Free The Rumpelstiltskin Problem by Vivian Vande Velde Page A

spinning wheel didn't fit.
    Rumpelstiltskin repeated, "What's happened? Why have you been brought"—she gestured around the room—"here?"
    "My father," Luella said in a tone of hopelessness.
    Rumpelstiltskin remembered him calling after her that he was sorry.
    Luella continued, "He told the king I could spin straw into gold."
    "Why?" Rumpelstiltskin asked. "
Why
would your father say such a thing?"
    "Obviously he wanted to impress the king," Luella said in a what-kind-of-fool-are-you? tone.
    "Obviously it worked," Rumpelstiltskin snapped right back at her. "Well, all right, I was just wondering. Best of luck to you." She nodded and started to back out the window.
    "Wait!" Luella cried. "Little man!"
    "Don't call me that," Rumpelstiltskin said. "I'm not a little man." But she waited.
    "Oh!" Luella said. "I'm sorry. Truly." She scrambled to her feet and rushed to Rumpelstiltskin's side. "Can you help me? Can you get me out of here?"
    "Can you climb?" Rumpelstiltskin asked.
    Luella looked out the window and swayed dizzily. "Ooooh, it's even worse in the dark." Luella sank to her knees, and Rumpelstiltskin
did
feel sorry for her. A bit. "He's going to chop my head off," Luella said softly. "The king. He said if I didn't spin this straw into gold by morning, he'd have my head."
    "Nonsense," Rumpelstiltskin said. "That wouldn't get him any gold. Surely it was just a threat."
    "Still..." Luella's sigh indicated that she fully expected to die.
    Rumpelstiltskin sighed, too. This girl was just the kind of beauty who always got everything her way, and it was about time she learned a lesson.
    But then Rumpelstiltskin sighed again. Getting one's head chopped off was a pretty drastic lesson.
    "All right, all right," she said. "I'll spin the straw into gold for you."
    "Oh, can you? Will you?" Luella said, jumping to her feet.
    Beautiful girls,
Rumpelstiltskin thought,
ALWAYS get their own way.
So she said, "If you pay me."
    "Oh, certainly," Luella said. She pulled a ring off her finger, a golden ring of the type that boys sometimes give girls to show their friendship. She probably had a dozen more in a drawer at home.
    "Oh, a ring!" Rumpelstiltskin muttered. "How useful." But she guessed the king would not be satisfied with one night's gold. It apparently hadn't occurred to Luella to wonder why he should settle for one room of gold if he could have one every night.
Maybe,
Rumpelstiltskin thought,
maybe this can develop into something that would finally benefit ME.
She pulled up the stool with which Luella had been provided and began spinning.
    By dawn, she had spun all the straw into gold.
    "Thank you, thank you, lit—" Luella caught herself before she finished saying "little man." Instead she finished, more calmly, "Thank you."
    "You're welcome," Rumpelstiltskin said, and she bowed and she left, climbing out the window and down the wall. She scurried across the courtyard before the servants were up and about, and she hid in the woods until nightfall.
    Once it was dark, she saw that there was no light in the tower room where Luella had been the night before. The king, Rumpelstiltskin would have been willing to bet, was getting greedy.
    Traveling from shadow to shadow, Rumpelstiltskin made her way around the outside of the castle, paying special attention to the high-up windows. Sure enough, she found one, in the south tower, that had a light and from which came the sound of someone crying softly.
    Rumpelstiltskin scaled the wall and looked in through the crack in the shutters. There was Luella, in a bigger room filled with more straw than before. If Luella had been watching the night before, she might have picked up some of Rumpelstiltskin's techniques.
But that's just like a beautiful woman,
Rumpelstiltskin thought,
waiting for someone else to do it for her.
    Rumpelstiltskin tapped on the shutter, and—to give her credit—Luella seemed to realize immediately who it had to be. She came over and threw open the shutters.