Draw Your Blessings

There are temples all around Welce, big and small, some heavy with incense and rugs, some austere and chilly, and every one has the same furniture: five benches, one for each element, and a barrel of coins in the middle. In the later books the benches wear the element colours, white for elay, blue for coru, red for sweela, green for torz and black for hunti, and people sit on each in turn to meditate themselves back into balance. Nobody speaks above a whisper. Nothing is locked; Josetta doubts any temple in the city has ever barred its doors.

The ritual is simple. Drop a few coins in the tithe box at the door; the tithes, Leah tells Chandran, mostly pay for the temples’ upkeep. Go to the barrel, push your arm in elbow-deep, stir, and take a coin by touch. Leah grabs the first disk that doesn’t slip through her fingertips; Foley sorts until one feels right to his hand; Val, at a coronation, grabs the first coin she can. Looking is cheating, and Val accuses Sebastian of having picked through the coins. Then you read the glyph aloud, which not everyone can do at sight, and decide whether the blessing is yours.

A set of blessings is three. “It is tradition in Welce for every child to receive three random blessings” before the baby is five hours old, and the best way to get them is to find a temple and have three strangers pull one each; those are yours for a lifetime. On the morning Zoe was born, Navarr Ardelay went out into the dawn streets and begged a coin from each of three strangers: a tavern drunk’s cheap pocket coin stamped with beauty, a servant’s bent and dingy love, and power, drawn at a temple barrel by a young woman who said, “One for your daughter.”

The same rule runs through the whole series. You may draw your own, but it is always considered better if someone else does it for you, because, as Josetta tells the empress of Malinqua, “the blessings have more power when they are bestowed upon you by a stranger.” Friends draw for each other at feasts; strangers swap draws in temples; and when Darien Serlast is crowned, the acolyte asks him to invite three people to pull the blessings that will inform his reign. A blessing or two is enough for a day’s guidance, any day, for any vexing problem.

Not every coin in an old barrel can be read. Coins handled for long enough wear smooth, and people call them ghost coins: blank, unlucky, offering no guidance, or as Corene puts it to Val, the mark of a woman of mystery. The acolytes try to sift them out, but short of emptying a barrel coin by coin there is no way to catch them all, and drawing one for a newborn is supposed to be bad luck. A freshly minted set has none. Rafe Adova, who was born outside Welce and has no birth blessings, pulls nothing but ghosts for himself, and some foreigners draw them too; Leah wonders if the Welchin elements only have an affinity for Welchin souls.

Three blessings belong to no element: synthesis, time and triumph. “Triumph was the rarest of the extraordinary blessings—everyone knew that,” the first chapter says; but the only count the books ever give is that there are forty-three blessings, so the barrels hold multiples of each. Rarity is lore, not arithmetic, and the draw on this page gives every blessing the same chance. When others draw for Rafe, they pull the extraordinary three, over and over; Josetta has never seen anyone draw only extraordinary blessings until she draws them for him.

Barrels need constant replenishing, because people keep the coins they are happy to get and drop the rest back; Corene once threw back “courage, courage, and courage.” Birth blessings are meant to last a lifetime, and people wear them. Zoe wears hers as three charms on a silver bracelet, and Mally wants one just like it, “Because then you never forget.” Corene’s birth set was made into rings of copper, silver and gold; she gives them to Rafe, who hangs them on a silver chain under his shirt, and Josetta adds three more, stamped with his own synthesis, time and triumph. Navarr hung his over his bed: courage on a square of hammered copper, endurance embroidered in blue on white, triumph painted on a long canvas.

Coins also live at home. Josetta sends Corene a whole set to keep in a bowl and draw from every day, one coin for each blessing and no ghosts; great households keep casks, often more than one; a restaurant keeper keeps a cauldron of blessings in the back and likes to pull some for every customer; and in Whispering Wood, the little park Val’s father, Damon Serlast, built with Taro Frothen has five coloured benches around a cauldron of hundreds of coins, ready for anyone to pull. That park, Val thinks, is a temple as well as a sanctuary.

Each coin here is a brass disk in an enamel ring. The ring takes the element’s colour from the books, with the element named across the top and the blessing across the bottom; the three extraordinary blessings are silver in a gilt ring; a ghost is a brass coin worn blank. The emblems are new, drawn for this page: a sun for joy, an anchor for steadfastness, an hourglass for patience, a clover for luck. They are deliberately not Shinn’s glyphs, which appear on the printable blessing sheet on her website, alongside her suggestion to “Put blessings in a box and pull one out when you need inspiration.”

The draw follows the books where they speak. A temple barrel holds “multiples of each” blessing, and since the books give no proportions, ours gives each the same chance, so the same coin can come up twice; it also hides the occasional ghost, at a rate the books never give, so ours is a guess of about one coin in eighty. A home set holds exactly one of each and no ghosts, and empties as you keep coins. Coins come up face down and turn over together, because, as Corene says, nobody looks until everyone has one. Kept coins stay in your browser and nowhere else.

Shinn has kept the custom going off the page: for years she drew three blessings every Monday and posted them for her readers, and Jeweled Fire is dedicated “To that crazy fan who never expected a dedication,” with the three blessings she pulled for that fan: intelligence, love and time. A metalsmith makes full sets of the coins, which she has praised and linked. This page is a reader’s homage in the same spirit.