The Spinner and the Slipper by Camryn Lockhart Read Free Book Online Page A

man was too strange. Too bizarre and too otherworldly. Eliana, instantly wary, demanded, “Who are you?”
    “You have soot on your face,” he said instead of answering.
    Despite herself, Eliana’s hand flew to her cheek and rubbed hard, smearing tears and soot together.
    “That only made it worse.” The green-eyed stranger chuckled. He stepped from his corner, approaching her slowly, his hands held out as though to soothe a frightened doe. “So tell me, why are you crying?”
    This must be a dream , Eliana told herself. All of it. Everything since yesterday morning. And this is merely the strangest part of the dream yet, and I’ll wake up from it soon.
    With this thought firmly in mind, she decided she might as well answer as not. “My stepmother boasted that I can spin straw into gold,” she said. “Somehow it reached the ear of the king, and now he expects me to prove myself.”
    “Can you?” asked the stranger, though something in his eye told her that he already knew the answer.
    “What sort of question is that?” she answered, her voice sharp with frustration. She shook her head vigorously. “Of course not! No one can! It’s the silly wish of a greedy woman who always wants more than she can have.”
    “So why did she send you here? If these are the garments you came in, she did not have the foresight to dress you well for visiting the king.”
    Eliana, suddenly weak, sat down heavily on the nearest straw bale. “She probably meant one of her other daughters when she invented the story,” she said with a shaky sigh. “But the king will kill me when he learns it was all a lie, and she did not want her own blood to die.”
    The stranger clicked his tongue and sat down beside her, his hands on his knees. “That is harsh indeed. So this is the reason for your sorry weeping?”
    “Yes,” said Eliana, frowning and suddenly defensive. “Isn’t it reason enough?”
    “Calm down, lass! No need to fuss. What if I told you that I can spin straw into gold?”
    Eliana laughed bitterly. This dream was too ridiculous for words! “I’d call you a rotten liar.”
    The man smiled and gave her a friendly nudge on the shoulder. “And you’d be right to do so if I were a normal man. But I am a faerie.”
    She jerked away from him, almost falling from the straw bale in her haste. Suddenly she knew—she knew —that this was no dream. It couldn’t be. Because there was something altogether too real about this stranger’s unreal-ness, about the brilliant starlight and the green of his eyes. As though everything else she had always known were the dream, and this, this , weird though it might be, were the reality always just beyond the edge of her understanding.
    A faerie? She should disbelieve his claim. Yet she could not find the will to do so.
    “What do you want with me?” Stories about faerie-folk came back to her, stories of how they snatched children from the cradle and stole young women away in the night.
    The faerie looked hurt. “I simply do not want to see you cry,” he said. “And it seems a shame to let you die because of a simple misunderstanding.”
    “Why should you care?” Eliana got to her feet and crossed to the opposite side of the room, on the far side of the spinning wheel. “I’m not of your kind.”
    “Ah, but your mother was.”
    Eliana’s heart froze in her breast. Her mother? A . . . faerie?
    Understanding fell upon her in a tremendous rush like the force of a waterfall. Of course she was! How could her mother, her beautiful, lovely, beloved mother, be anything less? Her mother, who was always just a little too wonderful for this world.
    Nevertheless, Eliana whispered, “You speak truly?”
    The faerie nodded slowly, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “She could not live long in your world, breathing your mortal air. She knew it would kill her to remain, but she could not bear to leave you or your father, not even for a day. So she stayed as long as she