The Wolf Tree by John Claude Bemis Read Free Book Online Page B

told her that something had approached the well, but maybe it was just a deer or wandering bear. It couldn’t be a person.
    With a forked stick, she lifted hot rocks from the fire and dropped them into the water-filled bladder at her feet. The heat lifted the aroma of the cooking fish, and she inhaled hungrily.
    At the quick snapping of bracken several yards away, Jolie turned. A blurred form burst from the underbrush and leaped upon her. Ferocious instinct took over and Jolie fought, kicking up with her bare feet, tearing and slashing with her fingernails. The attacker growled at the blows, and the two thrashed until Jolie was pinned at the elbows, her face turned into the earth as the attacker held Jolie by her tangled hair. The hard edge of a blade pressed against Jolie’s throat.
    As a final defense, Jolie began the high, warbling song sirens used to control others. The blade was released from her throat as the attacker gasped,
“Sirmoeur!”
    Jolie turned her head and looked up.
    She was tall, taller than Jolie, and a few years older. Her hair was golden red, almost to the point of being pink where the sun shone through the wisps. Her skin was pale, silvery. But unlike Jolie’s skin, hers shimmered iridescent, like the belly of a trout, swirling and shifting with faint hues of red and green and blue when she moved.
    The siren scrambled off Jolie, throwing the blade to the side as she passionately took Jolie in her arms and pulled herinto an embrace.
“Sirmoeur!
Jolie,
meu sirmoeur!”
she cried over and over.
    “Sister?” Jolie was startled to hear her siren tongue. “It is you, Cleoma?”
    “Yes, yes, Jolie. You are alive!” Cleoma said. “I thought we had lost you. Forgive me for hurting you. Are you injured?” She ran her fingers over Jolie’s forehead, where a pink welt was rising and blood speckled where she had been scratched.
    Jolie was too surprised to feel where she had been struck. She stared at her siren sister, thinking she must be some delusion that would vanish if she blinked. But Cleoma was real. She was here, in front of Jolie against all reason.
    “No, I’m fine,” Jolie choked, half laughing, half sobbing.
    Cleoma took Jolie’s hands in hers as she said, “I had no idea it was you. I was coming to
Nascuits ai Élodie
, when I saw someone hunched over a cook fire. I thought the well’s blessed waters were violated. But it is you,
meu sirmoeur!
Jolie, my sister.”
    “Are the others with you?” Jolie said, looking eagerly to the bracken where Cleoma had emerged.
    “No, I am alone,” she said. “I have come for the waters, to bring them back to our sisters in the Terrebonne.”
    “They have returned from the open sea?”
    “Yes, we learned of the Gog’s death and have come home. But listen—something terrible has happened.”
    “What is it?” Jolie asked.
    Cleoma sat back on her heels. She spread her handsacross her gown, the woven grasses not nearly so frayed as Jolie’s. “A sickness is spreading among the sisters. It began with the elders, but now even the young and strong are falling to it. Isabeau was the first to take the fever. She would not eat or swim. We gave her boneset and honey in hot water, but the fever did not break. Then she lost her sight. Soon others were sick, too.”
    “Dear Isabeau!” Jolie gasped. “Is she …”
    “She has returned, Jolie,” Cleoma said. “Inez and Breaux, too. But before they died, when the fever drove their minds where they could no longer recognize us, each mumbled over and over about ‘an eternal night’—the world covered in an endless dark. Whether it was the blindness or a vision of something more, we could not tell.”
    “No.” Jolie brushed her hand against the tears. “What is causing this fever?”
    Cleoma took a deep breath, putting her hand over Jolie’s. “Before it began, our sisters who eventually got sick traveled up the Mississippi to the Missouri River and then the Platte. They were drawn by a strange