Chapter 2: Baptism in Filth
The transformation was not an adventure. It was an abrasion.
Dawn came as a gray smear through the parchment window, and with it, Agnes’s boot nudging their straw sacks. “Up. The bog doesn’t care for your dreams.”
Ellie’s body protested in a symphony of new pains. Muscles she didn’t know existed screamed from yesterday’s hauling of water and firewood. Her hands, once soft, were mapped with a lattice of fine scratches and blossoming blisters. May simply groaned, burying her face deeper into the rough straw.
“Five more minutes,” May mumbled, her voice thick. “I’ll debug the drainage algorithm later…”
“You’ll get up now, or you’ll feel my broom,” Agnes said, her tone leaving no room for fantasy. “The peat won’t cut itself.”
The peat bog was a mile’s trudge from the hut, a vast, gloomy expanse that seemed to swallow sound. The air hung heavy and wet, tasting of decay and iron. It wasn’t the romantic, misty moor of Ellie’s textbooks; it was a sucking, waterlogged wasteland. Dragonflies the size of sparrows hovered over stagnant pools that gleamed with an oily iridescence.
Agnes thrust two strange tools into their hands. They were long-handled, with narrow, sharp-edged blades at the end. “Slanes,” she grunted. “You cut the peat into blocks. Like so.” She drove her own blade into the dark, fibrous earth with a wet thunk, levered it back, and kicked out a heavy, brick-shaped clod. “Stack them to dry. Don’t dawdle. This is winter’s warmth you’re holding.”
The first hour was pure, unadulterated agony. The slane was unwieldy. The peat resisted, tearing in ragged chunks instead of clean blocks. Mud, cold and clingy, soaked through their ill-fitting shoes and plastered their borrowed dresses to their shins. Soon, they were coated in it—a fine, dark spray on their faces, a gritty paste under their nails, a heavy layer weighing down their hems.
“This is worse than the coding marathon during finals,” May gasped after a particularly violent levering motion sent a jet of bog water up her arm. She stared at the slimy, brown streak with utter disgust. “At least then I had coffee and Cheetos.”
“Think of it as… immersive historical reenactment,” Ellie panted, wiping her forehead with the back of her wrist, only succeeding in smearing more dirt. “This is exactly how they did it. The fuel source for an entire community.”
“I’d kill for a community-sized bottle of hand sanitizer right now,” May shot back, but she bent to her task again, her jaw set.
Agnes worked a short distance away, her movements economical and powerful. She watched them from the corner of her eye, saying little. Her silence was a judgment in itself.
By midday, the novelty had long since curdled into a deep, bone-weary misery. The damp cold seeped into their cores. Ellie’s romantic visions of the past had evaporated, replaced by the relentless reality of blistered palms, a screaming lower back, and the constant, itching discomfort of grime in every crevice. Her braid, once a bright banner, was a matted, muddy rope hanging over her shoulder.
The only break was a lunch of hard, gritty bread and a wedge of sour cheese, eaten while sitting on a relatively dry tussock. The food tasted of the bog.
“You’re improving,” Agnes said abruptly, her first words in hours. She nodded at their small, crooked stack of peat bricks. “The blisters will callus. The softness will leave you. It must.”
May flexed her aching fingers. “It’s not the softness leaving I mind. It’s the everything else moving in.”
Agnes almost smiled. It was a thin, fleeting thing. “You learn. That is something.”
The walk back to the hut at dusk was a silent, plodding parade of exhaustion. Every step squelched. The fading light made the woods feel closer, more predatory.
The evening ritual was now familiar, and somehow worse than the labor. Agnes banked the fire to a dull glow, for modesty’s sake, and brought out a wooden bowl filled with a mixture of fine sand, dried crushed nettles, and a pungent herb that smelled of lemon and dirt.
“Off,” she commanded.
They shucked the filthy, damp dresses, standing shivering in the fire’s meager warmth. Their modern underwear had been confiscated that first week, replaced with long, rough linen shifts that Agnes called chemises. They were now grimed with sweat and bog.
Agnes began with Ellie. She took a handful of the abrasive mixture and scrubbed it over her skin with a brisk, impersonal efficiency. It scraped over Ellie’s shoulders, down her arms, across her back. It scoured the dirt away, but left her skin feeling raw and burning. The herbal scent did little to mask the underlying smell of hard work—a sharp, animal tang that was fundamentally unfamiliar on her own body.
“The skin must redden. It must look weathered, lived-in,” Agnes muttered, working on Ellie’s hands, rubbing the grit deep into the fresh blisters. Ellie hissed in pain. “Soft hands are a luxury you cannot afford. They are a confession.”
When it was May’s turn, she stood stiffly, her eyes fixed on the far wall. Agnes scrubbed just as hard. “You are gaining strength,” she noted, her hands on May’s slender but tightening shoulders. “The work is putting muscle on you. Good. Fragility is also a mark of the strange.”
After the scrubbing, they were allowed to rinse with a single, sparing basin of tepid water, turning it muddy. They pulled on cleanish chemises—the concept of truly clean had been redefined—and collapsed onto their straw sacks.
In the dark, the hut’s smells were amplified: the herbal pungency of Agnes’s stores, the peat smoke, the damp wool of their blankets, and now, their own new, earthy odor.
“Ellie?” May’s voice was small in the darkness.
“Yeah?”
“My phone. I had it in my jacket pocket. Do you think it’s… just dead in that chest? Or is it, like, blinking in there, searching for a signal that will never come?”
The question was so profoundly sad it stole Ellie’s breath. A tiny rectangle of light and connection, entombed in ancient wood. “The battery’s dead by now, May.”
“I know. I just… I keep thinking about it. A little piece of our world, just sitting in the dark.” May was quiet for a long moment. “My mom is probably losing her mind. She thinks I’m at a library intensive. She’ll call the police when I don’t check in.”
Ellie hadn’t let herself think about that. The ripples of their disappearance in a world that now felt as distant as a dream. “My dad will think I finally ran off to join a medieval fair for real.”
They shared a weak, choked laugh that bordered on a sob.
“Agnes said the village is having a May Day gathering in a few days,” Ellie whispered, changing the subject to a nearer, slightly less painful terror. “She says we have to go. To be seen. To look… normal.”
“Normal,” May echoed, the word flat. “I don’t remember what that is. I dream in code sometimes, and when I wake up, I can’t remember what any of it meant. It’s just… fading.”
Ellie reached out in the dark, found May’s hand. It was rough, the skin cracked. They held on, two points of alien warmth in the profound, unyielding dark of the past.
Outside, an owl cried. Inside, the fire settled. Agnes, from her pallet across the room, spoke into the silence, her voice low and contemplative.
“The bog keeps things,” she said. “It holds onto what falls into it. Sometimes, for centuries. Men have pulled faces from the peat, faces older than the King’s line, looking as if they fell asleep yesterday. The bog preserves. It also consumes.” She turned over, the straw rustling. “Remember that. This place… it preserves what it understands. It consumes what it does not. Sleep.”
The words hung in the air, a cryptic warning. Ellie stared into the blackness, feeling the raw sting of her scrubbed skin, the deep ache of her muscles. She was no longer a student of history. She was becoming a part of it—a tired, dirty, preserved thing in the making, wondering with a cold thrill of fear if she was being shaped to be understood, or if she was simply being slowly, inexorably consumed.
The days bled into a rhythm of ache and grit. Ellie’s blisters hardened into yellow calluses. May’s nails, once neatly filed, were ragged and permanently etched with black peat lines. Their hair, washed only with a harsh lye soap Agnes made from ashes, lost its shine and hung lank, often twisted under rough linen coifs. The raw, scrubbed feeling from Agnes’s nightly abrasive mixtures gave way to a tougher hide, their skin reddened and textured by wind and labor. They smelled of woodsmoke, soil, and their own sweat—a pungent, human animal smell that made Ellie’s nose wrinkle at first, then go numb.
May Day dawned clear and unnervingly bright. Agnes laid out two less-patched dresses, shaking her head. “You still move wrong. Too direct. Your gazes are too open.” She fussed with Ellie’s coif, tucking in a stubborn strand of ginger. “Keep your eyes lowered. Speak little. Let people see only what they expect: two poor, simple girls from the north.”
The gathering was in a water meadow at the village edge. The air buzzed with a foreign energy. It wasn’t the sterile joy of a modern festival, but something denser, a collective release from winter’s grip. A Maypole, stripped of its ribbons, stood in the center. The smells were overwhelming: roasting meat from a spitted pig, cheap ale, the sweet decay of spring grass crushed under dozens of feet.
Agnes moved through the crowd with a stiff nod here, a muttered word there. She brought them to a group of women by a mead barrel. “My cousin’s girls, El and Mara,” she said, the false names smooth on her tongue. “From the North Downs.”
A woman with a face like a kindly apple squinted at them. “Long way. You find our boggy air damp?”
“Yes, Goodwife,” Ellie murmured, copying the respectful dip of the head she’d seen. Her heart hammered. This was a test.
“They’re quiet ones,” the apple-faced woman said, laughing. She shoved two wooden cups into their hands. “The mead will loosen your tongues. Drink up! It’s Beltane!”
The mead was sweet, cloying, and surprisingly strong. May sipped cautiously, her eyes scanning the crowd like a programmer assessing a chaotic system. She nudged Ellie. “Look. Over by the wood. That guy’s got an actual flail. The craftsmanship is… insane.”
For a fleeting moment, a spark of their old selves flickered. Ellie followed her gaze, her historian’s mind automatically cataloging the weapon’s construction. May’s secret passion for medieval weaponry momentarily overrode her fear. They shared a look, a silent, giddy recognition of something authentically cool in this nightmare. It was fun, or something dangerously close to it.
A group of younger villagers started a clumsy, energetic dance near the Maypole. The music was a pipe and a tabor, repetitive and lively. A boy with straw-colored hair grabbed May’s free hand, his own callused and strong. “Dance, northern girl!”
May froze, panic flooding her face. She looked at Agnes, who gave a tiny, tense nod. “Go on, girl. Don’t be dull.”
May was pulled into the whirl. She moved stiffly at first, all wrong angles, but the simple steps were easy to mimic. A laugh, genuine and startled, burst from her as she was spun. Ellie watched, a lump in her throat. Her best friend, a genius coder from the 21st century, was dancing a jig in a muddy field, her dark hair flying from under her coif. The surreal joy of it was almost painful.
Agnes introduced them to a woodsman with a beard like a thicket, to a midwife with gentle hands, to a farmer who complained about the price of seed. Each interaction was a tightrope walk. Ellie kept her answers to “aye” and “nay” and “thank you.” Their accents, carefully muted, passed as merely strange.
The sun warmed their shoulders. The mead warmed their bellies. The music wove a fragile spell of normalcy. For an hour, the constant knot of fear in Ellie’s chest loosened. She watched the dancing, the laughing, the simple, brutal vitality of it. This was life, raw and unfiltered. It was terrifying, but it was also, undeniably, alive.
The spell shattered with the arrival of a single rider.
He came from the road, not the village, on a heavy destrier that scattered chickens and children alike. He wore the King’s livery, a familiar, hateful splash of color. It was the same man from the hut, Master Rylan. His face was a closed fist.
All noise died around him, the music stumbling to a halt. The pipe’s last note hung in the suddenly cold air.
Rylan’s eyes swept the crowd, zeroing in on Agnes with predatory ease. He didn’t dismount. The horse stamped, its breath pluming in the spring air.
“Goodwife Agnes,” he called, his voice cutting through the silence. No pretense of courtesy now. “The Lady Inquisitor summons you. Immediately.”
A collective, almost imperceptible shudder ran through the villagers. They took subtle steps back, creating a wider circle around Agnes and the girls.
Agnes stood very still. “For what purpose, Master Rylan? On this holy day?”
“Her purpose is her own,” he snapped. His icy gaze slid to Ellie, then to May, who had stopped dancing, her chest heaving from the exertion. “You will bring your… cousin’s girls. The Inquisitor has questions about your northern kin.”
The world seemed to tilt. The smells of roast meat and mead turned sickly. The fun was a distant, fool’s memory.
“We must finish our—” Agnes began, a last, desperate attempt.
“Now,” Rylan interrupted, the finality in his voice as sharp as a blade. He turned his horse, expecting compliance. “Or I will bind you and drag you behind my saddle. The choice is yours.”
Agnes’s weathered face went ashen. She looked at the girls, her eyes filled with a bleak apology and a clear, terrifying command. Without a word, she turned and began walking toward the path that led out of the meadow, away from the music and the crowd, toward the road and the unknown Inquisitor.
Ellie’s feet moved, numb and heavy, to follow. May fell in step beside her, their shoulders brushing. Not a word passed between them. The festive meadow, with its lingering music and stunned silence, fell away behind them. The only sound was the crunch of their shoes on the gravel path, the jangle of the knight’s harness, and the pounding of their own trapped hearts, marching them toward a judgment they had spent weeks desperately trying to avoid.