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Sterling and Bernadette had exchanged birth keys eight months ago beside the Bride of Fortune’s altar at the temple in Ironworks Street. It had been the happiest day of Sterling’s life up to that point, and every day thereafter had been better than the last. Today being the notable exception.

Sterling swallowed hard against the urge to cry as he folded the letter in half and wrote To Bernadette on the back of it.

He had lingered too long in her private room, a place to which he had no right, especially now, so he returned to the main part of the house, closing the door behind him.

He set the letter on the kitchen table and packed up his few belongings.

Before he left, he opened the small, lacquered box on the fireplace mantel.

Inside, their birth keys sat side by side, one gold and one silver, hers slightly larger than his.

They belong together , some inner, stubborn voice insisted, but his conscience knew better.

Even so, he was tempted to leave his birth key in her care.

When he died, he wanted his key to end up on the sparse altar in Bernadette’s study, not relegated to the back corner of an altar belonging to a distant relative who had never respected him in life and would undoubtedly never honor him in death.

But it would not be fair of Sterling to expect Bernadette to keep it, so he picked it up in his thick fingers and put it in his waistcoat pocket, thinking that he might as well reach down his gullet and pull out his own heart.

With nothing left to do, he inhaled deeply, memorizing the scent of home – of her – before letting himself out.

***

A half-hour after leaving behind the only real home he had ever known, Sterling teetered on a barstool with a frothy pint glass in front of him.

He rarely drank – certainly not during daylight hours – and he could count on one hand the number of times he’d consumed beer in his life.

But given his sudden change in circumstances and his reluctance to return in defeat to his mother and uncle, his feet had taken him to a nearby pub rather than to his uncle’s townhouse when the hackney dropped him off.

Unfortunately, the pub was located in a respectable part of town, so it was inadequately seedy for his present disposition.

Also, he hated beer, but since he had always thought of beer as the beverage into which one drowned one’s sorrows, he had ordered a pint.

He forced himself to take several gulps. Honestly, the stuff was vile.

The barkeep appeared before him, a pretty, fresh-faced woman in her late-twenties or early-thirties, probably the wife or the daughter of the pub’s owner. She held out her hands like two sides of a scale, weighing the options as she asked, “Which do you think is better? Beer or port?”

“Port.”

“Thought so.”

She whisked away the barely drunk pint and replaced it with a narrow port glass into which she poured the rich, red wine Sterling preferred.

“Thank you,” he murmured, flushing with embarrassment.

How marvelously transparent you are , Bernadette had told him early in their acquaintance, when he had first left his family’s home to live what little life he had left on his own terms. His mother and Uncle Stickles had promptly disowned him.

He had felt sadder about this turn of events than he would have thought, the emotional state that had prompted Bernadette’s comment.

From the mouths of most, the word transparent would have been an insult, but Bernadette Snaith appreciated people who didn’t hide who and what they were.

And for his own part, Sterling had relished being seen at last.

It was the moment he knew himself to be in love.

“What’s the matter? You look like someone drowned your kittens,” observed the barkeep with a face full of sympathy, as Sterling took a draught of port.

“I’m not going to die,” he answered mournfully.

“I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but I think it likely you will die someday.”

“But not soon.”

“You cannot know that either.”

Sterling regarded her with bleary eyes. She seemed oddly familiar, although he could not recall when and where he had seen her before.

“Aren’t you meant to be comforting me?” he asked.

“Death is a comfort. Your life is not meant to go on and on without end. Imagine how terrible that would be.” She polished the countertop as she spoke, as if this were the sort of conversation she carried on all the time. And who knew? Given her line of work, perhaps it was.

“Who are you? Grandmother Wisdom?” he joked, albeit weakly, referring to the god who gave humanity the gift of understanding mortality so that people would better appreciate life.

“Ha! Can you imagine? Ha ha!” Her eyes sparkled with amusement, reminding Sterling of Bernadette’s eyes, although his wife’s were much bluer and much lovelier. He ought to laugh along with the kind barkeep, but if anything, his spirits sank lower. He took another gulp of port.

“Hmm,” said the woman, her face falling as she studied Sterling’s miserable countenance.

“Perhaps you would be better off at temple, rather than hunkered down in a pub with a glass of port and a measly barmaid to keep you company. Go make an offering to some god or other. You look like you need to ask for the Bride of Fortune’s favor. ”

Sterling snorted. “I need no more favors from that quarter, I can promise you that.”

“Oh? What favors has she given you?”

“Only one, and she has already taken it back.”

“Are you certain about that?”

“Do you doubt me?”

“Yes, actually, I do.” She leaned her elbows on the counter and lowered her voice, her mien conspiratorial. “Let me ask you this: If the Bride of Fortune stood before you now, what would you ask of her?”

His knee-jerk response was Bernadette , but he thought better of it.

Even as the port began to muddle his brain, he understood that he could not very well ask for a person.

Bernadette had her own thoughts and hopes and dreams. How could he call affection that was not freely given ‘love’?

He could not. And since he did not want anything or anyone besides Bernadette Snaith, he had no choice but to answer, “I don’t know. ”

The barkeep nodded sagely. “Well, that is a good start. Most people ask for the moon. Cure this disease. Make this person fall in love with me. Stop the People’s Republic of Gol from hunting me down and cutting off my head.

But the truth is that, in a world full of free will, even a god has limits.

And really, it’s the little things that end up mattering most – the day-to-day banalities, barely noticeable in the moment, that add up to something extraordinary. ”

Sterling had the strangest sensation that the pub had faded away and there was nothing in the universe besides himself, the woman across from him, and the long bar that separated them.

The lunchtime conversations carrying on behind him became muted, forming a bubble of soft sound that surrounded them like a blanket.

“I will give you an example,” she continued.

“Imagine a mother and a daughter. The daughter is intelligent and curious, but she struggles to fit in among her peers. They bully her mercilessly at school. The child wants her mother to intervene. But what happens to children whose parents never allow them to stand up for themselves or to use their own voices?”

The conversations around them grew fuzzier as Sterling dredged up memories of his own childhood, of being cosseted by his mother, of his sense of self shrinking as his peers mocked his size and his doughy round cheeks.

“They become weak-willed,” he answered, his voice hardly above a whisper. “They come to believe that they have no power over their own lives.”

In short, children whose parents never allowed them to stand up for themselves or to use their own voices became Sterling Valancy.

“Exactly. Now imagine that same intelligent, curious girl growing into a woman who demands respect from everyone and who does not suffer fools. What might that woman accomplish? Whom might she help in a world made so trying and difficult and sad by the Old Gods?”

The barkeep leaned closer, and as she did so, the pendant of her necklace swung between them – a small golden key.

“It’s the little things that bring good fortune, Sterling. Sometimes luck comes in the form you least expect.”

“How did you know—?”

“Go home, son.”

She squeezed his arm, and he awoke with a start as the sounds of the pub came flooding back into his ears. He lifted his head from the bar to find a mostly full beer glass sweating at his elbow rather than a glass of port. He must have fallen asleep, precariously balanced on his barstool.

Already the dream was fading, but he could remember the last thing the dream-barmaid had told him: Go home, son . And so he paid his tab and made his way to the only home he had left.

***

Sterling stood on the stoop, staring at the plain wooden door painted the same dismal gray it had always worn, set into the stolid stonework that made up his uncle’s dreary townhouse.

He had spent the first twenty-six years of his life in this place, but he had never known what it meant to come home until he had married Bernadette.

Now, he saw that his childhood home was little better than a debtor’s prison.

And yet, here he was, his life having come depressingly full circle.

Should he knock? It seemed a bizarre thing to do when his mother lived on the other side of the door, yet she and Uncle Stickles had made it clear that he was no longer welcome.

What would Bernadette do? he wondered.

To Old Hell with them. Go in , she spoke in his mind as clear as a bell.

He went inside.