I pulled my hair out of the man’s grasp. “Trust me, my father has never said any of that.”
The man stepped even closer. His voice was soft, like the hiss of a snake. “Oh, but he has. He says you’re so talented you can spin straw into gold.”
A startled gasp sprang to my lips before I could suppress it. I was in a fairy tale after alclass="underline" Rumpelstiltskin. Somehow the stories had been combined and I was the miller’s daughter.
Wow, when Chrissy messed up a wish, she did it in a big way. Not only could I not turn things into gold, but I was now in a fairy tale 121/356
where the king was going to execute me if I didn’t turn a room full of straw into gold thread.
I tried to make the man see reason. “Spinning straw into gold is just a saying, like, ‘Every cloud has a silver lining.’ Clouds don’t really have silver linings, or it would rain money, wouldn’t it?” The man didn’t smile at my joke. I pushed on. “Spinning straw in-to gold is making the best of a bad situation.” Like this one. “People can’t literally do it. You must know that.” The bearded man narrowed his eyes at me. “Are you calling your father a liar?”
The knights that flanked us drew their swords, which seemed to indicate they actually didn’t want more input from me in this conversation.
“If your father lied about your abilities to spin straw into gold, he might have lied about other things too, perchance about his loyalty to King John.” The bearded man leaned closer to me. His breath smelled like rotting vegetables. “The penalty for disloyalty is death. So I’ll ask of you again, did your father lie when he claimed you could spin straw into gold?”
Sandra let out a sob; an intense, shaking fear lived in that noise.
“He doesn’t lie,” I said.
The bearded man took hold of my arm. “Then the king would be pleased to see your talents himself. My men shall escort you to the castle forthwith.”
The bearded man wrenched me away from my father and pulled me toward the front door.
Sandra let out a wail. My father stepped after me, grabbing hold of my arm. “You can’t just take her.” 122/356
A few of the men advanced toward us, swords drawn, showing that they could just take me. I yanked my arm away from my father.
“Don’t try to stop them. They’ll hurt you.” My father followed me anyway. “It’s only a fairy tale,” he insisted, like that made the weapons less sharp.
The men dragged me out the door. Over my shoulder, I called back, “The fairy tale never says what happens to the miller. I’ll be okay. You might not be.”
My father stopped following me then. I saw my family for one more moment: Dad, Sandra, and Nick, framed in the outline of the door with stark worry permeating their faces. And then I was hustled into the wooden coach, and one of the king’s men slammed the door shut.
The coach was sparse and dark inside, more like a prison than any of the carriages I’d seen in picture books. What light there was came in through several inch-wide gaps in the wallboards. Two rough-hewn benches sat on either side. No cushions. No backrests. And the wood looked full of slivers. I was glad I’d changed into jeans. At least they offered more protection than my pajamas.
A guard climbed in and sat across from me, smugly resting a knife on his knee. “You will stay seated,” he told me. I noticed he was missing several teeth too.
Without warning, the horses moved forward, making the carriage lurch drunkenly down the uneven dirt road. Out of the gaps in the back wall, I watched as my house, so odd-looking next to the wild trees of the forest, grew smaller and then disappeared.
Other houses came into view as we rode—shacks, really. Things made of mud and straw. Homes that a big bad wolf—or at least a severe storm—could blow right over. People came out to watch the carriage go by. The women wore ragged gray dresses and dirty aprons.
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Children, their feet bare, ran alongside the horses, waving at the procession. I wasn’t just a prisoner. I was entertainment.
The guard sat silently, regarding me without pity. I kept looking out through the gaps in the wall, paying attention to every landmark in hopes that if I escaped I’d be able to find my way back to my home.
And then those hopes fizzled. I wouldn’t be able to escape. The miller’s daughter was trapped in different rooms in the castle for three nights and the only way she kept from being killed was by making bargains with Rumpelstiltskin. That wouldn’t be so bad, I supposed. I already knew his name, but part of the fairy tale involved me marrying the king and giving birth to his son.
That was not something I wanted to do, especially since King John was the evil king from Robin Hood’s story.
How could Chrissy have sent me here? I asked for the power to create gold, not to go to some fairy tale where a creepy little man spun it for me. Under my breath, I called her name, but she didn’t come.
Hours went by. I didn’t have a watch and couldn’t see the position of the sun, but my stomach told me lunchtime had come and gone a long time ago. Finally, the castle came into view. I saw it during a turn in the road—a sprawling stone castle that peered over a hefty wall. The horses jostled the carriage up to it, then we went through the gates, and stopped in front of the stables. My guard prodded me out of the carriage.
I stepped out into the sunshine, blinking. Before my eyes even adjusted to the light, the man with the bushy beard took my arm and pulled me none too gently across the courtyard.
We went inside the castle and down large drafty hallways. The castle smelled of food, smoke, and something dank and mildewed.
Straw was strewn over the floor. I hadn’t expected that, but nobody else seemed to think it was unusual. Servants and soldiers came and 124/356
went without a second glance at the straw, although everyone I passed gawked at me like I was a circus-grade oddity.
I suppose it was strange to see someone wearing jeans and a bright turquoise shirt. No one wore pants here. Even the men wore tunics and leggings. Besides the red surcoats the guards wore, everybody’s wardrobes seemed drab and colorless—shades of brown and gray. Had these people even seen the color turquoise before?
The bearded man took me up a set of uneven stone steps. They curved upward in a steep circle without any sort of railing to hang onto. After we’d gone up three floors, he towed me down a dim hallway. Torches hung on the wall, but they only emitted feeble patches of light.
A sentry was posted outside a wooden door. As we walked toward it, the bearded man said, “Inside your room, a pile of straw and a spindle await you. If the straw isn’t spun into gold by morning, the king will assume you refuse to use your talents to help him and he’ll sentence you to death for treason. Unless”—he gave me an oily smile—“you want to recant your earlier statement and proclaim that your father lied about your abilities.” What a horrible thing to do to a person—he was making me choose between my life and my father’s. I met the man’s eyes. “I don’t have anything else to say to you.”
“Very well.” The man gave my arm an extra squeeze. “I’ll let the executioner know.”
We reached the sentry. I couldn’t see his face clearly because his helmet rested low over his eyes, and a long metal piece covered his nose. I could tell he was young though, and his square jaw seemed familiar somehow. I didn’t dwell on it. The bearded man opened the door and gestured for me to go inside. “Perhaps the king will have 125/356
mercy on you,” he said, still managing to make the sentence sound like a threat. “Often, the fairer the maid, the more mercy he has.” I gave the man what I hoped was a brave smile and stepped inside the room. The door shut behind me with a thud, and then I heard the scrape of a bar being slid across the door to lock it.
I was a prisoner in a foreign land and time. The thought made my breath catch in my throat. I was not as brave as I wanted.
I glanced around the room. A waist-high pile of straw stood in the middle of the stone floor. Next to it, a lone stool waited. I didn’t see a spinning wheel, but something that looked like a wooden top sat on the stool—a hand spindle. Across the room, a narrow, glassless window let in light and fresh air. It was a welcome thing now, but I knew when night came, the shutters on either side of the window wouldn’t do much to keep the cold out. Perhaps that was why a couple of dirty blankets lay in the corner. An unlit torch hung on the wall by the door.