Page 13 of Cinder's Adventure: Get Me To the Wedding!

Was it sleight of hand?

Or some sort of chemical reaction?

But no matter how intently she stared, she could not see how he was doing it.

And then—faster than she would have thought possible—he was finished. All of the straw was gone, replaced with long golden thread.

The boy stood and flourished a bow in her direction. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you,” he said. Then he held up her ruby ring, showing it to her one last time, before—

Poof.

He was gone.

He had vanished into nothing, and taken her ring with her.

Cinder didn’t have time to recover from her astonishment before a key turned in the door’s lock and the Alder King strode back into the room.

She stiffened, saying nothing as he strode over to the spinning wheel and inspected the golden thread. He did notsmile, exactly, but his bright eyes glinted with some unspoken approval as he turned back to face Cinder.

“How is it,” he said slowly, “that a girl of your… particular oddities”—he gestured at her cyborg hand—“has come to have such a remarkable skill?”

If Cinder tells him the truth, go to Chapter 13.

If Cinder lies, go to Chapter 15.

Chapter 13

“Well,” said Cinder to the Erlking. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t spin this straw into gold. There was this boy. Red hair. Freckles. Possibly dead? He said something about being a ghost…”

As the Erlking listened, his expression began to shift. It was subtle at first. A narrowing of his eyes, followed by an intrigued lift of one slender eyebrow. A deep breath accompanied by a tensing of his jaw.

“Also,” Cinder continued, “he took my ring. I mean, I guess I did trade it to him, but I’m starting to regret that decision.”

“Indeed,” said the Erlking slowly, his nostrils flaring. “I regret most things involving the poltergeist.”

Cinder frowned. She’d heard of poltergeists—ghosts who supposedly spent their time shrieking and rattling doors and being generally obnoxious. The boy hadn’t struck her asthatkind of ghost. But her experience with the undead was limited, so how could she be sure?

“I should have known,” the Erlking muttered, storming past her to rip the bobbin full of gold thread from the spinning wheel. He snarled as he stared at it. “I thought it was the girl, but… I can see now that I was wrong. All this time, that blasted poltergeist was a gold-spinner. Hulda-blessed. And trapped here, in my own castle.”

With a snarl, he turned back toward Cinder. “Follow me,” he snapped, and stormed from the room.

It happened so quickly that it took Cinder a speechless moment to rush after him. He was already halfway down the corridor.

She followed him up a set of winding steps, into an upper room of one of the castle’s towers. She hesitated when she realized they had reached, of all things, a bedroom. It was lavish, but far more Gothic than any of the luxuries of New Beijing Palace. Black-velvet drapes and leaded windows and lace like cobwebs spread across a postered bed.

“This is… nice,” she said, her chest tightening with discomfort. “But I wasn’t planning on staying. I have to get back to New Beijing.”

The Erlking gave her a maddening look, as though she was ridiculous for assuming the bedroom was for her. He gestured to the vanity against one wall, topped with an enormous mirror framed in ebony. “This looking glass will take you back to where you belong,” he said.

“Oh. Right. The magical looking glass. Of course.” She cleared her throat. “What happened to the carriage?”

He huffed with impatience. “It is otherwise preoccupied. Go on. As I have no use for you, I have no wish to waste more of my time.”

“Yeah, you thinkyourtime is valuable,” Cinder muttered. She approached the vanity, staring at her own reflection. She was caught off guard to see the sheen of makeup on her skin, the hair that Iko had painstakingly worked on now beginning to slip from its clips. “How does this work, exactly?”

“Simply walk through,” said the Erlking.

Cinder stretched forward her hand. Her cyborg fingers met cyborg fingers in the reflection, but then the glass rippled and her hand slipped through.

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