The Green Children of Woolpit

by J. Anderson Coats

  Agnes nods slowly. “The king is going to come to us, though. Those Good People will ride on May Eve.”

  I scoff. “Ride roughshod over this whole village and leave it a boneyard. They will rise from their sickbeds if that’s what it takes, which will only make them more violent.”

  “Through the crossing place? That’s the only spot they can come and go? And the king will lead the ride?”

  The tilt of her questions stops me from giving another snide answer. Agnes is running her fingers through the dirt, but she is somewhere far away. At length she holds up a tiny object, pale, all corners. A bone.

  “What if we stop him?” Agnes whispers. “What if he must halt the ride and listen to the terms of our new bargain? What if he must accept them if he thinks to leave the Otherworld ever again?”

  “I can think of nothing we could do to force him into such a thing,” I reply, and this time it comes out kind instead of unhelpful. “Nothing we could offer to tempt him.”

  “Precious few things gain and hold attention in the Otherworld One is a bargain.” Agnes places the tiny bone between us. “The other is a sacrifice.”

  I pick two bluebells and strip away the blooms. Senna sits across from me. She is no longer as green as the leaves around us, but she seems paler than usual. I snap one stem off halfway and leave the other long.

  The loser of this draw will be the sacrifice.

  The story will go like this: A girl will climb into a grave at the bottom of the wolf pit. She will hold close to her chest the piece of Martin’s cloak that Senna tore when she pushed him in. She swears up, down, and sideways that there’s enough glamour in this piece of fairy cloth to keep that girl alive, even buried, and this will fool the king under the mountain. The sacrifice will seem real, and nothing else will compel the king to halt the ride and parley with the girl who is not buried.

  The walls have been made quiet with iron. The king will not know what we’ve done to the crossing place till it’s too late.

  The girl who is not buried will tell him. No one but me can restore it, she’ll say, and your kind will neither cross here nor get well unless you agree to a new bargain. The king will have no choice. His kind will be suffering. The crossing place blocked by sacrifice. Once the new bargain is struck, the girl who is not buried will dig up the one who is. She will step out of her own grave, safe and healthy, and they will both be free.

  That is the story, but I don’t want to be the girl in it. Rather, there’s one girl in particular I don’t want to be. It has to be one of us, though. It has to be we who carry this off.

  Senna looks away as I slip the stems behind my back and shuffle them. Tonight is May Eve and Those Good People will ride at midnight. There is no time to dither and argue. I gently press the stems between my hands so neither of us knows which is short and which is long.

  Short straw is going in the ground. Long straw will dig.

  There have always been bones in the pit. Not all of them wolves. Someone must have done this before. When is a very long time.

  I offer the stems to Senna. I hold, she chooses. Like every time Glory and I decided who’d hide first in a game of seek-and-find or who had to sweep spiderwebs from the farthest corners of the manor house dairy shed.

  Senna hovers two pinchy fingers over one of the stems. Then the other. Woolpit is in terrible danger. When the king under the mountain is compelled to halt, one of us must be waiting to parley. The other must be beneath the cold soil. Present and absent. Both and neither.

  But Senna is surely thinking the same thing I am. I’m not sure I trust her to dig me up.

  Green fingers flash. Senna pulls a stem from my hands and closes a fist around it. I open my palm so we can both see what’s left.

  I’m holding the long one. I’m going to dig. Me with my dirty feet and stumbly words, the girl who was never meant to be in any story but an ordinary one.

  Senna swallows visibly. She licks her lips and uncurls her fingers, and there’s the crumpled stem as long as her thumb. She wads it up and throws it away in one harsh motion.

  We are quiet while birds chirr and the wind twists all silvery through the hedge.

  At last I say, “We should get a shovel. We must be ready by sundown.”

  She nods. Evening is day and night, both and neither. There’s a shovel in the shed near the house, and we move quickly. The yard is quiet, but Ma’s singing drifts out the front door, lully-lully-sleep-my-baby like when I was small and down with some fever. We come toward the house the back way, through the garden, and cross the yard to the shed. It’s cool and dark within, and Da has moved all the tools around. The shovel isn’t where I thought it was, and by the time we find it, a clatter in the yard makes me duck behind the door and pull Senna next to me.

  A cart rolls up the rise. The reeve sits on the driver’s plank and Glory is next to him. There are knitting needles dangling around her neck on a piece of string. The pair that matches mine, that Granny gave her when we were both small. Ma comes out of the house at the creak of wheels, and the reeve pulls the donkey to a stop.

  “Sir Richard has asked me to bring the green children to the manor house.” The reeve doesn’t climb down, only shades his eyes with one hand while he peers at my ma. “It’s been nearly a year and their parents are nowhere to be found. You’ve taken excellent care of them, but he thinks it’s more than time they were off your hands.”

  “Off my hands, is it?” My ma smirks. Ma never smirks. “Into his hands, more likely.”

  My mouth falls open. It’s discourteous to speak rudely to the reeve. No one refuses a direct command from Milord.

  “They’ll come with me now,” the reeve says in a no-nonsense way. “Are they inside? Bid them get in the cart.”

  “You will not take my boy from me. You have no right!”

  “Sir Richard has every right,” the reeve says patiently. “They are foundlings, and he has a duty to their welfare, and yours, too.”

  “Their welfare?” My ma scoffs. “He wants to put them on display as a curiosity. Imagine who’d come to have a look at green children. First among them would be those pompous men he’s always trying to impress with his worldliness. He’d finally be the talk of the countryside, wouldn’t he?”

  The leaf-rot smell drifts from the house, and my pig bite hurts. Glamour. Of course. It’s making Ma say such terrible things about Milord and his motives, and rudely, too. Even if those things are not exactly untrue. Martin is sick, yet he’s still trying to ruin my family out of spite. Any moment now the reeve will be glamoured enough to drag Ma before Milord, where she’d be fined for slander.

  “Da,” Glory says in a low, urgent voice, “we have to take them now. That Fair Agnes is lurking somewhere. She’ll be the reason they go back to that room made of earth. Martin said as much.”

  “You cannot take Martin anywhere,” my ma retorts. “He’s ill. Come look for yourself if you don’t believe.”

  Glory’s eyes go wide and she scrambles off the cart, flies past my ma, and leans into the house. From the doorway she shouts, “Da! Fair Agnes has done something horrible to him! I want to call hue and — ”

  “Hush now, Glory Miller!” the reeve bellows, loud enough that even I jump. “Remember we talked about these notions of yours. The boy is simply ill. Get back on this cart right now.”

  Glory makes one last helpless, frantic gesture at Martin’s sickbed, but she does as she’s told, needles clicking. She slumps next to her da, worrying a thumbnail. You’re right, I want to tell her. I’ve done this to him. But he’s not a boy, and he’s the one you should fear.

  A year ago I could have done it. A year ago it would have been Glory and me facing down Martin and the raging host that’ll ride on Woolpit at midnight.

  “The boy can stay till he recovers. I’ll be back to check on him in a se’ennight’s time.” The reeve glances around the yard. “Is the green girl sick as well?”

  My ma huffs a fierce sigh. “That girl. Take her! I�
��ve had enough of her wantonness.”

  “Is she home? Where can I find her?”

  “I don’t know where she is, and I care less. I’ve half a mind to call hue and cry on her myself. She threw my precious boy into the wolf pit and left him there to starve.” Ma scowls. “A little honest work will do her some good. If you can find her, take her to the manor house with my blessing.”

  Senna lets out a long, trembly breath. Her whole attention is on my ma and there are tears in her eyes. Almost a year Senna’s been here, being me. Her own ma and da are ages gone. She doesn’t even have a Mother. But for my parents, she has no one.

  But for me, who once thought to be her foster sister and friend.

  The reeve squints at my ma. “Then surely you won’t mind if I look around here a little.”

  “Of course not. Now I must go. My poor boy needs me.”

  Senna and I trade looks. Neither of us is anyone’s baby, not as long as Martin is here. The reeve climbs off the cart and walks toward the garden behind the house. Glory is still on the seat, her back to us. Senna grips the shovel and eases the shed door open.

  We go together, hurrying down the path. Senna makes it to the bottom unseen and slips behind the hedge, but Glory must hear my footfalls because she turns and spots me and lets out a wordless screech. I freeze. The reeve may or may not march me before Milord and argue to hang me, but he’ll keep me long enough that it won’t matter. There will be no sacrifice and no parley with the king under the mountain.

  Woolpit will be doomed, and Senna and I with it.

  Glory is taller than I remember. She must have grown while I was away. But she is still Glory. We lost our first milk teeth on the same day. We once had matching hair ribbons, given to us by a merchant on the road to the abbey who we convinced we were twins. It’s the glamour making her cruel and vengeful.

  Please have Glory be the kind of friend she used to be. I thought to ask it of Senna and Martin when I was sure they owed me a favor. Days ago, months ago, when ago. I wouldn’t have thought to ask if it was only glamour.

  “Martin is worth ten of you,” Glory says, low and vicious, “and proof be hanged, I will see that you pay for what you’ve done — ”

  The reeve grabs Glory around the middle and clamps his other hand over her mouth. He glances at me, but he’s too busy muffling her ravings to pay me mind as he marches her toward the cart.

  “Please don’t make me put the mask on you again, my girl,” he mutters, and there is a rawness that makes me think of my first da who is a washing stand, who I ended up leaving alone after all. “Enough with these stories, I beg you.”

  Glory will be back to her old self if Senna and I can do our work tonight, but mayhap it ought to be my turn to be the best dog namer, straw braider, and butterfly chaser in Woolpit. Mayhap it’ll be better for Glory to go turn heads with Kate and Tabby if that’s what she really wants.

  Only then I’ll have no one. I’ll have to braid straw and chase butterflies by myself.

  I’m not alone today, though. I meet Senna at the bottom of the track where it meets the main path, and she walks at my elbow, chin up, intent. Senna and I, who are we.

  It’s late afternoon by the time we reach the pit. We light a small fire at the bottom to help us see. There’s one shovel, so we take turns digging. Ten stabs for me, ten for her. The dirt we heap carefully nearby. The bones we fling into the shadows so neither of us must look at them. As the sun is disappearing, Agnes and I stand on either end of a hole that’s an arm’s length wide, a girl’s length tall, and just over knee-deep.

  It’s everything I can do to keep my face serene. I’m not worried I won’t survive. The fairy cloth will keep me safe. What it can’t do is move this dirt off me if Agnes decides to walk away and leave me here.

  I will stay in this grave, fully alive, buried forever.

  Agnes squints at the setting sun. Time has come. Twilight is the neither-nor those fairy wretches love so much. They’re drawn to anything that is not entirely one thing or another, but are both and neither at once. This time it’ll bite them right in the sitting place. This time it means we can win.

  Still, it’s slowly that I step into the hole. Slowly that I lie down. Slowly that I help Agnes place the first few sturdy branches meant to keep the weight of the dirt off me. She’s been saying we this whole time. Like there’s no other way to be. I have to believe she means it.

  The ground beneath me is cold, even for a pit at nightfall. There are bones here for a reason. This is a place that’s been here longer than both of us. Agnes’s round bread-dough face hovers over me. She holds the shovel with a resolve I did not expect from her. Quietly she says, “It’s not real. It only seems.”

  “See you soon,” I say, and I meet her eyes as she lays the last few branches over my face, then drapes a scrap of canvas over them. The world goes dark and I swallow a whimper. I fold my arms over my chest as if I really were a corpse. In my right hand I clutch the fairy cloth.

  There’s a shick of metal on dirt, then a pattering weight drops on the branches at my feet. A handful of earth tumbles through the small cracks and rains on my legs. Agnes is filling in the hole. Another shovelful falls, then another. The air is getting heavier. Never so heavy that I can’t breathe, but enough that I dare not move.

  My knuckles whitening around that green whisper of cloth are the last thing I see as Agnes heaps dirt over the branches and canvas covering my head.

  It’s done.

  My hands are shaking. My belly churning. The hole we dug is now a patch of dirt slightly raised above the pit floor, and Senna is at the bottom of it.

  There’s nothing to do but wait.

  When Those Good People ride, it will be at midnight, Granny would say. Be in your bed with the covers pulled tight and you’ll be safe till morning.

  Only I’m sitting on the edge of the wolf pit, my legs dangling down, so I’m neither in nor out. I’ve taken off my dress and I’m wearing just my undershift, so I’m neither clothed nor naked. My hair is half braided, half in tails. I am both and neither. I am me and we.

  That patch of ground is so still. Like Senna is truly dead and slowly turning to bones in the cold earth.

  I sit on both hands to keep from rushing to help her. It’s trickery. For a trick to work it must look real.

  The fire we built at the bottom of the pit slowly fades to coals, then goes out entirely. I dare not climb down and stoke it. The moment I leave neither-nor, we are no longer we. The dark grows deep and thick and cold. I’ve never been out alone this late, and I don’t like it. I’d rather be at the Maying. This year I’d be a better friend. I would think to ask before I approached the May King for someone who really might not want her private feelings aired.

  The rotty smell rises and all at once I am at the Maying, and it’s music and dancing and heaping boards of food, but this time I’m ready for it. The glamour works its way into my eyes as Those Good People stir in the Otherworld, but I can blink it away. The sting of pain from the bite on my leg helps me keep myself in myself and not go all fuzzy.

  Mother is with me even here.

  The walls are delirious. They are whispering all their fever dreams to me, shot through with iron like they are, and at first I’m afraid that they’ll pull me in and Agnes will dig up an empty grave, if she digs me up at all.

  But then I start listening.

  My ma made the best roast.

  My sweetheart’s brother is wed to your cousin. That makes us kin.

  My grandda inked these marks on my back.

  They are still here. Trinovantes, Iceni, Cantiaci, Catuvellauni — alive in whispers. Alive in the stories we told to the rocks and flowers, because no one is really gone. They remain in the smallest ways, if only you know how to listen.

  My leg hurts sharp and stabby at the same moment a gust of glamour hits me hard enough to ruffle my hair. There’s a rumble coming at me too, like a whole courtful of horses pummeling my way from the blackest part of
the wolf pit where I can’t see. They’re bearing down on me and they’ll leap up from the pit bottom and trample me and I must move out of the way if I want to live.

  “St-stop.” My voice fills the dark of the greenwood, the empty silence of a night I should not be out in. There can be no kneeling and no fear. No stumbly words. “I would parley with the king under the mountain. I call upon him to heed my sacrifice and halt.”

  The hoof-rumble stops abruptly. It’s too dark for me to see the bottom of the pit anymore, but the sound of restless horses and the clink of bits and stirrups fills the shadows. My arm hairs are prickling and I can barely breathe.

  A green light bursts out of the darkness and throws gaping shadows on all sides of the pit. The king under the mountain is standing on Senna’s grave, holding the reins of a massive black horse. He’s dressed to ride, but he’s sweaty and pale. His glare is absolutely murderous in the moment before a false, polite smile takes him over.

  “Of course it’d be you,” says the king. “More clever than you look. I thought for sure that useless fool would turn you into a looking glass or a privy seat and save me the trouble. I should have known she’d make the same mistake again.”

  He’s talking about Em. That’s why he sent me to find her with that butterfly. I was never supposed to walk out of her little room.

  “I didn’t think you’d have the stomach for a proper sacrifice, though.” The king tamps the ground with one boot. “You know enough to compel me, but I can’t imagine any reason you would want to. It’ll do no good to plead for mercy.”

  “I don’t want mercy,” I reply. “I’ll have no need for it once you agree to a new bargain.”