The real Somerset folklore behind THE KING BENEATH THE HILL — no spoilers, and no Book One required. This is the old story. September is what I did with it.
Friends. Before I tell you about the next Troth book, I want to tell you about the hill.
Glastonbury Tor rises out of the Somerset Levels like something the landscape didn't agree to — a steep, terraced, weirdly singular hill crowned with a ruined church tower, visible for miles across country that is otherwise flat as a held breath. The Levels flood. They have always flooded. For most of history the Tor spent its winters as a near-island in silver water, which is one reason the old name for this country was the Isle of Avalon, and one reason people have been telling stories about this particular hill for as long as there have been people to tell them.
The story I care about is the oldest one: the hill is hollow, and someone lives inside.
Welsh tradition gives him a name — Gwyn ap Nudd, king of Annwn, the Otherworld — and gives the Tor to him as a doorway. Not a metaphorical one. A door. Gwyn is the king under the hill: lord of the fair folk, leader of the Wild Hunt that rides the winter sky, keeper of the boundary between the living country and the country beneath it. The medieval life of St. Collen preserves the encounter everyone half-remembers: the saint, living as a hermit on the Tor's slopes, is summoned three times to meet the king inside the hill. He finally climbs up carrying a flask of holy water, finds a shining palace where no palace should fit, is offered a feast — and flings the water, and the whole of it vanishes, king and court and castle, leaving him alone on a cold hillside in the wind.
Notice what the story doesn't say. It doesn't say Gwyn was destroyed. It says the door closed.
Below the hill, meanwhile, stood one of the greatest religious houses in England. Glastonbury Abbey and the Tor lived side by side for something like a thousand years — the bells at the bottom of the hill, the old king at the top, prayer and legend keeping a wary, workable peace across a few hundred yards of Somerset. Pilgrims climbed the terraces. The monks kept their hours. Whatever was under the hill kept whatever it kept.
And then, in 1539, in the space of a single autumn, the arrangement ended. The abbey was dissolved — one of the last in England to fall — its abbot executed on the summit of the Tor itself, its bells silenced, its library scattered. A thousand years of daily observance stopped mid-sentence. Whatever the bells had been saying to the hill, no one said it anymore.
One more thread, because it's my favorite: the Glastonbury Thorn. A hawthorn that flowers at midwinter — actual botanical fact, a Levantine variety that blooms around Christmas, when no English hawthorn has any business blooming. The town's story says it sprang from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea. It's a lovely story. It has the specific shape of a story a town tells when it needs a safe explanation for something it would rather not examine: a tree, on that hill, flowering in the dead of winter, as if something under the ground were warm.
That's the inheritance: a hollow hill with a king inside, a door that closes but never quite locks, a thousand years of bells that stopped all at once in 1539, and a thorn that blooms when nothing should.
The King Beneath the Hill is set in that exact year, in that exact town, in the months when the bells were failing — and my Warden is what I believe was actually up there: not a fairy king in a shining palace, but something older, more tired, and more faithful than any story the saints wrote down. Someone has been holding that door for a very long time. In September, someone falls through it.
No preorder on this one, by the way. When it's finished, it will simply appear — and this list will hear it first.