Free The Ghost Sister by Liz Williams

though they were unkind,she told herself, and it was natural enough not to want to be constantly confronted by the sick.
    At least, she thought, guilty at her own ingratitude, Eleres always behaved as though she were a real person. To Sereth, so beautiful and so vivid, Mevennen was certain that she hardly existed. She had watched Sereth and Eleres on the journey here; riding out together, always bickering, and then Sereth asleep in his arms. Mevennen didn't begrudge the happiness of either one, but she envied Sereth, and that had always been there, too. She remembered watching Sereth before the masque last year, knowing that in a little while she would have to shut herself in her room, out of the way. It was as if all the humiliations were returning to her now, drifting down through the branches.
    And now, everyone except Mevennen was waiting for the spring, when they would all be drawn away to walk south to Heleth and perhaps Temmerar on the Great Migration, following the twelve-year lunar tide. That was, she knew, one of the reasons why Eleres had brought her here: to see if she could be cured before the migration came around again. She remembered the last time the clan had migrated, and she had stayed behind—the only landblind woman in Ulleet, haunting the silent house until her family came home, ragged and weary and themselves again. And she had wondered what no one else ever seemed to think about:
why
did they migrate? Luta just shrugged and said it was to do with the moons, and if Mevennen couldn't feel it then there wasn't a lot of point in trying to explain it to her. It was just something people did, that was all—obeying the pull of the moons, just as the sea did. But why? Mevennen wondered all the same. No one ever really talked about it, and it was drawing closer now, hanging unspoken on the air at mealtimes.
    Slowly, Mevennen closed the book that lay on her lap and looked out across the orchard. It was almost dark now. The sun was gone behind the ridge of the mountains and astar hung in the branches of the mothe tree. Eleres was fast asleep. And with a sudden start, Mevennen saw that a ghost was standing beneath the trees. Mevennen could see the ghost very clearly, as if the spirit were solid. Mevennen gaped at her. She did not think that the creature was a ghost in the same sense as herself; not
shur
'
ei
, landblind. This was surely a real spirit: she looked nothing like Mevennen's people. The ghost was tall, and at first Mevennen thought she was wearing some kind of helmet. Then she realized that what she had mistaken for metal was in fact hair: dark golden braids wound around her head. The ghost's skin too was gold, the color of the river shore, and she wore trousers beneath a knee-length robe—maybe indigo, though it was difficult to tell in the last of the light. Through a haze of amazement and alarm Mevennen wondered who the ghost might be, perhaps someone from the far past, when legend said that they had been a different people.
We were not the same
, the legends began,
when we were magical. When we lived in Outreven, long ago …
    Very cautiously, the ghost walked forward. When she was a few feet away from Mevennen, she crouched down in the long grass and took something from her pocket. It was some kind of box, and it hummed like an insect. Mevennen watched her with curious suspicion. She had once been told by a shadowdrinker in Ulleet that this would be part of her illness, to see spirits as real flesh, but it had never happened before. She could hardly believe that it was happening now, even though they said that if you saw a ghost, it meant that someone had cursed you. Surely she was cursed enough already …
    The ghost's eyes were dark and odd, and its fingers seemed stumpy without the long nails of her people. Then Mevennen remembered one of the old tales that Luta used to tell, about a spirit named Telluhar, whose hair was the color of gold and who came from the east with her clan, from