Nobody asked me "Egle, what are you going to do?" when we was coming up on my 19th summer. It was clear as a spring on a summer day I was going to stay - to me, to the other girls in my cohort, even to Vala's Chosen when sie came around stressing over hir choice. Sure I wasn't no Voice and I didn't think I would be. There was worse than that.

I liked being the rock, the one everybody depended on. I wasn't clever or pretty, and I sure told myself I didn't mind. I came from a long line of farmers, short and broad and muscular, and I was the practical one. The one taken for granted, I maybe said in my head, when I was alone at night. But I got to be part of something here. I liked that a lot. If it didn't fill me up like it used to, maybe that was just on account of I was waiting for my vows. Something'd come along and take care of that dark spot in my chest, soon enough. Mara would fix it, likely.

Still and all, I had maybe more nights awake than I ought, and the night before I was out in the dark, walking the grounds. The garden was one of my favorite spots, dark soil soft under my feet. I spent maybe more time out there than others'd like, but nobody did much complaining.

I wasn't alone, though. A ground snake darted across my bare feet, dark in the moonlight. I lost track of him in the brush, except he turned around and I'd have swore he whispered "you coming?" Who ain't going to follow that? So I did my best to keep an eye on him as I crashed into the wild space behind the castle.

When I was near about ready to turn around, I tripped over a log and fell onto it. The thing was rotted through, so I found myself nearly inside it, bits of wood and dirt and the scrabble of insects against my skin.

There was a hand on my mouth and I couldn't sit up any more than if there was a stone on my chest. Near panicked, I pushed and shook and fought, but it didn't count for a damn.

"What are you afraid of?" a female voice asked. She sounded so close she had to be right in my face, but even with the moonlight I couldn't make out much.

"Nothing," I answered, and sure it was a lie, but it was so damn obvious a lie I can't even count it.

"Good," she whispered, and I could feel her breathing on me. Something shifted and I was falling, but it ain't quite falling if you're on the ground to start with, now is it? The moon got swallowed quick as I slid beneath the dirt.

I couldn't breathe except for dirt. My eyes burned. My hands shot out to the side, but I couldn't get a grip nowhere as I moved. When I stopped feeling I was moving, all there was I could feel was that dark spot in my chest I always ignored. There wasn't anything to suck in but dirt, and finally I couldn't hold my breath. My chest was burning until that little, dark, rotten spot started to swell up. Seemed like it was no time at all until my chest was full of noting at all but that same feeling of crawling I'd had on the log. Beetles, or maybe maggots, I thought calmly.

Mara's gonna fix it after all, was the last thing I thought before I stopped thinking.

It was going on a week before someone found me.

That ain't quite right either. Tripped over me, I reckon it went, and they dug me out under not much dirt at all. I can't hardly remember sitting up or walking back, and even when the other girls took shifts watching me over. The acolytes sat with me all patient, I couldn't tell them what had happened after it went dark.

"Mara took me," I kept telling them. "Ain't that good enough?"

"That isn't... that doesn't..." None of them had the guts to finish the damn sentence, but I knew it clear anyway. Felt like the maggots still sat inside, whispering sometimes.

"So where in the world do you think I was?" I finally snapped. "Sure and I wasn't just laying there in the trees for days." They think you're lying, the maggots said. They know your secrets. They know you're awful.

The acolytes didn't want to answer, but one of the girls in my cohort finally did. "You're not special," she spat, and the older women at least made a show of looking horrified. "You don't have to lie about getting anxious about your decision date. We all do, and we don't make up stories about it."

I surely wanted to argue with that, but I didn't have a damn word coming to me. I never have been the arguing type. Instead I just watched the acolytes shuffling all the folks back out and I didn't know what to think. I felt about as useful as a compost pile that ain't been turned.

My chest ached, and sitting there in the dark I could've swore I felt something crawling around inside. I was sure as my mama's farm that it'd been Mara took me under. She saw I was rotting inside. Course she did, she took corpses all the time.

Was it her way of keeping the rot outta her temple, or something more'n that?

There wasn't a thing keeping me there. Not wanted, not missed, whispered the maggots. I packed my things. I didn't know where I was gonna go, but I wanted to be on my way afore they told me to get out.

Sometimes the crop'll fail. Sometimes all the crops'll fail, and it ain't anyone's fault, there wasn't something right you didn't do. All the praying and plowing and caring over them seeds ain't a guarantee. You do your best to put those odds in your favor but it's always outta your hands at the end of it.

If you're lucky, you got enough stored up to get you through, and you don't owe anybody anything you can't pay, and you can make a go again. But if you was lucky, it wouldn't've failed in the first place, now would it? And so sometimes you're packing up what you got to walk away and looking for someplace you can spend the winter and put food in your stomach and see through to spring.

Humans and animals, when we die, we go in the earth. Mara takes us apart so we can do other things. Souls go where souls wanna go, but bodies get to feed all kinds of other things. Someone else rotting's gonna maybe turn into the best blessing you'll ever get. Life's like that too. That farm's dying, sure, and that farmer's self is dying. But she'll go on and do something else, and someone else'll make a go of the farm in a year or two.

Sometimes the body dies and sometimes the life ends and the body keeps going.

I got shit-all idea where I'm gonna spend the winter, but my crop's good and failed and there's nothing left for me here. The maggots're asking what's left of me, but I ignore them.

On the way out I left offerings. Mara take the dead me. Mara guide what's left.

I hadn't seen any of my family in three, four years, and hadn't lived with them since I was a kid. But I knocked on my mama's door anyway, because I sure as war didn't know where else I was going.

The folks as answered shook their heads. "This is our second summer here. We don't know. Ask in town."

What else could I do? I thanked them and went on into a town I hadn't seen since I was small, asking around in stores and offices til I found someone who knew them.

"Not a lot of folks stayed after the flood a couple years back," sie told me with a shrug. "I think I remember her saying she was taking your sisters to family up north, but I really can't say, everybody was leaving then."

Why would anybody care? The maggots were having a grand old time, and it was getting harder to ignore them. Forgot you/don't care/didn't matter. Now that was plain ridiculous. I'd been fed and warm and took care of, and them not.

"You need a place to stay?" sie asked, distracting me. "Anybody with temple training has to be able to help me with my books, correspondence, that kind of thing. We can send off some letters asking after your family. Do they teach you kids computers?"

"Not much, but I can learn quick," I told hir. "I'll stay a while, if you'll have me."

I stayed through the harvest, learning to keep up the website and practice typing. The night the last grain came in, they asked if I'd see to the ritual.

"Ain't a lot of trained priestesses out this way," said the older woman doing the asking. She was the kind of old where you can't rightly tell if she's somebody's mama or somebody's grandma, a wild-looking lady lived outside town in the woods. I remembered being terrified of her as a little one.

"I ain't finished-"

"Closer than we had in a long time," she insisted, and I supposed I was still a little bit terrified.

The maggots told me I couldn't, but I'd been trying real hard to fight them lately, so I said I could.

"Hurry up then," she said. "Don't wanna keep her waiting."

I'd cut too deep. I knew it soon as the knife came back up, knew it as soon as the young man bled, and my hands shook so's I almost dropped it. wrong/wrong/fake/they'll know/they'll run you out/or worse/worse

When the older woman came and took the knife, she was shaking her head at the boy on the stone. "Been a long time since anybody bled like that."

"I killed 'im," I whispered. The maggots were screaming.

She just clucked her tongue. "Now honey, you think you know better than Mara?"

I looked at her, not trusting myself to say nothing.

"Whole point of the exercise is to trust in her, ain't it?"

Sure I'd known that, but...

She put her arm around me and we stood like that for a few minutes, together, watching him bleed in the cold. "Priestess's done working once the blood falls, you know. You can come in and eat some. Get your mind off it."

"No," I was shaking my head. "I ain't much of a priestess, and if he dies I wanna be here for him."

"Suit yourself." I didn't hear her leaving, but she was gone by the time I went looking around. The night went on. The boy kept breathing, real shallow now.

The boy's folks came to collect him at the first of dawn. He'd stopped bleeding hours ago, but his whole torso was a mess of scabs and dry blood. I helped cut him down. He was still breathing.

"I was dreaming," he whispered as his older brother gathered him up. "The first snow came real early, and it froze the sheep standing out in the grass." His parents gave each other nods. His mama went off to tell someone what the boy'd said, while his papa washed him up careful, not wanting to start him bleeding again.

"Clean cuts," he said as he worked. "I worried like a sheep dog at a sweater factory when you cut him. Thought maybe he'd bleed out."

I looked away. "I'm sorry for worrying you."

He was wrapping his son in a clean blanket. "Last year's girl died, they tell you that?"

"No." What else was I gonna say to that.

"Cuts weren't clean. Not a lot of blood, but something was wrong. Afore dawn they already looked angry. Turned into infection. And the winter was long." He looked after his wife'd gone. "Sounds like this year'll be long too." They carried the young man off and left me alone next to the stone.

Well, weren't so much alone. The older woman was there again. "Tired yet?"

"So tired I ain't able to hear how awful I been." So tired I couldn't feel much anxious about admitting it.

"Or maybe you done right and that'll shut 'em up for a while," she said.

"Reckon I've always been rotten inside," I admitted. "No amount of right'll change that. If it worked I'd've still been at the temple."

She put her arm round my shoulders. "Temples ain't right for everybody. Some of us do better in the open air is all. No shame in it."

"All my shame's in here," I said, hand pressed up on my empty chest.

"Stop holding on to it so tight," she said, and suddenly instead of being next to me she was all around. I didn't understand at first. "Rotting things go in the earth, Egle. Give over your rot and let me help."

Sure then I was shaking and alone, walking back to my room in town. I didn't see a soul the whole way there, and when I fell in the bed I didn't much fuss whether I'd even wake up.

Come spring I went on. We hadn't heard nothing back from my mama and if something came, he'd hold it for me til I told him where I landed.

My hometown had seemed real small after the city around the temples, but that ain't had nothing on a real city like Lybiv. I'm sure I looked every bit the farmer's daughter I was, walking off the train. My boss'd helped me put together a portfolio, and I had my savings and the remains of my dowry from the temple. I got myself a cheap room, and a cheap computer, and I went looking for work.

In between interviews that didn't seem to be going much of anywhere, I saw a lot of the city. I liked riding the trains around, getting off wherever took my fancy. I ate anywhere looked cheap and crowded; I figured that was how you knew it was good.

On a day the maggots was talking real bad about how I wasn't worth having around, I went hunting out Mara. Big city like Lybiv, ain't gonna be centered on Mara like out in the farmlands, there's lots a gods and lots a temples. I found her quick enough, though. Turned out the closest one there was was an old shrine outside the Market, and temple had opened in an empty storefront nearby, with a couple folks inside. There was a big shrine taking up most of the back wall, lots of spare change in the pool at Mara's feet, and glass cases full of handmade charms and jewelry and whatnots.

"What's all a this, then?" I asked the fella behind the counter. I'd mostly known 'Mother of the Market' as one title out of dozens, but he started explaining to me like I didn't know a shrine from a swamp, and just when I cut him off an older woman walked in.

She looked at the two of us and laughed. "You insulting the customers again, Mitka, aren't you? Don't mind him, he's just likes to hear himself talk. I'm Katya. What brings you in?"

"I, ah," I thought I felt myself blushing. "I was looking for a temple of Mara's and you folks came up the closest to where I'm staying. It just ain't the kind of temple I'm used to is all."

"It wouldn't be, with an accent like that. You're from up north, am I right?" She put an arm around my shoulder and walked me back to the foot of the shrine. "We get importers and wholesalers who like the Mara of the Fields, and sometimes pathologists or mourners, one guy who got a heart from a dead woman who makes offerings to Mara for the woman who saved his life... but mostly we get people who need the Lady of the Marketplace, so that's what we cater to."

"I hate to be rude about it and all but... is this a temple or a business?"

Katya shrugged. "Little of both. We have to pay for the space somehow, and we don't take much of a commission."

I looked at the statue of Mara and took a real deep breath. "So you hiring? Or recruiting? Or whatever you call it out here?"

She looked a lot less welcoming awful fast. "You got any qualifications?"

"I trained ten years at the temple in Riga, afore I decided that life weren't for me. I got six months bookkeeping and a reference who'll talk me up. I'll work high days and weekends if you want, don't matter to me. Any of that worth anything to you?"

Now Katya was smiling again. She didn't answer me direct, instead walking past me, "Hey, Mitka, you know how you said you wanted me to hire someone to cover your weekends?"

I emptied the change in my pockets into Mara's shrine right quick, then hurried to follow her.