by Sharon Shinn
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
QUINTILES & CHANGEDAYS
Ace Books by Sharon Shinn
MYSTIC AND RIDER
THE THIRTEENTH HOUSE
DARK MOON DEFENDER
READER AND RAELYNX
FORTUNE AND FATE
ARCHANGEL
JOVAH’S ANGEL
THE ALLELUIA FILES
ANGELICA
ANGEL-SEEKER
WRAPT IN CRYSTAL
THE SHAPE-CHANGER’S WIFE
HEART OF GOLD
SUMMERS AT CASTLE AUBURN
JENNA STARBORN
QUATRAIN
TROUBLED WATERS
Viking / Firebird Books by Sharon Shinn
THE SAFE-KEEPER’S SECRET
THE TRUTH-TELLER’S TALE
THE DREAM-MAKER’S MAGIC
GENERAL WINSTON’S DAUGHTER
GATEWAY
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2010 by Sharon Shinn.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shinn, Sharon.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-44416-0
1. Magic—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.H499T76 2010
813’.54—dc22
2010023028
http://us.penguingroup.com
For Robin,
with her elay soul
and her sweela crown
RANDOM BLESSINGS
ONE
Navarr Ardelay’s body was laid to rest in a blazing pyre, as befit a sweela man who owed his allegiance to flame. Zoe stood numbly within the circle of mourners, unable to speak, as she watched her father burn away to ashes. Even as he had wasted away for this past quintile, growing thinner, more frail, uncharacteristically querulous with pain, she hadn’t really believed he would die. How could there be a world in which Navarr Ardelay did not exist?
She was so cold that not even the leaping flames could chase away her chill; the weak winter sunlight offered no warmth at all. Doman hovered close, his hand always half-outstretched. Zoe wondered if he thought to catch her when she fainted or to yank her back if she attempted to throw herself into the fire. Doman was the unofficial leader of this little village; he made himself responsible for the well-being of every soul in the small cluster of houses, and he had been tireless in his efforts to ease Navarr’s passage out of this life. He had even sent to Chialto for surprisingly effective medicines that would soothe pain and keep the mind clear. Navarr had been awake and lucid as recently as two days ago, continuing to dictate to Zoe how he wanted her to distribute his few items of any worth.
“Doman must have anything he wants from the house, of course,” her father had said late that night. “He will probably choose my desk or fountain.”
That had caused Zoe to look up in surprise. “But—I want to keep both of those.”
Navarr had lain back against the pillows, his face thin and drawn, his body weak, but his mind, as always, working working working. “It will be too much trouble to transport them.”
She was even more surprised. “I’m not going anywhere.”
His eyes were closed. “Of course you are. It is time you remembered that you are part of your mother’s family as well.”
She had not bothered to answer that because, as soon as he spoke the words, he was asleep again.
And because she was too astonished.
He spoke of her mother rarely, and her mother’s family not at all. He blamed the powerful Lalindar clan for his fall from grace ten years ago, for the long years of exile and poverty. Zoe didn’t even know if her grandmother was still alive, and which of her aunts or uncles or cousins would have inherited Christara Lalindar’s title and property if the old woman was dead. Not that she cared. She would not be seeking any of them out, even if the unthinkable happened. Even if her father died. She doubted if any of them remembered her more clearly than she remembered them—or thought of her more often.
This village was her home now, this house the place where she belonged. She already knew, as her father lay there so quietly, that the tiny house would seem enormous once his spirit had flown it. She did not know how she could possibly fill its entire vast emptiness with her own limp and tired soul.
Zoe would have thought her father’s body would sustain any flame for a quintile at least—his swift, questing, inexhaustible mind should have been fuel for a nineday all by itself—but in fact the fire began to die down sooner than she would have thought possible. Most of the villagers had lingered for about fifteen minutes and then drifted away, although three women who had been in love with Navarr at various times still stood weeping around the pyre. Zoe herself was prepared to stand here watching until her legs buckled under her, and then she planned to kneel before the fading embers until the world itself ended.
But Doman would have none of that. He put his hand on her shoulder, avuncular, insistent. “Come inside now,” he said, nudging her away from the circle of stones, back toward the stand of houses. “The fire is al
most out. It is time to go in.”
“Not yet,” she said, planting her feet.
He turned his free hand palm up. “It has started to rain,” he said. So far the drops were thin and misty, hardly an inconvenience, but the pale sunlight had been blocked out by a slowly building mass of heavy gray clouds, and the air felt like it was gathering itself for a tantrum. “Your father would not want you to be drenched in the tears of the world for his sake.”
Since this was true, she allowed him to turn her away from the pyre and lead her to her small, sad, utterly abandoned house.
Together they stepped into the kierten, the tiny room set just inside the door. In great houses, Zoe knew, a kierten might be enormous—a huge, echoing chamber big enough to accommodate fifty people. A kierten was always completely empty; it was a homeowner’s way of saying he was so wealthy he could afford to waste space. Poor villagers could not make such a boast, of course, but none of them were so destitute that they did not have a kierten at their front door.
Doman stepped into the main room right behind Zoe, and she glanced swiftly around to see the place through his eyes. She hadn’t had much time to clean up the detritus of death, so the room was predictably messy. Bed linens were balled up on the floor, clothes and dishes were scattered across various surfaces, and books and papers were stacked in haphazard piles wherever she had tried to get them out of the way. A faint odor of rotting food drifted in from the only other room in the house—the small narrow kitchen that doubled as Zoe’s bedroom. She hadn’t had time to take her trash to the composting field for at least four days, perhaps longer.
“Would you like me to send Miela over to help you?” Doman asked. “You know she is a reasonably organized woman.”
It was a small joke, but Zoe found herself incapable of smiling. Doman’s wife was magnificently capable. She had raised ten children and served as a great maternal presence to everyone in the village, even Zoe’s father, who had been the last man in the world in need of mothering.
“Thank you, no,” Zoe said, speaking with an effort. “If I have something to occupy my hands, perhaps my heart won’t hurt quite so much.”
“You must come and spend the night with us, of course,” he said.
Zoe shook her head. “No. Thank you, but no.”
“Then Miela will come here to sleep.”
She shook her head again, but it was reflex. She knew if Doman decided she should not be alone tonight, one way or the other, she would not be alone. Doman was all hunti, all wood, stubborn and immovable. It did not matter how much you leaned against Doman, how many burdens you piled on him; he would not change and he would not break.
The rain had started to fall with a bleak and heavy steadiness; it was the kind of rain that could go on for days. Even less light spilled in through the small, high windows of frosted glass, so Zoe stepped over a pile of soiled clothing to light a lamp. Instantly the clutter of the room was even more visible.
She made an indeterminate gesture to indicate the whole room. “My father wanted you to pick something to remember him by,” she said. “Anything in the entire house.”
It was a common enough tradition, a way for the living to remember the dead. Doman must have realized that he had been given the supreme honor of being the first to choose among Navarr’s possessions, for he nodded once, suitably solemn. He was a tall man, thin and sinewy, with brown-bark skin and thick gray hair, and the colorful overrobe he had worn to the funeral made him look like some kind of oracle.
“I am happy to bring a piece of Navarr Ardelay into my own home,” Doman said. “But I wouldn’t want to take anything that you held especially dear.”
“The things I want to keep I have already moved into my room,” she said. “Take what you like.”
Doman glanced at the carved desk—a huge, ungainly piece of furniture, bought five years ago from a peddler selling a strange assortment of quality merchandise from the back of his wagon. Next he studied the bronze fountain, a miniature replica of the one that played in the great hall of the royal palace. But then he stepped toward the back wall and pointed at the three pieces hanging over the rumpled bed.
“I would take the random blessings, if you could stand the loss,” he said.
For the first time in four days, Zoe almost smiled. “Doman,” she said. “Your trait is wood. And you covet the blessings of a man of fire?”
He indicated the first item hanging on the wall. It was a square of hammered copper, perhaps five by five inches, with the symbol for courage embossed in it from behind. He had no trouble summoning a smile. “That is a blessing that should fall on a hunti man,” he said.
“True enough,” she said.
“And endurance is a blessing for a torz woman, and Miela is certainly that,” Doman added.
The symbol for endurance was the most beautiful of the three blessings, embroidered in shades of blue on a crisp white background and contained in a frame of carved wood. “Yes, I know Miela has always liked that piece,” Zoe said.
Doman gestured at the third blessing, a stylized symbol vividly painted onto a long narrow bolt of stretched canvas. “And who could not use triumph in his life?” he asked. “I shall be the envy of everyone in the village.”
Triumph was the rarest of the extraordinary blessings—everyone knew that—and Navarr had always considered it exquisitely ironic that it had been one of the gifts bestowed upon him at birth. Or perhaps the irony had only become clear to him during those last ten years of his life. Certainly, when he was younger, when he lived in Chialto and had the ear of King Vernon, he had been considered one of the most successful men of his generation. Maybe different blessings exerted their power at different points in a person’s life, Zoe thought. Triumph had governed Navarr’s existence for twenty or thirty years, but it had given way to endurance at the end. Zoe supposed that there had been times during his political career when her father had displayed great courage; thus, in their way, as they always did, the three blessings had proved themselves to be true.
“I will be happy to think his blessings are now blessing you,” Zoe said formally.
Doman turned to give her a sober inspection. “Although perhaps I should leave them behind to nurture you instead,” he replied.
Zoe shook her head. “I will draw strength from my own blessings,” she said, extending her left hand and giving a slight shake to the silver bracelet that held three charms.
“Beauty, love, and power,” Doman said, for of course he had seen the blessings dangling from her wrist every day of the past ten years. “At least one has been true your whole life. Love and power will surely come.”
“Surely,” Zoe echoed, though she had never believed it. In fact, she knew the first blessing wasn’t true, either. She was tall, thin, and serious, with straight black hair, fierce black eyes, and faintly olive skin that quickly tanned dark in the early days of summer. If she had had to pick an elay trait that described her, she thought she would have claimed honor instead. But no one had any say in their own random blessings.
“When shall I send Miela to come help you?” Doman asked.
Zoe glanced around the room, at the piles of clothes and papers and general disarray. For a moment she could not imagine how the whole mess could be reorganized into something tidy and respectable and bearable. She could not imagine how to restructure the house into a place she could live in without her father.
“I don’t know,” she said, suddenly too weary to stand. “Later. An hour or two from now. I have to lie down. I have to sleep. Maybe it will all make sense when I wake up.”
Doman crossed to her side and kissed her very gently on her forehead. “Perhaps not today when you wake up,” he said. “And perhaps not tomorrow. But soon enough you will heal. It is the way of the world.”
As soon as Doman was gone, Zoe curled up on her mat in the kitchen, but despite her exhaustion she remained awake for a long time. Idly, she played with the charms on her bracelet, fingering them one by one. Sh
e had always thought there could hardly have been three blessings that suited her less, but she cherished them anyway. Mostly because she loved the tale of how her father had sought them out, inebriated with happiness.
He had been so excited at her birth—so the story went—that he could barely wait for her to be five hours old before he rushed out into the crowded streets of Chialto, looking for likely strangers to bestow blessings on his newborn daughter. She had come squalling into the world shortly after midnight, so it was scarcely dawn when the clock struck that fifth hour, and the only people patrolling the street at that time were late drunks, early servants, and women who sold their favors. He had excitedly begged a token from someone in each category.
The cheerful, dizzy man, who had just stepped out of a tavern, fished in his pocket and pulled out a cheap blessing coin stamped with beauty. “It’s the only kind I carry,” he confided with a smile. “Every girl deserves to be beautiful.”
The servant, a rushed and unsmiling woman of exceeding plainness, had dutifully stopped and dug through her bag and come up with a bent and dingy coin that held the glyph for love. “We can go to a temple if that’s not one you like,” she’d said, but Navarr had been delighted to think that his tiny little girl would receive so great a gift.
It was the prostitute, weary and young, who had fulfilled her role in the traditional way, accompanying Navarr to the nearest temple, where he paid the tithe for both of them to enter. They didn’t waste time sitting in one of the five pews, inhaling the incense-heavy air and meditating themselves back into a state of balance. They just stepped up to the big, heavy barrel in the middle of the chamber and plunged their hands deep into its rich bounty of coins.
The prostitute had pulled up a token first. “One for your daughter,” she said, and dropped it into Navarr’s hand.
