A hand went to her throat as she worried over how he would do it—with a sword? An ax?—when her fingers brushed the slender chain of the necklace. She pulled it from beneath her dress collar and opened the locket, turning it so she could see the face of the girl inside. The child peered out at Serilda with her teasing eyes, as if there were a secret near to bursting inside of her.
“There’s no hurt in trying, is there?” she whispered.
The king had given her until one hour to sunrise. It was already after midnight. Here in the bowels of the castle, the only way to track the passing of time was by the candle burning in the corner. The persistent melting of wax.
Too slow.
Far too fast.
No matter. She was hardly one to sit still for hours, suffocating in her own self-pity.
“If Hulda can do it, why can’t I?” she said, grabbing a handful of straw from the pile. She approached the spinning wheel as if she were approaching a sleeping wyvern. Unclasping her traveling cloak, she folded it neatly and settled it in the corner. Then she hooked one ankle around the leg of the stool that had been provided and sat down.
The strands of straw were tough, the ends scratchy against her forearms. She stared at them and tried to picture tufts of wool like those Mother Weber had sold her countless times.
The straw was nothing like the thick, fuzzy wool she was used to, but she inhaled a deep breath anyway and loaded the first empty bobbin onto the flyer. She spent a long time looking from the bobbin to the fistful of straw. Usually she started with a leader yarn, to make it easier for the wool to wrap around the bobbin, but she had no yarn. Shrugging, she tied on a piece of straw. The first one broke, but the second held. Now what? She couldn’t just twist the ends together to form one long strand.
Could she?
She twisted and twisted.
It held … sort of.
“Good enough,” she muttered, running the leader yarn through the hooks, then out through the maiden hole. The entire setup was beyond precarious, ready to fall apart as soon as she pulled too tight or released those weakly connected strands.
Afraid to let go, she leaned over and used her nose to push down on one of the wheel’s spokes, so that it gradually started to turn. “Here we go,” she said, pressing her foot onto the treadle.
The straw pulled from her fingers.
The tenuous connections disintegrated.
Serilda paused. Growled to herself.
Then she tried again.
This time, she started the wheel sooner.
No luck.
Next, she tried knotting a few ends of straw together.
“Please work,” she whispered as her foot started to pedal. The wheel turned. The straw wound around the bobbin. “Gold. Please. Please turn into gold.”
But the plain, dry straw continued to be plain, dry straw, no matter how many times it slipped through the maiden hole or wound around the bobbin.
Before long, she had run out of knotted strands, and what had been successfully looped around the bobbin started to splinter as soon as she took it off the flyer.
“No, no, no …”
She grabbed a fresh bobbin and started over.
Pushing, forcing the straw through.
Her foot mashing against the treadle.
“Please,” she said again, pushing another strand in. Then another. “Please.” Her voice broke, and the tears started. Tears she’d hardly known were waiting to be released until they all flooded forward at once. She hunched forward, clutching the useless straw in her fists, and sobbed. That one word stuck on her tongue, whispered to no one but the cell walls and the locked door and this awful castle full of awful ghosts and demons and monsters. “Please.”
“What are you doing to that poor spinning wheel?”