Free Rumple What? by Nancy Springer Page B

suitable to wed His Exalted Highness. Now he’s a middle-aged Majesty with an ale belly, up to his triple chin in debt for doublets and hose and ermine codpieces and all the other ridiculous, expensive trappings of his regal job, and with vassals grumbling that he needs to provide an heir, and—and lo and behold, here the dumbass miller puts him onto a reasonably attractive girl who goes and makes him rich.
    The king does not care about being loved. He does not feel alone in the world; there are plenty more like him, heading up nations and corporations. He considers that he can be very happy with gold to pay the bills, plus a wench with whom to rumple the bed sheets. Why not marry her? While she lacks the sort of pedigree that is usually required, she shows every promise of being quite fertile—almost certain to pop out an heir—and then there are the financial considerations. If he needs more money, he can always threaten again to kill her.
    Not that he really thinks she has spun straw into gold. No, if he believed that, he wouldn’t touch her; what if she could turn other things into something elses? But the king doesn’t worry, because he knows about the little man. He is no fool; he has his spies, his guards, his people keeping watch. He figures that whatever she—the miller’s daughter; even though he is going to marry her, the king can’t recall her name—whatever she gave the little man doesn’t count because of the minuscule size involved, and absolutely can be overlooked in the light reflected from a pile of gold.
    And if the little man comes back into the picture, well, it depends whether he, the king—who does not deserve a name either—whether he wants more gold at the time, or would rather take the freaky bastard, who has been described to him as twig thin and no more than three feet tall, and whack him in half with one blow of his sword.
    *
    At first the miller’s daughter thought it would be fairly yucko, having to deal with His Ugliness, but she soon adapts. When he comes to her bed, she spreads her legs and thinks about necklaces made of real jewels, not beads. Thus, aside from her dealings with His Porcine Highness, being queen turns out to be a blast—getting to dress up, and spend money, and order people around, no more scrubbing and cooking and messy flour for her! Relief from hard manual labor is ample compensation for being married to the king, for the miller’s daughter is no dreamer; she had never thought to find love. Least of all in wedlock, but not in any other way, either.
    So it startles her to the heart of her heart, indeed it startles and astonishes her to discover such a heart within herself, when, most unexpectedly and all in a moment, she falls in love. Deeply. Irrevocably. Completely. Under the most unexpected circumstances, when she has just gone through the most harrowing pain she has ever known.
    When the midwife places the baby in her arms.
    When she lays her face against the soft spot atop the baby’s downy head.
    One breath of that primal infant essence, and the queen is no longer the miller’s daughter or the king’s wife either; she is woman, and she is mother. She is weak and invincible and happier than a butterfly yet fiercer than a wolf, for she will defend this tiny person, this newfound love, with her life, against anything that threatens—
    And then she remembers.
    What she promised.
    Oh. No.
    No. Never. No matter what.
    But—surely it won’t come to that; surely the freaky little man didn’t mean it, really. Or he has forgotten. She hasn’t seen or heard of him for a couple of years.
    Still, alarm bells of hell ring through her, agitation that will not cease for any soothing, so relentless that, within a day, she breaks down and asks to speak with His Royal Ego, her husband.
    *
    For the simple reason that the king gives not a rat’s sphincter about the fate of the baby, one can tell that the newborn is a girl. One can assume this even though the