“The passageways are all unguarded,” I tell her. “Nothing’s stopping us. We can make a run for it. Right now.”
Acatica sighs. “There’s no need for guards. The walls dislike us, and they’ll only toy with us before trapping us somewhere or humming a tune till we’re mad or just forcing us to wander in circles till we fall down as a pile of bones. The last thing they’ll do is heed us.”
“The walls . . . can think for themselves?”
“Don’t touch them, either. They don’t like being touched. They’ll leave you alone if you leave them alone, and do as you’re bidden.”
The whispering. It’s been coming from the walls. I shudder and rub the welts on my shoulders. “There has to be a way.”
“I thought so too.” Acatica smiles sadly. “For a while. Lots of us did. They’re not around anymore, though.”
She nods at the walls and I go cold all over.
“Senna got away,” I reply. “If she escaped, so can I. So can we.”
“No. Senna made a trade. Your life for hers.” Acatica gestures for me to stand and leads me down the corridor. “She made a bargain with the king, that if she could find someone to take her place who shared her blood, she would be free.”
“But we don’t share blood. How can we? She’s . . . well, she’s green.”
“The green is a punishment,” Acatica says. “Like a branding. Senna went too many times to the crossing place, so they marked her as their own. To remind her. She looked like you once. Like me. Like all the Trinovantes who agreed to serve under the mountain.”
“You agreed to this?” I jerk back. “Who in their right mind would possibly do such a thing? Didn’t you know the stories? Or did you just not heed them?”
“Did I know the stories?” Acatica snorts a laugh. “Who do you think made them? Who do you think lived them?”
I trail to a stop in a pool of greenish light.
“Our people,” Acatica goes on. “We were Trinovantes. The ones who lived. We are the stories. They were all we could give you. We whispered our stories into the flowers. We shouted them into stones. Sometimes they made it up to you, to the people above the mountain. Some of you we managed to save.”
There are thousands of stories in thousands of places. It’s not every day you stand before one of them.
“We are not Trinovantes in Woolpit,” I reply slowly, and I struggle to match her pace as she moves down the passageway.
“No. Trinovantes are gone now.” Acatica turns a corner. “Some tried to run. Most chose to stay. To fight those foreign soldiers, for all the good it did. We were dying when the king under the mountain made us a bargain. Serve him and live. I took it. So did Senna. We were friends then. Here?” She makes a bleak gesture to the walls, the light, the shadows. “It’s the first thing you lose.”
“That’s not much of a bargain,” I say.
Acatica shrugs and rounds another corner. “No, of course not. Even in the moment we all knew exactly what sort of creatures we were agreeing to serve. But when you see . . . things . . . you go numb. You do whatever it takes to make them stop. Later, when you can think again, sometimes you don’t even recognize the person you’ve become. But it’s done. There’s no going back.”
“Senna did.” I can’t keep the poison out of my voice. “She got back.”
“She shouldn’t have.” Acatica smiles, dim and sad. “The king set up conditions so she was sure to fail. There’d be no one left, you see. That was the only reason the king agreed to let her try. She’d fail, and watching her fail would amuse the whole court. What befell her when she was snatched back would make the rest of us think twice before daring to approach the king under the mountain with any foolish notions.”
“But she didn’t fail,” I whisper, and I blink back angry tears. “How can she even stay? She must have eaten the food under the mountain.”
“To remain among her kind, Senna had to fulfill all conditions of the bargain. Someone with her blood had to take her place, and she could never speak of where she’d been to anyone, for any reason. If she managed it, all things tethering her to the Otherworld would have no more hold. Even having eaten the food.”
I think of the meat in Em’s chamber, how close I came to sliding that knife through it and taking a bite, and I shiver. I’m sure to be tempted again. I’ll have to keep my wits about me or I’ll never be allowed to leave.
Those Good People honor a bargain, Granny would say, but they also hate to lose. That is why you never, never agree to anything they say, even when it seems like all will work out to your benefit.
I follow Acatica toward a glowing doorway. The room we enter is small, about the size of a house in Woolpit, and it’s lined on three sides with trestle tables. It’s warm and damp here, like hiding beneath the bedclothes and breathing your own breath. The room is filled with kids, all with their backs to me, crowded shoulder to shoulder doing some kind of work at the tables.
“I know you’ve just been given quite a blow,” Acatica says as she leads me toward the table at the far end of the room, “but we cannot have anyone standing idle. Hand work will be the best task for you.”
The table is piled with leaves, sticks, moss, and lichen. The kinds of things you’d rake out of the corners of the yard and pile on top of the garden to help it winter over. The girl at my right is weaving crumbly brown leaves into platters. Or rather, she’s holding the leaves near one another and they’re weaving themselves, stems twining into a tight spiral like they grew there on purpose.
“They’ve been glamoured, see?” Acatica says. “Glamour makes one thing seem like another. We can’t command it like our masters, but we can direct it if it’s already there. If it’s not redirected by someone more powerful. Here, you try it.”
I pull a handful of leaves from the pile. The kids at my table are working so fast it’s hard to follow what they’re doing. Acatica joins them. Platters pile up, all different sizes in neat stacks. Row after row of mugs made of twigs. I touch the stems of two bright oak leaves together, and sure enough, they curve around tight and cling so hard I can’t tug them apart.
“Good.” Acatica looks up from forming moss into compact balls and piling them in a basket made of weedy stems. She smiles like Glory used to when we’d make flower crowns all afternoon, and I miss flower crowns and I miss Glory. Or rather, I miss the Glory who loved making flower crowns all afternoon and didn’t halfheartedly twine a dandelion or two before complaining how the flowers stained her fingers.
I miss the Glory who’d see me struggling and wait for me to line up words, to learn the task, to get the rules of the game. Who’d make other people wait. Who’d stand close and whisper take your time while I babbled and stumbled.
I start on a platter. Leaf by leaf. Some I have to do over because however I’m directing the glamour doesn’t make the stems tight enough. Around me, kids work feverishly, each turning out ten plates by the time my first one is finished.
“Splendid!” Acatica says. “Put it on the pile, then keep going.”
“How many do we need to make?” I ask.
“Just keep working.”
“But Those Good People won’t want to eat off dishes made of leaves!”
Acatica smirks. “Don’t worry. The dishes are well glamoured. As far as our masters are concerned, they’re eating off silver and gold. They might not be able to make something out of nothing, but they can make nothing seem like something.”
Those Good People can make nothing of their own. They need human hands to do their work.
“What if we decide we’re not doing work for them anymore?”
She tips her chin at the massive rat that’s making its way along the table through the platters and leaves.
“But it . . . it just seems like a rat, right?” My mouth feels stuffed with yard waste. “It’s still a person. Right?”
“Only birth and death can stop the seeming,” Acatica says, “unless one of our masters decides to take the glamour off.�
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My hands go still. I should never have kicked one. Doesn’t cost a penny to be kind. Especially when you don’t know what you’re dealing with.
The rat stops in front of Acatica, sits on its hindquarters, and goes screeeeeee. She stiffens, then pushes away from the table and follows as the rat skitters toward the door.
“What am I to do?” I ask, but what I really want to say is don’t leave me here alone.
“Keep working,” Acatica says over her shoulder, and she’s gone.
I do. I’m glad none of the other kids feels much like talking. Every now and then someone comes to collect the things we’ve made. The leaves and twigs are dry. They slice my hands. It’s like the wheat field, cuts atop cuts, only this time I’m nowhere near my da and I sure wish I was. I fall into a rhythm. I weave and twist and twine and fold. It feels like days. It feels like months. It can’t be, though, and soon enough whoever is reeve here will blow his horn and we can stop. We can sleep.
My fingers sting. I pause long enough to flex them and choke on a scream. They’re stumps, ground down below the knuckle and too raw to even bleed.
“It only seems,” I whisper, “it only seems.”
I tell it to myself like a story, because I badly need something to believe.
I wake up in Agnes’s bed. I eat Agnes’s breakfast. Ma runs her fingers through my hair and I snuggle next to her on the hearth bench and close my eyes and in the darkness there, it’s like coming home. It doesn’t need to be the same. It only needs to be enough.
The reeve turns up at the door each morning, calling villagers to the harvest. Ma and Da insist I’m still recovering from my ordeal. The reeve gives me a long, measuring glance, but he does not overrule them. I rub the fairy cloth nestled deep in my apron, and he does not ask about the old Agnes. He does not ask where the boy-thing has gotten to.
I keep Agnes’s fire. I weed her garden and sweep her floor and set scraps out for her pig, even if it does not like me and rarely comes into the yard now that Agnes is gone. At last the harvest is in, and now I can win Agnes’s friends.
It won’t be long before everything that belonged to Agnes becomes mine, and the girl who once was Agnes was never really here.
I pack a basket with some mending and walk down the path through the village. It’s still uncanny to see so many houses this close together, but soon I’m standing before the place where the golden-headed fluffwit lives.
There are two iron needles tacked crosswise on her door.
This house is nicer than the one I live in. The thatch gleams in the autumn sun, and the wattled walls don’t have a single crack. The walk has been swept and there are herbs in rows within easy reach of the door. The old Agnes could not stop talking about this girl, but I remember Glory Miller best from the pit, how much noise she made about finding us and saving us with nary a mention of anyone else.
Still. If she and Agnes are friends, there must be something to her.
Glory is standing under the eave of the house, trying to work her way into a yoke. The dangling buckets crack her knees and she curses. She sees me coming and frowns like she recognizes me somehow but cannot recall from where.
“Want some help?” I smile and nod at the tangled buckets.
Glory’s mouth falls open. “You can talk?”
“I’ve always been able to talk.”
“You’ve always been able to talk,” she repeats, like she was foolish for believing anything else. “Ah. Hello. I’m Glory.”
“Agnes.” I rub the cloth and direct this girl, clear and firm, to know it, to believe it, to say it.
At length Glory replies dreamily, “Yes. Agnes.”
“And we are friends,” I go on, releasing the cloth and reaching for one of the ropes. “You are friends with Agnes. Here, shift that crosspiece so it’s even over your shoulders.”
“Ohhh, but Agnes is a liar,” Glory grumbles. “Always making things up so she’ll seem important. Never thinking how people don’t like being fooled.”
“Well, there’ll be no more of that.” I step back from her, the buckets now dangling properly at either end of the yoke. “I have no interest in stories.”
“Ah.” Glory smiles halfway. “I’m off, then. Ma’s sent me for water.”
“Don’t you want me to come with you?” I ask, and I give her the answer so clear that all she must do is nod.
Glory looks bewildered. “Not particularly. Please yourself, though.”
I wait, but Glory merely steadies her buckets and waves a clumsy farewell. We should be shoulder to shoulder by now, arms linked and giggling. She is . . . resisting in some way. I frown and gently tap the cloth once more. “I’m happy to help.”
“You’re happy to help,” Glory says, but then she blinks oddly and starts fidgeting under the yoke, trying to balance buckets that already hang even.
This is not right, but I dare not nudge her again. I don’t want her to be glamourstruck, and I also have no idea how much is left in this little scrap of cloth. I must use it well.
A woman in her middle years appears in the doorway. Her hair is covered, but she and Glory both have broad foreheads and eyes the same blue as a bird egg. The moment she sees me, the woman straightens like an apprentice caught idle. “You — you’re not — ah. Good morning, Green Agnes. I . . . ah . . . you’re here. Near my house. Somehow.”
“Green Agnes,” Glory echoes, and she squints and sees me, and I whip a glare at Glory’s ma for disrupting my glamour.
Glory’s ma steps outside and closes the door tight behind her. The iron needles clank faintly. She stands sturdy like she’d challenge me to a fight, only her face is gray, her lip trembling. “Is the green boy with you? Can’t imagine what might bring you by. There hasn’t been a baby here for months.”
She is not sure what I am. She thinks to ward me away with salt and iron at her threshold. Little wonder the glamour is haphazard.
I fight to keep my look pleasant. Already Glory is frowning, like she’s not seeing Agnes anymore, yet I am Agnes. I have to be. “Beg your pardon, mistress, and please hear this nice, but I have no liking for babies.”
“That’s close enough.” Glory’s ma doesn’t exactly say it to me; rather, she says it in my direction, in a scratchy, singsong voice. “The windows and doors are well secured. There’s nothing here for either you or the boy.”
Salt and iron disrupt whatever mischief the creatures under the mountain intend. They’d rant about it for days. There were houses they couldn’t enter, children they could not grab, simply because there was a poker at a yard gate or salt sewed into a hem.
I move away from the doorstep. Just being close to this house might strip away whatever glamour still clings to the cloth in my apron.
“Yes, where is your brother?” Glory looks like a misshapen beast, hunched with the yoke across her shoulders. “I’ve not seen him anywhere since the harvest.”
“He’s always been sickly,” I reply, and I rub the cloth harder against the force of the iron needles on the door. “He stays close to home.”
Glory’s ma lifts her pale brows. “Does he? Must be nice for Matilda, having a son again. Some of us may never know that joy. Others of us don’t deserve it.”
I narrow my eyes. That is Ma she’s slandering. Then I soften, because she must be the ma of the baby that the old Agnes wept over. Those fairy wretches did not snatch him away, though I see why Glory’s ma wants to think it. Sometimes it helps mend grief, having someone to blame who cannot be punished or touched.
“Go back to your place,” says Glory’s ma, and she does not mean my house. “The rest of us want no trouble from you.”
The rest of us. She says it pleasant, but there’s something of a threat deep within. If I am to stay, if I am to be Agnes and grow old here, this village cannot keep seeing me as the green girl. It’s not enough for me to win Agnes’s friends.
I must win her whole village as well.
Screeeeeeee.
I’m a
wake in a heartbeat and scramble away from the rat by my knee. Awake is the wrong word. I’m slumped in a heap on the workroom floor. I haven’t been sleeping. It’s like I’ve been put away, like a needle or a hoof pick or a doll you’re finished playing with. I push myself up and then panic because my fingers —
Are back. Entirely the way they were not a day ago. They’re not even raw and red.
The rat is screeing, scampering impatiently between me and the door like it’s in a hurry somehow. Like it’s anxious.
Most of the other girls are folded over too, likely where they collapsed after all those hours making things out of yard waste. A few are listlessly working stray leaves and bark shavings into slices of meat and slabs of honey cake. My belly rumbles, but I know better than to eat anything here. Acatica is nowhere in sight, and I hope it’s because she has somewhere nice to sleep and not because she’s this rat trying like mad to get me to follow it.
The rat shambles ahead. I keep to the middle of the corridors beneath the spindly ceiling fixtures. I want no trouble with the walls. There’s the safe thing and then there’s the smart thing. The rat stops in front of a door that seems familiar and chirrs at me till I knock.
Em throws the door open. She frowns as if I’m late, then makes a come-here gesture like you would to a dog. “Hurry. I’ve got an audience with the king.”
She buzzes away toward a footrest piled with heaps of mist and sunlight and dew, but I’m frozen in the hallway. Just looking at her makes me feel small and foolish. The kind of numbwit who’s easy to trick.
“Well?” She’s impatient, sunk to the ankles in that lush carpet of violets.
I grit my teeth. After all she’s done, for her to think I’ll just turn up and help her. But the rat at my feet screes at me again, like it’s telling me I’d better do as I’m told.
The Green Children of Woolpit Page 8