by oak, ash, and thorn

Shropshire, near the Welsh border, 1605

“Are you sure this is necessary?” Arthur gripes as they secure his hands behind the stake. With chains, this time, instead of rope.

“Shut up, devil-whore.” The man spits, yanking the chain tighter than necessary.

“Look you already killed me once and you know it doesn’t work.”

The man shudders, as if remembering Arthur sitting back up after being mauled by the dogs they’d set on him. The bastards had clawed one of his best shirts.

The man shuts his eyes and vows as if praying. “The Lord’s vengeance shall soon be upon thee.”

“I’m just saying that I’m the third witch you’ve killed this year. Don’t you think you might be getting a little paranoid?” His new king is fanatical about the witches and daemons supposedly plaguing his kingdom.[1]

“It is our duty as servants of God,” the man says solemnly. “To weed out evil where we find it.”

“The last one you burnt just because her neighbour’s vines died.”

“Death unto death,” he whimpers.

“Look I just don’t want you wasting all this wood.”

“God have mercy on your soul.”

“Oh, very well,” England tests the give of the chains and the thick wooden stake creaks under his nation strength but does not snap. The pile of wood under his feet is insufficient for a proper burn, which means he’ll likely smoulder and choke to death.

“I suppose you should get on with it then.” He suggests helpfully.

The fellow staggers backwards, muttering under his breath, and the vicar steps towards him with a lit torch. Arthur’s nostrils flare at the smell of smoke and his hands instinctively clench and tug again at his bindings. He restrains the urge to flinch during the vicar’s sermon every time he brandishes the spitting torch close to the kindling. He should go to death with dignity at least. But it’s almost impossible not to track the movement of the flame with his eyes.

The vicar touches the torch to the kindling and, as he’d thought, it smoulders. The wood is too green, cut down in eager haste. The acrid smoke stings his eyes and burns his throat. He tiptoes as much as he can as the heat steadily builds, and his whole body instinctively fights the bindings with the desperation of a snared rabbit as flames slowly start to lick upwards. Is this how she’d felt?

THUMP.

England looks down and sees the arrow impaled in his heart. A quick merciful kill. He only has a moment to be grateful before his consciousness slips away into the cool, shallow pool of half-death.

---

Arthur wakes up to a cool, dark room and a splitting headache. Voices murmur downstairs in what Arthur guesses is a public house, which means he must be in the next town over at least. A chair is pulled up beside the bed, as if someone had been watching over him, but the occupant is nowhere to be seen. A longbow and a quiver of arrows is propped up in the corner.

The sheets feel stifling and he’s soaked through with sweat where the healing processes of his body have generated immense heat. His soul is back, but he waits for the rest of his body to catch up.

His fingers and toes gain pinpricks of feeling as blood rushes back into the tiny capillaries. His stomach gurgles horribly as his digestive system grinds back to life, and he tastes metal in the back of his mouth from acid pooled in his throat. His diaphragm pings like a bowstring as it settles back into place. He tests his smoked lungs and throat, humming a hoarse tune into the room.

The door opens mid-tune and Wales bustles into the room backwards, carrying a bowl and cup in his hands and kicking the door shut. His hair is longer than when England last saw him, dark and curly and loosely tied back. When he turns, he has a moustache and pointed beard in the current court fashion.[2] He is dressed for the road in a dark doublet, with sensible ribbons at his knees securing the ends of his trousers to prevent draft. A pair of worn leather gloves have been abandoned on the foot of the bed.

“Oh, good you’re awake. I thought I heard you.”

Dylan insists that he came up with the melody, whistled between them over centuries of campfires and journeys across rolling plains.

His brother sets the bowl and cup down on the small bedside table and Arthur smells some kind of pottage with lentils and peas. He’s suddenly so hungry it hurts so he tries to sit, kicking back the sweat-sodden bedlinens.

“Easy,” Dylan murmurs. He helps Arthur up and hands him the bowl and a spoon. Arthur takes it and lifts the spoon to his lips with shaking hands and manages to get about half of the spoonful in his mouth.

“Thank you,” he croaks with his new throat after a few bites when he can think straight again. He glances pointedly over at the bow and arrows resting innocuously in the corner and thinks of curling flames and grey smoke.

Dylan pretends not to see it and makes him drink the cup of hot water with verjuice and honey. “It’s not much. You’re lucky I found us a room.”

Dylan is the best marksman of them all whether his weapon is a bow or a matchlock musket. The arrow through Arthur’s heart had been a perfect shot, carefully and precisely delivered. There was no luck involved.

“It’s good.”

His brother grunts to accept the veiled compliment. He settles on the edge of the bed. England’s hand has stilled its incessant trembling as the food settles in his belly and Wales fusses and taps his hand to remind him eat slower. There’s a faint crash and someone cheers downstairs. Wales gently brushes a spider away as it crawls over the bedsheets. There's dozens of them up in the rafters, recently hatched.

“How did you end up on a bonfire anyway?” Dylan finally asks.

“What are you doing here?” Arthur counters evasively.

“Delivering the king’s messages. Now you.”

Arthur shrugs. “Cursed their well.”

His brother rolls his eyes. “And why’d you do that?”

“For a laugh.”

“Arthur.”

“So that they’d have to go to the marshes for water.”

Wales frowns. “What? Why?”

“For Ginny Greenteeth.”[3]

“You didn’t bargain with her, did you?”

“Not on purpose!”

“What do you mean not on purpose?”

 Arthur shrugs defensively, eyes darting anywhere but Dylan’s searching gaze. For a second Dylan can see a much younger boy squirming out of consequences for his mischief.

“I took something from the marsh.”

Dylan pinches the bridge of his nose. “You took something from faerie waters and didn’t think that might constitute some sort of bargain?”

“I didn’t know it was her marsh. She used to be further north.”

“What even was it?”

England mutters something unintelligible under his breath.

“Put your teeth back in.”

“A brooch.” Arthur says louder.

“A brooch?”

“Not just any brooch!”

Wales growls. “No, no don’t say it. You nearly got yourself burned over a piece of faerie jewellery?”

Arthur shrinks because Dylan’s anger is scarier than Alasdair’s for its rarity. “It’s manmade,” he ventures.

“Oh hag’s teeth Arthur!” Dylan cuffs him across the head. “I’ve met magpies less covetous.”

Arthur frowns and eats another spoonful of pottage to avoid replying, too embarrassed to admit the truth about the bog. And anyway, it was hardly true. He’d met magpies with far more egregious aspirations of wealth.

“What did you curse the well with?”

“Pig’s blood in the water.”

Wales makes a face. “You might be the first witch burnt to actually deserve it. I should have left you up there.”

England doesn’t feel particularly apologetic towards the people who had tried to kill him twice over, so he just slurps the dregs of his bowl obnoxiously.

“You should remove the curse,” Dylan says with a tone of reprimand—like one of the king’s bench judges. Wales has served justices before—he has the right level mind and sense of equity for it.

Arthur wipes his chin and puts the empty bowl down. “I’d owe Greenteeth then.”

“You got yourself into this mess you can get yourself out of it. Just give the brooch back.”

England blanches. “I’m not giving the brooch back.”

“What could be so special about some damn brooch?”

He shrugs again, refusing to meet his brother’s eyes. It’s part self-consciousness and part exhaustion, as the meal after his overnight resurrection has left him sleepy and warm.

Wales brother sighs and shoves him over. “Rest more. I’ll chew you out properly in the morning.”

---

Under the cover of night Arthur dresses and sneaks back to the village. He undoes the curse on the well, scuffing over his hidden curse-marks on the bottom of the bucket. It’ll give fresh clean water in the morning, and the parishioners will congratulate themselves for having burnt the right person.

What had been his house has been picked clean floor to ceiling. England reaches up and brushes his hand over the rafters over his bed. There, concealed from prying eyes, is the gold and red enamel brooch he’d taken from Greenteeth. He thumbs the trefoil patterns as he sneaks back to the inn Wales had taken him to and climbs back into bed as slowly as he can. Dylan snorts and rolls in his sleep but does not wake. Arthur sleeps with the brooch clutched to his chest.

---

“This is what you took from the marsh?” Dylan gapes, dropping his spoon into his porridge with a wet splat.

Arthur scuffs the toe of his boot under the table, looking down into his oats. “If you don’t want it, I can just give it back.” He reaches for the brooch to take it out of Dylan's hands but his brother snatches it away.

“What do you mean, give it back? This is my brooch you know.” Wales says indignantly but his eyes are gentle.

England shrugs, embarrassed. “I thought you might miss it.”

“I haven’t seen this in centuries.” Wales reverently turns the brooch over in his hands, feeling the pin tip for sharpness. “It looks the same as it did the day it went in.”

“You dropped it?”

Dylan nods absently. “I was carrying you, I think. You’d gotten an infection in your foot, and you didn’t want to walk.”

He pins it to his doublet. It looks completely out of place against the new fashion. But it makes Wales look a touch more how England remembers his earliest memories of him.

“I recognised it when I saw it,” he says.

Wales brushes a thumb over it. “I’m surprised you remember it. You would have only been little.”

There’s an unspoken truce between them. Siblinghood comes at the price of justice. Wales had lost his laws, his kings, and his sovereignty at the hands of England’s Plantagenets. Who in turn were not really England’s Plantagenets at all but descendants of France’s wayward nobility. Arthur can’t give Dylan his kingdom back. All they can do is remember and maintain the act of brotherliness. Dylan is a better man in that way than Arthur is, who still wants to tear Francis’ throat out even though his kings have not been French for a long time.

For now, at least, Arthur is away from court and Dylan, as a king’s messenger on the border between England and Wales, is closer to the crown than he is. In a year’s time it may change, and trouble is brewing around the crown’s anti-Catholic stance.[4]

“So…you’re happy to see it?” Arthur fishes for approval in a way he’d never admit to in front of his European allies and enemies.

His older brother grins. “Well let’s see if we can offer Greenteeth something else.”

---

“No.” The green hag sneers. “I’ll drown you.”

“You haven’t even considered it.” Wales replies in old Welsh and waves the brass belt buckle at her.

“I don’t want your new trinkets. I want that,” a long spindly finger reaches for them from the ragged edge of her brown cloak dripping with slime and bladderworts. Greenteeth points stubbornly at the gleaming brooch affixed to Dylan’s chest. “Back.”

“It’s not even yours,” Dylan plants his hands on his hips.

“Is mine!” She cries indignantly, spitting a fragment of broken mossy tooth in rage. “Is mine and the Wessex boy took it.” She splashes the stagnant black water around her at them, glaring at Arthur.

“I dropped it and Arthur returned it to me. That’s only fair.”

Greenteeth grumbles. “Dropped it so long ago.”

“I could say there is a dirwy due for not telling me when I dropped it.”[5]

Greenteeth licks her teeth, weighing her options against the grave charge of concealment. “Give me something else.”

Wales makes a show of turning the buckle over in his hands and considering it. “Something else?”

“Yes.”

Dylan reaches for Arthur’s ear and pulls out the golden hook through his ear lobe.

“Oi!”

Dylan shushes him and presents the earring to Greenteeth, and her yellow eyes light up with curiosity.

“Dylan,” England growls. “That was a gift from Portugal.”

“Hear that Greenteeth? This is all the way from Lusitania.”

Greenteeth blinks like a frog and turns the earring over in her hands, shaking it so that the enamel starburst jangles in the low grey light.

“Do we have a deal?” My brooch for the earring?”

Greenteeth peers suspiciously up at Wales. “They’re a pair. Both earrings.”

“Deal,” his brother says happily.

“Dylan!” Arthur says indignantly again, but his brother elbows him hard then smiles beatifically at him when he grunts.

“Give her the damn earring.”

Arthur reluctantly hands it over, mourning the loss of Portuguese gold. Greenteeth snatches it and cups the jewellery in her hands, stroking over the delicate enamel work. 

“And—” Dylan reaches into their shared bag between them and pulls out a handful of baby spiders, scuttling and rolling over his hands like smoke at the sudden low light. “These. Just a few bites and your teeth will be as white as milk.”

“Like milk?” Greenteeth murmurs covetously, reaching out for the handful of baby spiders.

“By oak, ash, and thorn,” England swears solemnly.

Greenteeth stuffs the spiders into her mouth and rolls them around, chewing and making a face around globs of black spittle.

“Well?”

Greenteeth swallows and grins hopefully at him, showing a row of mossy crumbling teeth and chewed up spiders’ legs wedged between them.

“You’ll make the queen of fairies herself jealous,” Wales says.

Satisfied, Greenteeth thrusts her hand out and crunches another mouthful of spiders when Arthur hands them over.

“We have a wedd?”[6]

Greenteeth hums and nods. “I will spare you this time, green sons of Brutus.”

Shrewsbury town, Shropshire, 2026

Portugal raises an eyebrow, unimpressed. “Spiders?”

“Spiders.” England affirms solemnly.

The other sighs and stirs his coffee with the pink spoon provided by the trendy Danish café they’d dived into to escape the rain. He sips it, makes a face, then tears open two packets of sugar and dumps them in.

“So, am I out of trouble?” Arthur aims for light-hearted but even to his own ears it lands as a spurned husband hoping his wife will let him back in the house for dinner after staying out too late.

Gabriel’s lips pull up slightly around the rim of the coffee cup. “You’re forgiven, though I have a bone to pick with Dylan now.”

“Be my guest,” Arthur exhales, happy to be out of the line of fire.

They sit in comfortable silence, listening to the bustle of the café and the baby babbling at the table next to them and watching the rain slide down the window.

Gabriel frowns as if having recalled something and swallows the mouthful of pastry he’d been chewing pensively. “And what about that ring I gave you—the one with the carnelian? Cost a fortune. You’d better have that at least still?”

The ring is deep in the caves of the Peak District with one of the pixies who had demanded a toll fare for Arthur to leave the faerie circle he’d carelessly stepped into. To break one ring, you must gift another.

Arthur clears his throat. “Well. You see…”

Historical notes

[1] Referring to King James I (VI of Scotland), who actually wrote his own book ‘Daemonologie’, which endorsed the witch-hunting craze.

[2] i.e. the Stuarts. The fashion in the seventeenth century tended towards fuller facial hair and pointed beards.

[3] A grindylow hag-figure from English (particularly the Shropshire/Cheshire/Lancashire counties) folklore who pulled unsuspecting victims under the water in bogs and marshes.

[4] In November of the year this fic is set the Gunpowder Plot will be attempted and Guy Fawkes discovered as one of the co-conspirators. Soon after that, England will establish its first North American colonies, fundamentally changing Arthur’s place in the world and in his relationships.

[5] Dirwy – a fine (Welsh).