"Listen, Maria. If there truly is no other way, perhaps we still have one option left."
Golana held up the parchment. Maria turned to look and her expression changed completely.
"What, a witch? Absolutely not. Do you understand what you're suggesting? This is a house of God. You want to bring a witch here to save us?"
Golana shook her head slowly.
"But will God save us? If the Harvest Goddess is truly that merciful, why have those children already died? If she truly hears our prayers, why hasn't she sent food for her youngest and most helpless believers?"
Maria's face went red.
"That's because we haven't been faithful enough, we haven't, the Goddess is simply testing us, she's punishing us for wavering, she—"
"So she's letting us starve to death as punishment?"
Golana looked at her steadily.
"Look at me, Maria. I have been in the church for twenty-eight years. Longer than you. More devoted than you.
And because of those twenty-eight years, I know something. If the Goddess will not look down at us, then we do not have to hold her as absolute truth."
She stood up, reached to her collar, and unpinned the church emblem from her chest. She set it on the table.
"Call it apostasy. Call it blasphemy. I only want to save these children. These young lives should not end here. They are just beginning."
Maria stared at her and could not find words.
Crack.
The scene broke. Raphael's awareness was swept into the current of memory, time moving around him like water, and when the world reassembled he was back in the room with the long table.
Fewer children now. Thirty.
The table looked too large for them. They were thinner than before in a way that had crossed.
Bone prominent at the jaw and collarbone, eyes too large in faces that had stopped having the softness of childhood.
Sister Maria and Director Golana stood near the entrance with their heads lowered, receiving the monastery's only visitor since the famine had begun.
Raphael knew what she was the moment he saw her.
Deep purple robes. The tall pointed hat that had been fashionable among practitioners of a certain tradition for several centuries.
Heavy makeup, the eye work elaborate and dark. The neckline of her inner garment plunged dramatically and the cut continued downward to somewhere near her navel.
Her figure made it obvious she had not been going without food.
"Madam Charva. Welcome. I hope to ask for your help with the monastery's situation."
Director Golana, the woman who had been described as stern, who had run this place with discipline for years, bowed deeply to a witch, one of the church's designated enemies, her head going below the woman's waist and staying there.
Sister Maria kept more composure, but her own head was lowered, and she had removed the church emblem from her collar before entering the room.
Whether out of respect for the institution or respect for the children was difficult to say. Perhaps there was no difference anymore.
Charva kept her chin slightly raised throughout. Her eyes moved across the room with visible distaste.
"Poor as I expected. Come on then, old woman. Let's go somewhere else to talk."
Evelyn watched them leave. The scene dissolved.
---
The next memory assembled around a bed.
Evelyn was kneeling on the floor beside it, both hands gripping the frame, crying in a way that had nothing controlled left in it, the kind of crying that is just sound and grief and no ability to stop.
"Sasha... Sasha? look at me, please look at me!"
On the bed, Sasha stared at the ceiling.
Her face had the specific stillness that could not be mistaken for sleep.
The oversized clothing she'd always worn had become even more so, the fabric draping over a body that had taken too much from and given back too little for too long.
Her hair had thinned severely from the malnutrition, half of one side gone, what remained carefully gathered and pinned back with the metal clip she had always treated like something precious.
Voices in the corridor. The director and the witch returning from their negotiation, the outcome audible before either of them appeared.
Charva's voice carried without effort.
"Nothing to offer, nothing you'll agree to. You have nothing I want and you won't agree to anything useful. Why would I make this trade?"
She walked quickly, not waiting for anyone. Golana and Maria followed, still trying.
Then all three of them registered the doorway. Maria's face went grey.
She came into the room with the slow movements of someone doing something they had done too many times.
"Another one."
She knelt beside the bed. Her hand moved to Sasha's face, trembling slightly.
"Good child. May you find peace in the Goddess's kingdom. There is bread there, and milk. A sea of wheat and no hunger anywhere."
She bowed her head and kept speaking, very quietly.
"It must be that way. It must be."
Charva leaned against the door frame. She made a short sound that was almost a laugh.
"How inconvenient. Dying in front of me, is this brat trying to give me bad luck?"
She ignored the looks the remark earned and let her gaze travel across the room. It paused briefly on Evelyn's face with something like mild curiosity, then moved on to Golana.
"Actually. Director. Since we're here. That proposal I made earlier, I understand why you couldn't accept it then. Asking you to hand over a living child is difficult, I recognize that."
She looked at the bed.
"But this child is already dead. No complications now, surely?"
The room went completely silent.
"Her soul has probably gone to your Goddess's paradise already. What's left here is just a body. An empty vessel. Nothing inside it anymore."
Her voice was perfectly reasonable.
"Hand her to me and I'll give you bread. White bread, soft and warm, considerably better than that black bread you've been surviving on."
Golana stared at her as though she were looking at something for which she had no category.
Charva continued.
"If you're agreeable, we have a standing arrangement. Future ones don't need to be buried. Just contact me and I'll collect. Fresh only, I should clarify, I don't want them if they've been sitting."
She paused.
"Don't look at me like that. I'm offering you survival. Your Goddess hasn't sent bread. I'm sending bread. By any measure, that makes me more merciful than your Goddess. You're welcome."
"Heresy. Monster! You are a monster!!!"
Golana's composure broke completely. The words came out in a torrent.
Charva's expression shifted to something flat and cold.
Her hand came across and struck Golana's face with a sharp crack that brought every child in the room closer together, instinctively.
"Make the trade with me and the rest of them survive. Understand your situation."
She took two steps away, then turned her head.
"One more thing. Get me a pot. Large one. Put it in the outer room. I have a use for it."