Rump: The True Story of Rumpelstiltskin (19 page)

“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?”

“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.”