be

and the fire didn’t seem to be warming the place any. Elfrida coughed on the smoke, which persisted in staying inside, rather than rising through the smoke-hole as it should.
Mag’s eyes had gotten worse over the winter, and the cottage was very dark with the shutters closed. “No eggs?” she asked, peering across the room, as Elfrida let the cowhide down across the cottage door.
“None,” Elfrida replied, sighing. “This spring—if it’s this bad now, what will summer be like?”
She squatted down beside Mag, and took the share of barley-bread the old woman offered, with a crude wooden cup of bitter-tasting herb tea dipped out of the kettle beside the fire.
“I don’t know,” Mag replied, rubbing her eyes—Mag, who had been tall and straight with health last summer, who was now bent and aching, with swollen joints and rheumy eyes. Neither willow-bark nor eyebright helped her much. “Lady bless, darling, I don’t know. First that killing frost, then nothing but rain—seems like what seedlings the frost didn’t get, must’ve rotted in the fields by now. Hens aren’t laying, lambs are born dead, pigs lay on their own young . . . what we’re going to do for food come winter, I’ve no notion.”
When Mag said “we,” she meant the whole village. She was not only their healer, but their priestess of the Old Way. Garth might be hetman, but she was the village’s heart and soul—as Elfrida expected to be one day. This was something she had chosen, knowing the work and self-sacrifice involved, knowing that the enmity of the priests of the White Christ might fall upon her. But not for a long time—Lady grant.
That was what she had always thought, but now the heart and soul of the village was sickening, as the village around her sickened. But why?
“We made the proper sacrifices,” Elfrida said, finally. “Didn’t we? What’ve we done or not done that the land turns against us?”
Mag didn’t answer, but there was a quality in her silence that made Elfrida think that the old woman knew something—something important. Something that she hadn’t yet told her pupil.
Finally, as darkness fell,