The Forgotten Sisters (11 page)

Frid's brothers gathered, wanting to know what was happening. Frid told them that Sweyn had been one of her friends at the palace forge but she had no idea what brought him to Mount Eksel
.

Sweyn walked over to Frid. He said her name again. And then he put his arms around her. Right there for the whole village to see! I would not tell anyone but you that I noticed how his hands splayed against her back, how he rested his face in her neck
.

Of course her six brothers pounced on Sweyn like a pack of wolves on a hare and yanked him away. Sweyn
started shouting, “I love you! I love you, Frid,” over and over again. And Frid's brothers got madder and madder and started hauling him off. I nudged Frid and pointed out that that they were dragging Sweyn toward the Great Crevasse. That seemed to wake Frid out of her shock. She ran after and ordered them to let Sweyn go
.

And then everybody just stood there, staring at one another
.

Frid said she had to get back to the quarry. She started to walk away, and my heart seemed to stop beating. But then Frid looked over her shoulder and asked Sweyn if he was coming too. His smile nearly broke his face
.

For the rest of the day, he worked beside her. They never spoke. But one time after she got a drink from the water bucket, she filled the ladle again and offered it to Sweyn. She held the ladle herself for him to drink, and you know what that means. You can bet Frid's brothers saw it too. They never took their eyes off Sweyn the rest of the day. I am sure Sweyn did not notice the brothers. He was too busy looking at Frid
.

I am writing by moonlight as I do not dare use up our candles. But I am too amazed to sleep yet. A lowlander boy on Mount Eskel! And I think Frid means for him to stay. After all, she gave him drink from the ladle
.

Your sister
,

Marda

Written Winter Week Four

Never received

Dear Peder
,

Letter writing is like quarry-shouting without linder. It leaves me but seems to go nowhere. I exhale wind, not words. I smile in pitch-dark.

I am failing. I would not dare confess that to Britta or Katar or Marda or anyone I write letters to, though they do not answer me either. I feel a tug from home, a hope that I might do some good and return to them their own mountain. And I feel a tug of expectation from Asland, that I can somehow turn these girls into princesses.

I am here, so I will keep trying to fulfill my duty.

I miss you. I miss being able to turn to you when I have a thought to share, and you laugh or smile or add a thought in return, and I know that someone in this great big world understands me.

Your Miri

Written Winter Week Four

Never received

Dear Britta
,

You may tell Katar and the chief delegate and whoever you please: at last I have a princess academy. It took a few months, a skinned swamp rat, three books, a great deal of cajoling and bartering, and one bandit attack—but do not worry about that part. I'll explain when I see you again
.

I have sent letters to you with every trader group, but we were being robbed by an unscrupulous tavern owner and the traders in his pay. He is banished, so you should get this one at last. Please send supplies. We are quite poor. And perhaps a couple of trusted guards? The sisters were completely alone. There is no immediate threat, but with Stora across the border in Eris sharpening their swords, I cannot feel safe
.

Even though much has changed here, I find I have very little faith in the mail. Maybe you won't get this letter any more than the others. So nothing I say matters, as I am probably just talking to myself. Ho hum, the moon is a plum
.

Miri

Ho hum, the moon is a plum

The sun is an iron kettle

The stars on their spits drip juicy bits

To sizzle on black sky metal

Felissa was leaning against the windowsill, and the breeze from outside rustled her honey-brown hair. Since beginning the lessons on Poise, Miri had noticed a change in Felissa's posture, a lengthening of her neck and a confident set of her shoulders. She did not seem to fit in the swamp anymore.

“‘… and when he clambered over the first hill, he saw it,'” Sus said, reading from the book of tales. “ ‘The house where no one wanted to live, bathed with silver moonlight. He ached with fear, yet—'”

“Traders,” Felissa said, looking toward the village.

“Traders!” Miri leaped to her feet. “We'll have to finish that story later, Sus. Excellent reading.”

Miri grabbed the letters she'd written and ran into the village. She kept slipping as she walked, eventually
realizing it was from trying to skip. She traced her feet's inclination to skip back to a buoyancy in her belly, a raging hope in her chest, and up to the giddy idea in her brain that now that Jeffers was gone, she might get letters again!

The traders were laying out their goods in front of what had been Jeffers's house. Fat Hofer had informed Miri that Dogface ruled that roost now, but he tended to stay indoors during the heat of the day.

The trading party was a small one from Greater Alva, not Gunnar and his crew, who sailed in once a month from Asland. Even these traders had hired guards now. One kept whistling. Not a tune really, more as if he were practicing a bird call. The sound pricked goose bumps on Miri's arms.

No Jeffers, standing over the trading like the lord of the manor. Just Fat Hofer, sitting. Lesser Alvans asked him to barter on their behalf and then gave him a handful of this or that in exchange.

Fat Hofer was no longer slouching under his hat. Fat Hofer was smiling.

Miri gave her letters to the trader with the leather knapsack with promises again that if sent on a ship to Asland and delivered to the royal palace, they could be traded for coins.

“And here is a letter for you, Miri,” said the trader.

Miri's feet bounced under her. She had not received a personal letter since her first trade day months ago! She gave him a small coin as payment for delivery. The folded paper envelope looked weathered. If there had been a seal, it was long gone.

Miri tucked the letter inside her shirt, keeping it silent against her beating heart.

She waited until she was alone—after supper was set to cook and the girls had left to go buy more peat for the fire. At last she tore open the letter and looked at the bottom, hungry for Peder's name, or Britta's, or Marda's.

But it was from the chief delegate. Any inclination to skip drained out of her. She scanned the letter.

“… Delegate Katar reports she has received only two epistles from you, and Princess Britta, none. I hope the reason you have not reported back on your progress is that you are simply too busy schooling and polishing the royal cousins to perfection. When they meet King Fader, the princesses must shine …”

The princesses
. Could he call them that when they were not?

The king and queen both had relations who lived in Asland and other provinces. Surely there were royal relatives of a suitable age who had already been educated. For the first time, Miri asked herself, why the Lesser Alvan cousins?

Perhaps because those other relatives would be known, their genealogy traceable. And royal cousins were not enticing enough to offer a king of Stora. Only a princess would do. So if there were no actual princesses, well, that conniving lot in the palace saw fit to dig up some obscure cousins and pretend they were princesses.

Miri sat on the stone floor, feeling too heavy to stand. If none of the sisters chose to marry a foreign king, Miri would fail Mount Eskel—and Danland too. But if Astrid, perhaps, agreed to leave home and marry Fader out of duty, then Miri would fail her and her sisters.

Miri missed home as if a rope strung from Mount Eskel were lashed to her heart, the distance pulling. She lifted her hand, pretending that Peder was there beside her, holding it. Her fingers closed over her empty palm, making a fist.

Miri crumpled the letter from the chief delegate and tossed it into the fire. She splayed her hand on a linder stone, aching to speak to someone who would understand. She quarry-spoke, praying her silent singing could find a chain of linder to carry it from Lesser Alva all the way up to Mount Eskel, to vibrate inside Peder and Marda and Pa.

She knew it was useless. Mount Eskel was farther away than even a hawk could see. And besides, the only stones in the swamp were in the house itself.

But she gripped the linder hawk in her pocket and kept quarry-speaking anyway, pouring memories out, trying to communicate her present with those who shared her past, who would understand, who loved her.

It was impossible. She gave up and lay her head on the stone.

The stone was cool and as smooth as water, as familiar as home. Instead of trying to speak, she listened. Not just with her ears. She listened inside, the way she quarry-spoke inside.

The idea of the redheaded twin girls playing with painted wood animals brightened in her thoughts. Miri startled. She was not asleep and so definitely not dreaming now. The image had seemed to come from the stone itself.

She pressed herself against the floor and listened harder, following the tail of that dream.

Thoughts zigged in her like a snake through the reeds. A first thought led to a second and a third. Quarry-speaking was never random. It had a purpose, something to say and in a hurry. So Miri thought, why not listen that way?

Quarry-listening
, she thought.

Her head hurt as she concentrated. Not silently singing but creating a space inside herself for a song to fill. A
new image burned in her mind: a younger Felissa and Astrid decorating their hair with purple swamp flowers.

She jolted upright. Where had that image come from? If someone had quarry-spoken a memory to Miri, it would nudge a similar memory in her own mind. Quarry-speaking never implanted someone else's memory. And this was certainly not her own.

Miri exhaled and closed her eyes, re-created that space of silence, and listened again for Felissa and Astrid with the purple flowers.

The image returned. She followed it to another, and saw Astrid and Felissa, perhaps having a race, leaping through the window, running across the floor, and climbing out the far window.

Another memory? But again, not her own.

The stone stored memories. When she reached out, trying to examine them as she might flip through a book, the images fled. She calmed herself again inside that listening space and followed the image.

A woman. Elin, perhaps, dark-haired with a round face and a very wide smile. She sits on the bare floor, playing a game of stones with a young Astrid and Felissa. Sus toddles over, knocking the stones with her bare feet.

Miri flailed for a moment, stranded between memories, but refocused, relaxed, and found another image.

The woman she supposed was Elin, standing, a tiny child asleep on her shoulder, a younger Astrid and Felissa clinging to her skirt. Jeffers in the threshold. He hands Elin a bag of something and then carries out one of her chairs.

Miri's mind swam forward and now witnessed baby Sus, face red from crying. Elin, her forehead wet with sweat. Astrid and Felissa standing outside, watching through the window.

Miri focused her listening to go earlier in time, deeper into the stone. Elin and one baby—Astrid perhaps—lying in a bed with a white mattress, attended by a serving woman, two armed guards at the door. Reed houses surround the linder house, perhaps the lodgings for the guards and servants. The room is full of furniture. A painting of a woman hangs on the wall. Miri almost recognizes the woman in the painting till something else distracts her—one of the guards is Jeffers.

Back. The house, empty but for a snake crawling leisurely across the stone, wasp nests in the high corners.

Back. The ground not so tilted, the linder stones tighter. Reed houses outside, an unfamiliar pale-haired girl inside, an older woman with a stern face.

Back and back. Glass in the windows, the wood door hanging straight in its frame. There again the redheaded
twins, too big now to play with wood animals, sitting in chairs and cross-stitching like bored Aslandian ladies.

Back again. The stones being laid into the ground for the first time.

And then, Mount Eskel. The stones that will build the linder house cut from the mountain by people Miri did not recognize. Eskelites who lived long ago.

Miri clawed her way out of the memory and sat upright. She was wet with sweat.

She ran to the rain barrel and dipped in a cup, her hand shaking badly. She drank and breathed, concentrated on the feel of the ground beneath her feet, the sound of a bird shrieking across the water. The here and now.

Bricks of peat were stacked by the door. The girls must have come home and, thinking Miri was napping, left again. She felt more like she'd run up a mountain than taken a nap.

She found the girls out fishing and sat beside Astrid. A hummingbird buzzed from flower to flower, dipping its beak into the yellow, blue, and orange blooms. Suddenly one of the flowers seemed to reach out, grab the hummingbird, and pull it in.

“Whoa!” said Miri.

“Sly spiders,” said Astrid. “They're big and the same color as the flowers they live in. The bird doesn't notice anything's wrong till it's dead.”

Miri shuddered. She did not have a net or spear, so she picked some reeds and tried to weave them together. “Um, did any of the villagers help your mother when she gave birth?” Miri asked, thinking of Elin holding a newborn baby. In the linder memories, she had not seen a man who could have been their father—just Jeffers and another guard, always standing outside the house.

“I was young when Sus was born,” said Felissa. “I don't remember.”