by Rose Jermusyk.
There once were two sisters-in-law who refused to mourn the third. They’d met her only once on their joint wedding day, but in the days leading up to the nuptials they’d known her handiwork. In that work they’d seen themselves and each other reflected and this made them kin.
And it made her loss unacceptable.
None of them had really been asked if they’d wanted to marry the princes. The first two found golden arrows in their gardens that sealed their fate. The third had still been a stork at the time, and her wing had been pinned to the forest floor so that she was forced to make a deal with the youngest prince.
All through the wedding ceremony, and all through the wedding night, she had wailed and wept for the Sun Mother. All through the wedding ceremony, and all through the wedding night, she had wailed and wept for the youngest prince to let her go as he had promised. At the first light of day, she sprang for the window and welcomed in the light which pierced her heart as a golden arrow.
None of them had really been asked if they’d wanted to compete on behalf of the princes. But they’d each woven one of the most beautiful rugs the king had ever seen. And they’d each baked one of the most delectable cakes the king had ever tasted.
The elder sons quietly cursed the father. The father greatly accused the dead bride. The two remaining brides vowed to put all right as they watched their kin laying in her coffin and the youngest prince clutching the arrow that had caught her and the arrow that had freed her to his breast.
None of them had really been asked if they’d wanted to live without the wildest parts of themselves. But they washed their faces in morning dew, dressed as brightly as lightning, and commanded themselves with the grandeur of thunder. Only to see the wildest one’s only armor, her stork-skin, burned in effigy.
They hadn’t spoken to each other — her two sisters-in-law — they had both simply woken in the middle of the night and gone to where her stork-skin had been burned. They both reached into the ash and each retrieved a red stork-leg — one singed and one scorched — that hadn’t quite been destroyed by the flames. They took her treasures together to the church, walked past her widower who slept on the steps clutching two golden arrows, and laid her red stork-legs in her coffin and waited.
Her loss was unacceptable.
Moonlight shone through the colored glass of the windows that showed images of silent women crowned with light holding palms and implements. As the hours crept away, the moonlight crept towards the coffin until it was blanketed with a quilt of colored light. Then the wood of the coffin began to creak and groan, as if from growing pains, and the red stork-feet broke through the end.
The stork-legs stretched out from the coffin as if from their former body. They found their footing on the church floor and stood up, coffin-body and all. Out of the chapel the coffin walked upright, stepping gently over the sleeping mourner, and followed close behind by the sisters all the way to the edge of the woods.
Walking toward the woods the coffin unfolded and a little hut grew out of it like a chrysalis falling away as a butterfly emerges. At the edge of the woods the hut turned so its door faced the sisters and opened to let two large golden eggs tumble out before them, where they hatched into two rapidly-growing huts. Soon there were three little white huts with black pitched roofs and red front-doors and stork-legs standing tall at the edge of the woods, one for each of the three sisters united forever by the remnant magic rekindled.
Her gift was acceptance.
At first light the elder princes followed their missing brides’ trail of ash to the church, found their brother as he woke, and followed a trail of splinters to the edge of the woods. There they found the golden refuse of the living-houses hatched the night before, still warm. They returned to the castle and told the king to take his cold crown and follow the stork-trail into the woods himself.
The princes put the golden arrows and eggshells into the kingdom’s treasury and gave the keys to the people, and from then on the treasury always had as much to give as the people needed. The three brothers made themselves a new home, and built a platform on the roof for any stork in need of a place to nest.
Their gift was acceptance.