Midnight Law

by Geanna Culbertson

  No one spoke during the long hike. With every passing minute the world grew lighter, and soon the first rays of gold blinked through the trees.

  The green trail kept taking us deeper into the mountains. After a couple of hours, I felt like we were nearing the very heart of this region when we came upon him.

  “Guys . . .” Blue said.

  We froze in our tracks. A small boy, maybe nine years old, wearing raggedy attire and carrying a stack of firewood stood directly in front of us. His face was pale, but his nose was slightly red, like he had a cold and had been rubbing his nostrils too hard with tissues. The boy didn’t move either, as surprised by our presence as we were of his.

  “Red nose, did you—” Another pair of little boys, similar in age and dress, came around the trees. They stopped when they saw us. Then the first boy, assumedly Red Nose, dropped his firewood and all three kids took off running in the same direction as our light trail.

  My friends and I exchanged a glance and dashed after them, leaves crunching beneath our feet. After a minute, we saw where they were running. A cottage came into view—simple stone walls, wooden window frames, and a roof made of golden straw. Behind that, however, stood a massive factory. Smoke poured from the giant chimney, and farther down along the side of the building I spotted a loading dock. The kids raced for the big, open loading door; our light trail curved in the same direction. They ducked inside and we followed. Then we froze again.

  What in the heck?

  The factory was full of gold and full of children.

  On the left side of the room an enormous loom—as big as the cottage out front—wove straw into thread-like strands of gold. Kids moving in organized lines brought mounds of straw from a barn connected to the factory by a wide archway. A line of kids on the other side of the loom stood in perfect single file—holding and hustling along the heavy gold thread coming out of the device. As a team, they passed it to the next station where a conveyor belt sucked up the thread, like one might suck up a pasta noodle, and absorbed it into one of several rotating furnaces arranged on a sideways metal windmill. The farther away furnaces delved into the next step in the process, tilting on their sides and casting the now liquified gold into brick molds.

  The molds continued on to new snaking conveyer belts until they reached a cooling area that deposited them in water. A couple dozen feet away, kids operating robotic arm machines removed molds from different water basins. That gold had already completed its hardening phase; the robotic arms extracted the newly formed bricks from their molds and placed them on an inspecting station where a half dozen little girls cleaned them off. Last in the assembly line, pairs of kids worked hard to move gold bricks from the inspecting station to shining pyramid stacks while other nearby children struggled to transport the weighty bricks the rest of the way into the trunks of carriages. The vehicles were parked by the loading dock we’d entered, and where our green light trail ended. No flame in sight.

  There must’ve been close to thirty kids in this factory—and that was only on this level. The ceiling was transparent. Above a thick floor of glass supported by crisscrossing rafters, I could see beds and little girls walking around. It looked like a dormitory.

  “My Lord!” one of the boys we’d been chasing called out as he ran behind the loom.

  “Oh, crud,” Chance said, seeming worried and slightly uncomfortable.

  I understood his concern. I’d only ever read about one villain who could turn straw into gold, so I could guess who was responsible for this place. However, the discomfort in Chance’s expression I didn’t understand.

  A few seconds later the loom stopped, as did the rest of production. All the children stared at us. Then a man came around the side of the loom. He was short—not more than three feet tall—but a lot more dapper than I would have imagined, even sporting a blazer with a fancy pocket square.

  “Well, who do we have here?” the man said. He approached us with giddiness in his step. His nose was big, as were his feet. His thick brown hair was slicked back, though the ends at the base by his neck curled. I’d have guessed he was about sixty years old.

  None of us said a word. The short man took note of each of us before stopping at Chance.

  “You look familiar,” he mused. He stepped closer and Chance’s frown tightened. The short man snapped his fingers, cockiness and some cruelty sparking in his eyes. “Aw, yes, I’ve got it! That jawline, the nose, the brows—too familiar to forget. You’re the spitting image of your father, you know that?”

  I looked to the prince. “Chance?”

  Chance released a deep, irritated breath. “Everyone, this is my uncle. Rumpelstiltskin.”

  We congregated in the living room of the cottage with the gold straw roof, which turned out to be Rumpelstiltskin’s home. A few of the kids from the factory prepared us tea in the connecting kitchen. We’d insisted against it, but Rumpel’s insistence is what the kids nervously listened to.

  Trembling, a little girl darted into the room carrying a tray of steaming teacups. She set the tray on the glass-topped coffee table, which utilized three stacked gold bricks for each leg.

  “Now I know I have been exiled to Alderon for almost twenty-five years,” Rumpel said, sitting down in an easy chair. “And the higher-ups of Book have always moved fast and efficiently when it comes to manipulating the narrative to protect their beloved protagonists. But even I’m impressed that my lineage has been forgotten so quickly. Of course, my brother never has been afraid to grease the wheels with some extra gold to get a job done.”

  Without saying anything, the little girl squeezed three drops of lemon in a teacup, stirred, and then handed it to our host before bowing her head and darting out of the room. She and the other kids that’d been with her exited through a door in the hall that connected with the factory.

  Rumpel took a sip of his steaming tea and addressed our group. “You probably have no idea what I am talking about.”

  Blue stepped forward. “You’re Rumpelstiltskin Midas Darling,” she said plainly. “Chance’s grandfather may be our land’s most famous King Midas, but Midas is a family name that has been passed down through the Darling family for centuries. Since Chance’s grandpa King Midas obtained his powers, gold magic has been passed down through his bloodline too. You are the half-brother of Clevaunt’s current king, Dominique Midas Darling.”

  Rumpelstiltskin actually smiled. “Well, that is a nice surprise. One of you is educated. What is your name, dear?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Considering that the four of you are clearly protagonists on a quest to find the Midnight Law flame that is currently in my possession, I would say every facet of you is my business.” Rumpel took another sip of his tea and gestured toward the couches. “Won’t you sit? I so rarely have company other than my buyers and Queen Nadia’s messengers.”

  “You seem to have plenty of people around here,” Girtha commented. “What’s with all these kids?”

  “The workers?” Rumpel waved his hand dismissively. “They’re my property. Never mind them.”

  A warning alarm that had been going off in the back of my brain went up a few hundred decibels.

  “I’m sorry, but how are these kids your property?” I asked. “I know your story; you used to use your gold magic to help people in times of crisis. You appeared to them when they were most desperate and made them trades in exchange for spinning straw into gold. The stories say that you accepted all kinds of payment, but when you appeared to people with nothing of traditional value to give, you made a deal that those victims had to give you their firstborn children. You only got caught when you made a deal with a poor miller’s daughter who was being held against her will at a castle in . . .”

  I glanced at Chance, not wanting to insult his family. They had an interesting, touchy background to say the least. And a lot of aspects of that story were not publicized as common knowledge. I, like Blue, just happened to do a lot of recreational researc
h because of a shared love of history.

  “My grandfather was a good man in the end,” Chance said carefully. “In his later years, he tried his best to make amends to the people he hurt and pushed away throughout his life. By the time I was born he’d changed completely and I only ever heard stories. But I know when he was young he did a lot of cruel things and did not treat people with the respect they deserved. Like my mother, who is the quote, ‘miller’s daughter’ from the better-known Rumpelstiltskin stories. She and my father fell in love, but my father was in line for the crown—a great, earned honor since our kingdom’s line of succession is not determined by birth order, but by a series of political, economic, psychological, and combative tests.”

  “So your dad isn’t the eldest sibling in his family?” Girtha asked Chance.

  “Second oldest,” Chance responded.

  “Third,” Rumpelstiltskin corrected crudely.

  “You didn’t compete in the succession tests,” Chance argued. “No one even knew you existed until after you got caught.”

  “Per my mother’s begging,” Rumpel replied. “When I turned thirteen and discovered my gold powers, she told me who I was—the bastard son of the infamous King Midas. She made me swear not to go seeking family with him. He was a terrible man and she worried he would have us both executed rather than have his infidelity exposed, especially considering the kind of woman my mother was.”

  “And what kind of woman is that?” Girtha asked.

  “A magic hunter,” Rumpelstiltskin replied. He took another sip from his cup, set it down on the table, and leaned forward, looking Chance in the eye. “Though some might call her a witch given the magic powers she absorbed prior to retiring from hunter life. Your Granddaddy King Midas would have killed an entire village rather than let the realm know that his eldest son was a dwarf born to such a woman. My mother warned he’d have to get in line though. All royals are supposed to be main characters. Do you really think Lena Lenore and our realm’s higher-ups would allow a child like me to attend Lord Channing’s? Or does silencing me—someone different and a threat to conventional fairytale heroes—seem like an action more fitting with their general character?”

  My friends and I exchanged a glance. I hated that I kind of understood where Rumpelstiltskin was coming from. It was eerie when villains made sense. And it was troubling to feel sorry for them, even a little.

  “Now then, nephew,” Rumpel said to Chance. “Care to finish the story? Not all your friends may be aware of how it ends.”

  “I’ll tell them later.”

  “You’ll tell them now if you want what you came for.”

  “Why do you want to hear it?” Chance asked. “You know this story.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Rumpel said. “But I can see that it bothers you to speak of what your grandfather was like. You’d rather not talk about it. I want you to say the words and make them real. I like the spark of suffering it causes in your eyes.”

  Chance didn’t respond. Rumpel settled back in his chair. “I have all day.” He glanced at the cuckoo clock on his wall. It was nearly half past seven. “Though I imagine you don’t.”

  After a moment, Chance sighed and begrudgingly looked at us. “My father bested his competing siblings and earned the right to be king after my grandfather. My mother was not a protagonist or a noble of any sort. She was the daughter of a miller. Despite my father’s love, my grandfather forbade her from being a part of our family unless she could prove herself worthy of the Darling bloodline. He was going to have her father executed as punishment for allowing his daughter anywhere near the kingdom’s heir. However, in a desperate attempt to save her father’s life, my mother lied and claimed she was worthy and could spin straw into gold. My grandfather locked her in a tower with mounds of straw that very night and said if she didn’t spin it all into gold by morning, he would have her and her father beheaded. That’s when . . .” Chance’s eyes fell upon Rumpelstiltskin.

  “That’s when I stepped in,” Rumpel replied, picking up the story. “I was not poor. As noted, the power I got from my Darling bloodline was the ability to spin straw into gold. I had been granting my services in exchange for valuables for a while; your mother likely heard the rumors and that’s what inspired her lie in the spur of the moment,” he said, looking at Chance.

  “But why take valuables at all?” I asked. This was something I’d always wondered about the Rumpelstiltskin tale. “Like you said, you weren’t wanting for wealth. When the higher-ups of Book eventually tracked you down, your fortress was comparable to those of the richest men in the realm. You only appeared to truly desperate people. Why not just help them out?”

  “I like the suffering,” Rumpelstiltskin said with a shrug. “I was forced to conceal my powers as a child, was denied my princely protagonist birthright, and people in our village tormented me for my appearance and my mother for the rumors of her background. She never used her magic to hurt any of them for fear of giving away our location to King Midas. The sum of that is that I know suffering. It deeply insults me to come across people who don’t. They are not complete. They don’t understand. I like to make people understand. It would be an injustice to spare them that aspect of life.”

  “That’s messed up,” Girtha said, shaking her head.

  Rumpel rose from his chair and took three grand steps to stand directly in front of Girtha. “That’s a kindness, large one. Would you be who you are today if not for the suffering in your life? Would any of you? Pain builds strong character much better than anything else.”

  “So you were doing my mother a favor by making her pay you with the ring her sister gave her before she died?” Chance said coldly.

  “Correct,” Rumpel said with a nod, narrowing his eyes. “Not a very good parting gift if you ask me; the ring was quite gaudy. The only thing I ever used it for was to balance the uneven leg of a coffee table. But I thought I could get more out of your mother later. I had a feeling my father wasn’t done persecuting her, and I was right. Even though the next morning your mother was found in the tower surrounded by gold straw, he insisted on her performing the trick a second time and the next night he locked her in a larger room of straw. So I came again and took her necklace—the only thing she had of her mother’s who died in childbirth, which I used as a paperweight in my home for a long time. Tell us what happened next, dear nephew.”

  “My grandfather broke his promise again,” Chance said. His fists were clenched. Rumpelstiltskin was right; it clearly caused Chance pain to admit aloud this horrid aspect of his grandfather’s legacy. I felt bad for him.

  “On the third night, my grandfather locked my mother in our castle’s throne room, which had been filled to the rafters with straw. He said if she spun all that straw to gold by morning, she could marry my father. If not, he would behead every person in her village. You came to her,” Chance said to Rumpel, “but she had nothing left to give of value. So—like you did with other such desperate, but poor people—you spun all the straw into gold in exchange for the promise of her firstborn child.”

  “Lo and behold, she had twins,” Rumpel finished. “I said she could choose which of them to give me—Daphne or Cereus—or she could play a game with me instead. Double or nothing. I challenged her to guess my name, which no one knew at the time. It was a fun game for me, a sort of revenge for the realm not recognizing my existence. I never expected her to figure it out. But your mother and my brother were cleverer than I gave them credit for. If they hadn’t inherited the kingdom, they would’ve made excellent detectives because they discovered my lineage and my name along with it. Fearing I would take revenge in one way or another, they then had me arrested for attempted kidnapping, harassment, fraud, witchcraft, and a bunch of other charges too long to list. I have been in Alderon ever since.”

  “But what about these kids?” I gestured toward the window, through which I could see several children coming from the forest carrying firewood.

  “Turns out Alderon
has a fair number of wormholes that open to other dimensions. Mainly Earth, but also the Ghost Dimension.” Rumpel put his hands in his trouser pockets and strolled over to the unlit fireplace. Above it was a large map. I recognized it as one Blue had shown us in the Lord Channing’s library. Rumpelstiltskin’s version had an assortment of pins in it, the vast majority sticking out from the right side of the map.

  “This is Earth,” Rumpelstiltskin said. “I occasionally take wormholes there to make the same sort of deals with people that I once did here in Book. All the children in my factory are firstborn children traded to me by my Earth clients who had nothing of value to offer me in exchange for my services. Those over the age of six can begin to work in my factory. Upstairs is a dormitory and nursery for the younger ones until they’re old enough to start. In exchange for gold, Queen Nadia has provided me with a Hole Tracker and the assistance of a team to help me better understand the seemingly erratic patterns with which black holes appear so my factory can run as efficiently as possible.”

  He leaned against the fireplace and glanced up at the map, looking pleased with himself. “I’ve been to so many countries across that dimension in the last couple decades—Germany, England, Ireland, France, Iceland, Russia, Hungary, Japan, Slovakia, the Czech Republic . . . As a result, there are legends about me all over that world, and those are just from the people brave enough to speak about me. Most don’t, given how much they fear me.”

  “Why would someone fear you?” Girtha asked, jutting her chin out.

  “For a couple of reasons, dearie,” Rumpelstiltskin said. “For one, I have used the black holes that connect with the Ghost Dimension to befriend some of the more vengeful spirits in that domain. They visit Earth all the time, drawn to suffering themselves, so we make good allies and they scout potential victims for me. Second, my magic has a way of intimidating people.”