The Green Children of Woolpit

by J. Anderson Coats

  I will visit my old parents in the village. I can help them once I learn to magic things. Any Woolpit ma who has something mean to say will find her cat refusing to hunt and her house overrun with mice. The May King just might fall in a mudhole. Once Glory knows, she’s sure to forgive me, and I’ll help her, too, and watch over all the babies so nothing bad happens to one of them again.

  I help Em up and arrange her arm over my shoulder. She has more of her footing now and shuffles along mostly of her own power. Her cheeks are pinker and she’s muttering how someone will pay, although I must be mishearing because I’m doing her a kindness. The corridor is grand and high and lit with that faint greenish light. Higher than the manor house, and grander, too, but ominous where the manor house was cheerful. This is a place of dark corners. A place of forgetting.

  Go ahead, try to run, something whispers. We’ll be waiting.

  “What is that?” I ask. “Who’s saying that?”

  Em makes no reply and hauls me into a bigger, airier hallway with huge spidery fixtures marching down the ceiling, each holding hundreds of glowing green leaves. She’s shambling us toward a towering doorway made of bright gold, shining on its own despite the green light dimming it down. It’s set with jewels the size of my two hands together. My heart is racing because I’m going to stand before the king under the mountain, who is also my first da, and I haven’t had a chance to plan what I want to say.

  Just outside the doorway, Em drags her arm off my shoulders, closes her eyes, and mutters something. That leaf-rot smell hits me hard enough that I choke and everything goes fuzzy. I blink, and Em is walking alone into the room, limping the smallest bit. I hurry in behind her. This is a court and there must be rules, but this is also my ma and da. I am their baby in a way I’ve never been anyone else’s.

  The chamber is a sitting room of some sort. The floor is made of light and dark stones worked in alternating squares. It’s sprawling and airy, and there are chairs and settees made of plump moss, and Those Good People are sitting in them, or standing near them, so many and so scary-beautiful that for a long moment I wonder how I can be one of them, round and pink like I am with too many freckles. A murmur goes through the room as we enter, followed by whispering and then snort-laughs.

  There are others here. This reunion should be private.

  At the far end of the room is a man sitting in a massive chair that seems to be carved from a single block of gold. His feet are propped on a blue cushion set on a wooden stool. He has long dark hair in graceful ringlets, and his tunic is a shimmering array of greens that’s a thousand-thousand times richer than Senna’s. I’ve never seen anyone so beautiful.

  This is the king under the mountain. He can be no other.

  My ears are roaring. This is my da. My first da, who’s been worried for me since I got lost all those years ago, who sent Senna to bring me home. I don’t see the queen. My ma. He’s alone, no one within an arm’s length, and Em is moving straight toward him, trying to walk steady on and not limp or sway. The room is pin-drop quiet, but Those Good People are grinning, fighting down laughter, and I cannot think what’s funny. This moment will be touching and joyous.

  Em kneels. She’s breathing hard, through her teeth. Still ailing from being above the mountain, likely. The king barely looks at us. At my sister and me. So I kneel as well. One day we will laugh about this, how his lost baby appeared before him on her knees like any common subject.

  “You failed to present yourself when you arrived,” the king says to Em. “I had to send for you. I should not have to send for you.”

  “Beg pardon, sire.” Em lurches to her feet, unsteady and weak.

  “Is something the matter with you?”

  Em shakes her head, and there’s a ripple throughout the room as Those Good People snicker behind their graceful hands.

  “You’re not ill?” The king looks concerned, but in a mocking way, like Kate, like Tabby. “Not, say, ironsick from where a mortal girl buried two crossed needles beneath your bed?”

  That cannot be right. I hid those needles well so they’d cause no harm. Besides, Senna would never do such a thing and no other girls have come near our house.

  “I’m fine, sire,” Em says, making a stiff curtsy. “Come to claim what’s due me.”

  “What’s due you?” The king raises a brow. “This isn’t the mortal thing you left with.”

  “No, this one is better.” She kicks me till I rise, then shoves me forward. “Go on. Go hug your daddy.”

  The king isn’t smiling. His beautiful brown face is set like a cat tracking prey. “What is this thing doing here? Do you think this is funny somehow?”

  Em blinks rapidly. “Sire. It’s . . .”

  The room is spinning, slow and sickening, and for the first time since Senna spoke the words, it dawns on me what being the lost princess under the mountain well and truly means. Those Good People are pitiless and cruel, and I will have to live among them. They delight in trickery and malice for the mere sake of it, and they have no patience for foolishness or idleness or greed. They take what isn’t theirs, if they can get away with it, and nothing they have is real.

  In Woolpit I have a ma and da. They are real. They are kind, even if they’re dull, and I want to be back there with them. Right now. Cut-up hands and porridge and everything.

  “Pardon me,” I say, and my voice cracks but I can’t stop now. “Milord. Sire. I — ”

  “I wager Emmmmmrrrrrrrrnnnnththththth was dragging her feet presenting herself here because she hopes we won’t recall her last disastrous mistake.” A young man who looks much like the king leans gracefully over the back of a chair and aims a mean Tabby-smile at Em. “It’s one thing to turn one of these servant-things into a more useful creature. Quite another to lose track of it.”

  Em whirls, her hands in fists. “You laughed like everyone else. And that creature is still here somewhere.”

  The king sits up straighter. “If this isn’t the girl-thing you left with, then she won the bargain.”

  Precious few things gain and hold attention in the Otherworld, Granny would say. One is a bargain. The other is a sacrifice.

  “If she won the bargain,” he goes on, “it means the girl-thing made a fool of me. After you swore up and down she’d fail. You’d see to it, you said. She’d never be able to face a boy the image of her dead brother, and she’d fall apart. You swore this.” He narrows his eyes. “Then again, you swore once that she’d never so much as think about the crossing place again.”

  Em looks worse than sick now, but she stands proud like a stalk of wheat. I can’t breathe. He’s talking about Senna. There can be no other thing he means.

  “Instead a mortal girl bested my conditions and won her freedom,” the king growls, “and you have the cheek to turn up here, before every last one of my court, and you’re not kneeling and cowering with the shame of it?”

  “There is this one.” Em’s voice trembles. “Blood must serve. This one has the blood. What difference is it?”

  This isn’t right. This can’t be right. A princess doesn’t serve. A princess wears pretty dresses. She eats meat and honey cake instead of beans and porridge. She is the girl in the story.

  “There is every difference and you know it.” The king’s face is hard, his voice a terrible kind of calm. “This one here can’t help that she’s brainless. But you?” He levels a finger at Em. “If you know what’s good for you, you will get out of my sight and be very, very careful when you next come into it.”

  Em backs away slowly. I cannot move. I’m alone in the huge, airy chamber with the tall ceiling beams and the eerie green light and Those Good People smirking openly from the edges of the room.

  “What are you still doing here?” The king frowns at me.

  “I came to see my ma and da,” I whisper, but it carries like my normal voice and sets the whole court howling with laughter. “The king and queen under the mountain. I came because Senna said I was the lost princess and
I wandered away and you wanted me to come home. So we could be a family.”

  “To think,” the king says to no one in particular, “that mortal girl went out of her way to cripple Emmmmmrrrrrrrrnnnnththththth just so she wouldn’t interfere, when all along this halfwit thing believed every word.”

  Em is alive and recovering and back where she belongs, just like I promised. I have no more reason to be here. No more wish to. “Please. I brought back your child who was sick. Where is Senna? She said I could go home to Woolpit whenever I liked.”

  “My child ? You mean — ” The king under the mountain barks a long, echoing laugh that cracks like thunder amid the giggling court. “Emmmmmrrrrrrrrnnnnththththth, my child. I’d have drowned her years ago if it were so. At least you are amusing. The other mortal girl was too dour and frowny.”

  “S-Senna?” I choke. “Please, I just want to go home.”

  “I imagine she said a lot of things to get you down here,” the king replies. “That was the bargain, after all. A life for a life, traded by whatever means. Now you are here and here you’ll stay. Blood must serve. If not hers, then yours.”

  “No,” I whisper, because it’s hitting me in waves that I’m in the worst kind of story. The kind you tell yourself can’t be true because its ending is unthinkable.

  The king leans back on his throne and makes a little shooing motion. “I’m bored. Go away.”

  I’m frozen. Wavery and weak. Senna could lie to me because she is not one of Those Good People. She never was. She’s a girl like me. She was the girl in her own story, and she has gotten the happy ending.

  Something dark and furry twines around my ankles. It’s a rat and it’s as long as my arm and I shriek and kick it and it goes tumbling and screeeeeeing across the black-and-white floor.

  If Senna is not one of Those Good People, none of what she told me is true. It’s never been true. I’m not the lost princess. There’ll be no dancing. No feasting. No people paying me mind, caring what I think.

  Laughter all around me. Those Good People are snickering and cackling and guffawing, not bothering to hide it behind their hands any longer, but doubled over and holding their bellies. Their stark, lovely faces swarm and blur. I am like Glory at the Maying, only it’s worse because at least she could run home and hide under her bedclothes and cry.

  I have nowhere to go, and it’s no one’s fault but my own. I was fool enough to listen to a story and believe every word.

  I become her with every step. Across the heath, and I am Agnes. Past the mill, Agnes. By the time I climb the little rise and my house comes in view, my yard and my fence and my garden, there was never any other Agnes but me.

  Past the threshold, past the fire, to the sackcloth bag hanging from the rafters. There is bread inside, suspended here to keep the mice away, and my hands are trembling so hard I can barely work the knot. Then it crumbles out and into my hands and I shove the lot into my mouth.

  Then I wait. Palms slick. Heart racing.

  I do not die.

  Instead the crumbs go soft on my tongue, soggy and nutty with the tiny odd stone from the mill, and I sob, nearly choking, because it means the whole business is behind me now. There were conditions, and this was one of them. The food under the mountain no longer has any hold on me. I have escaped the fair folk. I am a girl again. I am a girl with a ma and a da and a home and a sky to be under. I am this girl now. I am Agnes, and she is me. She is what’s left of Senna, daughter of Duro and Oconea. She just might be the last of the Trinovantes who walked this place so long ago that even the land does not remember us.

  A shadow falls across the doorway. Everyone is still at the harvest and I reach for the iron needles that remain buried in the dirt beneath her — my — sleeping pallet. The fair folk have no more claim on me. That was the bargain.

  It’s not one of those fairy wretches, though. It’s the pig.

  She stands in the doorway making a low, throaty sound like I’m the one who doesn’t belong here. I scratch the needles out of the ground. An angry pig who outweighs you thrice-over is nothing to ignore. Slowly I move around the fire to study her. The old Agnes spoke to this pig like she was a friend. Mother, she’s called.

  We should all be so lucky to have more than one mother.

  Mother is glaring at me. There’s no other word for it. She makes that rumbly sound a few more times, then swings her rear end around and relieves herself in a stinking pile right on the threshold. Then she lumbers past the shed out of sight, and I’m left to clean up the mess.

  It’s like she thinks to punish me.

  After I put supper on the fire, I sit in the yard and run my hands over the dirt. We would meet here for the shearing. None of these houses stood then. Neither the paths nor the mill, and definitely not the abbey and its ever-clanging bells. We would meet here, Trinovantes from everywhere in a day’s walk, and sometimes a few Iceni would come down through the woods. My first da would sharpen the shears and my first ma would choose a lamb to roast for the feast. My brother would pull my hair and I would chase him, ready to pounce and tickle.

  This spot, beneath my hands. It’s nothing like it was, but it is still here.

  The sun is going down when I spot Ma and Da coming up the hill from the wheat field. I rub my thumb against the fairy cloth in my apron. They are so used to the boy-thing’s glamour that they will not notice more. I fly down the path and greet them both with deep, long hugs. They hug me back, and they don’t let go until I do.

  We sit down to supper. The three of us share the bench near the fire, and I savor bite after bite of porridge.

  “Something is missing,” Da says.

  “We had guests here,” Ma replies. “Fosterlings.”

  I press a hand over the green cloth in my apron, but carefully, because too much and they will be glamourstruck. Too much and they will go mad.

  Da shrugs. “They must have gone back where they belong.”

  There’s no need for it, but I keep my hand near the cloth well after they begin to discuss how much longer the harvest will last. No more is said of the fosterlings. Agnes has always been their very own and only.

  The throne room is a gut-lurch blur. Those Good People are still laughing. I can’t stay here. I turn and crack heads with someone, and I stumble back whimpering because if I’ve just collided with one of Those Good People, I’m worse than dead. But it’s not. It’s a girl. A normal girl, whisper-thin with chapped lips and a crooked nose, a few summers older than me. She’s cradling the rat I kicked and staring at me with eyes like moons.

  “Oh, gods,” breathes the girl. “She did it. Senna actually did it.”

  Her look is part pitying and part sad, but her stooped-over cringe is all fear as she pulls me with her toward a rat-size hole in a shadowy corner. I let her lead me. Head down, eyes blurry, belly awash with sick. Squares of black-and-white floor stone flash beneath my feet. I duck my head to move through the hole that is suddenly our size, and abruptly the floor becomes rough, uneven ground. It’s dark here, and damp, and lit with that greenish light that’s starting to give me a headache. My chest feels full of hot, wet wool, but I’m shivering.

  Go ahead and cry, something whispers. We like it when you cry.

  “I’m Acatica,” the girl says as we move down a narrow, musty corridor made of rough-hewn stone. The rat lies in the crook of her arm like a baby. “Do you understand me? If you don’t, breathe in deep. Like this. The glamour should work its way into your ears soon enough and we’ll understand each other however we speak.”

  Too much is happening too quickly. I’m not the lost princess under the mountain. Senna lied to me. I’m never going home.

  “You can sit here, but only for a moment.” Acatica settles me on a knee-high stone next to the damp wall. She steps away and holds the rat in the light, running gentle hands down its legs and along its belly.

  I could have paid some heed to all those things that were the way I wanted them to be instead of the way they
were. I know the stories. I should have seen it. I close my eyes and lean against the wall and hug myself tight.

  Get off, something growls, and I leap forward because something stings me, too, sharp and cruel across both shoulders. I swivel, rubbing the hurt through my dress, but there’s only bare wall. No spiders or wasps or insects of any kind.

  Acatica is still looking the rat over. Finally, satisfied it’s not hurt, she stoops and lets it go. It scurries into the shadows and disappears, its little claws ticking on the stone. Then she turns to me. “Be kind to them, understand? They’re already paying a price. And when one of them comes to fetch you, by all means go.”

  “Fetch me? Fetch me where?” I shiver. “I’m not following a rat anywhere.”

  “That’s how our masters summon us,” Acatica replies, “and do not even jest about refusing to do what you’re told.”

  They snatch away the curious, Granny would say. They take the rude and the greedy and the vicious, and every now and then they snatch away the innocent, just because they can. Just to remind us that there is truly no such thing.

  “Every night our masters revel,” Acatica says. “They’ll pack that hall from one end to the other and they will feast till dawn. There will need to be food and drink, lots of it, and each of them will need a new gown, or a tunic trimmed with moonlight, or the shiniest, pointiest boots. It all must be ready at the appointed time.”

  She gives me a long look that fills in the or else hanging at the end, but the way she says it, the way it comes together in my head — it’s a story. This is the part of the story where the girl has an impossible task, and she must complete it or be eaten by the monster or married off to the foul prince or cast into the sea to drown. But if I’m the girl in the story, it means there’s a way through. It means there’s a way to get to the end with me safe in Woolpit and Senna punished for her treachery.