a few days, teaches Tanyushka silk embroidery, shows her a magical vision of a malachite room in the palace and a woman just like her, but dressed like a tsarina, and then leaves her a button to look at whenever she needs guidance. There’s lots more, but basically all the boys want Tanyushka, she’s not interested in any of them, and eventually she gets one determined bridegroom to bring her to the palace and the malachite room, where instead of agreeing to marry him she melts into the wall and disappears.
For a card about generosity, I thought Tanyushka and the mysterious traveler who teaches her silk embroidery, and shows her her future, and leaves her a magic button as a remembrance was perfect. It’s strongly implied that Tanyushka is in some mysterious way the changeling child of the Malachite Maid, and at the end after she disappears into the wall there are seen to be two identical Mistresses of the Copper Mountain.
