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time on self-analysis—not even back when she had time and energy to think about herself. “My sweela father used to say that he had passed on to me the gift of clarity. From my coru mother, I inherited a certain amount of resilience. I think this means that, no matter what my situation, I can look about me, I can appreciate what it offers, and I can adapt.”
    He listened closely. “Then this—this docility that you show is your true self, not some mask that has descended over you as a manifestation of your grief.”
    She blinked at him. Your grief. Such a casual way to describe such devastation. “I suppose that in general I am not a contrary sort of person,” she said, her voice muffled.
    His eyes were narrowed; he was making no attempt to disguise the fact that he really wanted to peer inside her soul. “And yet you are the daughter of a sweela man,” he murmured. “You cannot be as tame as you appear. There must be passion in you that can be roused by something . There must be something you would fight for, or against.”
    “I am a woman of water,” she replied. “I am more likely to slip away in stealth than to blaze up in wrath.”
    He looked dissatisfied. “All men and women have a little wood and bone in them. Somewhere, from some ancestor. Something that will not back down. Something that will not give way.”
    She turned her right hand palm up and studied the faint lines. “There must be bone in me somewhere, or I could not hold my shape,” she said. “But these days all I can feel is blood.”
     
     
    T hey passed the rest of the meal in silence, which suited Zoe just fine. The rain had slimmed down to a faint gray drizzle by the time they left, and the gaslights had been put out.
    “There’s a temple around the corner,” Darien said. “Would you like to stop in for a blessing?”
    It was a practice city dwellers honored more often than country folk. Zoe knew that after they had moved to the village, her father had missed having constant access to the blessing barrels. He was delighted whenever they visited a town large enough to hold a temple, so he could pull out a blessing for the day. She had always thought it was the ritual that appealed to Navarr, or perhaps the folly; how could a man really expect to receive guidance from a message presented to him entirely by happenstance? But he had taken advantage of every opportunity that came his way.
    “Yes,” she said, and they turned their steps toward the temple.
    It was a small and pleasant round stone building filled with incense and lamplight, heated and dry on this chilly and wet day. The five benches lining the perimeter were painted in traditional colors—white for elay , blue for coru , black for hunti , green for torz , red for sweela . The space was so small, and the benches were so close together, that their edges almost touched, turning the interior into a pentagon. Darien tossed a tithe into the box at the door, and then he and Zoe went straight for the blessing barrel that was set squarely in the center of the floor.
    “You first,” he said.
    Zoe plunged her hand deep into the pile of coins, enjoying the cool, sliding sensation of the metallic disks against her wrist and forearm. She wanted to close her fingers over a whole pile of blessings, shower herself with gifts of strength and endurance, but she resisted. Instead she pinched a single coin between her thumb and forefinger, and brought it slowly up.
    They looked at it together. Its utter unsuitability would have made Zoe laugh, if she were capable of laughing. “The blessing of surprise,” Darien said. He inspected her. “It might have been the very last one I would have bestowed upon you at this moment.”
    “Perhaps that is why I need it,” she said. She slipped it into her pocket. Some people tossed blessings back into the barrel, particularly if they didn’t like what they’d been given, but Darien had paid the tithe, and a handsome one at that. It would more