Sister Light, Sister Dark

by Jane Yolen

  As Grete had promised, the sisters of Calla’s Ford lay side by side in the darkening Hall. Jenna wandered up and down the many lines, kneeling occasionally to tidy a lock of hair or to close staring eyes. There were so many women, she could not count them all, but she refused to cry.

  Petra, standing in the doorway, wept for them both.

  “This be the last of ’em,” Jerem said, pointing to an elderly woman in a long dress and apron, lying by the far door.

  “Be they right?” Grete asked Catrona. “Be they in’t form?”

  “We will see them all right,” Catrona said. “But best you leave us for now so that we may give them the proper rites.”

  Grete nodded, and turned to speak to the rest of the townsfolk who had gathered by the entryway, silently waiting. Her hands shooed them out like chickens toward the courtyard. She herself was the last one through the door, calling out in a whisper, “We will wait.”

  Jenna stared across the Hall. In the gray light the bodies of the women almost looked like carved stone. Though they had been cleansed of the blood on their hands and faces by the hard-working townsfolk, their shirts and aprons and skirts and trousers were stained with it. But the blood was black, not red, in the graying room. The bodies lay on rushes scented with verbena and dried roses, but the sharp, unmistakable smell of death overpowered the flowery bouquet.

  “Shall I light the torches now?” Petra asked, her voice so quiet, Jenna had to strain to hear it. “So that their dark sisters might accompany them?” Without waiting for an answer, she went by the back hallway into the kitchen, came out with a lit candle, and proceeded to light the candles and torches that were set in the walls.

  Slowly, in between the bodies, the corpses of the dark sisters took form and soon the room was crowded with them. It was as if a great carpet of death lay wall to wall.

  Strangers, thought Jenna, and yet not strangers to me at all. My sisters.

  “We must fire the Hame now,” said Catrona. “And then go.”

  “But Alna and Selinda are not here,” Jenna said. “Nor any of the younger girls. They may be bidden away like the children of Nill’s Hame. We do not dare set the flames until we find them.”

  “They were taken,” Catrona said bluntly, “you heard what Grete and her husband said. Taken. Like the girls of Callatown. Like the boy’s sweetheart.”

  “Mai.” Petra said suddenly, still lighting the torches.

  “No!” Jenna shook her head violently, her voice echoing loudly. “No! We cannot be sure. Why would they want the girls? Why would they need them? We have to look.”

  Catrona put her hand out toward Jenna just as Petra put the candle to a sconce near them in the Hall. Katri appeared by Catrona’s side and put her hand out as well.

  “They always want women,” said Katri. “Such men do.”

  “They have not enough of their own.” It was Skada’s voice right by Jenna’s ear. “That is what Geo Hosfetter said.”

  Jenna did not turn to welcome her. Instead she insisted, “We must search the Hame. We could never forgive ourselves if we did not.”

  It took an hour of searching to prove to Jenna that the girls were not to be found. They even overturned the mirror in the priestess’ room, ripped down tapestries, and knocked endlessly upon solid walls in the hope of finding a secret passage. But there was none.

  In the end even Jenna had to agree that the girls were gone. This time she did not ask why.

  “And what of the Book?” Petra asked, her hand atop the great leather volume in the priestess’ room. “We cannot leave it here for anyone to read.”

  “We do not have time to bury it,” said Jenna, “so it will have to be burned with the rest.”

  Petra cradled the Book in her arms, carrying it back down to the Hall where she placed it between the priestess and her dark sister. She set their stiffened hands on top of the volume, palms up so that the blue Alta sign showed, tying their wrists together with her hair ribbands. The in a voice eerily familiar, she began to recite:

  “In the name of Alta’s cave,

  The dark and lonely grave,

  Where we dwell twixt light and light …”

  “I will not cry,” Jenna promised herself. “Not for death. Not ever for death.” She shook her head violently to keep away the tears. Skada did the same.

  They did not cry.

  THE LEGEND:

  There were twelve sisters who dwelt in Callatown, by the ford, each one more beautiful than the last. But the loveliest of them all was the youngest, Fair Jennet.

  Jennet was tall, with hair the color of the Calla’s foam, and eyes the blue of a spring sky.

  One day the king’s own sons rode into the town, twelve handsome youths they were. But the handsomest was the youngest, Brave Colm. Colm was tall, with hair the color of dawn, and eyes as brown as bark.

  Twelve and twelve. They should have been fair matched. But a king’s son is like the cuckoo: he takes his pleasure where he will, then leaves to love again.

  When the king’s twelve sons had left, eleven sisters flung themselves into the Calla, above the ford. But the last, Fair Jennet, stayed to bury them, then she rode to the king’s hall. She sang her sorrow at his table, before climbing the stairs to the highest tower. There she cast herself into the wind. As she fell, her cry was the cry of the woodcock rising to its mate.

  Colm heard her and raced outside. He held her poor, broken body cradled in his arms, singing back to her the song she had caroled at his father’s feast:

  “Eleven sisters side by side,

  Each one a dishonored bride,

  Married to the ebbing tide,

  And I wed to the wind.”

  At the song’s end, Fair Jennet opened her eyes and called Colm’s name. He kissed her brow before she died.

  “I am the wind,” whispered Colm, drawing his sword from his sheath and plunging it into his breast. Then he lay himself down by Jennet’s side and died.

  They say that every year, at the spring’s rind, the folks of Callatown build a great bonfire. Its light keeps away the spirits of the eleven who rise like mist above the Calla waves, trying to sing every man down to his death. And they say that Colm and Jennet were buried in a single grave whose mound rises higher than the ruins of the king’s tower. On that mound—and nowhere else in the Dales—grows the flower known as Colm’s Sorrow. It is a flower as light as her hair, with an eye as dark as his, and it rains its petals down like tears throughout all of the long spring days.

  THE STORY:

  The fires burned quickly and the long, thin column of smoke wrote the sisters’ epitaph against the spring sky. Catrona and Jenna stood dry-eyed, watching the curling smoke. But Petra buried her face in her hands, sobbing in soft little spurts. The townsfolk wept noisily. Only Jerem’s boy was still, staling off to the west, where the sky was clear.

  At last Jenna turned away, walking toward Duty who had waited so patiently by the broken wall. She patted the horse’s nose with great concentration, as if the soft nostrils were the only thing that mattered in the world. She inhaled the heavy horse smell.

  Catrona came over and put a hand on her shoulder. “We must go now, Jenna. And quickly.”

  Jenna did not look up from the horse.

  “Do you go to fight?” It was Jerem’s boy, who had come up behind them. Small, wiry, he had a look of passionate intensity.

  Catrona turned. “We go to warn the other Hames,” she said sharply.

  “And fight if we must.” Jenna spoke softly, as much to the horse as the boy.

  “Let me go with you,” the boy begged. “I must go. For Mai’s sake. For my own.”

  “Your father will need you, boy,” Catrona said.

  “He be having less to do now that so many be gone,” he answered. “And if you do not let me go with you, I go anyway. I be your shadow. You be looking behind at every turning and at every straightaway, and I be there following.”

  Jenna, her hand still on Duty’s nose, stared a
t him. The boy’s dark green eyes bore into her own. “He will, too,” she said softly to Catrona. “I have seen that look before.”

  “Where?”

  “In her mirror,” Petra said joining them.

  “And in Pynt’s eyes,” Jenna added.

  Catrona said nothing more but strode to her horse and mounted it with swift ease. Then she jerked on the reins and the startled mare turned toward the fallen Hame gate.

  Petra’s horse stood still while she climbed up, its withers trembling slightly, like ripples on a pond.

  Jenna ran her hand along Duty’s head and down her neck with slow deliberation. Then suddenly she grabbed hold of the saddle’s horn and pulled herself up in a single, swift motion.

  “Hummmph!” was Catrona’s only comment, for she had turned in her saddle to watch the girls mount, but a smile played around her mouth before resolving itself in a frown.

  They sat, motionless, on their horses for a long moment. Then Jenna leaned down and held out her hand to the boy. He grinned up at her and took it. Pulling hard, Jenna lifted him onto the saddle behind her. He settled easily as if well used to riding double.

  “Jareth, boy, where be you going?” Jerem ran over, grabbing onto the boy’s right knee.

  “He rides with us,” Jenna said.

  “He cannot. He must not. He be but a boy.”

  “A boy!” Catrona laughed. “He was promised in marriage. If he is man enough to wed, he is man enough to fight. How old do you think these girls are?” Her voice carried only to Jerem’s ears. It was Petra, standing up in her stirrups, who addressed the rest of the villagers.

  “We ride with the Anna, the White One, She who was thrice mothered and thrice orphaned.”

  The Calla’s Ford folk gathered around to listen. Grete and her husband stood in the front, Jerem still by his son’s knee. They were silent, staring at Jenna.

  “We follow Her,” Petra continued, pointing dramatically. “For She has already made both hound and ox bow down. Who would deny Her?” She paused.

  Feeling that it was her turn to speak, Jenna drew her sword from its sheath and raised it above her head, wondering if she looked foolish, hoping she appeared noble. “I am the ending and I am the beginning,” she cried out. “Who rides with me?”

  From behind her Jareth called, “I ride with you, Anna.”

  “And I!” It was a dull-haired, long-legged boy.

  “And I!” Standing by him, one who might have been his twin.

  “And I!”

  “And I!”

  “And I!” The last was Harmon who, caught up in the moment, had snatched off his hat and thrown it into the air causing Petra’s horse to back away nervously. The commotion gave Grete time to put her hand forcefully on her husband’s shoulder, and he sank back, hatless, against her.

  In the end, three boys volunteered. Jareth was given his father’s blessing and Grete and Harmon’s two sons took a loan of their father’s spavined gelding. Riding double, they tracked behind the mares down the darkening road toward the west.

  THE MYTH:

  Then Great Alta said, “You shall ride to the North and you shall ride to the South; you shall ride to the East and you shall ride to the West. And there great armies will rise up beside you. You and your blanket companions shall match sword with sword and might with might that the blood shed between you shall wash away the stain left by the careless men.”

  Buy White Jenna Now!

  A Personal History by Jane Yolen

  I was born in New York City on February 11, 1939. Because February 11 is also Thomas Edison’s birthday, my parents used to say I brought light into their world. But my parents were both writers and prone to exaggeration. My father was a journalist; my mother wrote short stories and created crossword puzzles and double acrostics. My younger brother, Steve, eventually became a newspaperman. We were a family of an awful lot of words!

  We lived in the city for most of my childhood, with two brief moves: to California for a year while my father worked as a publicity agent for Warner Bros. films, and then to Newport News, Virginia, during the World War II years, when my mother moved my baby brother and me in with her parents while my father was stationed in London running the Army’s secret radio.

  When I was thirteen, we moved to Connecticut. After college I worked in book publishing in New York for five years, married, and after a year traveling around Europe and the Middle East with my husband in a Volkswagen camper, returned to the States. We bought a house in Massachusetts, where we lived almost happily ever after, raising three wonderful children.

  I say “almost,” because in 2006, my wonderful husband of forty-four years—Professor David Stemple, the original Pa in my Caldecott Award–winning picture book, Owl Moon—died. I still live in the same house in Massachusetts.

  And I am still writing.

  I have often been called the “Hans Christian Andersen of America,” something first noted in Newsweek close to forty years ago because I was writing a lot of my own fairy tales at the time.

  The sum of my books—including some eighty-five fairy tales in a variety of collections and anthologies—is now well over 335. Probably the most famous are Owl Moon, The Devil’s Arithmetic, and How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? My work ranges from rhymed picture books and baby board books, through middle grade fiction, poetry collections, and nonfiction, to novels and story collections for young adults and adults. I’ve also written lyrics for folk and rock groups, scripted several animated shorts, and done voiceover work for animated short movies. And I do a monthly radio show called Once Upon a Time.

  These days, my work includes writing books with each of my three children, now grown up and with families of their own. With Heidi, I have written mostly picture books, including Not All Princesses Dress in Pink and the nonfiction series Unsolved Mysteries from History. With my son Adam, I have written a series of Rock and Roll Fairy Tales for middle grades, among other fantasy novels. With my son Jason, who is an award-winning nature photographer, I have written poems to accompany his photographs for books like Wild Wings and Color Me a Rhyme.

  And I am still writing.

  Oh—along the way, I have won a lot of awards: two Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott Medal, the Golden Kite Award, three Mythopoeic Awards, two Christopher Awards, the Jewish Book Award, and a nomination for the National Book Award, among many accolades. I have also won (for my full body of work) the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Grand Master Award, the Catholic Library Association’s Regina Medal, the University of Minnesota’s Kerlan Award, the University of Southern Mississippi and de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection’s Southern Miss Medallion, and the Smith College Medal. Six colleges and universities have given me honorary doctorate degrees. One of my awards, the Skylark, given by the New England Science Fiction Association, set my good coat on fire when the top part of it (a large magnifying glass) caught the sunlight. So I always give this warning: Be careful with awards and put them where the sun don’t shine!

  Also of note—in case you find yourself in a children’s book trivia contest—I lost my fencing foil in Grand Central Station during a date, fell overboard while whitewater rafting in the Colorado River, and rode in a dog sled in Alaska one March day.

  And yes—I am still writing.

  At a Yolen cousins reunion as a child, holding up a photograph of myself. In the photo, I am about one year old, maybe two.

  Sitting on the statue of Hans Christian Andersen in Central Park in New York in 1961, when I was twenty-two. (Photo by David Stemple.)

  Enjoying Dirleton Castle in Scotland in 2010.

  Signing my Caldecott Medal–winning book Owl Moon in 2011.

  Reading for an audience at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2012.

  Visiting Andrew Lang’s gravesite at the Cathedral of Saint Andrew in Scotland in 2011.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the
right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1988 by Jane Yolen

  Cover design by Kat JK Lee

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-3451-7

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10038

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