Wind by Naomi kritzer(4)

Gytha tossed her hair. “I don’t understand you,” she said, and there was scorn in her voice, because now that she’d rid herself of her Earth, it seemed contemptible to her. “I promise I’ll write.”
Gytha walked through night and day to one of the great cities, where her art and magic quickly earned her great acclaim. But like the wind, she could never stay in one place for long. She travelled restlessly, leaving in her wake beautiful buildings, stone like ribbon, and a trail of broken hearts—the first of which was Dagmar’s.

Dagmar, in her home village, got what training she could in healing, then married a man who needed her, and had four children, two girls and two boys. She knew that she’d made a terrible mistake, but had no way to fix it: for Gytha, there could never be anything but change, but for Dagmar, there could be no change at all. (Other than parenting—but once you’re married, children have a tendency to arrive on their own, unless you’re careful.) Each, in her own way, was trapped. Gytha would never realize that the cause of her unhappiness was the imbalance in her own heart that she’d longed for so fiercely. Dagmar, without Air to drive change, could never take the steps she needed to shed the parts of her life that began to eat her, piece by piece.