Rump: The True Story of Rumpelstiltskin (17 page)

“And do they all spin the same way as you?”

“Well, I suppose a few have lost a finger or two in the business, but mostly we all get on the same. Not much to it.”

“But I’ve heard tales … stories of those who can spin wonderful things. Not regular yarn, but more … uh … valuable things.”

The man stopped his spinning and looked up at me with pale, penetrating eyes.

I stepped back.

“You’re speakin’ of the Wool Witches?”

“The Wool Witches? Is there such a thing?”

“Oh yes,” he said with a laugh. “And they’re witches, all right, can turn wool into silk and grass into silver! Their work is quite fine, though I’ve never seen it. They travel to trade it. Won’t trade with anyone they know. They live there, in those woods.” He pointed in the direction of the mill.

Witches must like to live hidden in trees.

“Thank you,” I said, and turned to leave.

“Watch your step,” said the old man.

I froze. “Excuse me?”

“You’re stepping in my wool,” he said, pointing to my feet.

“Oh … right. Sorry.… Thank you.”

I walked through the little village and kept my eyes on the ground. I could feel the stares on the back of my head.
I guessed they didn’t get many visitors. Well, we never did on The Mountain, either. I glanced up as I passed the mill. A girl sat outside combing through wool. She reminded me of Opal. Opal and bargains and babies. My stomach twisted. I looked back down at the ground and stepped into the trees.

There was a dusty little road leading into the woods, but soon it became a narrow, rocky trail, which twisted and wound until I thought I might be going in circles. Then the trail faded altogether, and I wondered if it was one of those tricky paths Red used to find her granny. These were witches, after all.

Pixies flitted about my nose and buzzed in my ears. Maybe I should roll in the mud again. Maybe I should find the path and go back, but then I saw smoke rising in the distance. As I drew closer, the pixies seemed to multiply, and they danced and squealed all around me. Finally, I came to a little cottage with flowers blossoming along the hedge and a stone path that led to a door painted bright red.

A red door was a bad sign. I felt all hot and twitchy. I shouldn’t be here. These witches might not know anything about my mother. They might not know anything about my kind of spinning. And they might not be nice.

Before I could change my mind, the door flew open and a girl stepped outside. She squealed in delight. “A visitor! Oh, do come in! We have cake!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Wool Witches

The girl grabbed me by the arm and yanked me inside. The first thing I noticed was a delicious smell, sweet and spicy. My stomach growled. Food. Real food.

The room was large, but it was many rooms in one, just like my cottage: the kitchen, the bedroom, and the sitting room all occupied their own corners of one big open room, which was bursting with colors and patterns. Sunlight poured in from three tall windows, their curtains intricately embroidered with vines, birds, and blossoms. Four chairs circled a big oak table. They were painted in bright blue, violet, yellow, and green, and each was built in its own unique style and shape, as if they had been designed for very different people. A large bed took up an entire wall and was covered with a blanket woven in rich rainbow colors. The room seemed to hum as if it were alive.

“Now, what is your name?” the girl asked. “No, let me guess! I love guessing names.” She put her fingers to her mouth and studied me. She was maybe just a few years older than me, and pretty, with black curls all around her face and eyes as green as new spring grass. “Your name is … Herbert. No, no, you don’t look like a Herbert. Bertram? No, you don’t have the right aura for that. Ooh, tricky, tricky! Something unusual—one of a kind, I think. Zelgemeier? Woldenecht? Rolfando?”

“Ida, who is it?” said a voice coming through a small doorway to the right. Another woman entered who looked very much like the girl, but older. She had gray streaked in her black hair and lines around her mouth and eyes. When she saw me, she froze. “Oh my.”

The woman closed her eyes and took a deep breath and then opened them again.

“What is it, Sister?” said Ida.

“Hadel! Come here!” the older woman shouted.

Another woman came hobbling in. This one looked more like a witch to me. She wasn’t so old, but she was hunched and she had a cane and one foot was turned in. Her face was lopsided: one eye squinting while the other was wide. Her mouth was pinched and cross, but when her big eye was level with mine, her expression softened and her mouth hung open.

“Do you see it?” said the second woman.

“See what?” said Ida.

“Anna,” said the lopsided witch.

“Anna was my mother,” I explained.

Ida gasped. It was as if they had all been frozen by some spell. Shocked into silence. I felt like an idiot.

Finally, Ida broke into a laugh. “Nephew!” She rushed to me and crushed me against her, which might have felt comforting if I could breathe. When she released me, she squeezed my cheeks between her hands and said, “Isn’t he beautiful? Our nephew, Sisters! Anna’s son! Who could ever have known?”

The second sister blinked and came to me. She reached out a finger and lifted my chin.

“He looks very much like Anna, doesn’t he, Hadel?”

Hadel finally broke from her stupor as well, but she didn’t come to me. She paused, looking me over with her big eye, and then grumbled, “I don’t see it as something to rejoice over.” She hobbled out of the room. Ida’s cheerful face fell, and her older sister looked at me with a suspicious frown. This was a mistake. They didn’t want me here. I shouldn’t have come. I took a step back, but Ida caught me by the shoulder.

“Oh, don’t mind Hadel, dear nephew,” said Ida. “She has always been crabby. This is Balthilda. We are so glad you came to us! You may call me Aunty Ida. Come and have ca—”

“Ida, we know nothing of the boy,” Balthilda cut in, “where he came from, how he found us, or even what his name is.”

“His name.” Ida’s face darkened. “I’ve been unable to guess it. So curious. I’m usually spot-on.”

I looked between them. I was so tired, the idea of
trying to explain my name and everything else overwhelmed me. I didn’t really want to see the look on their faces. “My name is Robert.”

Balthilda furrowed her brow, confused.

“Well,” said Ida, looking disappointed, “I never would have guessed that.”

“How is it that you found us, Robert?” asked Balthilda.

“I asked in the village about my mother. Nobody remembered her, but when I asked about spinning …”

Balthilda stiffened, but nodded. They must know about my mother’s spinning.

“Oh, but come eat cake and see what we are making!” Ida dragged me through a small corridor leading to another room, but Hadel barred the doorway with her walking stick. “You’re filthy!” she growled.

“Hadel, Robert is our nephew and our guest!”

Hadel’s big eyes looked me up and down, and I felt that she could see every secret I held. “Hmph. Robert, you’ll take a bath before you set foot in here. You look like you grew from dirt!”

The bathtub was in a corner of the kitchen. Balthilda poured hot water in the tub and held out soap and a brush to scrub myself. Then she and Ida left the room through the doorway where Hadel had gone.

After I washed, my clothes were hanging to dry by the fire, so I wrapped myself in a quilt sewn with a hundred different colors.

“I made that,” said Ida when she returned. “Do you like it?”

“How do you get so many colors?” I asked, brushing my hands over the intricate patterns.

“It’s all in the fingertips. Wait until you see what I’m working on now.”

While my clothes dried, Ida fed me as much food as I could shove into my mouth, which was a lot. Not only had I forgotten what it was like to be clean, I had forgotten what it was like to eat real food instead of wormy sludge. And this food was even better than the food I remembered eating—better than Martha’s meat pies, or Red’s granny’s stew. It was certainly better than sludge. There were beets and potatoes sprinkled with herbs and cheese, fresh bread, and milk. I’d never had cake before, but it turned out to be a sort of bread that was sweet and crumbly and moist. I had three helpings.

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.”