They lived with their mother by the North Sea Shore; Keir, named so for the raven hair that trailed to her waist, and Atle, her golden haired sister. They lived a peaceful life of only women by the bank of the lapping waves and singing fish; braiding each other’s hair before sleep and sharing a single bed, the jewelry of coral and shell on their thin wrists, and the veils of sea flowers sewn on their delicate dresses.
It was a stormy night the day the young man came to their home. The sky turned black with a quiet anger and bled streaks of white lightning that split the clouds and screaming waves as they crashed into sharpened rocks and coral and thrashed against unlucky rafts and floating nets. His name was Abner; a silently tall man with hair the color of shadows and ocean eyes. The girls were charmed by him and he by them, but there was something about the glance he gifted upon Atle, and Keir saw it and burned with a jealousy she never before had for her sister. He wooed the both of them as his stay extended; courted Kair with golden jewels and intricate delicacies from the land he ventured far from, until she sparkled like the diamonds on the bracelets themselves. But with Atle, he was subtler. He twisted sea flowers into ribbons that he braided into her sandy hair and admired her soft hands and blue eyes. He did give her one gift; a simple golden bracelet with words carved thinly on the sides in a secret language, which he slipped like a proposal onto her little wrist. That was the day the sky burned red with the bleeding sun and Keir watched them both with a silent rage, as the waves washed quietly on the shore and sighed at her anger.
~~~
“Sister, will you come with me?” Keir gently took her sister’s hand and led her through the door. “Let us stand together on the dock and watch the sailors as they set out to sea.” She smiled at Atle and the other girl nodded and gathered her skirts, and together they pranced along the sand filmed rocks to the mossy dock and stood side by side as the warm wind shifted their hair like gentle hands and cupped their chins with unseen fingers.
It was a moment of silence, that time of day in which everything stilled so that even a second lasted like an hour, and one is filled with a feeling of peace. A wave of thought clouded Keir’s darkly beautiful face, and in the instant that time slowed, she felt her arms break like dried clay from her thin sides and stretch like elastic toward her sister, frozen in that moment of stilled time, and give her a light push.
The silence shattered as the bright haired girl uttered a cry of surprise and fell into the dancing waves below the wooden boards of the dock, but not before she turned round and took her dark sister’s hand with her own, as she fell. Keir shook her off, and as her sister crashed into the waves she felt the golden bracelet slip into her cruel hands. Time came rushing back to make up for the moments it lost as it slept, and Keir watched her sister gasp and flail beneath the strong arms of the waves, her flowery dress weighing her down as it ate the water greedily and trapped her legs as they ran with no footing.
“Sister!” Atle cried. “Keir, let me live!” She coughed at the water and slapped the waves with her weak hands. “Reach to me your hand! I swear, all I have I will give!”
At this Keir smiled. “It is your Abner I will have and more. But thou shalt never come ashore.” She tried to turn away but could not. Atle sank below the waves as they engulfed her and then arose again, like a bird searching for its food below the water. Keir waited until her sister lost the fight and floated like a swan atop the calming waves, her dark blonde hair fanned out in the water and her skirts opened like a multicolored lily. Only then she left, but with something tugging at her heart.
~~~
Keir came home without her sister and sobbed out her treacherous tale to her mother and the anxious Abner; of Atle slipping on the foamy moss of the wooden boards and falling into the murky depths below, and he ran to search for her, not leaving the shore for days, searching under the thick rays of the golden sun and mourning under the silent shadows of the gray moon. On the fifth day, the sea took pity on the child it helped kill and gently pushed her bones to the shore, where they washed up on the sandy banks of the other side of the town. Two gypsy boys had been walking along the strand of running water, and saw Atle’s bones as they came ashore. They slid down the muddy bank and watched the smooth bones as they sparkled under the sand, and the golden hair that shone like the sun. They made a harp of her elegantly curved ribcage, and wove several locks of her yellow hair round the thin bones, creating an instrument that could melt a heart of any stone, and turn a bird to ice with jealousy. On that day, the grieving Abner proposed to Keir with the golden bracelet Atle had cherished, and they were to be married the next day. The gypsy boys were invited to play their harp at the wedding; as it had become famous overnight in its rarity and the delicate notes it sang under their dark fingers.
The minstrels came to the hall in which the ceremony was held and when called for, stood at the front and placed the harp on a slab of stone. But before they even began to play, the golden strings shimmered like a ghost and let out a doleful sound, that brought sorrow into every heart that heard. The first string sang as the assembly watched; “Oh, sister, why have you treated me so?” And the dark haired bride leapt from her chair with a cry of terror she hid behind her hand. The second string, louder, echoed round the room, “I promised to give you all I owned, Sister, why did you not save me?” Keir backed against the wall and tore her dress with her hands as she moaned, “no, no...” Abner fell to his knees beside the harp and their mother, oh their poor mother, gasped as she heard her dead daughters voice escape from the shining strings of the little harp. The third and final string rang the loudest as the people assembled wondered aloud at the scene before them, “And now you will beg me to save you from the darkness of the dancing waves, and surely now your tears will flow.”
Keir ripped herself from the wall and ran to the dock at the edge of the shore and jumped into the waves and drowned as they pulled her down. The gypsy boys stared in wonder at their little harp, but once again before they moved to touch the instrument, it shimmered as three more strands of hair wrapped themselves round the smooth bones; three gleaming strands black as a raven’s feather.
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