A heart for the rite – a heart to sacrifice. The mortals watching her from around the altar and the gods watching from above both demanded it. But neither said it had to be a beating heart. Neither said it had to be the sort that could bleed.

She carried it up the torch-lit path in her cupped hands, with all the reverence it deserved and the rite demanded. A heart as surely as any thing could be, though it had a clasp instead of valves, though it ticked instead of beating. The precious gift that had first been lowered into her hands in a quiet, hidden spot by the river, by the girl for whom her heart beat.

The watch once given to that girl by her mother, given again now out of love. She laid it on the altar, tiny silver thing in the nest of its own chain, and waited to see whether the gods would judge it as precious as she did.