The World of Welce

Each element is paired with a part of the self: elay, air and soul; coru, water and blood; hunti, wood and bone; torz, earth and flesh; sweela, fire and mind. It shows in temperament: elay people are dreamers, coru people changeable and contrary, hunti people stubborn and steadfast, torz people practical and patient, sweela people clever and impetuous. Shinn’s wording drifts a little: elay’s soul is sometimes spirit, and torz’s flesh becomes body when Taro Frothen says it aloud.

An element runs in the blood, not the surname. Zoe Ardelay is coru like her mother’s family; her father Navarr took his dark colouring from a hunti mother while his brother Nelson is all sweela; Darien Serlast is hunti though his mother was torz. Many people carry a second element, and Rafe Adova, in Royal Airs, seems to have none at all. There is no fixed table of which elements suit each other, and the characters argue it endlessly, but the romances are built from opposites — coru Zoe and hunti Darien, hunti Valentina and sweela Sebastian — and the friction is the point.

The elements have colours, and Whispering Wood states them outright: white for elay, blue for coru, red for sweela, green for torz, black for hunti. Welce’s emblem, on its flags and its guards’ uniforms, is a rosette of five interlocked colours. This companion’s borders and accents follow the same code.

The year turns through all five. Its 365 days fall into five quintiles named for the elements — Quinnelay (early to deep winter), Quinncoru (late winter to midspring), Quinnahunti (late spring to midsummer), Quinnatorz (late summer to fall) and Quinnasweela (fall to early winter) — each of eight nine-day weeks called ninedays, with a holiday, a changeday, between one quintile and the next. Quinnelay changeday is New Year. Three, five and eight are lucky numbers, the money counts in fives and eights, and the card game penta has five suits.

Blessings are the series’ signature. Each is a virtue with its own glyph, stamped on small coins. Shinn’s own list gives eight to each element — elay’s include joy, hope, kindness and beauty; coru’s change, travel and luck; hunti’s courage, strength and loyalty; torz’s serenity, honesty and patience; sweela’s innovation, love and imagination — plus three extraordinary blessings that belong to no element: synthesis, triumph and time.

Every child receives three at birth, and they are meant to come from strangers. At dawn on the day Zoe was born, Navarr Ardelay begged them in the street: a tavern drunk gave a cheap coin stamped with beauty, a plain servant a bent one bearing the glyph for love, and a young woman of the streets went with him to a temple to draw the third, which came up power. Blessings are worn: Zoe keeps hers as charms on a silver bracelet; Corene’s birth-blessing rings go to the blessing-less Rafe, who hangs them on a chain, and in Jeweled Fire she wears rings of gold, silver and bronze.

Random blessings can be drawn at any time, for guidance. “Random blessings were supposed to be freely given,” and you are not supposed to choose whom you ask. In Whispering Wood the new king’s wife, daughter and sister draw his coronation blessings — steadfastness, vision and time — and an acolyte greets one as a propitious sign. Rafe unsettles everyone because he pulls only blank ghost coins, while anyone drawing on his behalf comes up with the extraordinary blessings.

The coins live in temples marked with the five elements; no god is named. You pay a tithe to enter, sit on one of five benches meditating yourself back into balance, and plunge your hand into the barrel in the middle of the floor. A small temple in Royal Airs, of veined grey stone covered with vines, lays all five elements out in its stone, vines, butterfly fountain and smoky oil lamp. In Whispering Wood a little park in a poor quarter of Chialto, built by Damon Serlast and Taro Frothen, sets five painted benches round a cauldron of blessing coins.

To draw your own, go to the temple barrel: forty-three coins, the occasional ghost, and three strangers’ hands.

Five great families have amassed wealth and advised the crown for generations, rising and falling with each king. Each is bound to an element and headed by its Prime: the Dochenzas (elay), the Lalindars (coru), the Serlasts (hunti), the Frothens (torz) and the Ardelays (sweela). The Primes are the closest thing Welce has to magic. Each can read people through the element: Taro Frothen can touch a stranger’s hand and recite his genealogy, and probably his health, Nelson Ardelay can pick the truth from a lie, the coru Prime reads blood. They command their elements, too: Kayle can control the wind and Taro shake the earth; Mirti can break bone at a distance and mend it by touch; Zoe, in Troubled Waters, sends the Marisi through the royal palace. All of them can heal.

The same five hold office from the first book to the last. Kayle Dochenza (elay) is tall, absurdly thin and dishevelled, dreamy but razor-sharp, an inventor whose gas-powered cars and flying machines are remaking the country. Mirti Serlast (hunti), Darien’s aunt, is thin, grey and unbending. Taro Frothen (torz) is big, brown, rumpled and comfortable, a man who looks straight off the farm. Nelson Ardelay (sweela), Zoe’s uncle, is loud, cheerful and red-haired. Zoe Lalindar becomes the coru Prime in the first book, as her grandmother Christara’s successor.

A Prime names or recognises an heir. By Unquiet Land only Nelson has done so, long since: his elder son Kurtis, sober and thoughtful by Ardelay standards. The others come late and from unexpected quarters. Taro’s is Mally, the little girl who stood in at court as a decoy princess and turns out to be Leah Frothen’s daughter; Mirti’s is Natalie, Queen Romelle’s eldest. In Whispering Wood the hunti Prime is styled Guardian of the challinbar, and the trees of the Serlast forest are said to murmur the next Prime’s name. Being Prime is not a title you can set aside: Zoe marries Darien and stays the coru Prime, and so she is not crowned queen.

The Primes’ largest power is political. When the royal line fails, they choose the next monarch.

When the series opens, Welce is ruled by King Vernon, old and failing, with his adviser the force behind the throne. He has four wives from four of the five elements: Elidon, the first, elay; Seterre, hunti; Alys, sweela; and Romelle, torz, a distant Frothen cousin. The missing element is coru, and Troubled Waters begins when Zoe, a coru woman, is summoned to be the fifth.

The queens have given Vernon three daughters, and none is his; Vernon is nearly impotent, and men of the court quietly fathered heirs for him. Josetta, Seterre’s daughter and the presumed heir, is Navarr Ardelay’s child, which makes her Zoe’s half-sister; Corene, Alys’s, is Darien Serlast’s; Natalie is Romelle’s by an unknown lover. During Troubled Waters Romelle is found to be pregnant again, and that child, Odelia, is Vernon’s own and the true heir. The man really running the country is the king’s hunti adviser, Darien, who knows far more than he says.

By Royal Airs, five years on, Vernon is dead and Darien is regent for the child Odelia, who stays on Taro Frothen’s estate while a look-alike, Mally, appears at court in her place. When the truth comes out — Odelia, healthy in body, seems trapped in her own mind and can never rule — the Primes look past the three princesses who are not Vernon’s blood and, after much argument, choose Darien himself. Through Jeweled Fire and Unquiet Land he is the chosen king but still uncrowned, and people go on calling him the regent.

Whispering Wood opens on his coronation: two hours on a stage, and three blessings drawn for the new king. Zoe is not crowned beside him. The old reign’s queens linger: Elidon keeps a suite in the palace, Seterre has turned patron of the arts, and rooms are kept for the dowager Queen Romelle whenever she is in town; Alys had already remarried by Royal Airs.

The capital lies on the Marisi River below a palace of golden stone set halfway up a low mountain. Beside the palace the great waterfall tumbles from the summit, fills a lake by the courtyard, and becomes the Marisi, which runs along the city’s eastern edge and out to sea. Inside, past a cavernous kierten, one stair climbs to the king’s wing and the other to the queens’. Every Welchin home, down to a village cottage, has a kierten just inside the front door, kept empty because emptiness proves you can afford to waste space.

The main road is the Cinque, “the five-sided boulevard that made an inner loop around the city.” South of it lie the slums, with the all-night tavern where Rafe plays cards and the shelter Josetta runs. The heart of Chialto is the shop district and its two plazas, nearly identical in size and entirely different in feel. The Plaza of Men, at the district’s northern edge, buzzes with horse traders and stalls of meat on a stick and fried bread, and has held the promise booth for centuries. The Plaza of Women is crammed with booths of flowers, used clothes and alcohol of dubious origin, and at its centre the three blind sisters sell secrets. On the river flats the poor and the itinerant camp along the Marisi in the warm quintiles; Zoe goes to ground there in Troubled Waters.

The city changes across the books. In the first, Kayle Dochenza’s gas-powered elaymotives are new enough to bring a whole village out to stare, though Chialto already has smoker coaches that look big enough to carry fifty people; by Unquiet Land Chialto has largely gone over to gaslight and half the vehicles on the road are elaymotives, some of them public transports for twenty or thirty people. In Whispering Wood the city has outgrown its narrow streets: a canal rings it, gas omnibuses run, a university of white stone stands round a common, and the harbour to the south, Vernon Harbor, holds Kayle’s aeromotive works. Men and women alike wear tunics and trousers, often under a long overrobe.

Welce is one of the southern nations, which all keep its quintiles and ninedays under their own names, if not its holidays. Soeche-Tas shares Welce’s small continent, beyond a mountain range on the northern border. It is ruled by a viceroy — the corrupt old man Vernon meant twelve-year-old Corene to marry — and in Whispering Wood its envoys come looking for Welchin wives.

Over the sea lies Berringey, whose royal house is ruthless about heirs: surplus royal kin are killed, and an heir’s ear is marked and kept hidden under a turban. Its Prince Ghyaneth rides into Chialto in Royal Airs, and Berringey declares war on Malinqua midway through Jeweled Fire. Malinqua, almost two ninedays’ sail away, is an empire under the stern Empress Filomara, its capital Palminera split into a red-granite south and a white-stone north under two great towers. It does not celebrate changedays, and its flag of white flowers on red strikes Corene as gaudy beside Welce’s simple rosette. Leah Frothen spends five years there as Darien’s spy, and Jeweled Fire is set almost entirely in its capital.

Cozique is the largest, richest and most powerful nation in the southern seas, and its navy takes Palminera’s harbour at the climax of Jeweled Fire. Its princess Melissande and its merchant Chandran carry it into the later books. Dhonsho, under a murderous king, is home to the princess Alette in Jeweled Fire and the prince Kendol in Whispering Wood; the Karkades, a possession of Cozique, send a prince and a delegation in Unquiet Land; and Yorramol is so far off that it is practically mythic.

That widening is the shape of the series. Troubled Waters begins at a village pyre; by the last book the court at Chialto is a crossroads of envoys, smugglers and princesses, and the new king’s work is keeping Welce in balance among its neighbours.