“I’m going to wear my glowworm gown.” Em puts herself on a little stool in front of her dressing table and starts magicking butterflies into her hair like pins. She looks stronger. Whatever sickness Senna gave her must have passed. “Get it.”
She’s not even going to help. She’s not even going to turn around and look at me.
I scowl as I step into the room and search for something that might be a glowworm dress. There are heaps of leaves and lichens everywhere, like a compost heap sneezed, but no dresses. Nothing that could even be mistaken for a dress, but behind a coffer I find a nest of glowworms in a writhing, shining mass.
They can make nothing for themselves. That’s why they need us.
These little creatures were a gown at one point. Now they’re glowworms again. Everything here was once clothing, and now it’s yard waste.
I gently scoop up a handful of glowworms and work them as I did the leaves. It isn’t difficult, but there are hundreds and each must be convinced to curl next to its friends in the shape of a bodice and sleeves and skirts. Beneath my fingers, the glowworms brighten and fade, brighten and fade. On summer nights in Woolpit, Glory and I would find them in the undergrowth and we’d each collect a palmful just to watch them make light in their wondrous tails.
Only this summer Glory kept her distance, still fuming, and I had to find them myself. Then she started speaking to me, little one-word answers along with lots of weary sighs like her ma insisted she be courteous, only she kept having things to do so she couldn’t go glowworm hunting. One night I spotted her near a little fire. I had a palmful to show her, but when I got near, she and Kate and Tabby were playing one of those predict-your-future-husband games, exploding apples in the coals — as if Glory is anywhere old enough for courting. She saw me coming over their heads and gave me such a fierce look that I backed away, cupping my hand over the poor little worms so my running home wouldn’t cause them to fall.
When the gown is finished, I gingerly carry it to the dressing table and ease it open so Em can step in. The little creatures part amiably and then cling together down her pale back snugger than any lacings.
“Can I go?” I must find Acatica. To make sure she’s all right, and also because just being near her makes this place much less dark.
“Not yet. I need you to carry my train. Keep still.” Em holds her hand palm up and blows a fine sand into my face. That rotty, dead-leaf smell hits like a fist and I stagger back, snuffling the grit out of my nose, swiping at my eyes, fighting down a choke as it coats the back of my throat. The pig bite on my leg hurts in deep, throbby stabs.
Em peers at me. “That’ll do. It’s a bit of a hash-job, but it can’t be helped.”
I’m almost afraid to look down, but when I do —squinting, just in case it’s worse than I thought — my tattery shift dress has somehow become a plain but elegant gown, apron, and matching hose, all woven of the tiniest of tiny twigs. It’s almost like kindness so I try to say thank you, only it comes out as a long, screeching donkey bray.
I slap a hand over my mouth. It’s worse than words coming out all confusing and jumbled, and Em cackles Kate-like before flouncing a long cloud of meadow mist near her shoulders.
“Hold that off the floor.” Em heads for the hallway. “It’s delicate, and if it gets torn, there will be consequences. I can hardly appear before the king without it, though.”
I sweep the mist into my arms and hurry after Em. As I handle it, the mist becomes a graceful train, weaving its way into the glowworm gown and sinking deep. It’s cool and gentle on my hands, swirling constantly, a lovely gray blue with the smallest sheen of purple. We move along corridors until Em stops abruptly in front of a small room lined with sheer panes of crystal. The king under the mountain is standing with his back to the door, leaning over a basin made from a gem that’s perched on a slim, graceful pedestal. He’s facing a still, clear pool of water set in the wall that reflects his likeness. He peers at himself, tilting his head this way and that, hovering a golden blade near his bristly brown cheek.
Only yesterday the king told Em to think very carefully about when next she appeared before him. And yet here she is. Here I am. The girl Senna tricked, whose trickery makes the king look like a fool.
Or was it yesterday? It feels as if it must be, yet it feels timeless, too. Both and neither.
“Sire.” Em clears her throat and the king tenses. He closes his eyes, breathes out long and windy like a horse, then touches his blade to his cheek a few more times, but slowly and without intention.
At last he turns, glances at Em, then picks up a leaf to wipe his blade. “Are you so desperate for an audience? How sad.”
“No. Well, yes.” Em’s voice goes careful and measured. “Sire, there’s been a mistake. With the revel tonight. The seating order.”
My hands and arms are now tiny panes of crystal that blend seamlessly with the walls. My hem and feet are stones, same as the floor. I bite back a scream, then hesitantly flex my fingers, praying they won’t shatter. Bits of the dust Em blew on me fall from the hair-thin cracks in my hands and drift toward the ground on a silver whisper of wind.
It only seems. It’s not real.
I hope.
“Has there?” The king turns back to the mirror and fidgets with his chin. The golden blade catches light and winks. “Take it up with my steward. He makes all those sorts of arrangements.”
“I did.” Em’s voice is brittle and too polite. “I’m in the fifty-first row. The fifty-first ! I’ve never been lower than the thirtieth.”
“Oh, that’s definitely a mistake,” the king replies to his likeness. “I told him nothing better than row seventy.”
“I’ve done nothing to deserve this.” Em means it to sound firm, to appeal to some sense of fairness, but there’s a waver deep in it and her neck is turning bright berry red. “What happened with the girl-thing is not my fault.”
“Interesting that you should bring up fault.” The king scrapes the blade just above his beard, tidying the line of it. “My son made an interesting point at the revel last night, which unfortunately you did not hear because your row was still waiting for permission to enter.”
Em scowls but says nothing. The butterflies in her hair gently fan their wings.
“The Crown Prince wondered why the mortal girl was able to summon anyone at all to trade with. He pointed out, rightfully, that every numbwit hapless thing with that blood was either long dead or serving under the mountain.” The king meets Em’s eyes in the watery looking glass. “That was what made it amusing.”
“I’m sure the Crown Prince has many interesting ideas that are entirely his own and not put there by those who would kiss his . . . ring.” Em makes a small, polite gesture that is also somehow mocking. “He does love that jibberjab about the pig.”
“Jibberjab, is it?” the king asks quietly. “Right, then deny it. Deny you turned one of the mortal things into a pig and now you don’t know where it’s gotten to.”
A pig loose in the court under the mountain would serve Those Good People right. Pigs are not splendid and elegant like everything else here. Pigs bump tables hard enough to knock food on the floor, then gobble it down while you try to shove them clear.
“Begging your pardon, sire, but do you know where every servant under the mountain is at this very moment?”
The king turns his attention back to his likeness in the pool-mirror. “My son wondered whether the pig escaped somehow, and this girl-thing right now holding up a train that you have no right to wear is that very pig.”
Em buzzes something low and angry. Whatever she did to keep me from being seen obviously didn’t work. At length she replies, “That’s impossible. The one I turned into a pig was grown. Not a girl-thing like this one. Besides, I don’t believe for a moment it escaped.”
My arms slump to my sides, Em’s train forgotten. My mouth is falling open and my belly goes sour. A pig turned up days after baby me arrived. She came right to o
ur house and wouldn’t leave the shed. When I could talk I called her —
“Find it, then.” The king puts down the golden blade and faces Em. He is not smiling. “Produce the pig and turn it back into a mortal thing before all the court. At tonight’s revel.”
Em pulls in a hiss of breath. Then she smiles, big and false, and says, “Very well.”
But there is no escape from the Otherworld. Granny said so. Acatica too. That’s how the stories go. All of them.
“The walls will know if you leave the court.” The king rubs his face with a huge rose petal, then lets it fall to the floor. “They’ll be sure to whisper it to me.”
“You don’t trust me?” Em asks, and she’s trying to sound prim and offended but really she sounds like she’s hiding something. Like the king is right not to trust her.
“There’s only one reason you’d go anywhere before the revel tonight. The walls will know to watch for it. If you leave, I’ll know you for a liar. All the court will know it too.”
Em is quivering with rage. She can’t leave the kingdom under the mountain now. Which means she had every intention of doing so. Whoever she needs to find and turn back into a person isn’t down here. That someone is a grown-up. Old enough to be a ma.
“One more thing.” The king waves a hand across the pool of water hanging on the wall. It spirals smaller and smaller and disappears. “Tonight you will walk into the feast in the ninety-and-ninth row.”
“What? You — ”
“I do not recall giving you permission to use one of these things as your personal servant. You thought to win the privilege by finishing the job you started under the guise of tormenting the mortal girl for the amusement of the court, and you failed. Now here is one holding up your train, and you thought your dismal glamour could hide it? Did you honestly believe I’d look past the likes of you defying me?” The king shoulders past Em toward the door. On his way out, he gestures around the crystal room and says, “Clean.”
Em buzzes something low and desperate. As she darts after him, her mist-train jerks out of my hands and shreds on the floor. The king said clean and there’s no one here save me, but I’m not sure I can move.
The tattery woman who brought me to Woolpit turned up speaking gibberish and wearing green. She disappeared after handing me over, and no one ever found her body. Because she didn’t disappear. She came back as Mother. The same servant Em turned into a pig for the sport of it.
Who somehow escaped the kingdom under the mountain.
Voices echo in the hallway, the king mocking and Em protesting. I’d better at least seem to be cleaning if they return. But as I try to collect myself, the basin quivers and goes fuzzy, and then the crystal falls away in shards to reveal a man crouching where the washing stand was just a moment before. He’s in his middle years, bony and summer-brown, and his forearms are scratched with dozens of scars. The basin teeters on his shoulders around thatchy dark hair, bearing down so heavy that he’s struggling to keep it from crashing to the glittering floor. He lowers the curved gem in groans and jags, and at last he straightens, rubbing his shoulders and wincing. Then he starts cleaning the room slow, like an ox with a whole field to plow.
The king must have been talking to him when he said clean. This man who is otherwise kept for endless days as a washing stand.
I pull in a sharp breath, loud enough that he glances at me. His mouth falls open, and before I can work out whether I should be afraid or curious or pitying or plain gobsmacked, tears slide down his cheeks and catch in his beard. “This can’t be real,” he croaks. “Lemme look at you. Closer.”
I back up. I don’t know what kind of grown-up he is. He steps nearer, half cringing, trying to smile, and that’s when I fling myself at the door and almost crash into Em. A butterfly drifts out of her hair and a narrow plait sags. Her eyes are red like she’s been crying, but her lovely, terrible face is steely.
“You,” she says to the man. “You’ll know. Where is she?”
He studies his feet and doesn’t reply.
“The woman-thing,” Em goes on, sharp and impatient. “Call to her. Make her come back. I know you were cozy with her. She’ll come if you call her.”
At that, he looks up. His eyes are brown, deep and rich like earth that wants a seed. He lifts his shoulders slow and sad, still crying, not bothering to hide it, and part of me wants to say something comforting because no one else here will do it.
Em wrinkles her nose in disgust and waves him back to his work like she’s done so a thousand times. She stands, arms folded, watching his every limp and stoop and swipe. When the cleaning is done, he glances at me one more time, then kneels and shuffles the washbasin back onto his shoulders. There’s a whisper of that leaf-rot smell, and crystal climbs up his legs and midsection. His body goes smooth and slender and disappears entirely till he’s a washing stand again, delicate and shiny.
I’m trying hard to breathe. They can make nothing of their own. The tables in that workroom, the chairs and settees, the king’s throne — they’re all mortal servants. Every last thing beneath the mountain once lived and breathed, and now must hold water or platters or the backside of one of Those Good People.
The walls were people once too. Acatica said so. Men and women who thought to escape. That must be why they hate the rest of us so much.
The pig bite on my leg is throbbing. It’s still red and raw. Mother nipped me that first day the green children arrived at our house. At the time I was shocked; she’s never so much as growled at me, even when I was small and pulled her ears and tail. But that bite only hurts when Those Good People are trying to make something seem. Mother took one look at the green children and knew exactly who they were, what they’d come for. She did the only thing she could to help me.
I always wondered why my first ma would leave me like she did. My Woolpit ma said mothers are always with their children, even when they can’t be. It sounded like one of those kind things to say to a foundling, to make up for what they don’t have because of other people’s choices.
I never reckoned how there might be truth in it.
I dreamed of them again.
The king warned me this would happen when I walked once more the place where I grew up. Where I should have grown up, had the foreigners not come in their red tunics with long, curved shields and big swords. When they marched you could hear them, even far away, because their feet would hit the ground in unison, tromp tromp tromp, like they were one creature with one single will.
You will never be free of them, said the king. Enough of you bled out that the very ground remembers.
They came burning settlements. That’s what we heard, and there was nothing for it but to fight or run, and given the ragged, haunted souls that sought refuge among us, it was more than clear that fighting would gain us very little. But there was nowhere to run. No way to keep ourselves if we did. The smoke rose from all directions. They’d be upon us soon. They were not like us. What they might want, only the gods knew, and our mothers had no wish for us to find out.
So the men and boys armed themselves. They formed up behind our chieftain and off they went to fight. My father went, and my brother, and both fell somewhere far away, along with enough of their fellows that there were not enough of ours left alive to bear their bodies home. They had to be left for the enemy, to do with what they would.
The last time I saw my mother, we’d fled as far as the stream. She hoped the foreigners would find goods enough to plunder in the houses and keep moving. A while back, she’d buried coins and jewelry near the holy well on the other side of the meadow and we would need to buy safety, wherever we tried to go. I was to wait at the edge of the greenwood where there’d be easy hiding if anyone should happen by, but she swore she’d be back before the sun was overhead. We would make our way north. My great-grandmother had married an Iceni blacksmith. Someone might still remember her.
I waited three days.
By sundown on that first day,
I knew she wasn’t coming. There was too much stillness, like I was the only living creature in a month’s walk. I stayed the other two days because leaving made it real. Leaving meant I was well and truly on my own.
Leaving meant I might come across her body, wherever it lay lifeless. Whatever the foreigners had done to it.
There was nowhere to go. Nowhere to be where the world didn’t smell like char. Serve me and live, said the king under the mountain, and I knew him from my grandmother’s stories but still I went with him through the greenwood and into the wolf pit ankle-deep with bones.
There are bones because there is sacrifice, said the king, and as I followed, the walls began to whisper, telling me where my mother lay slain, my father and my brother, where their white bones lay bleaching.
The walls are very interested in bones.
Mostly when I dream of the foreigners, I dream of the smoke and the tromp tromp tromp of their tread. It’s enough to wake me gasping, but when I wake, I am Agnes. Her dark is ordinary, the light a warm orange glow from the last of the fire. Now when I cry, it’s for how commonplace everything is, how simple and comforting. How there’s a ma who’ll put a hand on my back and murmur that all will be well. Like my first ma did when we crouched behind that stand of brush by the stream, her wispy hair tickling my cheek as she tried to keep the rasp of tears from her voice.
Now when I wake, I am home again. Like those soldiers never came.
You want to find your little friend, don’t you? whisper the walls. Go ahead and try. Run through the corridors. We’re hungry.
I back slowly out of the crystal room and into the eerie greenlit corridor. Em is long gone, buzzing in a rage out of sight. A mouse hole appears in the wall across from me like a slow, creeping spill.
“Agnes?” Acatica’s voice echoes through the hole. “Can you hear me? The cleaning work in the great hall is finished. We must lay the new table for tonight’s revel.”
I crouch and wrap my hands over my head. I should do as I’m told, but my legs are mush. Mother the pig used to be a servant under the mountain. Mother the pig is my first ma. Somehow she escaped and became a woman long enough to have me and make sure I’d be cared for.
The Green Children of Woolpit Page 9