Elemental Blessings, walked

Welce is a kingdom among the southern nations, with its capital, Chialto, on the Marisi River. Every Welchin is affiliated with one of five elements, and each element carries an aspect of the self: elay is air and soul, coru water and blood, hunti wood and bone, sweela fire and mind, torz earth and flesh. A newborn is given three blessings, coins drawn for it by strangers or pulled from a temple barrel, and anyone may draw more for guidance at any time. There are forty-three, eight to each element and three extraordinary. Five great families, one to an element, advise the crown, and each is headed by a Prime with real, sometimes frightening command of the element and an uncanny ability to read people. The technology is gaslight, gas-powered cars called elaymotives and, from the second book on, the first flying machines.

Each novel gives one element its heroine: Zoe Ardelay (coru) in Troubled Waters, Josetta (elay) in Royal Airs, Corene (sweela) in Jeweled Fire, Leah Frothen (torz) in Unquiet Land and Valentina Serlast (hunti) in Whispering Wood, which Shinn described as the hunti story readers had been asking for. Each is a slow-burning romance wrapped around a real political plot, with its own shape: two viewpoints in the second and third, one in the others, and flashbacks in the fifth.

Underneath runs one question of succession. Old King Vernon has four wives and four daughters, and only the youngest daughter is his. Darien Serlast, his hunti adviser, rises across the books to regent, to the Primes’ choice for king and finally to the crown, and he is the one character at the centre of all five. Readers come for the cozy, intricate world, the blessings, and Zoe and Darien, and argue about slow middles and tidy endings.

Shinn, born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1957, studied journalism at Northwestern and has spent her career as a St. Louis journalist, mostly at trade magazines, writing novels on evenings and weekends. On her own site she casts herself as torz by nature, with the odd spark of sweela.

Zoe Ardelay is twenty-three and coru, and she has spent ten years in a provincial village with her exiled sweela father, Navarr. Days after his funeral pyre, a man in black steps out of a six-wheeled elaymotive: Darien Serlast, the king’s closest adviser, come to take her to Chialto as King Vernon’s fifth wife. At an unplanned stop in the capital she simply gets out and walks away. She goes to ground on the river flats, befriends Annova and Calvin, keeps a cobbler’s shop and slowly comes back to life, until the water starts to answer her. Her grandmother Christara, the coru Prime, is dead, and the power has passed to Zoe.

As Prime and head of the Lalindars, she enters a court of four rival queens while Darien doles out his secrets one at a time. Someone is trying to kill Princess Josetta, who turns out to be Zoe’s half-sister, fathered by Navarr on Queen Seterre. The king is nearly impotent, other men fathered the three princesses, and Darien is the father of the fierce, red-haired, twelve-year-old Corene. When Vernon and Queen Elidon arrange to marry Corene to the Viceroy of Soeche-Tas, Zoe raises the Marisi, floods the palace and takes the princesses with her. The betrothal is dropped, and her only penalty is that the Lalindar estate must pay part of the cost of the damage. Darien, it turns out, vowed at the promise booth soon after she vanished to find her and marry her, and the book ends on his word: “Word of a hunti man.”

What it costs Zoe is her picture of her father, brilliant and faithless, who kept her from her mother’s family; what it costs Welce is much of a palace. It was a finalist for the 2011 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award.

Five years on, Vernon is dead and Darien rules as regent for the king’s one true child, little Odelia; he and Zoe are married, with a baby daughter, Celia. Josetta, elay and no longer anyone’s heir, runs a shelter in Chialto’s southside slums. Rafe Adova is a twenty-seven-year-old professional gambler born without blessings: at temples he pulls only blank ghost coins, and the outer curve of his right ear is cut into five points. They meet over Corene, seventeen and fleeing her stepfather, in the wrong bar. Later Rafe is carried unconscious into her shelter; at Kayle Dochenza’s works she draws him all three extraordinary blessings, and Kayle, the elay Prime, makes him test pilot for his flying machines.

His ear and his blood give him away. Touching his hand, Zoe reads that he is close kin to Ghyaneth, a visiting prince of Berringey, a country that kills off spare royal heirs. Nelson’s cover story, that Princess Josetta has fallen for a pilot, stops being a story. Darien finds Odelia, who does not speak, unfit to rule; a decoy child, Mally, has been standing in for her. Empress Filomara of Malinqua sails in, and when Rafe is shot outside a temple she recognizes him as her grandson. Berringese soldiers carry him off to sea, Kayle and Zoe stop their ship dead, and Rafe blasts himself free with a pilot’s escape device. Aboard the rescue ship Zoe shows Ghyaneth she can make his blood obey her, and Rafe swears: “I will stay in Welce or know my life is forfeit.” The prince goes home. The Primes vote Darien the next king and Celia his heir, Rafe’s half-brother Steff sails for Malinqua with the empress, and Josetta, asked whether she will marry Rafe, says maybe. Corene, overlooked in all the talk of heirs, runs away.

Corene, seventeen and nearly eighteen, has stowed away on the empress’s ship; her guard Foley is with her, and so is Steff, Rafe’s half-brother and Filomara’s other grandson. Palminera, half red granite and half white stone, is watched over by two towers, one crowned by a fire inside stained-glass petals. There Filomara is weighing three nephews and Steff for her heir, with a row of foreign princesses at court as possible brides, guests who are also hostages. Corene makes friends of her rivals, Melissande of Cozique, Alette of Dhonsho and the prefect’s plain daughter Liramelli, and finds she has a head for trade. A handful of chapters follow Leah Frothen, for five years Darien’s spy in Palminera, who takes a place behind a Coziquela merchant’s stall in the Great Market to get near the princess.

The comedy darkens when a missing girl is found dead in the tunnels under the palace. Dhonshon men try to seize Alette, Corene and Leah smuggle her away, and Nelson, sent ahead of Welchin warships as Darien’s ambassador, finds Leah and tells Corene that the decoy princess is Leah’s daughter. Corene accuses the empress to her face of keeping them all as hostages. On the night of a masked gala Greggorio, the nephew favoured for heir, is found strangled in his cousin Garameno’s wheelchair, and Garameno, it turns out, can walk. The steward Lorian betrays himself with a single word. Corene drives Nelson’s smoker car to the tower of fire, fights off the soldiers with half of her burning jacket, and jumps from the blazing tower when Foley tells her he loves her. Cozique’s navy comes for Melissande. Corene sails away as Welce’s diplomat to the southern nations, with Foley beside her, thinking “I’m a sweela girl who is learning to control her own fire”.

The book opens on the autumn changeday, with Leah home after five years away. “She was a torz woman, tied to earth and flesh.” The baby she left behind, Rhan Ardelay’s daughter, was raised by her uncle Taro, the torz Prime, and became Mally, Odelia’s decoy. Darien offers Leah a crown-funded shop of foreign goods, which is really a listening post, and the bait is Mally, brought to the city for a quintile by Taro’s wife, Virrie. Zoe and her friend Annova help open it in record time. A delegation from the Karkades, a possession of Cozique, arrives seeking an alliance for independence, and Leah befriends the prince’s attendant, Seka Mardis, while someone maims and kills the city’s poor. Then Chandran, the merchant who once drugged her as a test, appears in her shop, on the run. He confesses that he killed his wife; slowly, they become lovers anyway, and Leah tells Mally who she is.

The Karkans kidnap Mally, believing her to be the true heir. Chandran offers himself for the child and swallows a dose he expects to kill him. Seka leads Leah to Mally and then turns on her, and Yori, a royal guard who has been watching over Leah, kills Seka. As Karkan soldiers close in, the hillside heaves and they scatter: Mally, five years old, is the torz Prime’s heir. Readers call the ending happy and very tidy. Darien is still uncrowned.

Seven years after Unquiet Land, from a new publisher, the hunti book opens at Darien’s coronation, with his reclusive sister Valentina, twelve years younger, sitting rigid on the stage, hating the crowds. She draws the third of his coronation blessings, Time. In the crowd she glimpses a red-haired man who might be Sebastian Ardelay, a sweela smuggler and the illegitimate son of one of Nelson’s remote cousins, whom she has known since she was eight. Five present-tense flashbacks, at eight, fourteen, nineteen, twenty-one and twenty-five, tell the old love story alongside the new one: the boy she offered to hug, the grove where she laid her hands on the heart tree, the engagement to a torz landowner that she broke off, her mother’s death. A short present-tense epilogue finds her at twenty-seven.

The present is court politics seen by an onlooker: Soechin envoys wanting brides, Melissande arriving with a secret, a smuggling raid. The trees of the hunti estate name Natalie, not Val, as Mirti’s heir. At dawn she finds Sebastian asleep on the red sweela bench in her father’s park, and their talk turns on two definitions: “Hunti means forever.” “Sweela means the fire that never goes out.” Melissande’s secret is Kendol, a rebel prince of Dhonsho. Sebastian smuggles him over the mountains on foot while Val drives south as a decoy with the prince’s bloodied shirt over her head. She goes to ground in the challinbar grove, where the heart tree hides and feeds her; when she comes out, six Dhonshons seize her, but Mirti and Natalie are waiting on the road with soldiers, because the trees told them. Natalie cuts Val’s hair short. Darien admits he has never been so worried, and Sebastian comes home. The king hands him a box with a black frog in it, payback for a boyhood prank, and welcomes him into royal service. The cost is Val’s certainty: a woman of rules learns to bend, and makes peace with the brother she thought had abandoned her.

Every heroine comes back after her own book, all four earlier ones turn up in the fifth, and almost every one began as somebody else’s supporting player. Josetta is the frightened young heir of the first book; Corene is the twelve-year-old hellion of the first and the runaway of the second. When the fourth book was still called Dangerous Grounds, Shinn said it would follow Leah, who first appears in the opening pages of the third. Mally is the decoy princess of the second long before she is the torz heir. Yori, a royal guard in the fourth and fifth, leads “Blessing in Disguise”, a Welce novella in Shinn’s 2026 collection Tropes. Only Valentina comes from nowhere: Shinn introduced her as someone readers had never met.

Two people hold the series together. The coru woman and the hunti man of the first book are married by the second, and whenever they are on stage, readers say, they steal the scene. Zoe reads Rafe’s blood, writes to the runaway Corene, crashes Leah’s party with Nelson and stays Prime rather than become queen. Darien works the plot from behind a desk, keeps Leah as his spy in Malinqua and is crowned at last.

The pairings are made by element, rarely to type: water and wood, air and a man with no element, fire and earth, earth and a foreigner, wood and fire. Blessing draws work as omens in every book, each of which opens with a blessings chart. The political thread runs from Vernon’s secret to Darien’s crown and on to new heirs: Celia for the throne, Mally for the torz, Natalie for the hunti.

The joins show a little. Troubled Waters was billed as a stand-alone and Unquiet Land as the last book, and Whispering Wood opens with an author’s note squaring Darien’s family with what he said about it in the first. Goodreads readers rate all five close to four stars, Unquiet Land highest and Royal Airs lowest.