Wind by Naomi kritzer(7)

“I can’t pay you,” the woman said, as Dagmar sat down to feed her.
Dagmar shrugged. “Few enough people bother.” She glanced around at her house, which had long since fallen into disrepair.
“You have a gift,” the woman said. “Too large of a gift for this village.”
“I don’t care to leave,” Dagmar said.
“Are you going to ask me my name?” the woman asked. “Or ask me how I came to be in that field?”
“You’re welcome to tell me your name,” Dagmar said. “As for your situation, I assume that you were set upon by bandits.”

“You can call me Zimeya,” the woman said. “And I met no bandits.”
Dagmar gave her a dubious look, then shrugged. “In fact, you look more like someone who’s taken a bad fall. But that doesn’t explain what happened to your clothes.”
“True enough,” Zimeya said.
Dagmar looked her over again, to see if she’d missed any other broken bones or other injuries. Satisfied, she said, “You may stay here until you heal,” and started preparing dinner.
*
Three of Dagmar’s children were grown and gone, but the one who was still living at home, Madel, was quite curious about the injured woman by their fire, and utterly perplexed at her mother’s lack of curiosity. To Madel, however, Zimeya pretended to be foreign, or perhaps suffering from a severe head injury, and spoke in words Madel didn’t understand; the girl eventually grew bored. She herself had a bit of an excess of Air—not enough to give her magical powers, but enough to thoroughly exasperate her mother at every opportunity—and she spent as little time at home as she could. Dagmar’s husband came home for dinner, and they proceeded to have an argument (in quiet tones, because of their guest) about Dagmar’s decision to treat yet another person who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay her, and about the hole in the roof he had promised six times to repair. (Her husband had a slight excess of Water; he was charming but unreliable, and willing to say whatever he thought would get him out of trouble. Which is why he promised yet again to fix the hole in the roof the next day, even though he had not even purchased the materials.) When the argument had reached its usual conclusion, which is not to say a resolution, he left to join some of the other men of the village at the tavern.