What Witches Tell
A Latvian tale, this version is taken from the 1938 anthology Wonder Tales from Baltic Wizards by Frances Jenkins Olcott.
In the Land where on Midsummer Night, the St. John’s Fires blaze up, and the girls dance at the Flower Feast, adorned with garlands of wheat-ears and blue cornflowers, in that Land, I say, Witches fly about at the midnight hour.
There were once two brothers, who wished to go out into the world to try their luck. They thrust the blades of their knives into the trunk of a mighty fir tree, and made this compact: Whichever one of them should return first, he was to look at the blade of the other’s knife. If bright, then his brother was alive.