Child Rowland dedicated to Juliet and Willa who support Story Nory on Patreon.

Hello and welcome to Story Nory. This is Johnna and I'm back with another English fairy tale.

This story is quite dark and mysterious and it features a very old English game which we call

Football.

Many centuries ago in the time of knights and dragons, three brothers and their sister were playing

football on a green in front of a church. The youngest whose name was Rowland was the most

skilled with the ball. He scooped it up off the ground with his foot and bounced it up and down

on his knees. And until finally he let it drop. But as he was about to kick it, he slipped in the mud

and instead of driving the ball towards the goal, he sent it up into the air and it sawed over the

nave of the church and landed in the graveyard behind it. His two older brothers looked at him

as he lay on the ground and chorus together. Rowland! Meanwhile their sister Ellen skipped

off to fetch the ball from behind the church. But she was not careful to go around the church,

keeping it on her right hand side. No, instead she circled the church on her left.

In other words, she went widdishins. In superstitious times it was considered bad luck to go

widdishins because the sun travels in the opposite direction. The three boys waited for their sister

to return from behind the church and then they waited some more. But she did not come back.

They looked at each other and shrugged. Eventually Rowland went to look for Ellen.

He found her footprints leading into the graveyard. But they stopped in mid-track

as if she had vanished into thin air.

The mother of these four children was none other than Queen Gwynnevea. By this time her husband

King Arthur was buried on the island of Avalon. His famed nights of the round table had dispersed.

The castle of Kamlott lay in ruins and she now lived with her children in a townhouse in the

...