"Ella…how could you?"
The look on his face broke her; the betrayal, outrage and hurt that radiated from his eyes, was too much to bear.
She stepped towards him.
"Please, please understand, I didn't know, I thought he meant gold or jewels, I didn't…I didn't know I would have to give him…" She trailed off, unable to say the words that stuck in her throat, to voice what she had promised to the creature.
"Just, please, please don't be angry with me." She reached for him and he jerked away as if burned.
"Don't. Don't try to justify what you did." His voice was laced with venom.
"Please…darling…"
"I'm not your darling. I'm not your love." He spoke, shaking his head and backing away from his wife.
"I was just your ticket out of a life filled with cinders and ash. Wasn't I?" he asked her looking at the floor. He continued. "I was your golden knight, riding in on a white horse to save you from your wretched beginnings and bring you into your shining future. But now…" he turned away from her and gripped the post of their bed canopy.
When he spoke again his voice was barely controlled and he was trembling.
"What, exactly did you ask him for?"
"Sweet heart I…"
"No!" he cut her off again and white knuckled the bed post in his hand. "I want to know what you thought our child was worth! What you bought with our baby!" he whirled around to look at her, hand still grasping the wood of the bed frame to keep himself from tearing out his hair in anger or worse, raising a hand to his pregnant wife.
Ella was crying now, large drops fell from her eyes to the floor like little glass jewels, which instead of inspiring pity only served to remind him of those damn slippers she had worn the night they met.
He finally let go of the wood pillar supporting their bed frame and flew to his wife's clothing chest and tore through it, looking for the box he knew he would find at the very bottom.
He ripped the glass slippers from their adorned wrapping and held them up to her. "Was it this, Ella?" he hissed. "Did you ask him for pretty shoes and a pretty dress so you could woo the handsome prince?"
"No, please Thomas, that's not it at all."
"Or maybe you didn't need to woo me? Maybe you asked him to put a spell on me so that I would fall in love with you and look past your obvious lack of nobility and breeding." He spat.
"I would never do that, never. I fell in love with you and you…you fell in love with me!"
He looked at the glass shoes in his hands. "Is that right?" he chuckled softly. "I fell in love with you? But you see, right now, I'm having a hard time believing I could ever fall in love with someone so ignorant…" he tightened his grip on her shoe.
"…So selfish." He reared his left arm back.
"So unbelievably selfish!" he threw the shoe, shattering it on the wall and watched with dark satisfaction as the beautifully crafted crystal became a pile of broken glass.
Ella sank to the floor, weeping.
Thomas panted and looked back at her withered form. "I don't think I can ever forgive you for this Ella." He turned again to look at the shoe in his other hand and then carelessly tossed it aside. It didn't fragment, like its counterpart, only cracked on one side.
Her sobs had turned to whimpers and she wrapped her arms around herself helplessly.
"Get up Ella." She looked up at him eyes swimming, but no compassion greeted her in his stare. "Get off the floor and put on your traveling cloak," he went to her wardrobe and pulled out the item, tossing it at her feet.
She stared at it mutely.
"Pick it up and put it on, we're going to the enchanted forest." At this she looked up, alarmed.
"Why, why take me to that cursed place?"
"Because," he said putting on his own cloak. "We are going to seek out this, Rumpelstiltskin, and he and I are going to make a new deal, one that doesn't involve my future son or daughter."
"Does this mean that you lay the blame on him and not me? That you understand that he tricked me?" she asked hopefully.
"Absolutely not," He answered, while pulling on his boots. He looked at her crestfallen face and moved on to his gloves. "But I need you with me. If we are going to right this wrong we must do so together." He reached for her hand with his now gloved ones. She rose and took it shyly.
"Make no mistake," he said as he opened the door. "I haven't forgiven you, I don't know if I ever will, but right now the most important thing is our child and what this creature wants with it."
She bowed her head and nodded into the hood of her cloak.
"For our child then…" she said softly, fingers lightly grazing her stomach.
And the two of them, hands held, stepped out into the dark.
Forty years earlier,
In the Kingdom of Or
"This is completely unacceptable!"
A meaty fist came slamming down onto the ornate desk in the dusty, gloomy office and immediately, the hand that had caused parchment, quills and ink to go flying and scattering off the table, began to shake from the slight exertion of balling his appendage. The tremors of old age coursed through his fingers and traveled up his arm to his wrist, which was covered with a cuff of yellowed lace that belonged to a wine colored waist coat with brass buttons and trimmings of silver thread.
It seemed that at one point in time the doublet and shirt he wore was of very fine quality, but where the buttons should have shone they were dull, and where the silver trim should have been neat, it was frayed.
Indeed, his clothes were just as haggard and drawn as his visage, which now poured over what was left of the papers on his writing desk. Dark circles, sat under his murky black eyes which were partially obscured by a curtain of stringy, iron-gray hair that fell in an unruly cascade down the sides of his face and the back of his neck to just reach his hunched shoulders. The wrinkles around his tired eyes and across his forehead and drooping chin made caverns and canals in which stray bits off food and rivulets of wine enjoyed to travel, only to find their final destination in his tangled, mossy beard.
When he smiled, which was seldom, you would see that he was missing a great many teeth and the ones that were left untouched by the black rot seeping from his gums were the color of yellow brown.
The King of Or, indeed the man described in such grisly detail, sat at his desk mumbling quietly to himself about the rising cost of grain in the wake of his earlier outburst, when the door to his private study swung open, and without a knock or an invitation, a young man came strolling in.
"Father." He greeted him shortly.
The King did not look up from his work, only grunting to acknowledge his son's presence. The Prince of Or sat down in rather sunken arm chair across from his royal father and waited patiently to be allowed to speak.
After what seemed like an eternity of unintelligible mumbles and the soft scratch of quill against parchment, the Old King spoke again.
Still without looking at his son, "What do you want now?"
"Father," he replied, sitting up in the chair. "We must talk about my wife."
The King harrumphed and rose from his chair with much protest from his screaming knees, to stand by the large window in the office, his back to the prince.
He chuckled quietly, at his own private joke. "Hmm, yes your wife. You know, son, I thought that when you ran off and married that girl in such a hurry, that it was because you'd put your bastard in her belly."
He traced the dusty glass with his fingers lightly frowning when they came back caked in gray.
"But it turns out that your sole motivations for eloping with that common whelp were spite and sentiment."
The prince stiffened at the king's words.
"I love her, father." He said softly.
"Hmmm," he said, wiping his fingers on the threadbare curtains. "Be that as it may, I was willing to overlook your disadvantageous marriage in a time of dire financial peril because I thought that at the very least your foolish union would have wrought a legitimate heir to the throne."
"Father I…"
The king silenced him with a wave of his hand.
"That was over three years ago Edward. And in that time in the absence of royal children our kingdom has had less and less rain, and much more starvation and disease."
"Father," Edward sputtered. "You don't expect me to believe that you blame the lack of rain and the suffering of our people on Dora and me taking too long to have a child?"
The king rolled his eyes and finally turned to face his red faced son. It struck him for a moment how like him the boy seemed just then, when the wizened old king was at his prime. Broad shoulders, chestnut hair, startling green eyes, all his, only the proud and pointed nose was his mother's.
"No, of course I don't you dolt. But you must understand that for a small kingdom like ours a strong bloodline is key," he began to shuffle about the room at a snail's pace.
"Royal children, lead to royal marriages, which come with dowries and alliances and resources we do not possess, especially if those children are boys." He stopped at his son's chair and placed a trembling hand on his shoulder.
"Your sweet mother gave me twelve sons, but you are all I have left. I must be able to count on you to do what is right for our people and to lead when I am no longer able."
"I understand my duties as future king father it's just…"
"Just nothing boy! You will carry out your responsibilities to the best of your abilities because you must, and that includes providing an heir, which as I recall you finally got around to doing." The king left his hand on his son's shoulder and gripped it gently.
"That is what I came to talk to you about, Hickory and Dickory told me that the baby would be born sometime in the next few days, I came to inform you of the imminent birth of you first grandchild."
The king harrumphed again and clapped his son on the shoulder.
"So nice of you to try and keep me in the loop, but I have been monitoring the progress of that child since you first learned of its conception, there was no need for you to leave your pregnant wife to come and tell me that bit of old news."
The prince faltered slightly and reached out to gently grab the hem of his father's royal robe, a sign of supplication.
"It's only that…that I wanted to come and invite you in person. To come to the house I mean."
The king stared down at him silently for a beat then. "What do you mean invite me? You dithering dirt clod, did you really think that I wouldn't want to be present for the birth of my only son's first child over something as trivial as an elopement?" He sauntered over to his desk to gather his abandoned work and put it in a locked drawer.
"Phfft, we were all young once sonny, I know how…charming pretty, young things can be." He turned to his son again, who was now smiling fondly in his direction. The king cleared his throat awkwardly.
"Well? Let's go then, we don't want that little flower of yours to squeeze out that mewling mess when we aren't there to catch it. What are you waiting for?"
The prince rose with a grimace.
"Yes let's hurry, but I do believe father, that it is the midwife's job to "catch the child" as you so eloquently put it."
"Yes, yes." The king dismissed impatiently. "Whoever is doing the catching doesn't matter but what you name it does, and I insist you name the child after me if it is a boy, your late mother if it is a girl."
The prince smiled as they made their way to the waiting carriage.
"Rapunzel would be a nice name for a girl, especially if she turns out to have mother's beautiful golden hair," he frowned slightly. "But I highly doubt any boy prince would want the name Rumpold."
"Well, why the bloody hell not? Rumpold is a fine, strong name, been in our family for generations; that boy will win all his battles with a strong name like that."
"Yes well, it is very old fashioned, and common, I'd rather something unique and new."
"New, my wrinkled backside, you should always stick with the familiar sturdy names Edward, if you really despise your father's name that much we can have a fairy present at the birth, I'm sure she'll glean the most suitable name for the child."
The prince sighed as he helped his father into the carriage.
"I don't despise your name. I'm just not sure I want to call him that. Anyway, we're not even sure it's a boy yet."
"But you're hoping." The king quipped knowingly as he settled into the seat.
"Yes," Edward whispered. "hoping..."
The king knocked on the hood of the carriage loudly.
"We're off to my son's cottage," he bellowed. "to see my new grandchild!"
And then the carriage lurched forward, and they were on their way.