They stood outside the fisherman’s hut at the edge of the forest. Falk had gone into the village, stumping off on his wooden leg, and as soon as he left, Hans had appeared. Fritz knew why he was there—Hans only came to visit for one thing anymore—but that only made Fritz more reluctant to go out and talk to him. He had finished binding his chest, pulled on his shirt, and slumped outside with a crumpled paper and some charcoal.
“It’ll take me some time,” Fritz said. “It’s getting h-harder to find.”
Hans’s lip curled. “Why don’t you tell me where it is, and I’ll fish it out of the lake myself?”
“It won’t work for you. It will only work for the first person who found it.”
Hans slashed a hand through the air impatiently. “Go on! Hurry up so I don’t have to live in this horrid place anymore. And don’t make any excuses or I’ll know, and everyone will hear about Fritz the child killer.”
With a furtive look around, as if there was ever anyone else down by the lake, Hans hurried back up the road to the village. Fritz sighed, folded the parchment into his pocket, and went to get his net.
He tried not to be upset with Hans. Several mornings ago, his father, Jürgen, had been hauled out of the well, his whole body bloated, his skin fish-belly white and marbled with blue veins. The children he had kept under his shop could not say what he had been doing with them, only that he would take one of them away every so often and they would never be seen again. The villagers did not mourn Jürgen; they gave him no burial, instead tossing his body into the forest for the animals. Ulrich was carving a statue in Liesel’s likeness which would be mounted near the well. They had found a dress in the well that many now assumed was hers. Her boots were probably at the bottom of the well somewhere. The consensus was she’d died and turned into a warg.
Hans claimed he had not known about the children under the house, and Fritz believed him, but not everyone did. AndHans had never spent the time or effort to learn his father’s trade, so now others in the village were vying to take Jürgen’s place as butcher. Hans was alone and, for a while, Fritz had felt bad for him.
That feeling was gone now, and something worse had taken its place.
Fritz got into his little old boat, the one his father had passed on to him after Fritz had helped him build a new one, and rowed out into the lake. Thunder rumbled overhead, but thunder was usually rumbling these days. A light snow dusted the boat. The lake would not freeze, no matter how cold it got. Fritz huddled into his jacket and hat, wishing his gloves were thicker, wondering if he could convince Heike to make him something warmer. She’d been a little distant since she’d gone into the woods to speak to the witch, but maybe she just hadn’t been eating enough. Maybe a nice string of salmon...
The lake curved to the east and south, and the forest made a tall gray barrier around its shores. Fritz angled the boat east, to a spot where the bank had crumbled and a tree had fallen across the mouth of a small inlet. The tree’s roots twisted upward like broken fingers, and its branches made an impassable tangle, but between the two, the trunk slanted at an angle that left Fritzjust enough room to scrunch down and guide his boat into the inlet.
The inlet was dark and peaceful, the water lapping gently against the sides of the boat and the banks of the lake. Fritz eased his net over the boat’s side and lowered it into the water. The net had a large triangular mouth fastened onto the end of a pole, so he didn’t have to get his hands wet hauling it in and out of the water. He waited patiently, not moving, wishing he could see below the iron-gray surface so that he would know if the fish was still here, or if it was purposefully avoiding him.
He had lied to Hans when he’d said the fish would only listen to the person who had first found it. Fritz couldn’t read well, and he wasn’t good at much else besides fishing, but he wasn’t stupid; if Hans knew where to find the fish, Fritz was sure he’d do something terrible with it. There had been a time when Fritz would have told him right away, when he would have been too scared to argue with Hans, when he would have given Hans whatever he wanted, because Hans was his closest friend in the world. But that was before Katrina had died.
There was a tug on the net, and Fritz exhaled and slouched back in relief. He hauled the net out of the water and carefully set it on the floor of the boat. Inside the net was a flounder,flat and round, with two ugly little eyes staring at him from the side of its head. It didn’t flop around like other fish, but instead remained still. Its tail curled and slapped once, as if annoyed.
“What does he wantnow?” the flounder asked.
Two
Flounders lived in the ocean, not in lakes, which was the first thing Fritz had thought when he’d hauled it out of the water several weeks before. He’d never fished in the ocean, but his grandfather had, and his father had told him about the types of fish that lived there. He had stared at the flounder hanging on the end of his line, and the flounder had stared back, and then Fritz had begun the task of unhooking it. What a catch! His father would be very interested to see this, and to know that the flounder had been inside the dark little inlet with the felled tree blocking the entrance. Like the lake creature that had washed up years ago, the flounder was something that wasn’t where it was supposed to be.
Then the hook had come out of its mouth, and the flounder had said, “Thanks for stabbing me in the cheek, you bastard.”
Fritz, who had a habit of giving fish voices when he was by himself on the lake, had paused and wondered when he’d started makingangryfish voices. He usually made them nice. Happy Mr. Fish, happy to feed the village.
“Yes, it’sme,” the flounder had said, slapping its tail against the boat. “Listen, if you promise not to eat me, I’ll give you a wish. Well, you’ll have to answer a riddle first, but I’ll make it easy.”
“How can you speak?” Fritz asked, still not sure if he had fallen asleep and was dreaming.
“How do you think? It’s magic. And I’m human, too, so if you eat me, you’re committing cannibalism. Know that before you make any decisions here today.”
“You’re a magic fish,” Fritz said, “and you can grant me a wish.”
“I’m a magichuman,” the fish said, “and I can grant youmanywishes, but I need you to help me. I need you to wish for me to be human again.”
“Oh. But you’re magic.”
“Yes.”
“And I can wish for anything?”
“Yes.”
“Can I have time to think about it?”
“I—I suppose? Why do you need time to think about it? You must listen to me: I have been trapped this way for many years, I haven’t seen family or friends, I can’t even go out into the lake for fear I’ll be eaten by a larger fish or pulled up by afisherman and ignored when I beg for mercy....”
