Read Online Sister Emily's Lightship by Jane Yolen - Free Book Online Page A

mist kept rising, as if carrying away the last of her body’s heat with it.
    And then the mist seemed to turn and shape itself, head and hair and long neck and broad shoulders and arms that beckoned back to her and a face that was as familiar as Marda’s and yet not familiar at all. And the mouth echoing her own:
    Thee to me,
    Thee to me,
    Thee to me.
    â€œAlta’s hairs! It’s cold. Do we have to stand here till dawn?”
    â€œWe?” Selna wondered if she were dreaming.
    â€œYou, Selna. Me, Marjo. Your dark sister. You did call me out, you know. Blood to blood. Dark to light. Only it’s hideously cold. And I can’t move out of this stream until you do.”
    â€œDo?” Selna echoed. And then in an instant it came clear to her. Out here, in the woods, not in the cozy warmth of Mother Alta’s chambers before the mirror with the other mothers there for support, here she had called her dark sister. Marjo, not Marda. “I don’t want you,” she said.
    â€œDoesn’t matter,” Marjo answered. “You’ve got me. At least for the night. Now can we go get dry. And warm?”
    â€œDry,” Selna echoed. “Warm.”
    â€œRight,” Marjo said.
    It seemed so sensible, and she suddenly was shivering so uncontrollably, that Selna turned, plowed through the pool on stiffened legs, and stumbled up the embankment to the fire, which was all but out. She fed logs into it and more sticks and leaves, Marjo exactly following her movements. With two working, the fire was quickly renewed, though it took much longer for the warmth to seep through and make them both stop shaking.
The Legend:
    Near the town of Selsberry is a small pond, fed by an underground stream. It is called Sisters’ Pond or Sels Pond. It is said that once a year, at the Spring Solstice, when the moon is at its highest point overhead, the mist rising up looks just like a beautiful young woman. The mist woman will call you with her mist arms beckoning. “Come to me, come to me,” she calls over and over. But you’d better not go. If you do, she’ll drown you, just as she was, herself, drowned some hundreds of years ago when that underground stream was a great, roaring river. At least that’s what the folks in Selsberry say.
The Story:
    Selna got dressed quickly and Marjo matched her, leather pants, linen shirt, leather jerkin, mocs. It was like a dance, really, the way they kept time to one another. Selna had known what to expect, of course. She had been around other women’s dark sisters all her life. But expecting and knowing, it seems, were two very different things.
    In the end Selna strapped on the belt and knife and grabbed up her bow. Marjo did the same.
    â€œAre you really very like me?” Selna asked at last. She thought Marjo looked older, guanter. It might have been the black hair, the darker features. It might have been the moonlight.
    â€œVery like,” Marjo said. “And not like at all.”
    Selna put out the fire with her moc. Together they buried the coals. There was still enough moon to keep Marjo quick and eager.
    â€œI need to get out of the woods. I’m—”
    â€œ We need to get out of the woods. One moon time is bad enough. Two is an open invitation,” Marjo said.
    Selna hadn’t thought of that. “What if a cat gets me?”
    â€œIt gets me, too.” Marjo laughed, though her face hardly changed with the humor. “I guess it is true as the Book says: Sisters can be blind.”
    â€œI…am…not…blind to this,” Selna said. She found no humor in the situation.
    â€œYou do not know how to laugh. In this way we are different. And in other ways. I am you, and I am also what you will not let yourself be.”
    Selna turned away. “I have no wish to be what you are.”
    â€œIf your mouth turns into a knife, it will cut off your lips, or so it is said where I come from.”