At the sick house for poor folks, Maw and her girls are magi in a caravan of woe, priestesses and potentates and midwife medics of spirit and flesh. They dismiss calamitous disasters of farm and homestead, new equipment misused, a travesty of the gut or groin. Each wound must be unwrapped. Maw and her girls gather up the split sutures, dispel the night terrors, disperse the ghouls come to besiege the ill: phantoms competing in a contest for most ghastly, a tricky conjure game.