I was feeling rather sleepy after I ate, especially when I put on my warm, freshly cleaned clothes, but Ida had other ideas. She pulled me into the other room, where Hadel and Balthilda were. I stopped in the doorway and gaped.
Hadel sat at a spinning wheel, and piled at her feet were skeins of threads in colors that no dye could make. Red brighter than strawberries, yellow like sunshine, blue like the morning sky and blue like deep water, green like the forest leaves, and all shades in between, colors I had never seen in the world.
Balthilda was knitting what looked like a shawl, creating a fluid and intricate pattern with Hadel’s rich threads. She worked with such speed and rhythm, her fingers and knitting needles became a blur.
But what amazed me the most were the tapestries. Every inch of the walls was covered with bright pictures full of life: a white unicorn in a field of orange poppies, dancing princesses, a knight shielding the red fire of a dragon, a maiden in a tower. In the middle of the room was a big loom, strung with varying shades of threads. Ida went and sat behind the loom, moving her hands across the strings, weaving her threads in and out and around each other. As she drew the fibers together, they created vibrant pictures—birds and pixies and flowers—and they were so lifelike they seemed to breathe and move as if in a gentle breeze. Surely, this was magic. Magic like how I spun the gold, and how my mother had.
As I watched, I had a tingling sensation in my toes and fingers, my head and my chest. This was where everything started, where I started. It all began with my mother, and she began here.
“How does it work?” I asked.
“Enchantments,” Ida said with a thrill in her voice. “Magic.”
“Ida,” said Balthilda. It sounded like a warning.
“We do more of our own work than the magic does,” said Ida. “We just allow enough enchantment to give the fibers a nudge.”
“You’re nudging a little hard there, don’t you think?” said Hadel. She had been spinning wool into a gentle shade of lavender, but as she spoke, the color deepened to a violent purple.
“It will fetch a good price at the market,” said Ida.
“Yes, but at what cost to you?”
“Oh, Hadel, you worry too much. There is no greed or pride in this, only beauty.”
Hadel glared at the tapestry but continued with her spinning, and as she fell back into the rhythm, her threads lightened back to lavender.
“Can you only change the color of the threads?” I asked. “Or can you change what they’re made of?”
“A little, but not too much,” said Hadel. “I would never be so foolish or greedy.” She eyed me, and again, I felt that she could see right down inside me, to the foolishness and greed that had gotten me into so much trouble.
“Hadel is very cautious,” said Ida.
“We would all do well to be cautious, considering what happened to his mother,” Hadel said, nodding toward me.
Balthilda put her knitting down. “Hadel. It could happen to anyone.”
“Anyone foolish enough to be so greedy.”
“Anyone can be greedy,” said Ida.
“Clearly,” said Hadel.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but I never knew my mother—”
“Oh! You poor thing! We are being insensitive,” said Ida. She dropped her work and rushed to comfort me.
“No, it isn’t that. It’s just … Well, I hardly know anything about her. I knew that she was from Yonder and that she could spin. Her spinning wasn’t like other people’s, but how was she foolish and greedy?” The three aunts stopped what they were doing and exchanged cautious looks.
“Did she make any of this?” I asked, pointing to the tapestries and yarns.
“No,” said Balthilda. “She traded everything she made.”
“Including her soul,” mumbled Hadel under her breath.
“Hadel!” gasped Ida. “Our poor nephew!”
“Well, he’s poor because of her. Don’t you think he has a right to know?”
They all fell silent. Balthilda and Ida stared at the ground, but Hadel watched me, her big eye twitching.
“I know about her spinning,” I spoke up again, dancing around the questions I most wanted to ask. I wanted to know what had happened to my mother. I wanted to know if there was anything that could be done about my problems, but I couldn’t decide how much I wanted them to know about me. “I know that she could spin … valuable things. Will you tell me what happened to her?”
“Greed,” said Hadel. “Greed and magic sucked her in and spun her to death.”
“Hadel, be sensitive,” said Ida.
“It’s the truth. You were too young to understand.”
Ida opened her mouth in protest, but Balthilda cut her off. “She was a fine spinner,” said Balthilda in a gentle voice, “the finest there has ever been in Yonder or anywhere.”
“Not so fine, considering,” said Hadel.
Balthilda glared at Hadel and began again. “I will say she was unwise, and a bit overly confident, even though she was a fine spinner, and that is where the trouble began. You see, Robert, in our work we must balance the skill of our own hands with the magic we use to transform the threads.” She held out her knitting as if to show me. “We do not call for more magic than we have skill, because then we lose control of the outcome. We lose control of ourselves.” I thought of poor Kessler, and the sick dread in my stomach returned. “Anna knew this, but she always pushed the limits. She was always experimenting.”
“How?” I asked.
Balthilda put down her knitting and swept a strand of graying hair back from her face. “Your mother could spin wool into velvet and grass into silk. Beautiful threads. Her work was much admired, but we feared she was losing the balance. Yet somehow it never seemed to affect her. She always managed to bargain well at the markets, so in spite of our warning, Anna came to believe that her skill was more powerful than any magic.”
“She thought she could control it, you mean?”
Balthilda nodded. “One day Anna told a wealthy merchant that she could spin any worthless thing into something beautiful and valuable. Well, he took her at her word. He had a bundle of straw in his cart and said he would be pleased with her skill only if she could turn the straw into gold. He promised her a fair trade if she could fulfill the task.”
“I warned her, that fool,” said Hadel, “but she was all pride and greed.”
“It was dangerous, to be sure,” continued Balthilda.
“But she couldn’t have known just how dangerous,” said Ida. “It wasn’t her fault. That merchant was the greedy one!”
“When she told me of the bargain she had made, I truly hoped she would fail,” said Balthilda. “Velvet and linen and silk were one thing, but gold? I didn’t think it possible. I hoped it wasn’t, but to my dismay, Anna succeeded beyond what I ever could have imagined. She spun that straw into gold, into perfect glimmering skeins of gold more pure than any gold in The Kingdom. But even her skill could not match the enormous magic of spinning straw into gold.”
All three sisters looked down, filled with an unspoken grief.
“Was the merchant’s trade fair?” I asked.
Hadel blew through her lips like a horse. “Fair! That man swindled her to pieces! When he came and demanded what had been made of his straw, of course he was delighted, and what’s more, Anna had no power to demand a fair bargain. That’s what happens when you get greedy with the magic. You lose control. The merchant gave her a sack of grain for her pile of gold, declaring that it was a fair trade, for without his straw she would’ve had nothing to spin.”
I shivered, remembering the first time I had traded with the miller, how my tongue had swelled in my mouth and I mechanically accepted his bargain. I didn’t understand then what it all meant.
“I remember that day,” said Ida. “I was small, but I remember her nearly fainting as she held that sack of grain. Her face! She looked as though she had seen death.”
“You’d
think she would have stopped there,” said Hadel. “But, no, she was determined to be the greediest wench there ever was.”
“Hadel, you mustn’t speak so of our sister. She only thought to remedy her mistake,” said Ida.
“Yes, well, it didn’t work, did it?”
I felt as if all my past troubles were being laid out before me, troubles I well knew, and I was waiting, hoping for them to tell me the solution. “What happened?”
Balthilda’s eyes glistened with tears. She fumbled with her knitting and brought it close to her face, as if her work would keep her emotions at bay.
“She didn’t believe she had lost control because of the magic. She claimed it was because the merchant had given her the straw. She spun more gold, this time from her own straw, thinking she could negotiate the terms of the trade, but she couldn’t. She took that gold thread to the markets and sold it for a pittance. People always start a bargain ridiculously low, and Anna had no power to refuse or suggest a price. Whatever they offered, she had to take, and the gold was theirs.”
I knew that feeling. I was blind to it at first, but with Opal, I recalled the powerlessness I felt at not being able to suggest a trade, or even refuse one I thought abominable.
“Then the merchant returned,” growled Hadel.
“Yes. That was truly the worst part,” said Balthilda.
“He returned with a wagon full of straw for Anna to spin,” said Ida. “I remember that. So much straw, and I knew what he wanted. I knew!”
This merchant was sounding a lot like the miller.
“Anna refused,” said Balthilda. “But the merchant told her he was on his way to The Kingdom and he was certain that King Herbertus, the ruler at the time, would be interested to know of Anna’s great skill. It was a threat she couldn’t live with. Anna was so fiercely independent, and she knew that any king would want to use her skill for his own gain. So she spun the gold for the merchant once more, and for payment, he gave her a new spinning wheel, so that she might spin for him on many more occasions.”
“Rumpel,” said Hadel. “She was locked in a rumpel then.”
Her voice was so soft I almost didn’t hear her. “What? She was locked in what?”
“Rumpel. That’s what we call our own work sometimes. It means wrapped or trapped in magic. We wrap our work in magic; only your mother did it to herself: she spun herself in magic so tight it killed her.”
“Oh, Hadel, that’s ridiculous!” said Ida. “A person can’t be trapped in a rumpel! And I’m sure Anna didn’t spin again once she left. She probably died in childbirth.”
“She died right after I was born,” I said.
“See?”
“You think that, Ida, if it gives you comfort. But I say once you’ve become unbalanced in the magic, rumpel grabs you and spins you fast and tight, so that it’s impossible to get out. It suffocates you. She was never free of it, no matter what she died from. A rumpel never lets go.” Hadel fixed her crooked gaze on me until a chill ran up my neck and through my bones.
“What happened then?” I asked.
“She knew the merchant would never leave her alone,” said Balthilda. “So she ran away that very afternoon. She told no one where she was going, and she took nothing with her but the wheel from the merchant.”
“I begged her not to go,” said Ida as she wiped tears from her eyes. “I ran down the road, crying for her. I waited outside for days for her to return. Ooh, I’d like to wrap my threads around that merchant’s fat, greedy neck!” She twisted the threads in her hands.
“The last we heard was that she had married a man from far away and she died shortly after of illness. We never knew she had a son.…”
They kept talking, but their words faded from me. Rumpel. Was that what my mother had named me? Because she was trapped in the magic, and she knew I would be too. It made sense to me, but it didn’t bring me any comfort. I didn’t feel like more of a person, smarter or bigger like I always hoped I would. I felt smaller and more alone than ever.
“Come, Robert, you must be exhausted.” Ida pulled me to my feet and led me back to the kitchen. “Here we are, nice and cozy.” In a corner near the hearth, there was a little bed made of a pile of straw and two blankets woven with blue-and-green wool. I stared at the straw and shivered.
Ida frowned and bit her lip. “My sisters and I share a bed. I’m sorry we don’t have another. I thought you would be most comfortable here.”
“Oh,” I said, forcing a smile. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. “It’s wonderful, really. Straw is so … warm.”
Ida stared at me for a moment. She had been so kind and excited when I came, but now I could see the wariness in her eyes too. “Good night, Robert.” She left me with only the last glows of the coals for light.
Every part of me was exhausted as I slumped down in the straw bed and closed my eyes. I was too tired to think. The only thing I had in my mind as I drifted off to sleep was the drumming of a single word, over and over. Rumpel, Rumpel, Rumpel …
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Growing Crazy
I woke to hushed voices in the dark. Where was I? Who was there? Was I in danger? My heart pounded and then I remembered. I was with the Wool Witches, my aunts, my mother’s sisters. They had just told me how she died and why I was the way I was. They had told me my name.
Rumpel.
My aunts’ whispers carried from the opposite corner of the room. I couldn’t see them, but I strained to hear their voices.
“He’s not telling us something,” whispered Hadel.
“What would you have him tell us? Anna died when he was just a baby. He knew nothing of her troubles.”
“Anna died, but that doesn’t mean her trouble died with her. If she was in a rumpel—”
“Oh, stop! She was not trapped in a rumpel!”
“You don’t understand,” said Hadel. “If she was in a rumpel when the boy was born, the magic wouldn’t have died with her. It would affect her child too.”
“You think the boy is in a rumpel too?” Balthilda asked.
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous!” hissed Ida. “He probably has a gift just as Anna did. We could teach him our work, only this time—”
“No!” said Hadel in a harsh whisper. “That would only bring trouble for all of us. And, besides, who knows what he is running from?”
Silence passed for a minute, and then Ida spoke. “Do you think he came to us for help?”
Hadel spoke gravely. “A rumpel is deep magic. If it has been the boy’s state since birth, it would be all the stronger.”
“The knowledge must have tortured Anna,” said Balthilda. “Oh, how she must have suffered!”
“She deserved it,” said Hadel.
“Shame, Hadel!” snapped Ida. “No one deserves such suffering. No one!”
“Perhaps we should question him,” said Balthilda.
“He would tell us if he wanted us to know,” said Ida. “Let him be.”
“Don’t we have a right to know? If he’s running from something, it will catch up to him. You can’t hide from a rumpel.”
“But he’s so small and young,” said Ida. “We must be able to help him.”
“We couldn’t help Anna,” said Balthilda. “There was nothing for us to do.”
“Who knows what the boy will do to us,” said Hadel.
They all fell silent then and didn’t speak anymore. Soon I heard the rhythm of their snores, but I stayed awake for a long time, thinking over their words, thinking on one word. A name. Rumpel. I was certain now. Rumpel was my name, because that’s what I was. This was why I could spin the gold. This was why the trolls could smell so much magic on me. I was born in the magic, trapped inside of it. What had been my mother’s purpose in giving me such a name? Was it a warning? A cry of despair? Or maybe just the cold, hard truth.
Balthilda said there was no help for a rumpel. Had The Witch of The Woods known about rumpels? Did my aunts know about stiltskins? If I found one, coul
d it still set me free? And would my aunts even allow me to stay? I might bring danger to them, as they said, but I had nowhere to go. These were my mother’s sisters. They were the only family I had in the world.
I wrapped the blankets tighter around me, trying to feel warm and safe, but I only felt alone, shivering with fear. I wished more than anything that I were back on The Mountain with Gran sitting by the fireplace telling me stories about other people’s magic troubles.
My aunts were talking again when I woke the next morning. They sat around the table in their chairs: Hadel in the blue, Balthilda in the violet, and Ida in the yellow. That must mean the green chair had been my mother’s.
When my aunts saw me, they grew quiet. Hadel very deliberately inspected my pile of hay, as if I might have turned it to gold just by sleeping in it.
Ida handed me two slices of bread for breakfast. “Did you sleep well?” she asked with a searching look, as if she were trying to see the rumpel that bound me.
“Yes, thank you,” I said, taking the bread and sitting down in the green chair. No one spoke another word for the rest of breakfast.
My aunts busied themselves with their work—baking bread, combing wool, and sweeping the dirt out the door. When I offered to help with the chores, Ida warmed considerably, and she was delighted when I said I could milk a goat. She handed me a bucket. “Eloise is grazing in the back.”
“Eloise?”
“The goat, of course. Her name is Eloise.”
“I never heard of an animal with a name.” Calling our goat Milk and our donkey Nothing was strange enough, but giving an animal a name you would give a human was unheard of.
“Haven’t you?” asked Ida. “How silly. How can we expect them to give us any respect or work if we don’t give them a proper name? Common sense.”
I thought she was crazy until I milked Eloise. She filled the bucket to the brim. Milk couldn’t have filled an inch. Maybe Nothing would have been a little less ornery if I’d given him a proper name. He probably didn’t like being called Nothing any more than I liked being called Rump.