Woolpit, Suffolk. Sometime in the 1100s. Harvesters find two children by an old wolf-pit, a boy and a girl, green as spring leaves, dressed in clothes nobody recognizes, speaking a language nobody has ever heard.
They wouldn't eat anything but raw beans. The boy sickened and died. The girl lived. She was baptized Agnes, lost her green color over time, learned English, married a man from King's Lynn.
And then she told them where she was from: a twilight land called St. Martin's, where the sun never shone brightly and everything stayed green.
Two chroniclers wrote it down, William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall, men who didn't traffic in fairy tales. They wrote it the way you'd write a tax record.
Cass says: lost Flemish children, malnutrition, a garbled memory. Probably. Almost certainly.
But I keep thinking about the girl learning English just to tell them about the twilight, and nobody believing the only part that mattered. Some dispatches come from the edge of the map. Hers came from the edge of the light.