The Forgotten Sisters by Shannon Hale Read Free Book Online

more of the water plants.
    When she came back, the girls were home, and the silk dress was gone.
    â€œDid one of you move the dress?” Miri asked.
    â€œYou mean the one you left out for anyone to come steal?” said Astrid. “Toad toots, girl, don’t you know how to take care of your things?”
    â€œNone but a bandit would dare enter another’s house,” said Felissa. “But something hanging out a window? Anyone could steal that and no one would blame them. Always keep your things inside a house.”
    â€œOr in a boat,” said Sus. “Though we don’t have a boat.”
    â€œUm … my dress?” asked Miri.
    â€œI hid your things for you,” said Felissa. “Just in case someone saw the fancy dress and decided to risk some thievery.”
    The linder house had a cramped attic reached by climbing the wall and removing a flat stone. Miri followed Felissa up. Besides her dress, there were treasures that had belonged to their mother: a portrait of a woman, its paint streaking from heat; worm-eaten clothes; a glass-headed doll with a painted face; and stacks of letters.
    Miri brought the letters down.
    For supper they ate raw roots and stuck the tiny fish on sticks, roasting them over the fire till they were browned and crunchy.
    â€œWhat happened to your parents?” Miri asked.
    Sus and Felissa looked at their older sister. Astrid tested a fish with her fingers and then set it back over the embers to cook longer.
    â€œOur ma died,” Astrid said at last. “Several years ago. Her name was Elin. We never knew our father.”
    Sus reached out, placing her arm on Astrid’s knee. Felissa leaned her head on Astrid’s shoulder. Astrid put her arms around them both, a knot of sisters.
    Miri had not seen her own sister in over a year. Separation felt like a fever—a wrongness and ache on her skin, as tangible as the lack of a touch.
    With Astrid’s permission, Miri read the letters. They were all formal, brief notes from a king’s official in Asland, sent each month with the allowance. Starting about ten years before, the letters no longer came every month, sometimes missing several in a row. Around the time of Elin’s death, the letters ceased altogether.
    â€œWe used to have coins to buy food from the traders,” said Astrid, “but when Ma died, I couldn’t find any coins and figured we’d run out. I never knew they’d been coming from the king.”
    Where was that money going now? Did it even leave Asland?
    From the village Miri could hear singing. At first, just a single child’s voice, high and piercing, too distant for her to unstring the words from the night. And then more voices. The song became as wild and loud as the swamp itself, and then it softened, became melancholy, a ballad or dirge perhaps. But even when the song was as quick and high as a dance, it always sounded lonely to Miri. Far away. Unwelcoming.
    She could not see the water outside the window. She could not even hear a ripple over the honks and croaks, rasps and cries of the swamp. But she was aware of it, the breeze wet, the feeling of greatness and endlessness, like that of standing on a mountain’s edge and sensing the cliff beyond. A cliff did not border emptiness. It met up with a great deal of air and falling. And falling was something, just as water was something.
    Miri could sense the vastness of the ocean out there, and she felt displaced, a flower uprooted, tossed onto the water, pulled into the current.

Chapter Six
    Trader, trader
    Bone and stone
    Pay it later
    Get a loan
    From the cracking and cawing moment of dawn, Miri was waiting where the forest path from Greater Alva spilled into the swamp. Over a week in Lesser Alva and at last a trading day had come. And not the sporadic traders who came from Greater Alva but the monthly merchants who traveled all the way from Asland. Those traders would carry letters.
    She heard