On the first day of the first month, it rained on a certain village and you could see exactly where the rain ended.

The plaza lay dark beneath the downpour and water was pouring from every corner of the church roof, yet beyond the last house, the wheat fields were barely damp.

Despite the bad weather, the whole village had dressed up anyway. Two rows of stalls stood in the plaza, their awnings sagging under the water, and children ran between them in colorful coats with their hoods protecting their heads from the rain.

Two men in brown leather coats stopped at the stall closest to the church. They had their hoods up like everyone else, but the taller one had let a lot of crimson hair spill out of his. He leaned on the counter while his companion went through the goods.

"What's the occasion?" he asked.

The stall owner gave him an odd look. "The occasion?" He paused, then snorted. "What, did you drop in from another world?"

The hooded man laughed. "We're just new around here."

The stall owner laughed too and gave up trying to make sense of the strangers. It was a good morning, and he had plenty to sell.

"Well, it's the Prism Ceremony." He gestured toward the sky. "See the rain? That's the pastor's doing. He's been holding it there since before sunrise. Once it stops and the rainbow comes up, the ceremony begins."

"I see."

"Don't tell me you don't know what a prism ceremony is?"

"I do," the man said. "It's just done differently from where I come from."

A woman at the other end of the counter was digging through a basket of knitted caps, and she inserted herself into the conversation without looking up.

"They're nobles. That's what that is." She said it to the stall owner. "That's what it sounds like, anyway. The big houses keep their own prism stone, and they test their children whenever they feel like it. Most before seven, and I've even heard of it being done on newborns." She turned a cap over and checked the seam. "The rest of us can only wait for the nearest Vaelith church's schedule. Like today."

She said all of it the way you'd talk about the weather in a country you've never been to, and then went back to the caps.

The stall owner's face lit up at the word nobles. He had one morning a year to sell most of what he had, and by the time he was finished, the two men had been shown carved combs, hairpins, three kinds of ribbon, and a small painted box with nothing in it.

The rain thinned out while he was still talking. It went from rain to sunshine in about a minute.

The light came up under the clouds, and a rainbow settled over a certain distance from the church, running from the mill to the orchard. Then the bells rang, and most people in the plaza went inside.

At the front of the church, the pastor placed his left hand over his heart, held his right hand before him with the palm turned toward the ground, and bowed his head. It was the gesture of thanks in the faith of Vaelith: one hand for the life they had received, and one for the world they walked upon.

Most of the room did it with him. A few only bowed their heads, but nobody thought any less of them for it.

Half the families in that district prayed to the Goddess of Life and Death, or to the God of Magic, or to nothing much at all, but every one of them came to the mass on the day of a prism ceremony. That had been the tradition for as long as anyone could remember.

Whatever you pray to on the other days of the year, the prism is the prism, and every child touches it to determine their blessing.

"Vaelith made the world," the pastor said.

He was not a large man, but a simple voice spell carried his measured, unhurried words to every corner of the church.

"He made the ground under this floor and the sky where the rain came out of this morning. He made the sea and everything living in it, and the hills, and the trees standing on them, and the wheat you have all been complaining about since spring."

A ripple of laughter spread through the church, and he let it pass before continuing.

"He made the stunning elves and the outstanding dragons. He made the dwarves under the mountains and the beastfolk over in the east. He also made us, humans, and he did all of it for no reason except that he wanted it to be there.

And when he had made his children, he blessed us. Every one. There is nobody in this room who was overlooked, and nobody in this room who was not thought about."

He let that sit for a moment.

"Now, the blessing is not the same in all of us. You know that. Some are given a great deal, and some are given a little. But hear the next part, because it is the part that people forget on a morning like this one.

The blessing is not the gift. You are the gift. He made you, and he made you to be alive in the world he created. That is the greatest thing he has ever given to anything that breathes. Everything after it is an addition.

A man who cannot be grateful for the life already placed in his hands will not be made happy by the blessing laid upon it, no matter how much of it he turns out to be carrying. And I have buried enough of both kinds to know it."

There was no statue behind the altar. Nobody has ever known what Vaelith looks like — whether he takes the shape of a man, a dragon, or something no one has a word for — so no church has ever dared to guess at a face. Instead of a statue, Vaelith churches put in a wall of clear glass that ran from the floor all the way to the ceiling, so that what stood behind the pastor was the sky itself. This morning it had the rainbow in it, from one edge of the frame to the other.

The pastor came to the reason they had all gathered beneath the rain. As he spoke, he turned slightly and lifted a hand toward the colors arcing in the sky, drawing every eye with it.

"The blessing shows itself as color, and the colors above our heads this morning. Red. Orange. Yellow. Green. Blue. Indigo. Violet. Red is the least of it, and violet is the most, and inside every color there are shades, light to dark, and a dark shade stands above a light one of the same name. That is the whole of it. When your child puts a hand on the prism, the glass will say what he was given, and we will thank Vaelith for it, whatever it turns out to be."

A good number of the parents were saying the colors along with him under their breath, the way you do with something you learned as a child and have never once needed to look up.

Two rows from the front, a woman with pleasing beauty sat beside her equally pleasing husband, her hands pressed against her heart in prayer. She had been praying since the doors opened.

One acolyte carried out a low table with carved legs and set it in front of the altar, and the other put a gilded box on top of it. Then they called up the children.

Most of them were seven, and a few were eight. Children were meant to be tested at seven, but a village that size only received the ceremony once a year, and never on a fixed date. For some, that meant waiting months after their birthday. One boy had missed the last ceremony by a week and had complained about it almost daily since then.

The children all wore plain white capes over their good clothes. Some of them were thrilled with themselves, while some of them had gone as white as the capes.

Their parents talked in the low voices people use in a church when they can't quite manage silence.

"An orange," someone said a couple of rows back. "Bless my child with an orange, and I'd never ask for another thing as long as I live."

The people around him laughed, kindly enough. One of them remarked, "For people like us, a really dark red would be more than enough already."

"But there's no harm in dreaming a little," the person softly replied.

The pastor opened the box. The prism inside was about six inches across. It was a cloudy white ball of glass, or something close enough to glass. He smiled at the first girl in line and gestured for her to touch the ball.

The girl put her right palm flat on it. Nothing happened for a moment, then color came into the glass under her hand. It started light red and got darker and deeper as it spread, the way ink spreads through water, and the whole church watched it go with bated breath.

Then, it lightened again, and the shade had changed. By the time it filled the sphere, it was a clear light orange, and it stayed at that color.

"Light orange," the pastor said, causing the room to applaud.

The girl hurried back down the aisle and ran to her parents. Her father rested a hand on the back of her head and left it there, while her mother, who had been praying since the church doors opened, kissed the girl's hair. Even among the congregation, the family stood out for their pleasing appearance.

"She could be a mage's apprentice," someone said. "A real mage would take an orange blessed."

"That family," someone else said, with a tinge of bitterness. "Married up twice already. His mother was a beauty, and then he goes and marries a pretty one too, and now look, an orange in the house. Some families keep improving themselves, while the rest of us keep having each other's children."

None of the others reached orange. The reds came out deep, then ordinary, then thin, more or less in the order the children were standing in, and the last boy in line barely brought up any color at all. Light red, the pastor said, and he said it as warmly as he'd said the first one.

Nobody had told the acolytes how to arrange that line. They just looked at the children's faces and put them in order, and they got it almost perfectly right. That was just how the world's blessing operated.

Whether beauty reflected blessing or blessing reflected beauty, no one knew. They only knew that those with more of one often possessed more of the other. Everyone in that room had known that since before they could read.

At the end, every child got a pin, a small glass circle in the color they'd raised, and the acolytes securely fastened them on the children so none would be lost.

By the time the church emptied, the sky was already clear.

Out on the steps, the last boy in line rode on his father's arm with his cape bunched over one shoulder and his pin held in both hands. He had been quiet for longer than usual.

"Am I bad?" he asked.

His mother reached up and rubbed his hair the wrong way. "No."

"It's the lightest one."

"It is," she said. "But it doesn't matter for families like ours. None of us has ever done much with magic, yet we've never gone hungry a day in our lives. Your father isn't any better than the rest of us, and I married him anyway."

"You'll have the eatery," his father said. "You'll take it over when I'm too old to run it, the same way I took it from my father. That's a trade that keeps food on the table. Not just yours, but everyone who depends on you. Vaelith gave our family honest hands before HE gave us bright colors, and they've never failed us."

The boy turned his pin over. Then he leaned out and looked at the one on his father's coat, which had been there for so long that the glass had gone cloudy around the edge. The two of them were almost the same shade.

"Yours is like mine."

"It is."

"You can warm a cup of milk."

"Yes, I can."

"Then I can probably warm a cup of milk, too!" the boy exclaimed.

That seemed to settle the whole question, and all three of them were laughing by the time they came down the steps.

By noon, the plaza smelled like hot wine and wet wool. Someone was playing a fiddle under the awnings, someone else was arguing with the stall owner about the price of ribbon, and every child in the village who had a pin was wearing it where people could see it.

Far from that village, in a room that was warmer and a great deal quieter, a stunning lady carried a baby beside a sphere of cloudy glass about a meter in diameter.

Once more, she guided the baby's small hand down until its palm lay flat against the sphere. The sphere remained cloudy white, showing neither the faintest tint nor the slightest hint of red.

The orb was a beautiful prism, mounted on an exquisite stand of dark indigo wood. Yet it remained perfectly white, exactly as it had been before anyone touched it.

An elaborately caped mage left the room and came back with a case under his arm. Inside it was a commoner's prism, six inches across and scuffed along the base, the kind a village church keeps in a gilded box and brings out once a year.

"Try this," he said.

The lady turned the baby's hand onto it. They waited a full minute by the clock, but nothing happened at all.

"She might just be too young," said the man sitting by the fire.

Nobody answered him, and even he himself stopped believing the words before he finished saying them. Everyone in that room knew what the instrument measured and how little it cared how old you were.

Someone knocked at the door, and the guard outside announced that the Glamourist from the Grand Spire had arrived.

The man stood up. "I'll handle it," he said gently, and went out.

The Glamourist was waiting in the long room with two flat cases at his feet. He had been kept there for a while, but he did not seem to mind at all. He bowed to the King, low and unhurried, and came up smiling.

"Your Majesty. The Spire sent me down with this season's work." He crouched over the nearer case and opened it. Inside was a row of small pots set in a tray lined with felt. "It's better than last year's!" he exclaimed.

"I stood in this very room a year ago and swore there was nothing better. But I was wrong, and I'm very pleased about it." He turned one of the pots so the light caught the lid. "It's milled finer, so it goes on thin and stays where you put it. It also comes off with warm water and a cloth, no oil and no scraping at the end of the day. Gentle enough for young skin, which is the part I'm proudest of. Child-friendly, Your Majesty."

The king looked at the tray and said nothing.

"Perfectly safe on a small child," the Glamourist said. "I bring it up because nobody ever thinks to ask, and they ought to."

"The Spire is very generous with its time."

"We're glad to present our best products, Your Majesty."

"Then we should try it on someone who qualifies." The King turned toward his aide and told the bespectacled man to bring the crown prince.

The eight-year-old Prince Alaric arrived so quickly that he had obviously been somewhere he wasn't supposed to be. He was put on a stool and told to sit still, which he didn't, but the Glamourist paid it no mind. He opened the nearer case, laid his brushes out in a row from smallest to largest, and talked while he worked.

He was there to make the Prince look his best, and he took that responsibility seriously. After all, glamouring was an old and respected craft.

Every court on the continent kept specialists in the art. They were paid as generously as physicians, and people argued over who was the finest much as they argued about cooks.

Men also wore glamour as readily as women. A merchant glamoured himself before a negotiation, a magistrate before passing sentence, and a knight before a duel.

Going out with a bare face is not laziness. It is a statement, and everyone who sees you draws the same conclusions. You are either confident enough with your appearance, too poor to afford even the cheapest face powder, or too defeated to care about impressions anymore.

"We start with the skin, Your Highness. Always the skin." He wet a cloth and wiped the boy's face, taking his time about it. "Nothing goes on a dirty face, and nothing goes on a dry one either. Several drops of dewwater, a touch of aloe balm, and a few minutes of patience. That's the part the uneducated skip."

He took a small pot out of the case and worked a little of it over the boy's cheeks with a moon-silk pad.

"Children need this more than grown men do. A child's skin is thin and delicate, and half the glamour sold in this city would give a boy your age a rash that lasts a week. That is why the Spire spent two years on this one. You could wear it all day, and it would do you no harm."

"Does it make me stronger?"

"No," the Glamourist said. "And yes."

Alaric turned his head to look at him, and had it turned back.

"No, because this does not change your face. It only cleans and nourishes it. The part that changes your face is the cosmetic glamour, and I will put that on next." He wiped his fingers on the cloth.

"And yes, because a face that has been looked after still looks good at 60, and a face that has not been taken care of stops looking good at about 35. I have watched it happen more times than I can count.

A man buys cheap glamour, wears it every day, but never takes it off properly. At 20 he is the best-looking man on his street, but at 40, his skin is already ruined. There is nothing left underneath for anyone to paint, and even a great deal of money can barely salvage it."

"If their face is ruined, does that make their blessing smaller?" Alaric asked.

"No, Your Highness. A ruined face will not make a blessing smaller, and a glamoured one will not make it bigger. What you were given at birth is what you have." He set the pot down and opened the second case. "Very rarely, a person's blessing changes, though no one has ever discovered why. Sorcerers are much the same. Some are born with far more magic than their appearance should allow. They simply happen, and that's all anyone can tell you."

"But glamour makes magic stronger," Alaric said. "Everybody knows that."

"Both are true, Your Highness." The Glamourist looked pleased by the question. "Your blessing may remain exactly as it is, yet glamour can help you draw more from it. That is my trade."

He paused for a moment as he selected a velvet puff. "Take the same man into a society that thinks well of him, then into one that doesn't. His face never changes, yet his magic does. It will be stronger in the first, and he'll feel it. I've watched that for thirty years and still can't tell why. Nobody can. We only know that it happens, and glamour helps it happen more often."

Someone handed Alaric a mirror. He turned his head one way, then the other, then further than that, and announced that he looked older. The Glamourist agreed that he did, then began packing away his tools in the same careful order he had laid them out.

"My congratulations, Your Majesty," he said lightly, without looking up. "Both of your older children are outstanding, and there is very little left for me to glamour in either of them."

He fitted the last brush into its loop before glancing up with a smile. "And the youngest princess? She should be much the same. They'll surely have read her blessing by now. A house like this doesn't wait."

Alaric still held the mirror before him, but his own reflection no longer held his attention. Instead, he watched the Glamourist in the corner of the mirror.

"She's not well," the king said. "Her health has been poor since she was born."

"I'm sorry to hear that, Your Majesty." The Glamourist closed the case and stood. He bowed as deeply and unhurriedly as he had upon entering. "May Vaelith bless Her Highness with good health."

The king thanked him and signaled to his aide, who presented the Glamourist with a silk purse before escorting him from the room.

As Alaric moved to follow, the king called after him. "Don't forget to wash your face."

"Hmm." The prince gave a small nod as he handed the mirror back to an attendant and headed off to his studies.

The king listened as the footsteps dwindled in the corridor. When the doors finally closed and silence settled over the chambers, he retraced his steps to the room he had come from.

"This hasn't happened before, right?" he asked.

The mage, who shared much of the king's features, had clearly been expecting the question.

"Not in our kingdom," he replied without hesitation. "While you were away, I searched the royal records twice. Every child in them has a color, without exception, all the way back to the earliest archives."

The lady cradling the infant lowered her gaze to the baby's tiny face, her usual poise giving way to lingering unease.

"...Red is the lowest rank on the scale." Her fingers tightened almost imperceptibly around the child before she lifted her eyes to the king. "There is nothing beneath it."

The king stared at the glass for a long moment before lifting his eyes to meet the queen's. Their gazes locked, and for a brief moment, neither of them spoke.

"Viviana..." he said at last. "Princess Viviana is very ill."

The words seemed completely out of place, yet everyone in the room understood exactly what he meant.