Love Over Gold

a sorta fairytale from Caroline Bennett.

Hard labor, a full night of it.  Skin on my palms chafing to crimson, finally splitting.  The straw soaks up the blood.  I feed it into the wheel and the thread spins out, fine and flawless, although there is a bit of a rosy tint to the new gold.  Even magic does not erase bloodstains entirely.

While I work, the miller's daughter sleeps, her hair tangled and mingled with a skein of golden thread, her useless white hands in babyish fists beneath her chin.  She dreams of suckling at her mother's breast, the mother she does not remember upon waking.  Waking, she has known no such kindness.  The mother died, in the woods, before the girl could walk.  The miller himself is as worthless and coarse as the straw that scrapes my fingertips.  There is no love in him.  Imagine a man so eager to be rid of his only child that he would promise a miracle to a barroom full of strangers.

Imagine a girl without an upbringing or a backbone, walking meekly into this cell, even curtseying as her suitor shuts and bars the door.  Imagine that neither prince nor princess-to-be would have the sense to call a lie a lie.

Do my hands hurt? I do not think I feel them, though they swell and gape like wounded mouths.  As the one window, barred and high, grows lighter, the heaps of straw are shrinking, receding like a tide.  The flagstones of the floor are exposed.  One of the stones can be shifted from beneath, a trap-door, but the miller's daughter hasn't noticed it.  She didn't see me come in.  She was frightened almost to fainting when I spoke, and told her I could help her, and yet she hasn't even asked my name.   She's a little fool.  

Foolish: she offered to pay me with the cheap glass beads at her neck, with the cold iron ring on her finger.  With, finally, the true-silver comb in her hair, her only possession of value.  It belonged to her mother.  I refused, of course.  My gifts command a much, much higher price.
Myself, I'd rather die than marry the kind of bastard prince who would ask a girl to spin straw into gold.  But, and unfortunately, she is her father's child, with her mother's rash judgment.
The tips of my fingers become burning coals, and then cold stones.  I watch them as I work and they hardly seem to belong to me.  My voice--for I have been speaking, all this time, aloud, incanting the words of the charm.  Over and over.  It is this rhythm of my voice that's lulled the miller's daughter to sleep.  The gold thread reels out like a tale from the tongue of a drunk.

"If you do this," said the miller's daughter, "he will marry me.  I'll be a queen, and I'll pay you anything you ask, anything, only do this for me now."

"Blood," said I, "must be paid for with blood.  Labor with labor."

"What do you mean?" said she.

Little fool.  I sighed.  "Your firstborn child," I murmured.  "Nothing less."

There was no horror on her face.

She hums softly, in her dreaming, though what she hums does not quite make a song.  The whole of the castle sleeps, and will sleep until the wheel stops, until my chant stops.  This is strong magic, no village coin-trickery.  You can only spin straw into gold if you have no use for gold.  This, and the words of the spell, are among the things I learned in the woods.

She does not know what it is to give up a child.  She does not know the pain that coils and uncoils, serpent in an empty womb, gnawing at me so that my hands can't hurt at all.  I gave up my child to be free of my husband; she smiled as she bartered hers to buy one.

The wheel turns, and turns.  The last bundle of straw thins between my black-stained fingers.
In my life in the woods, I learned strong magic, but turning one substance to another is still a little thing.  It is nothing to the power of creating a new life, giving that life meaning.  I had this power once and I failed it.   As surely as the miller failed as a husband, as surely as the prince will fail as a king--I am a failed mother.  And I have no use for jewelry, but I would spin my hands to dry bones for a second chance.

The window shows blue now; outside, hens are beginning to chuff over new eggs.  The cell is filled near to the rafters with golden thread in brilliant loops and whorls.  No dungeon now, but a fit chamber for a bride.  The bride herself, floating near the surface of sleep, looks younger than her sixteen years, her face empty and smooth as a newborn's.

I wonder whether, when the day comes, I will relent.  When she faces me with her child in her arms, after a night of hard labor, maybe I'll let her keep my second chance for her own.  
I am on my knees now, the voice dead in my throat.  With my hands crippled into claws I lift the trick-stone.  I do not look back at the miller's daughter.  I am gone before the shock, and foolish pleasure, dawn upon her face.