The Green Children of Woolpit

by J. Anderson Coats

  “This is where we cross,” Senna says, and after a long moment I work out all the meanings in those few words.

  “Isn’t there a hill?” I ask. “Granny always said . . . your people, our people . . . they live inside a mountain. That’s where the kingdom is. Hidden away in the Otherworld. Deep underground.”

  “There was a hill. Then there was a war.” Senna gestures at the pit standing dark and open, waiting, like a newly dug grave. “Now there is this.”

  I edge a step back. Toward the safe thing. Toward Woolpit and my hearth and Glory’s massive sighs and the endless hand-slicing work in the wheat field.

  But it’s not the safe thing. Not anymore. I’m one of Those Good People now, and I promised to help my brother get home so he can recover. Going back on a promise is the worst thing I can do.

  No. The worst thing I can do is ignore someone who’s crying. Someone who might be dying.

  “We’ll need to lower him gently,” Senna says. “Let’s get him on his feet.”

  Martin is buzzing, low and stuttery. Somehow, in spite of what happened to me, he convinced our ma and da   to let him join Senna in her search above the mountain. They must love him beyond measure, even when he was all they had left. I could do with a little of that sort of love. The kind you don’t think much about because it’s always with you, keeping you warm and safe like a good wool cloak in winter. It’s simply there, like the strands of wind that play along the floor for you to watch.

  Now he’s fighting for breath. Sweating through his fancy tunic and hose. Because he wanted to be the hero and find his sister, and the salt and iron were too much for him. I wish I could lay a gentle hand on his heart so I could feel it still beating. Just so I know there’s hope.

  I kneel, and Senna slings one of Martin’s limp arms over my shoulder. He’s so flyaway thin that it’s no trouble to straighten with him hanging off me like a cloak. I think I can ease us into the pit if he can hold on a little.

  A jolt, sharp and sudden, and I’m falling. Senna’s holding me by my free arm and then she isn’t, and the floor of the wolf pit is rushing at me fast. I scrabble for a handhold and my nails drag down the earthen walls and I try to scream but there’s no breath for it, no air.

  A flailing shape follows me. Martin is falling, too.

  I hit the pit bottom hard. Dizzy white stars everywhere. For the longest moment all I can do is gasp and then . . .

  . . . roll slowly, bit by bit, onto my back . . .

  . . . and look up, where Senna’s face, hovering over the pit, blocking out the pale, tree-scratched sky, is the last thing I see.

  I peer over the side of the pit and there she is, sprawled at the bottom like a crumpled handkerchief. Now that it’s done, I cannot help but be sorry for her. She asked all the right questions. She had all the right doubts. But she had all the right frailties, too. All the little gaps that let the glamour in.

  The boy-thing lies beside her. He will not like the headache that’ll greet him when he wakes, but the iron needles I found on the shelf and buried beneath the pallet did their work. All Agnes could see was her sick brother. The urgency of him, how he writhed and suffered.

  That part was real. It was hard not to smile.

  The trade is complete. A life for a life, by whatever means. There was nothing in the bargain that required me to be truthful.

  There’s something in my hand. A scrap of green material. It shimmers across my palm, the thousand-thousand greens of fairy cloth catching light that is not there.

  It must have torn from his cloak as he fell. It’s not in my hand by accident, though. The boy-thing means for me to have it. Even now this wretched scrap of cloth is pitifully trying to make the sky darken, the clouds threaten, the door of the house that is now mine slam in my face. Even now he is trying to foil me, but it’s too late and I’ve held up my end of the bargain. It’s been years since the glamour has been able to sway my mind in any meaningful way. Besides, this is the smallest piece of fairy cloth. It could barely make a stone seem like an egg. It will never be able to convince my new ma and da to turn on me when the boy-thing is far away.

  I will open my hand. I will throw this scrap of cloth into the pit and leave it there to rot. Taking anything from those fairy wretches always brings the most unintended of consequences.

  The cloth flutters between my fingers. The green of it is depthless, and there are so many shades. So many interlocking, intertwining layers of shimmer and gleam.

  At the end of this walk will be my new house and this ma and da, my ma and da, and for a while they will want to know where the old Agnes is. They will miss her and weep for her.

  I will be the last person who saw her.

  When the boy-thing was here, this ma and da breathed in his glamour and saw what he wanted them to see. Thought what he wanted them to think. Now that he’s gone, soon my ma and da will start seeing things as they really are, and they may not like any of it. They may not like me.

  There’s glamour in this cloth, though. No one to stop me from using it, either.

  Ma hugged me. She called me child. She still may do so after the old Agnes is gone and only I remain. She may do it without the glamour to make her see me as needful and charming. Lovable. Her very own and only.

  She may, but I cannot take that chance. I stuff the scrap of cloak deep into my apron, straighten my skirt, and turn my back on this place one last time.

  I drag my eyes open. Every last bit of me hurts. I’m damp, too, shoulders to bottom to feet, and there’s grit in my hair and my fingertips are aching. I push myself up. My head throbs big — deep — spinny. I’m shivering and it’s dark here and I don’t like the dark.

  Martin. Martin is dying and Senna and I are returning him under the mountain so he gets well. Only I was foolish and slipped and fell into the pit. Senna tried to catch me but she couldn’t, and down I went and pulled Martin after me.

  I cover my face. I can’t bear to see him lying nearby. His neck will be broken. His eyes blank like drying puddles. He was too ill to break his own fall. It will have finished him.

  I have to look. If I could face baby Hugh, I can face my own brother.

  Slowly I move my hands down. Squint, like that’ll make it better somehow, if I see just slivers of his lifeless green body at a time. But there are only dark walls too high to climb and rugged ground where wolves pace and whine and finally meet their ends. No sign of Martin anywhere. No sign of Senna, either, in or out of the pit.

  I’m alone.

  My arm hair is prickling. Because of Granny I know a little of Those Good People, but it’s just enough to keep me wary. It won’t help much if I’m to visit the Otherworld. I know they have a kingdom, and there’s a king and noble lords and knights and courtiers. I know they feast and revel every night, and they ride on their holy days in an unruly procession through mortal places like Woolpit, and if you know what’s good for you, you stay indoors behind salt and iron so you don’t interrupt it and earn their wrath. But I know nothing of how to speak to kings and only a little of how to speak to lords. I won’t know where to stand in the court. I won’t know how to behave.

  The safe thing to do is yell for help. Someone in the wheat field will hear me and pull me out. I’ll take my thrashing for shirking the harvest and by nightfall I’ll have cut-up hands, same as yesterday. The day before that.

  But the safe things are all different now. Those Good People do not harm their own. Besides, I promised to get Martin back to his ma and da. If he’s — if I can’t find —if his body isn’t here, the least I can do is tell the king and queen what’s befallen him.

  I’m finally the girl in the story. Me, Agnes Walter. Even with my dirty feet. My stumbly words. This story will be new. No one will have ever heard one quite like it.

  “Senna?” My voice echoes from wall to wall. It does not seem able to climb out and free itself.

  The sky overhead is a sickly, faded-out pale with a faint breath of green. Nowhe
re near the glorious summer blue it should be. It’s the color of an old bruise or a day-old corpse. A half-light, as if the sun is going down, but with none of the pinks and oranges of a harvest sunset. The rotty smell is thick, like a drench of cold water.

  “Long gone.”

  I startle and turn around. It’s a girl’s voice, but not a girl I know, and it’s slicey like a sharp knife and amused without being any sort of kind. Martin stumbles out of the shadowy wall of the wolf pit, only it’s not Martin. Not exactly. He starts as my brother, but as he weaves toward me, his face gets pointier and his hair longer and his tunic and hose shift and ripple and change until he’s a girl in a long leaf-colored dress with skin as pale as plaster, and nothing of the green boy remains.

  “Wh -what?” I manage, because I’m not sure what I just saw was real and not a story I made up and my head still hurts and if I really did just see Martin turn into a girl, I’m not sure what to say without causing him — her? — offense.

  “She’s long gone.” Not-Martin sways on her feet. “What are you waiting for? Get over here!”

  “Oh!” I hurry toward her. She’s taller than me now, and heavy in a way the green boy wasn’t. She puts all her weight on me and I must stagger. “You look . . . better, at least.”

  “I will be, now that I’m back here,” Not-Martin replies grimly.

  “Ah . . . weren’t you just a boy? A green boy?”

  “I only seemed to be a boy, and the green was her punishment and not mine. Now walk on and keep quiet. Nothing is worse than foolish questions.”

  Walk on is what the plowman says to the oxen as he taps their rumps with the guide pole. My face feels hot, like it’s just been slapped, but I say nothing as Not-Martin heaves us down a long hallway. And it is a hallway, not the narrow, damp earth walls of the wolf pit. The paneling is made of thousands of tiny twigs woven to make pictures of flowers and butterflies, trees and rivers, stags and boars. The whole place is lit with that greenish light, glowing in ornate holders of . . . saints, is that gold ?

  I’m in the kingdom under the mountain.

  Fresh meat, something whispers, and I manage a glance at Not-Martin, but she is whimper-groaning with each shambling step and there are no words in it. We are alone in the corridor; there are no shadows for anything to hide in. Even here, tiny slivers of wind drift in silver swirls along the floor, but when I look up, I can only gape at the glittering bowls of green light high above me, the delicate scrollwork on the arched beams curving toward the ceiling. Not even the manor house is this grand.

  “Are we going to see them?” I’m trying to take it all in as we stagger past. “Our ma and da? The king and queen?”

  “What part of nothing is worse than foolish questions was unclear to you?”

  I bite my lip. It’s too much like how Glory sounds when I say something she thinks is foolish. Even before the Maying, especially if Kate or Tabby were around, sometimes she’d turn on me this look of everlasting weariness, like why do I bother?

  I’m not sure how asking about our parents is a foolish question, but I haven’t known I’m one of Those Good People for very long and there will be rules for this place, even for a princess. My brother — my sister — is sure to help me learn once she feels better.

  We turn down a corridor that’s dimmer than the others, and the walls are a simple weave of twigs with none of the pictures from the last hallway. My shoulders are aching and my legs afire. Not-Martin stops in front of a plain, sturdy door and waves her hand at it.

  Nothing happens.

  “Look who’s back.” One of Those Good People is standing outside the next door down, arms folded, smug. She looks something like a normal girl, but at the same time . . . not. She is lovelier than any mortal girl could ever be, graceful-tall like a cornflower and regal like a warhorse. Her dress is made of — storm clouds? — but her voice is all Kate, all Tabby. “If it isn’t Emmmmmrrrrrrrrnnnnththththth, who bragged how easy it would be to win her spurs by finishing a job that should have been done long ago.”

  The name comes out a buzzy drone that doesn’t sound like words. She may have been Martin in Woolpit, but now that she is my sister instead of my brother, it seems right to call her by her proper name. Even so, the best I’m going to do is Em till I’m better at being one of Those Good People.

  Em scowls at the cloud-girl. “Krrrrrrrshshshshshsh. I’m in no mood for you. Go away.”

  “Were you trying to do this?” The cloud-girl — Krr —swishes a hand at Em’s door and it swings open soundlessly, revealing a spacious chamber with a high ceiling. A plush purple carpet spreads from end to end, and the walls are done up in contrasting shades of green. There’s furniture made of wood and gold, and the bed is draped in thick red curtains and piled with heaps of messy, slept-in bedclothes.

  This room is as big as the manor house hall. Ten times the size of my home. Yet somehow it’s held within the wolf pit, and there must be many others like it. The Otherworld is a marvel, and I am part of it now.

  “Shut up.” Em tries to storm into the room but staggers back howling like she walked into a door, one hand pressed to her nose. I catch her, nearly falling on my rump, and when I recover, I reach a hand toward the doorway and gasp when it bumps something solid. Only, nothing is there.

  Something giggles. High and shrill, like Kate, like Tabby. I glance all around, bewildered, but it’s as if the sound came from the very walls.

  Em is hanging off me, barely on her feet, and my shoulder is screaming with holding her up. Krr cackles as Em’s pale cheeks grow redder. Just like Glory at the Maying. I pull in a deep breath and do what I should have done then and face Krr and say, “Stop it. Leave her alone. The king won’t like how you’re speaking to us right now.”

  Krr’s smile widens. “Is it . . . I think it’s trying to threaten me.”

  “No!” I don’t know where to look. Anywhere but her face. “Please. Just leave her be.”

  “Pleeeeeeease,” Krr mimics, giggling. “This’ll be better than any of us thought. He’ll tear them both apart!” She turns on her heel and glides down the corridor, the train of her cloud-gown catching the floor in faint swirls of cold.

  Em scowls at me, but weakly, like I’m embarrassing her somehow. She closes her eyes and scrunches her face, concentrating. When she waves a hand through the empty doorway, there’s no barrier, and Em stumbles inside and throws herself in a plush chair piled with wisps of mist that gust everywhichway.

  I stand awkwardly in the corridor. I’m not to ask foolish questions. “Ah . . . is it all right if I go find Senna? So you can rest?”

  “You can be quiet and make yourself useful. My head is aching.” Em puts a hand over her eyes and turns her face into the back of the chair.

  I’m not sure what she means by useful, so I step into the chamber and my bare feet sink into the soft, thick carpet. It’s made of tiny violets, thousands and thousands of them, and they whisper around my toes. This must be Em’s room. We must be sharing it. Of course princesses would have a room like this. I really want to meet my ma and da since Senna kept saying how frantic they were to see me, but Em’s still clearly not well. I don’t know enough about being any kind of princess, much less one of Those Good People, so I’m going to need her help.

  There’s a small table next to the bed, covered with bowls in tall stacks. I’ve never seen more than two bowls side by side, except at the manor house when I was invited to eat my fill and get Senna and Martin out from under the table. All that venison, those dishes of savories and mutton glistening in grease — and just like that, a pewter plate appears on the table next to the bowls. On it there’s a thick slab of meat covered in rich, velvety sauce.

  My mouth waters. I haven’t had so much as a sniff of meat since that day.

  Eat nothing that’s given you, Granny would say, or you’ll never be allowed to leave.

  But I’m the lost princess under the mountain. One meal will do me no harm.
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br />   This could be my life. All I must do is choose it. I don’t have to go home to Woolpit and that dim, smoky house and the harvest, and all at once the rotty smell rises and here I am in this room, lounging on this bed with this plush red bedcover snug around my ears and I am deciding which of my gowns I’ll wear because there’s a feast in my honor and so many people want to know what I think and hang on every word of the stories I tell —

  The pig bite on my leg stings, a solid stab that makes me buckle. It’s not healing like it should. Mayhap it will, now that I’m in the Otherworld where I belong.

  I’m turning back to the meat, eager for that first juicy bite, when a wolf appears sleek and silent in the open doorway. There’s no cover. Nothing to duck behind. I screech and grip the meat knife, but it’s not a knife anymore. It’s a stick, the kind you’d throw for a dog to fetch. The kind a small child would use to play swords. I reach for the meat to throw to him, only there’s nothing but moss on a slab of tree bark.

  My whole leg throbs. That wolf will devour me and leave my bones to bleach.

  The wolf doesn’t growl or lunge. He just stands there until Em rolls her head enough to get a look at him. Then she winces, mutters a curse, and hauls herself to her feet, but she isn’t two steps from her chair before she sways hard and falls to her knees.

  “Tell him I’m indisposed!” Em shouts at the wolf. “Tell him I’ll present myself before the court when I’ve had a chance to bathe and change.”

  The wolf cocks his head.

  “Ugh, very well, fine.” Em waves a hand at me where I’m standing frozen, openmouthed, helplessly clutching a stick that should be a knife. “Help me up.”

  She said before the court. We must finally be going to see our ma and da. The story will go like this: I will walk into the throne room and the king and queen will know me on sight. They will rise from their places as one, weeping openly, you are our baby, and they will hold out their arms and I will hug them. They’ll be able to tell me what just happened with the meat and the knife, why those things disappeared and left sticks and moss in their places. I’ll tell them how my Woolpit ma and da raised me with love and kindness, how they ought to be rewarded for it. I’ll tell them what good work Senna did finding me and explaining everything and they will give her the room next to this one. It would be nice to have a friend nearby.