That night I sat with my aunts again as they worked. Ida was weaving the same tapestry from the night before, and as she formed pixies with her threads, I could almost hear their squeals and giggles. Balthilda was knitting something different tonight, something with green fabric, though I couldn’t tell what it was. Hadel sat in a dim corner spinning, but her wool glowed as it wrapped on the bobbin so it shone through the darkness.
My fingertips tingled as I watched, like they itched to spin. I curled my fingers into tight fists, trying to crush that feeling out of me. Hadel looked up, her big eye boring into me. I turned back to Ida.
“Can you tell me more about how it works?” I asked Ida.
Ida smiled, full of delight, like she’d been waiting her whole life to show someone and explain what she could do. “Think of drawing water from a well. You pull the magic inside of you as one might pull the water up from the well, slow and steady. You try to measure what you can do on your own, and then you imagine what you would like the magic to improve. Then you pour the magic from your fingers right into the threads—not too much, though, just a little spark.” Her hands moved quickly over the loom, pulling threads in and out, the colors swirling and shimmering.
“Where do you pull the magic from?”
“Everywhere!” She laughed. “Magic is everywhere. In the air, in the ground, in fire and water and the stars and clouds and the sun. The sun is bursting with magic. You pull it in from all around you.”
“How?”
“Like you pull air into your lungs.”
“What if you pull too much in?”
“Well, I …” Ida hesitated. “You push it back. You can feel when it starts to overwhelm you.”
“But how do you push it back?”
She looked confused. I could tell she was trying to explain something she had always known how to do, but didn’t know exactly how she did it. Like seeing or smelling or wiggling your fingers.
“You just push it back.”
“And what happens if you don’t push it back? What if you let it overwhelm you?”
“Then you get into trouble,” said Hadel in a gruff voice. “Like your mother.”
I didn’t ask any more questions.
I studied my aunts’ work very intently for the next few nights. Mostly, I wanted to watch Hadel, to see her pull the magic in and push it back as she spun. But she was difficult to watch because that big eye of hers always caught me with a cold stare that made me shiver. So I watched Ida and Balthilda work instead. I focused on their fingers, trying to see how the magic came in, but I saw nothing. Although there were no sparks or flames, it all looked like magic to me.
I tried to forget about spinning gold, and the next week Ida and Balthilda helped take my mind off things by surprising me with new clothes—two sets of them! Who besides nobles and kings and princesses owned two sets of clothes? Ida wove the fabric on her loom and then cut and sewed it: brown and blue woolen pants and two shirts. Balthilda presented me with two knitted sweaters, one with many colors interwoven, and one green, bright but somehow calm, like spring on The Mountain. The green was my favorite.
“Hadel spun that green just for you,” said Ida.
“Thank you,” I said.
Hadel grunted, “It’s the color of your eyes.”
“You have your mother’s eyes,” said Balthilda.
“So we hope it’s a good surprise,” said Ida, emphasizing the rhyme, which made me smile. I guess rhymes must run in the family.
As I folded up the sweater, I wondered what my mother had been like. How she smiled and laughed. Did she make up rhymes too? My aunts rarely mentioned her, and when they did, it was always with sadness or, in Hadel’s case, anger. I imagined that my mother had looked a lot like Ida with her black hair and merry smile.
“Do I look anything like Mother?” I asked her. “Besides my eyes, that is.”
Ida shook her head. “The rest of you must look like your father. I’ll wager he was handsome.”
“I never knew him, either. He died before I was born, in the mines.”
“Then who has been caring for you all these years?”
“My gran, but she’s gone now too.”
Ida’s eyes swam with tears. “Oh! You poor thing! Nothing sad should ever happen to you again.” And she squeezed me so tight I started seeing sparks. I liked Ida, but I wasn’t sure I liked all the crying and squeezing girls seemed so fond of. I missed Red.
After a few weeks, my aunts became less wary of me and we settled into a routine. Ida was the sweetest toward me, and she made sure to put huge amounts of food in front of me, which I ate and ate. Balthilda was kind but quiet, and Hadel stayed as far away from me as possible. If I ever came near, her big eye got bigger and her squinty eye crinkled up like a knot on a tree. She seemed to think I was contagious. And I never forgot her words: You can’t hide from a rumpel.
The spring turned to summer, and instead of spinning and weaving and knitting by fires, my aunts did their work by open windows, waiting for a breeze to come in. The problem with open windows was the pixies.
“Oh, these pixies!” said Ida, brushing a green-haired, fuzzy-winged pixie off her loom. “I do think they are worse this year.”
“Yes,” said Hadel, and she eyed me as several pixies rested on my shirt.
“Why do pixies like it so much here?” I asked innocently.
“They like the bright colors,” said Balthilda. “Color and shine are the next best thing to gold for a pixie, so we usually have more than our fair share”—she swatted one away—“but they’ve never been quite this bad.”
I now had three pixies fluttering around my head. Ever so faintly, I heard one of them chanting for gold in its tiny voice. I hoped my aunts didn’t notice.
It became my job to shoo the pixies outside. I waited by the window with a rag, flicking it at them every time they came near. They usually laughed and it became a game, but sometimes I’d give a pixie a good whack and it would flip through the air and fly away topsy-turvy. I kind of enjoyed it.
On cool days, when the windows were shut, I would help my aunts with their work. Balthilda had me hold her yarns so they wouldn’t tangle as she knit, and sometimes I would arrange Hadel’s yarns according to their shades.
Helping Ida was my favorite. She’d let me pick colors for her loom or suggest a picture she could put into a tapestry. I suggested trolls once, but she didn’t like that idea, so I asked her to make an apple tree. When she finished, it looked so real I almost thought I could reach into the tapestry, pluck an apple, and take a bite. It looked just like the magical apple tree in the trolls’ forest.
Ida and I made rhymes as we worked. She was clever with her words, and we tossed the rhymes back and forth. This one was my favorite:
In Yonder there lived three lovely witches
Who spun and wove and sewed little stitches
Together they made me a new pair of britches
Just the right size with no snags to cause itches
But don’t let the witches
Make straw into riches
Because witches’ riches
Cause glitches
Ida and I got so used to speaking in rhyme, sometimes we didn’t even realize we were doing it.
“There’s a pixie on your head.”
“He must see a thread.”
“I’ll swat him away.”
“Please, don’t delay!”
One morning, when I tried to pull my pants up, they rose above my ankles.
“My pants have shrunk!” I cried to my aunts. I danced around in them. They were tight and uncomfortable.
Aunt Ida laughed and then cupped her hands over her mouth.
“Nothing happened to your pants,” said Hadel. “You did that yourself.”
“I didn’t shrink my pants.”
Ida shook her head and laughed. “Robert, look at yourself. You grew!”
I stopped hopping and almost fell over. “I … what?”
&nbs
p; “For all you eat, how can you be surprised?” said Hadel. “A cow can’t eat as much as you.”
I stared down at my feet with the pants hanging a few inches above my ankles, then glanced over at Ida. When I had first come, I barely reached her chest. Now my nose was level with her shoulder.
“But I don’t grow,” I said in disbelief.
“You do now,” laughed Ida. “Eat your oatmeal before it gets cold!”
I was excited—and confused. I had grown! Was it because I knew the rest of my name? That must be it.
I was so happy at the thought, I almost forgot about everything else—the spinning, the gold, the rumpel, and Opal’s promise to me. Somehow the growth made me think other things had changed too. Maybe I wasn’t as trapped anymore.
That morning I ate two bowls of oatmeal, filling my belly to bursting. I could almost feel myself growing! I was halfway through a third bowl when Ida spilled her gossip from the markets.
“The new queen is with child,” she said excitedly.
I choked on my oatmeal, coughed, and spit it out.
“Hope he’s not as big an oaf as his father,” grumbled Hadel.
“Who says it will be a boy?” asked Ida. “Perhaps we shall have a little princess.”
My stomach clenched, and I pushed away my oatmeal. My aunts’ conversation faded from my ears as a strange feeling came over me. Inside me I felt little threads, growing and spreading and knotting together, tangling me up and binding me tight. It was the rumpel—my curse.
The threads stayed tangled tight inside me all day.
My only hope was to keep myself hidden so I wouldn’t find out when the baby was born. If I never heard of the baby being born, I might not need to take it. My aunts were far from The Kingdom. They didn’t get little news, but they got big news, and a royal baby was big news. There was no way that I could avoid hearing of the baby’s birth while in the company of other people. I would have to leave and go far away. I would have to live alone.
It should have been a happy day. I had grown, but all I could think was, I am growing. I am growing crazy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Where There’s a Will, There’s No Way
I decided I wouldn’t have to leave right away. Babies take a long time to be born, almost a year. So I could wait. As the summer heat cooled and the leaves began to turn yellow and orange and red, my aunts traveled to the markets in turn. They traded their yarns and cloth and tapestries for grain and potatoes and carrots and onions. Ida came back with a bushel of apples and a pot of honey, which Hadel thought was very foolish, but even she couldn’t hide her delight at eating apple pies and hot biscuits drizzled with honey.
I licked my lips at the sight of all the food stacked in piles for winter. I thought I had time to stay through the winter.
One morning, when the first frost appeared, Hadel asked me to help her with a chore. She rarely even spoke to me, so I found it strange that she would ask for my help, but the chore she wanted help with was even stranger.
“It’s time to move the pixie nests.”
“Pixie nests? Move them?”
“Want to get the pixies out just before they’re ready to sleep for the winter so they’re too tired to move back.”
“Why don’t you just move them when they’re sleeping?”
“Have you ever woken a pixie from its winter sleep? Foolish thing to do. We move them while they’re tired but not sleeping.”
I watched as Hadel hobbled around and picked up what looked like nothing more than a decaying log, but when she brought it close, I peeked inside and saw a swarm of pixies crawling around, a hundred at least. They yawned and cuddled against each other or wrapped themselves in leaves, feathers, and bits of wool. They didn’t seem to notice or care that they were being carried off.
If only I had known about this before, I could have moved all the pixies far away from the cottage and the mines. Spring on The Mountain would have been a much more pleasant time.
“Hold this,” said Hadel. “I will gather others and you will follow me to where we will leave them.” She placed the nest gently in my arms and then hobbled off to gather other nests. She picked up a bundle of twigs and grass and reached up into the branches of a tree and brought down a tangled mass. This one looked like a bird’s nest, only woven completely shut in a delicate sphere. Another nest was made of leaves and twigs that hung like a basket from a tree. She cradled the nests in her apron.
I looked down at the log-nest in my arms. A pixie had fluttered sleepily to the opening. It chirped and sniffed like a squirrel searching for food. It fluttered its wings and landed on my hand. Oh no. Another came and another, until half the nest had risen from their sleepy stupor and were crawling up and down my arms and head, chirping and squeaking. One pixie with bright orange hair crawled down my nose, wrapped his hands around my nostril, and looked inside. His wings tickled my nose. I sneezed, and all the pixies shrieked and swarmed around me. Soon they settled again and continued their exploration.
Hadel came around a tree and froze at the sight of me.
“I think it would have been better to wait until they were really asleep,” I said.
“Stay still!” she hissed.
“I am.”
“Don’t move.”
“I’m not.”
“Stop talking!”
I shut my mouth.
With one hand, Hadel untied her apron and gently placed the nests on the ground. She took a bucket and filled it with dirt and walked slowly toward me. “I’m going to pour this on you, but don’t move until I say, understand? Don’t answer. Don’t move, don’t even blink.”
Of course I needed to blink. My eyes burned and my nose started to itch. I think I needed to sneeze again. And now my eyes were watering. Hadel walked slowly toward me. Painfully slow. Tears ran down my cheeks and the pixies swarmed on my face. The sneeze was burning in my nose. I tried to hold it in, but that only made it worse. I exploded.
“Ah—CHOO!”
Hadel pounced on me and flipped the bucket on top of me. The dirt poured down my head and face and arms.
The pixies scattered and screamed. Hadel took their nest and pulled out the bits of wool and leaves and made a trail for them, leading the pixies away from me to the hollow log. Slowly, the pixies calmed, gathered their bedding, and flew back into the nest.
As soon as the pixies had settled, Hadel hobbled to me, her wide eye boring into mine. “Has that ever happened before?”
Of course it had happened before. Pixies were always pestering me. But Hadel already suspected that something wasn’t right with me, and I wasn’t about to give her any more reason to think so.
“No,” I said. “Pixies usually hate me.”
“Do they?” She seemed amused. “Pixies have always been abundant here. They like shiny things, pretty things, but their numbers seem to be even greater since you arrived. Like they smell what they really love. Gold.”
“Gold?” I said, as though I had never heard of this before.
“Yes, gold. They can smell it from far away, and deep down in the earth. They smell it like a wolf smells blood, Robert.” She lowered her one big eye right level with mine. My heart was beating very hard in my chest so I could hear it pounding in my ears.
“My name isn’t Robert,” I said quietly. “My mother, she didn’t ever get to say my whole name before she died. No one ever heard all of it, you see. The only part she said was ‘Rump.’ ” I laughed nervously, but Hadel didn’t. She only widened her big eye. She knew what the name was really supposed to be. Tears burned in my eyes. I didn’t want to cry, not now in front of Hadel. I held my breath until the burning stopped.
“So you’ve spun, have you?” asked Hadel. Her voice was a little softer now.
I nodded.
“Spun yourself into trouble?”
“A wi— My friend’s granny told me that there was a way to get out of it. She said I needed a stiltskin.”
“A stiltskin,” mus
ed Hadel. “Yes, I’ve heard of them. Very rare, mysterious magic. I’ve never seen one. But, yes … maybe. Still, even with a stiltskin, it would be difficult.”
“Is there anything else? Is there any other help for it?”
Hadel put her knobby hand on my shoulder and pressed down. “There’s only one thing I know for sure about spinning.”
I waited, my whole chest expanding with hope.
“When you get your wool tangled in a knot, only the tangler can get it untangled.”
And with that, she scooped up her apron of pixie nests and hobbled away. She did not ask me to help.
“Is something wrong, Robert? You look pale.” Ida brushed her hands on my cheek. “You didn’t eat. Are you ill?”
“Just tired.”
“Too tired to eat?”
Hadel glanced up at me but didn’t say anything. She didn’t tell Ida or Balthilda about my name, and somehow this made me feel more hopeless, as if there was no need to explain because there was nothing they could do.
Ida sent me to bed early, but no sleep came. I waited for my aunts to settle in, and once I heard their even breathing and snores, I crept into the wool room with a handful of straw. The spinning wheel shone in a sliver of moonlight. I sat down. It was just a bunch of wood. In my hands was straw. Straw and wood, plain and totally unmagical. I tried to feel the magic in the air. I lifted my hands and closed my eyes and pictured pushing all the magic away. Back into the earth or the sun or wherever it came from.
Straw is straw
Gold is gold
This straw I hold
Won’t turn to gold
I started pushing down on the treadle, and I fed the straw through the wheel. Straw is straw. Gold is …
Gold. The straw turned to gold. I broke off the strand of gold and wrapped it around my finger. I tried again. Straw, straw, straw.
Gold. I ripped off the thread and crushed it to a tiny ball. I would not let the rumpel overpower me!
By my feet was Hadel’s wool basket. I took a handful of wool. Maybe straw always turned to gold, but I could spin wool without magic.