Once upon a time, in a green valley ringed by mountains, there lived two sisters.
The elder was named Marta, the younger Elsa. Their mother had died early, and their father was a charcoal burner who worked in the forest all year, leaving the two sisters to depend on each other. One might think such sisters would be closer than anyone else. But deep in Elsa's heart there was a thorn—and the thorn's name was jealousy.
Marta had long chestnut hair, which she braided down her back; when she worked, the end of the braid swayed gently with her movements. Her eyes were a warm brown, like the autumn streams in the woods. Elsa was not ill‑favored herself—she had golden hair, blue eyes, and skin as white as milk. Yet Elsa always felt she lacked something.
When her sister fed the chickens, the hens laid double‑yolked eggs. When her sister planted flowers, they bloomed larger than any neighbour's. When her sister baked bread, the crust was crisp, the crumb soft, and even passing woodcutters stopped to beg a piece. When Elsa baked the same bread, she always burnt the bottom. Furious, she threw the loaf into the fire; the flames leaped high, reddening her face.
"Why?" Elsa would lie in bed at night, listening to her sister's steady breathing, and the thorn would drive deeper. "Why is she good at everything, while I can do nothing right?"
Marta never argued with her sister. When Elsa lost her temper, Marta quietly picked up the burnt loaves Elsa had thrown away, crumbled them, and fed them to the birds. The birds gathered around Marta, chirping merrily. Seeing this only made Elsa angrier—even the birds sided with her.
One autumn, a young hunter came to the valley.
His name was Hans. He wore a coat stitched from deerskin and carried a black bow. He had chased a white stag for three days and three nights, all the way into the valley, until the stag vanished by the stream, as if melting into the morning mist. Hans was bending down to drink from the stream when he heard a song.
It was Marta, washing clothes on the far bank. She had wound her chestnut braid around her head and rolled her sleeves to her elbows. As she scrubbed, she sang an old song their mother had taught them—about a lost deer that found its way home.
Hans was spellbound. He felt the white stag had not vanished but had become that song.
He waded across the stream, splashing his deerskin boots. Marta looked up and saw him; her face turned as red as the first maple leaf of autumn.
"That song," Hans said, "who taught it to you?"
"My mother," Marta answered, lowering her head. The garment slipped from her hands and drifted a short way downstream.
Hans reached out and retrieved it for her. In the water, their hands touched.
From that day on, the hunter made his home in the valley. Every evening after hunting, he would detour to the charcoal burner's cottage and hang the best of his game—a hare or a brace of partridges—on the branch of the walnut tree before the door. When Marta opened the door and saw it, she knew he had been there.
Elsa watched it all from behind the curtain. She saw that every time Hans hung his game, he would glance toward the doorway, and that look stung her like a wasp—not with pain, but with a sour ache.
"He should be mine," Elsa said to her brass mirror. The mirror reflected her golden hair, which she thought ten times more beautiful than her sister's chestnut braid. Yet Hans had never once looked toward her window.
One evening, Hans did not hang game on the walnut branch. He knocked directly on the door.
When Marta opened it, her hands were still dusted with flour. Hans stood in the doorway, the sunset behind him throwing his long shadow across the floor. He reached inside his coat and brought out a silver ring, resting it on his palm.
The ring was neither thick nor thin; its band was worked into two overlapping oak leaves, the veins clearly carved, as if freshly plucked from a branch.
"This was my father's ring," Hans said. "He once saved a fox from a trap in the forest. The fox repaid him by stealing this silver from the hoard of a mountain spirit. My father forged it into a ring and gave it to my mother. On her deathbed, she gave it to me and said, 'Give it to the one your heart truly chooses.'"
He placed the ring into Marta's flour‑dusted hand.
"I have chosen."
Marta's tears fell, wetting the ring and washing away a patch of flour to reveal the silver gleam beneath. She nodded, unable to speak a word.
Behind the curtain of the inner room, Elsa heard everything. Her nails dug into her palms, leaving four white crescents. The thorn in her heart suddenly grew wild, becoming a bramble that shook her whole body.
Why? Why her again?
That night, moonlight streamed through the window and fell upon the sisters' beds. Marta put the ring on the middle finger of her right hand, held it up to the moonlight, looked at it again and again, and at last fell asleep contentedly. The silver ring glowed softly on her finger, like a tiny piece of clipped‑off moon.
Elsa lay awake, waiting until her sister's breathing became deep and even. Then she rose silently, tiptoed barefoot to Marta's bedside. In the moonlight, the ring glowed quietly on Marta's finger.
Elsa's hand reached out, then drew back. Reached out, drew back again. The third time, she bit her lip and gently slipped the ring from her sister's finger.
Marta turned over in her sleep. Elsa's heart pounded so hard she thought it would burst through her ribs. But her sister did not wake.
Clutching the ring, Elsa slipped outside. The night valley was a silver white; dew wet the hem of her skirt. She ran all the way to the stream, to the very spot where Hans had first met Marta.
The stream flowed under the moonlight, each ripple edged with silver.
Elsa held up the ring. The two oak leaves on its face were clear in the moonlight—one large, one small, their tips touching as if leaning against each other.
Suddenly she remembered an autumn long ago, when her mother was still alive. Their mother had taken them into the woods to gather acorns. Mother said acorns were the forest's treasure; one acorn could grow into a great tree, and a great tree could feed all the creatures of the woods. Marta had gathered a lapful and given half to Elsa, who had found none.
"I don't want them!" little Elsa had cried, knocking the acorns from her sister's hands. "I can find my own!"
The acorns had rolled everywhere. Marta had crouched down and picked them up one by one. When she reached the last acorn, she looked up and said, "Little sister, I'm not pitying you. I want to share them with you."
Standing by the stream, Elsa felt that memory rise in her throat and choke her. But she tossed her head as if to shake it off.
"I don't want to share with her anymore," she whispered to the water.
Then, with all her strength, she threw the silver ring into the stream.
The ring traced a brief silver arc and disappeared soundlessly into the water. A single ripple spread across the surface and quickly smoothed, as if nothing had happened.
Elsa turned and ran back to the cottage, burrowed under the covers, and pulled the blanket over her head. She thought she would feel relieved, but she did not. The bramble in her chest had not vanished—it had grown deeper.
The next morning, the first thing Marta did when she woke was to look at her hand.
Her finger was bare.
She thought the ring had slipped off in bed. She searched the mattress, the pillow. Nothing. She got down on her hands and knees and felt every crack in the floorboards. Nothing. She searched the whole cottage, even poked through the ash under the stove. Nothing. It was nowhere.
Elsa sat in the corner spinning flax. The spinning wheel creaked round and round. She dared not look at her sister, keeping her eyes fixed on the thread. The thread broke three times; she tied it and broke it again.
At last Marta stopped searching. She walked out of the cottage and down to the stream—the first place she wanted to go after receiving the ring. The water was as it had been yesterday; the walnut leaves were half‑yellow, and when the wind blew, a few fell and floated on the surface.
Marta sat on a stone by the stream, and her tears fell one by one.
She was not weeping for the ring itself, but for the two overlapping oak leaves on it, for the warmth of the hunter's palm, for the tremor in his voice when he said, "I have chosen." She thought that losing the ring meant losing all of that.
Her tears dripped into the stream. One drop, another.
Then something strange happened.
Where each tear fell, the water flashed—not with moonlight, but with a silver gleam rising from the depths. After several flashes, the whole stream suddenly fell silent. The flowing water stopped; the surface became as flat as a mirror.
Then the water parted.
It did not split open; it curled aside like a curtain, revealing the round pebbles and swaying waterweed at the bottom. Among the pebbles and waterweed, a silver fish swam toward her. Its scales shone like polished silver leaf, and its eyes were two black pearls.
In its mouth, the fish held a ring.
It swam to Marta's feet, raised its head, and gently laid the ring on her knee. The ring was still wet with stream water, gleaming in the morning light—two oak leaves, one large, one small, their tips touching.
Marta cradled the ring in her palms and wept even harder, but now not with sorrow.
The silver fish spoke. Its voice was as clear and ancient as water running over river stones.
"A true heart cannot be stolen. Jealousy only burns the one who holds it."
With that, it flicked its tail, turned, and swam back into the deep water. The parted stream closed, and the sound of flowing water returned. Only the ring in Marta's hands was brighter than before, as if something had been washed away from it—or as if it had been blessed.
Marta slipped the ring back onto the middle finger of her right hand. This time she felt it grow slightly warm, like a tiny hand holding her finger.
She stood and turned around.
Elsa stood not far away, barefoot, the hem of her skirt muddy. Her face was as white as the river pebbles, her lips trembling, unable to speak. She had seen the silver fish and heard its words; she understood everything now, and nothing more could be hidden.
Marta walked toward her. Elsa stepped back until her back pressed against the walnut trunk.
"Take it if you want it so badly," Marta said.
Elsa froze.
"But there is only one ring," Marta went on, her voice as gentle as the stream. "Even if you take it, he has chosen me. That is something you cannot take away, little sister."
At last Elsa's tears burst forth. She cried loudly, like a very small child, her voice echoing through the valley and startling a flock of birds. She cried for a long time, weeping out the bramble in her heart one thorn at a time. With each sob, the pain in her chest eased a little.
Marta held her. Elsa's tears soaked her sister's shoulder.
That night, Elsa did not go home.
She sat by the stream the whole night. The moon rose and set. She watched the moon in the water and her own face reflected on the surface. The golden‑haired girl on the water looked back at her, eyes red.
At dawn, Elsa rose and left the valley. She took only a change of clothes and a wooden comb her mother had left her. At the mouth of the valley she looked back—a thin curl of smoke rose from the cottage chimney. Her sister was lighting the fire to make breakfast.
Elsa walked a long way, over three mountains and across two rivers, until she came to a place where no one knew her. She found work on a farm, milking cows, spinning wool, baking bread.
She burnt countless loaves, but she no longer threw them away. She crumbled the burnt bread and fed it to the birds, and little by little the birds began to gather around her too. She learned to knead the dough until it was smooth and glossy, and to tend the oven just so. When the first golden, crisp loaf came out of the oven, she held it in her hands and tears fell onto its crust.
"Sister," she whispered, "I can do it too."
A year passed.
The news that Marta would marry the hunter Hans traveled over the mountains and reached Elsa's ears. The peddler who brought the word said the wedding was set for the autumn equinox; all the walnut trees in the valley were heavy with nuts, and the bride wore a silver ring worked into two overlapping oak leaves.
Elsa listened without crying. She went to the small stream behind her cottage, a stream that reminded her a little of the one at home. From her chest she took the dress she had worn on the night she stole the ring—she had kept it all that time, unable to throw it away, unable to wear it.
She folded the dress, picked the whitest lotus flower blooming by the stream, wrapped it in the dress, and gently set it on the water.
"Go," she said.
The water carried the white lotus slowly downstream.
On the autumn equinox, the valley was hung with golden walnut leaves. Marta wore a wedding gown she had sewn herself, wild chrysanthemums braided into her chestnut hair. Hans wore his deerskin coat, his bow on his back, as if ready at any moment to chase another white stag.
The wedding was held beneath the walnut tree. Everyone in the village came. The old charcoal burner, their father, drank several bowls of fruit wine, his face flushed, saying it was the happiest day of his life.
Suddenly someone by the stream cried out.
A white lotus flower drifted down from upstream, its petals intact, white as fresh snow. It floated around the bend, over the gravel shallows, and came to rest on the water directly before Marta and Hans.
Marta bent down and lifted the white lotus from the stream. A dewdrop rolled from its petals onto her silver ring, blending with the oak leaves carved there.
She looked upstream. There stood the entrance to the valley—the place one could reach only after crossing mountains and valleys for an entire year.
"It is Elsa," Marta said softly.
She pinned the white lotus over her heart. All day long, every guest who came to congratulate them smelled the lotus's faint fragrance, light and clear, like someone brewing tea with stream water in a distant place.
After the wedding, Marta picked the lotus petals one by one and pressed them between the pages of an old book their mother had left. When the book closed, the petals and the paper clung together, inseparable.
Every autumn, the walnut trees in the valley bear their full fruit. And by the stream, no one knows when, a clump of white lotuses appeared, blooming each year, their petals covering the water. Marta gave lotus petals to every girl in the village, saying—
"This is a blessing from far away."
Elsa never returned to the valley. But her white lotuses came every year.
It is said that many years later, on a stream in another mountain, people saw a golden‑haired woman planting lotuses by the water. Someone asked why she planted them, and she smiled.
"The stream at my sister's home is too far. I plant them here, and the water will carry them to her."
That year, the white lotuses in the valley bloomed more abundantly than ever, covering the whole stream from source to mouth in a white so thick it looked like a moonlit river that could not flow away.