I stood up so quickly that I nearly toppled over as I curtsied. “I’m not a French spy, Your Highness. I wouldn’t have come here at all except that I was dragged here by your men and—” King John put up one hand to silence me. “Can you prove you’re not French?”
I hesitated, unsure how to do that.
He humphed at my hesitation like it proved my guilt. “Do you speak French?”
“No.”
His eyes narrowed. “Do you know how to spell ‘rendezvous’?”
“Um, probably not. I’ve never been great at spelling foreign words.”
“ ‘Hors d’oeuvres’?”
“Why yes, I’d love some.”
King John didn’t have a sense of humor. He simply stared at me, waiting. I cleared my throat. “No, sire, I don’t know how to spell ‘hors d’oeuvres,’ either.”
He gave me another elegant flick of his fingers. “That proves nothing. The French don’t know how to spell that word either.” King 147/356
John turned to Haverton. “We are not impressed with the girl. True, she is pretty, but she doesn’t have golden hair and she is a bad speller.
We are wondering about your judgment now, Haverton.” He shook his head resolutely. “We are not impressed at all.” Then again, it was entirely possible King John kept calling himself
“we” because he was referring to the other voices in his head.
Haverton walked to the window. “But, Your Highness, you have not even properly seen the girl.” He opened the shutters, and the morning light spilled into the room. Two dozen golden spools shimmered in the sunshine along the back wall.
Both men stared at them. “Wait,” King John said. “We have changed our mind. We are quite impressed.” Haverton’s jaw dropped in amazement. His gaze shot to mine.
“How can this be?” he sputtered. “You spun the straw to gold?” I figured it was a rhetorical question so I didn’t answer. I hadn’t actually done it, and I didn’t want my liar’s hat to go off.
Neither of the men noticed my silence. Haverton paced around the spools, eyeing them in shock. King John dropped to his knees in front of the gold like a man about to pray to the god of greed. As he bent down to examine a spool, his comb-over flopped off the top of his head. It made me feel vaguely like I’d been flashed.
He pulled a shiny thread away from the spool, stroking it like it were a cat, even holding it to his nose and sniffing it. Which made me wonder if gold had a smell.
“She’s a lovely maiden,” King John said without looking at me.
“We are quite smitten, overcome with love, in fact. And now we shall take this gold back to our chamber and get better acquainted.” I was pretty sure he meant he wanted to get better acquainted with the gold and not with me.
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With one hand, he tried to pick up a spool. It didn’t budge. He used both hands, with the same result. Either it was very heavy, or he was very weak. Or both. He got to his feet, bent over, and tried again.
The spool still didn’t lift off the ground. Mostly he just managed to look like he was doing some sort of yellow-and-orange-striped yoga bends.
Haverton took hold of my arm. “How did you do this?” I couldn’t lie, but I wasn’t supposed to tell the king about Rumpelstiltskin. At least, in the fairy tale, the miller’s daughter never let him know how the straw had been turned to gold—not even when their baby was in danger. And if she hadn’t told him, it seemed I shouldn’t either.
I stammered out, “This gold is more than my father’s share in taxes. You must let me go back to my family now.” Haverton shook his head, but not at me—he didn’t give my demand enough notice to refuse it. He was shaking his head at himself.
“What a pied ninny I am.”
I nodded, then stopped. Maybe that wasn’t something I was supposed to agree with.
“I should have known the truth when I saw the riches at your manor,” Haverton said. To King John, he said, “Clearly the girl has a magical gift.”
King John gave up trying to lift the gold and dropped back to his knees in front of the spool. “Yes, yes, she’s charming, but she made the gold too heavy. If we ask our guards to move it, they will rob us blind.
They’re rogues, every one of them.” He took hold of the end of a golden thread and unwound it from the spool. Chortling, he said, “This is how we shall carry it—half a spool at a time.” I tried to pull my arm away from Haverton but he didn’t let go. He turned my hand over so it was palm up. “Your hands have no calluses 149/356