* * *
You do it again that night. The spinning is effortless by now. As you spin, you perform little comic flourishes for the girl. You spin for a while one-handed. You spin with your back to the wheel. You spin with your eyes closed.
She laughs and claps her hands. Her laughter is low and sonorous, like the sound of a clarinet.
This time, when you’ve finished, she gives you a ring. It, too, is cheap — silver, with a speck of diamond sunk into it.
She says, “This was my mother’s.”
She slips it onto your pinkie. It fits, just barely. You stand for a moment, staring at your own hand, which is not by any standards a pretty sight, with its knobbed knuckles and thick, yellowed nails. But here it is, your hand, with her ring on one of its fingers.
You slip away without speaking. You’re afraid that anything you might say would be embarrassingly earnest.
* * *
The next day …
Right. One last roomful of straw, twice the size again. The king promises that this is the last, but insists on this third and final act of alchemy. He believes, it seems, that value resides in threes, which would explain the three garish and unnecessary towers he’s had plunked onto the castle walls, the three advisers to whom he never listens, the three annual parades in commemoration of nothing in particular beyond the celebration of the king himself.
And …
If the girl pulls it off one more time, the king has announced he’ll marry her, make her his queen.
That’s the reward? Marriage to a man who’d have had you decapitated if you’d failed to produce not just one but three miracles?
Surely the girl will refuse.
You go to the castle one more time and do it again. It seems that it should be routine by now, the sight of the golden straw piling up, the fiery gleam of it, but somehow repetition hasn’t rendered it commonplace. It is (or so you imagine) a little like being in love; like wondering anew, every morning, over the outwardly unremarkable fact that your lover is there, in bed beside you, about to open her eyes, and that, every morning, your face will be the first thing she sees.
When you’ve finished, she says, “I’m afraid I have nothing more to give you.”
You pause. You’re shocked to realize that you want something more from her. You’ve told yourself, the past two nights, that the necklace and the ring are marvels, but extraneous acts of gratitude; that you’d have done what you’ve done for nothing more than the sight of her thankful face.
It’s surprising, then, that on this final night, you don’t want to leave unrewarded. That you desire, with upsetting urgency, another token, a talisman, a further piece of evidence. Maybe it’s because you know you won’t see her again.
You say, “You aren’t going to marry him, are you?”
She looks down at the floor, which is littered with stray strands of golden straw.
She says, “I’d be queen.”
“But you’d be married to him. That would be the man who was going to kill you if you didn’t produce the goods.”
She lifts her head and looks at you.
“My father could live in the palace with me.”
“And yet. You can’t marry a monster.”
“My father would live in the castle. The king’s physicians would attend to him. He’s ill, grain dust gets into your lungs.”
You’re as surprised as she is when you hear yourself say, “Promise me your firstborn child, then.”
She merely blinks in astonishment, by way of an answer.
You’ve said it, though. You might as well forge on.
“Let me raise your first child,” you say. “I’ll be a good father, I’ll teach the child magic, I’ll teach the child generosity and forgiveness. The king isn’t going to be much along those lines, don’t you think?”
“If I refuse,” she says, “will you expose me?”
Oh.
You don’t want to descend to blackmail. You wish she hadn’t posed the question, and you have no idea about how to answer. You’d never expose her. But you’re so sure about your ability to rescue the still-unconceived child, who will, without your help, be abused by the father (don’t men who’ve been abused always do the same to their children?), who’ll become another punishing and capricious king in his own time, who’ll demand meaningless parades and still-gaudier towers and who knows what else.
She interprets your silence as a yes. Yes, you’ll turn her in if she doesn’t promise the child to you.
She says, “All right, then. I promise to give you my firstborn child.”
You could take it back. You could tell her you were kidding, you’d never take a woman’s child.
But you find — surprise — that you like this capitulation from her, this helpless acceding, from the most recent embodiment of all the girls over all the years who’ve given you nothing, not even a curious glance.
Welcome to the darker side of love.
You leave again without speaking. This time, though, it’s not from fear of embarrassment. This time it’s because you’re greedy and ashamed, it’s because you want the child, you need the child, and yet you can’t bear to be yourself at this moment; you can’t stand there any longer, enjoying your mastery over her.
* * *
The royal wedding takes place. Suddenly this common girl, this miller’s daughter, is a celebrity; suddenly her face emblazons everything from banners to souvenir coffee mugs.
And she looks like a queen. Her glowy pallor, her dark intelligent eyes, are every bit as royal-looking as they need to be.
A year later, when the little boy is born, you go to the palace.
You’ve thought of letting it pass — of course you have — but after those nights of sleepless wondering over the life ahead, the return to the amplified solitude and hopelessness in which you’ve lived for the past year (people have tried to sell you key chains and medallions with the girl’s face on them, assuming, as well they might, that you’re just another customer; you, who wear the string of garnets under your shirts, who wear the silver ring on your finger) …
You can’t let it pass after the bouts of self-torture about the confines of your face and body. Until those nights of spinning, no girl has ever let you get close enough for you to realize that you’re possessed of wit and allure and compassion, that you’d be coveted, you’d be sought-after, if you were just …
Neither Aunt Farfalee nor the oldest and most revered of the texts has anything to say about transforming gnomes into straight-spined, striking men. Aunt Farfalee told you, in the low, rattling sigh that was once her voice, that magic has its limits; that the flesh has proven consistently, over centuries, vulnerable to afflictions but never, not even for the most potent of wizards, subject to improvement.
You go to the palace.
It’s not hard to get an audience with the king and queen. One of the traditions, a custom so old and entrenched that even this king dare not abolish it, is the weekly Wednesday audience, at which any citizen who wishes to can appear in the throne room and register a complaint, after the king has taken a wife.
You are not the first in line. You wait as a corpulent young woman reports that a coven of witches in her district is causing the goats to walk on their hind legs, and saunter inside as if they owned the place. You wait as an old man objects to the new tax being levied on every denizen who lives past the age of eighty, which is the king’s way of claiming as his own that which would otherwise be passed along to his subjects’ heirs.
As you stand in line, you see that the queen sees you.
She looks entirely natural on the throne, every bit as much as does her image on banners and mugs and key chains. She’s noticed you, but nothing changes in her expression. She listens with the customary feigned attention to the woman whose goats are sitting down to dinner with the family, to the man who doesn’t want his fortune sucked away before he dies. It’s widely known that these audiences with king and queen never produce results of any kind. Still, people want to come and be heard.