Rump: The True Story of Rumpelstiltskin (5 page)

“Gold! Gold! Gold!” the pixies sang in response.

I gathered the straw from the ground until I had a handful. I sat at the wheel. A few pixies fluttered around my hands and the straw and the bobbin.

“Gold! Gold! Gold!”

I fed the straw into the wheel.

Whir, whir, whir
.

I spun the straw.

My breath caught in my chest. I stopped, unable to believe what I was seeing. In my hand were bits of straw, but around the bobbin were glowing, shimmering threads. I brushed my fingers over the threads, smooth and warm.
Gold
. I had just spun straw into gold.

I let my breath out and my whole chest swelled. Straw! More straw! I scrounged for more straw on the ground, all the little bits I could pick up. I fed them through the wheel. More gold! I ripped open my mattress and pulled out the straw. Who needed a straw mattress when you could sleep on gold?

I laughed and chanted rhymes as I spun.

                
One gold thread

                
Will buy me bread

                
A pile of thread

                
Makes a crown for my head

Whir, whir, whir
.

I fed the straw into the wheel, rhythmically pulling and twisting it, and it made the most beautiful sound as it transformed into gold. A tinkling song, soft yet vibrant. More pixies burst from the crevices, and they all danced on the gold, twittering and screeching, “Gold, gold, gold!”

I laughed. I loved the pixies! I slid the silky gold off the bobbin and onto the floor to make room for more. I spun all the straw in my mattress. I spun until morning broke through the little window and sunlight made the gold glimmer. I stood and admired the fruits of my labor. A fortune lay at my feet. Enough to feed me and Gran for the rest of our lives!

Gran was still sound asleep, though the sky was lightening. Lately she slept until after I left for the mines, but I was so excited, I wanted to wake her and show her our fortune. This was my destiny, to be rich and fat and happy!

A shadowy movement caught the corner of my eye. I jerked around and saw a figure ducking beneath the window. I ran to the door and stepped outside. Two people were running down the street. Against the rising sun they were just two black shapes, but I knew those hulking outlines well. Frederick and Bruno.

I started to shake. All the excitement drained from me. I didn’t care why they had come here or what trick they had been waiting to play. I was only worried about one thing.

Had they seen the gold?

CHAPTER SEVEN
Gold Means Food

I tucked the gold beneath my blankets. The warm happiness I had felt at seeing all that gold fizzled as fast as snow on a hot griddle. Now I had a weighty, guilty, heart-pounding, sick-to-my-stomach dread.

I didn’t leave for the mines when I should have. I sat on top of the gold and thought of all the things that could happen. Frederick and Bruno might think I stole the gold. If they told, I could be arrested. I could go to the dungeons for the rest of my life, or even
lose
my life.

I had to tell Gran. Gran would know what to do. But when she rose from her bed, she looked so old and tired, so pale and stooped. I couldn’t tell her. Any more weight on those shoulders and Gran would crumple to the ground. And I remembered the way she had reacted when I first found the spinning wheel. She did not want me to spin, and now I realized it wasn’t because I couldn’t
do it, but because I could spin more than thread or yarn. I could spin straw into gold. And Gran had tried to keep me from doing it. What kind of magic was this?

No, I could not tell Gran. But I needed to tell someone because I felt heavy with worry, and I wouldn’t know whether my worry was real or not until I said it out loud to someone. The only person I could think of to tell was Red.

When Gran wasn’t looking, I removed the bobbin from the spinning wheel, wrapped it in a rag, and tied it to my waist.

I didn’t see Frederick or Bruno in the mines. Any other day this would have made me happy, but today it made me anxious.

The pixies swarmed around me more than ever. When I threw dirt over my head, they’d fly away for a minute or two, but they always came back. So I just let them crawl all over me, their tiny chant ringing in my ears: “Gold, gold, gold!”

“Wow, look at him! Look at the pixies!” said a little girl working closest to me along the sluice. “You must be finding
hoards
of gold.”

I didn’t find a speck.

When the sun was low, I waited for Red to come out of the tunnels. She had dirt smeared all over her face and looked cross. She walked right past me but I still followed her.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I want to show you something.”

“Show me, then.”

I looked around, wary. “And I need to tell you something.”

She walked even faster. “So tell me something.”

“It has to be someplace where no one will see or hear”—I brushed the pixies out of my eyes—“and where there are as few pixies as possible.”

Red scowled at me and kept walking. But after a while she stopped and turned back. “Hurry up, I’m hungry.”

I followed Red down the mountainside and through The Village. When we passed the mill, I got a cold prickle on my neck, like someone was watching me. I hurried past.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when Red went into The Woods, but it was getting cold and dark. I stopped just inside the trees.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To a place where no one will hear or see, and where there are no pixies. That
is
what you want, isn’t it?” Red folded her arms impatiently.

“Is it safe?” I asked.

“If you stay on the path. And don’t ask questions.”

“What path?” I looked down and my mouth fell open. There was a path beneath my feet, clearly trodden and winding farther into The Woods. I would have sworn it hadn’t been there before. I had never seen it. “How—?” I started, but Red cut me off.

“I said, don’t ask questions.” I closed my mouth and followed.

Red led us deep into The Woods, much deeper than I’d usually go. She didn’t seem afraid, though. In fact, she seemed more comfortable here than she was in The Village. She touched the trees as if they were friends. A bird fluttered down to a low branch and chirped as though he were saying something to Red, and I had the feeling she understood the bird, even though she pretended not to notice.

“Do you come here often?” I asked. Red glared at me. “Sorry.” I wasn’t supposed to ask questions, but questions were all that rose to my mind.

The path curved and twisted. Where was she taking me and how much farther was it? I bit my tongue to keep in the questions. Then I started to hear something, a low hum. It got louder as we walked. Suddenly we rounded a corner and came upon a giant fallen tree. The tree was swarming with bees. I froze. I saw Red’s thinking, of course. Bees and pixies don’t like each other, so where you find a swarm of one, you probably won’t find the other. But bee stings didn’t sound much better than pixie bites. I stayed far back.

Red walked right to the edge of the swarm. Slowly, like a creeping cat, she moved through the buzzing wall of bees, reached her hand down the log, and pulled out a chunk of honeycomb, dripping with golden honey. She moved back just as slowly. Bees crawled all over her head and arms and even her face, but she didn’t flinch, and
soon they all flew away, back to their honey log. She broke the honeycomb in half and gave me a piece. “Gold you can eat,” she said, and we licked the sticky mess.

“You could trade this for grain,” I said. “Probably lots.”

“Wouldn’t want to,” said Red.

“Why?” She could get a whole sack of grain for just this one chunk of honeycomb.

“Because some things people like to keep to themselves. This has always been my tree, and I don’t want anyone else to know about it. If you tell, I’ll punch your teeth out.”

It made me feel really special that she would share it with me.

“And don’t think you can come here without me, either.”

“I won’t.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.” Even if I dared to walk this far into The Woods alone, I wouldn’t be able to get the honeycomb like she did, not without getting stung a thousand times.

We sucked all the honey off and chewed the waxy comb. Then we licked our fingers. It was so sweet I almost forgot why we had come here until Red pointed at the bundle tied to my waist and asked, “What did you want to show me?”

I untied the bobbin and held it out for her to see. She glanced at it, then stared blankly at me. “It was my mother’s,” I said.

Red raised her eyebrows, suddenly interested. “She was a spinner. From Yonder.”

I looked at her, confused. “Yonder?” Gran never told me my mother was from Yonder, and she didn’t tell me about the spinning until I found the wheel. It made me mad that Red knew these things and I didn’t. “How do you know that? How did you know she was a spinner?”

“Some people know,” she said, not looking at me, and I could tell she was hiding something.

“What people?”

“
Some
people,” she said, and her nostrils flared.

“The bobbin,” I said. “I think it’s special.” I didn’t want to say “magic.” I knew how Red felt about that.

“It’s just a bobbin,” she said.

“But special, maybe.”

“How’s it special? What does it do?”

I chose my words carefully. “I think it spins things different. Makes things change.”

“Bobbins don’t spin. They just catch whatever you’re spinning.” Then her eyes widened as though she suddenly realized something. “What did you spin?”

“Nothing,” I said quickly. “I just … What if you could spin one thing into something different, not just wool into yarn?”

“Such as?”

“Such as … What if you could take some … straw and spin … uh … gold?”

Red stared at me. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

“We need gold. Wouldn’t that be great?”

“Maybe.”

She didn’t believe me. “If a cow can give milk and
chickens can lay eggs and dragons can make fire, then why can’t a
magic
bobbin make gold?”

“Because this bobbin isn’t magic,” she said. “But
you
might be.”

“Me? Magic? No, I’m not.” Using magic was one thing.
Being
magic sounded like a mountain of disaster.

“If anything changes to gold when you spin, it’s coming from inside of you, not the bobbin.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m just guessing.”

“Well, maybe you’re guessing
wrong
.”

Red sighed. “It doesn’t really matter where the magic is coming from. What matters is that it’s magic, and magic makes trouble. Your mother used magic to spin and she got into a lot of trouble because of it. There’s always a consequence for using magic.”

“But this would be a good consequence,” I said. “Gold.”

“Yes, but—”

“And gold would solve a lot of problems.” Stomach problems, for sure.

“Maybe, but—”

“And it’s not like I want it all for myself—”

Red hit me on the head so I would stop talking. “Those are just the natural, regular consequences, Rump. There will be magical consequences too. Magic has its own rules.”

“How do you know? Don’t tell me it’s just a guess.”

Red gritted her teeth. “Didn’t you learn anything when you watched Kessler get chased by every mouse on The Mountain?”

“But nothing happened when I spun! I didn’t catch on fire or get attacked by mice! I just made gold! Fat skeins of gold that could feed the whole village!” I clapped my hands over my mouth, but Red didn’t look surprised.

“Rump,” she said in a soft voice, “does anyone else know about this?”

I sighed. “Frederick and Bruno were looking through my window this morning, right after I spun the gold.”

Red frowned.

“But,” I went on, if only to make myself feel better, “they probably didn’t know what they were seeing. Probably just looked like a pile of yarn to them.”

Red’s frown deepened.

And that’s when I realized what kind of worry I had. The worry went from my head and sunk down to my chest and settled to a sickness in my stomach. Frederick and Bruno might be complete idiots, but any village idiot knows gold when they see it.