Senna is nowhere among them. She’s not at the mill or in the churchyard. I even risk the heath, just far enough to call to her, but she doesn’t come and that’s as close as I’m willing to get to the greenwood.
I ask at every door in the village. The Woolpit mas don’t know me. Those who can be convinced to open their doors to a stranger peer at me suspiciously, jowls in tight frowns, eyebrows arched. There is an Agnes, they say, but you are not her.
Senna is Agnes now. All it took was almost a year away for everyone I know and love to forget I was ever here. My village. My neighbors. Even my own ma and da.
The sun is going down and the nip in the air is getting stronger. I have no cloak and no shoes, snatched away like I was at the height of the harvest when it was hot as blazes. I want like nothing else to go home, to curl up on my ma’s lap and let her hold me even though I’m too old for such things. Instead I stand at the bottom of the path, looking up at the orange-glow windows and wishing I hadn’t followed that crying in the greenwood all those months ago.
Shadows shift in the pig byre. Mother! I race up the hill, but it’s Senna who’s settling herself into the straw. I’ve spent all afternoon trying to find her, the girl who traded my life for hers and shoved me headlong into the wolf pit. Now she’s here, and I want to knock her a good one and stand her in front of Martin. Then all this can be over.
But her eyes are red, like she’s been crying. She pulls in a long, wavery breath. It stops me. All my urgency. All my worry.
All my anger.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, because she is nowhere near a smug, triumphant girl who’s spent the last year taking things from me one by one.
“You’re here,” Senna replies bitterly, “and you shouldn’t be. You escaped, so now he’ll snatch us both away. It hasn’t happened, so you must have promised him something. You don’t know what you’re dealing with, so you’ve likely doomed us both.”
I slip farther into the byre, out of sight of the house. “I thought to stall him. We have till sundown on the morrow.”
“All you’ve done is make it worse,” Senna says. “He’ll not stand for you making him look the fool.”
Reveal nothing to them, Granny would say. Never give them your fears, your worries, your pain, your guilt. If you do, they will not hesitate to use it against you.
Only Martin — Em — has worries too. Senna managed to fool the king under the mountain and win her freedom even with Em sent to keep her from it. Without Mother, Em is stuck in that tiny chamber without her fine clothes. The false pig likely made her a laughingstock and possibly worse besides. Em must have returned as Martin to get revenge the only way that would give her satisfaction, and that’s to snatch the pair of us away and punish us publicly, and Mother, to regain some dignity before the court under the mountain.
Senna and I are within easy reach. It’s Mother who’s tripping Martin up. If he’s giving me time to find Mother, it means he cannot find her himself, and snatching us back without her will do him no good.
“What if Martin can’t take us back?” I say aloud. “What if we can stop him?”
Senna gives me a hard look. “Are you simple? There’s a debt outstanding. There’s no stopping him. No salt and iron. No business with food. A bargain made is a bargain sealed.”
“That’s the thing of it,” I reply. “There’s a debt outstanding. Who owes it?”
“We both do,” Senna snaps.
“Then . . . isn’t it also true that neither of us does?”
She starts to say something. Then stops.
“You don’t owe it because you fulfilled it,” I go on, “and I don’t owe it because I never made it in the first place. You owe it because I didn’t fulfill it, and I owe it because you passed it on to me.”
Senna is slowly nodding. “Both and neither.”
“What we need is a new bargain,” I say. “One that makes sure we’re both free of Those Good People.”
“You keep saying we,” she mutters.
“It has to be we,” I reply. “We is both you and me at the same time it’s neither you nor me. Each of us by ourselves owes a debt and is bound by a bargain. Together we are free of both. At least until tomorrow at sundown.”
“Even if I trusted you,” Senna says cautiously, “there’s no way the king under the mountain will make a new bargain.”
“He might, for the same reason anyone takes a bad bargain.”
She bristles. “What we’d need to ask for wouldn’t be bad. It would be humiliating.”
“Why? We don’t want their treasure. We don’t want their favor. All we want is to be free of whatever bargain you made all those years ago.”
“That’s not all we want.” Senna sighs, big and windy. “While you’re making a bargain with the king under the mountain, he’s already thinking of every possible way he can work around it and get what he wants regardless. We must make our demands carefully. At the very least, one condition must be that there’ll be no other punishments. No wasting away of a fever. No blight on the wheat.”
A blight on the wheat would punish all of Woolpit. Not just us. But if Those Good People feel they’re wronged, they will not hesitate.
“We’d be forcing the king under the mountain to accept a new bargain with new conditions that he did not offer and doesn’t benefit him. That’s the humiliation.” Senna shakes her head. “We’d have to do something catastrophic to even get his attention. The whole fairy court would have to suffer. They’d have to believe their other choice was death, and I can’t begin to imagine what it would take to harm those fairy wretches that much.”
“Mayhap.” I pull out a set of iron needles that I stole off the door of a Woolpit ma. “But we can make the fairy court suffer. We can keep them from the thing they like best — their fun.”
When it gets dark, the old Agnes and I slip out of the pig byre and drift through the village stealing iron needles off doors. By the time we’re finished, we have enough needles to fill each of our palms so full that our thumbs don’t quite fit around them.
She is telling me a story: Salt and iron ward those fairy wretches away from person, place, or thing, so there will be no snatching anyone under the mountain if they cannot use their crossing place. If the boy-thing cannot get home, if he gets sicker and sicker and cannot call for help, he just may change his mind about the purpose of blood.
We pass a restless night in the pig byre. Neither of us sleeps, and when the barest of gray dawns has lifted, we’re on our way to the crossing place. The pit is hidden in a smudge of fog. A lingering length of rope still hangs over the edge, put there by the reeve as a safety measure after the boy-thing and I were found at the bottom. We each fling our needles into the pit, where they make a dull clatter, then the old Agnes climbs down and I follow. She lifts a hand toward the pit wall, not quite touching it, and that’s when it hits me, what she means to do.
She means to silence the walls.
Full of iron, they will struggle to think clearly. Full of iron, they will be of no use at all to those fairy wretches.
The old Agnes presses a needle against the dark, crumbling earth. In her other hand, she holds a palm-size rock poised like a hammer. She glances at me, and I steady myself and do likewise. We are a neither-nor. This must be carried out as one. At her nod, each of us drives a needle into the pit wall. The iron disappears slow and even, and tiny trickles of rich black dirt patter our feet.
Stop that, the walls hiss. How dare you —
We bring the rocks down till the needles have disappeared into the wall and only the tiniest winks of metal remain. The walls are sputtering, gabbling out threats in broken syllables. The old Agnes leans down, picks up a handful of loose earth, and crams it into the dent left behind.
“This must go quickly,” she says. “Before the walls can call for help.”
We drive the rest of the needles without speaking. The walls in the kingdom under the mountain are more than just the souls who�
�ve been dragged within. They are the eyes and ears of those fairy wretches. The whisper that won’t leave you be. But now their hearing has been muffled. Their vision dimmed. Their vicious mouths gagged and their thoughts muddied. They will not think to carry tales. They will not respond when one of their masters calls upon them.
They will not know they’re needed.
* * *
There’s a commotion at the house as we’re coming up the rise toward the pig byre. Da rushes toward the shed, then back with a double armload of firewood. He should be following the harrow this time of year, and he should already be afield and nowhere near home till evening. The old Agnes and I trade glances and hurry.
“He was fine this morning!” Ma’s voice is shrill and scared as she rushes toward the garden. “Where’s that chamomile? I know I have some!”
The old Agnes and I edge toward the door and peek in, but Ma and Da are too frantic to pay us mind. The boy-thing lies in their bed, moaning and shivering, with the fire built to roaring and every blanket in the house heaped on him.
“It’s happening again,” the old Agnes says, and there’s a note of triumph in her voice. “I remembered from last time. How sick Martin got just being out from under the mountain.”
She still doesn’t know I made him ill to force her to make a bad decision in haste, without giving her a chance to think it through. But he got that sick that fast because I buried iron right beneath him, in the floor of a house where no one owed him anything. It’s true enough that those fairy wretches get more ironsick the longer they’re above the mountain, but for him to be this ill so soon makes no sense.
Unless the iron in the pit walls is doing this. Unless piercing the very ground we share with the Otherworld has poisoned him.
The old Agnes meant to make the whole fairy court suffer by penning them up so they could not amuse themselves with our sorrows. That they’re likely ill as well — it’s a downright joy to picture.
Da is by the woodpile. Ma is in the garden. Neither is watching the door, so I slip in and approach the bed. The boy-thing looks bad. He’s such a pale green that he almost looks like a normal boy. His cheeks are sunk deep, like a corpse, and there’s a sheen of sweat on his brow.
My brother’s face. Long dead but not forgotten. Never forgotten. I grit my teeth even as I blink hard.
I pick up a rag and bowl of water next to the bed. The old Agnes stations herself on the boy-thing’s other side. When I touch the damp cloth to his forehead, his eyes fly open.
“What have you done?” he wheezes.
“Made you sick,” the old Agnes replies calmly, “and trapped you here. Once the king under the mountain sets us free, we’ll fix it.”
The boy-thing’s teeth are clattering. “You. Made. A. Bargain.”
“Then suffer,” I reply, and I wipe his forehead daintily as if I give a tinker’s curse whether he gets well or not.
“Once we’re released from that bargain,” the old Agnes goes on, “both of us, and allowed to live here with our ma and da in peace, I promise we will make things as they were for you. You’ll be well again. You can go back to your place and be about your business there.”
Our ma and da. Across the bed, the old Agnes —Agnes — is earnest and firm. My throat is closing. From those first moments the king laid out terms, my thoughts went to trickery. How I could hoodwink a girl like me, how I could fool and beguile her. The king left me no choice. Just as he did with that first bargain, me trembling and weeping at his feet.
There was a choice, though. A simple one. A human one. I could have asked for this girl’s help and believed she would give it if she could.
Just like I should have believed that Ma and Da would love me without me having to beguile them.
They nearly won, those fairy wretches. I almost ended up no better than them.
The boy-thing sinks back against the bedclothes, panting. He slits his eyes at me. “You think when I die you can still direct my glamour? Oh, don’t look so shocked. I could feel what you’ve been doing to these fools from the moment I crossed. Walter and Matilda don’t love you. They never have. You forced them to, and you will lose everything. They will turn you out. Slam the door right in your face and ignore your crying on their doorstep.”
I’m holding in panic. The tears that won’t stay down. Agnes will have them back, both of them. They will wonder why they ever took this green stranger into their home.
“Or . . .” The boy-thing draws out the word, and then he starts speaking in the tongue of my childhood, the calming swirl of syllables and curlicue words that whisks me back to before Rome left everything in ruins. “The bargain still holds. You could return this dim girl to the pit. I’m too weak to walk, but you could carry me there, and once I touched that earthen floor with her, you’d never see either of us again. You could come home, to this house, and there’d be your ma and da, arms open, like I was never here. The world you crafted with my glamour. Just you and them. You’d have your family back, free and clear.”
Agnes is frowning her bewilderment, looking thick as a pudding full of lumps, rot her, because even when weak glamour hits it’s hard to blink through it. For three whole heartbeats I decide she will be my sacrifice, and I will shove her in the pit without mercy or afterthought.
But then I’m back in myself, back in this house and back at the side of a girl who has never once thought to do the same to me. I made a bad decision one time when I was afraid. I can’t have it back, but I can make a better one now. I fold my arms and regard the boy-thing, weak and squirming under his pile of covers, and I shake my head.
“We’ve made it so you can’t snatch us anywhere,” Agnes tells him, “and you cannot call to those like you, either. We are the only ones who can put that right. As far as I’m concerned, you’re reaping what you’ve sown. Now you and your kind must take the sort of bargain you once gave to Senna — agree or die.”
The boy-thing flinches each time Agnes says we, but when she sits back, he smiles in a cheerful, cheeky way, as if we’d caught him in a bit of mischief. “Very well. I free you from this bargain. Now lift whatever ward you’ve placed on me before I get so weak I can do nothing for you.”
Agnes sits up straighter, but I hold out a hand. “That’s not in your power. The king under the mountain made this bargain. Only he can free us from it.”
In an instant, the boy-thing’s face goes vicious. “And how am I to call him? Hmm? Am I to die here because you’ve stopped me from doing the very thing that could save me?”
He’s right. If he could call to the other fairy wretches, he’d have done it already. We have the wolf by the tail. We cannot hold it forever, but if we let go, we’ll be mauled.
“You might be able to keep me from snatching you,” the boy-thing sneers, “but iron won’t stop my kind from leaving the kingdom under the mountain. The court rides on every holy day. That’s May Eve. Tonight. Once they cross, my kind will hear me calling. They will come for you both, and they will have no mercy. Blood must serve, even if it serves to water the dark earth.”
I grip the sickbed rag so hard that it dribbles water on the bedclothes.
“When they realize they cannot go home because of whatever you did to the crossing,” he goes on, “they will level this village. Every man, woman, and child will bleed into the soil for the insult, and we will make this place our own.”
“You cannot,” Agnes whispers, but she is remembering that fairy wretches do not lie. She is realizing that her plan to keep them safely contained in the Otherworld will fail.
“Daddy!” the boy-thing cries weakly, batting my rag away with a flail of hand. “Mama! She’s hurting me! Help!”
I barely have time to turn before Da’s big hand falls on my shoulder and I’m staggering away from the bed. Agnes is backing away on her own, edging toward the door.
“It’s her.” The boy-thing waves a trembling hand at me. “She’s the one who pushed me in the pit. She left me there to die. Dad
dy, why didn’t you come?”
It takes me a moment, because it sounds so much like a lie and the boy-thing cannot lie, not in this form or any other. But oh, gods — I did push him into the wolf pit. Right after I pushed Agnes, all those months ago. When I stood over them victorious, convinced I was finally free of him in every form.
“I’ll kill whoever hurt you, son,” Da growls. “I’ll kill her with my bare hands!”
“Make her go away!” the boy-thing shrieks, and a whiff of glamour rises like horse apples downwind. “The other girl, too. She was there. I bet she helped. Make them both go!”
The iron in the pit walls should be disrupting his glamour if it’s making him sick, but he wouldn’t need much. Not given how I’ve been directing Ma and Da all this time. He might even be using the scrap in my apron.
The boy-thing coughs pitifully, writhes in the bedclothes, and rasps out noises that are half cry and half moan. Ma starts bawling and I slither out of Da’s grip and fly out the door, where I nearly collide with Agnes. We sprint headlong through the garden, away from our house and away from where Glory is possibly keeping vigil at the bottom of the path.
At last we stop. There are fields on one side of us, greenwood on the other. Agnes sinks against a tree and touches an open wound on the back of her leg below the knee. “I know it’s not real. Ma and Da. I know he’s magicked them. But what if they don’t get better? What if they’re like this forever?”
I shake my head. “There are different kinds of seeming. This kind lasts only long enough to cause people to make bad choices, and the source of the glamour must be nearby for it to work.”
“So if Martin goes back where he came from, Ma and Da will be like they once were?” She toys with a flower. “Glory, too?”
“Whatever they did when they were glamoured will not change, but they will have no memory of doing it.” I make no mention of what it is to be glamourstruck. How there is no coming back from that. “But it won’t matter, will it? Those Good People are going to destroy this village. We cannot let the boy-thing summon the king, yet no one but the king can free us from the bargain, and I’m sure as anything not going back down there.”
The Green Children of Woolpit Page 15