The old woman was dying in the way that old women died in the Sovereign Dominion — slowly, with access to temple healers, in a bed with clean linens, surrounded by family members who had been told by the physicians that the healing could slow the process but not stop it.
Mira Greenhollow was eighty-four years old. She had outlived a goddess.
The house in the southern absorption zone — the territory that had been Demeterra's and was now the Dominion's — was the same house she had lived in for sixty years. The walls were the same daub-and-timber. The hearth was the same stone. The garden outside the window still grew the same herbs — rosemary, sage, the stubborn mint that she'd planted when her first husband was alive. What had changed was the altar.
