“H-how?” Fritz moved around the pole to meet her eye.
“Because it’s magic that made everyone forget,” she said, “but I don’t think it can make me forget. And you?”
“I was the one who made the wish,” he said. “It’s my fault.”
She spared him a quick, cold glance, then returned to her task. “Can you fix it?”
He thought of the tired flounder. “M-maybe.”
“Then we have to try.” There was a softclink, and Wenzel’s right wrist came free of the manacle. “Watch out. Move.” Heike came around to the other side of the post and wound her ribbon through the other manacle, sawing again. Fritz watched as the red silk wore away the iron in visible shavings, like scaling a fish. Magic. Heike had magic, somehow. There was another softclinkas the last bit of iron lost its hold, and Wenzel leaned against the pole and withdrew his hand.
“Can we get out of here, please?” he asked, grimacing and glancing at Hans, who was unconscious on the floor. A sheen of sweat covered his face. Heike gently took Wenzel’s arm and led him toward the door.
“Heike,” Wenzel said as they crossed the threshold, “they’ll be coming up soon—they’ll kill Fritz, too, if they think he’s Hans’s friend.”
“I’m not his friend,” Fritz said, taking Wenzel’s other arm. Then, backtracking, “W-wait,whowill kill me?”
Heike blew a lock of hair out of her face. “The villagers. They’re planning a coup. They’re going to throw Hans out intothe snow. They saw you with him in the great hall, and Ulrich and Godric saw you come here with Wenzel. Theymightlisten to us if we tell them you helped us escape, but they’re all very angry, and I don’t know if we can convince them.” She didn’t say the rest, but Fritz understood.Or if we want to try.
Fritz didn’t blame her; he didn’t entirely feel like he deserved to get out of the mess he’d made. All he’d wanted was to escape Hans’s lies, and he’d gotten tangled up in them anyway.
“Do either of you know how to get out of here?” Heike asked. “Everyone except me seems to know where things are around here.”
“N-no idea,” Fritz said, feeling even worse about himself.
“Door on the third-floor landing,” Wenzel said. “There’s a corridor and a back staircase that leads down to the servant’s quarters. But where are we going?”
“First, we’re getting out of here,” Heike said. The murmur of angry voices and the scrape of leather and metal on stone was echoing up the stairs. “And on the way, Fritz is going to tell us how he made this happen, and how he can change things back to the way they were.”
They crept down the stairs and pushed through the door on the third-floor landing. In a low voice, Fritz told them the story of finding the flounder and testing its magic, and making Hans’swish and returning to the village to find it as it was now. By that point they were several flights down a narrow servant’s stair and coming to the ground floor.
“You’re saying none of this is real,” Wenzel said, staring hard at Fritz while Heike peeked around the corner to make sure their way was clear, “and it’s all because you answered a riddle from a fish in the lake and made a wish?”
“It’sreal; it’s just notright.If I can get back to the fish, I can wish it back to normal.”
Heike motioned to them. They emerged in a guardroom, dark but dry, lit only by the torch at the door. They found a heavy coat and hat, which Heike immediately pulled on, though they were too big for her.
“I can’t find any others,” Wenzel said. “We’ll have to go look somewhere else.”
“No.” Heike pulled her hood up and arranged the scarf over her face. “You’re hurt. Go find Doctor Death, or even Gabi. They’ll fix you up. You can’t go running around out in the cold with your back cut open.”
Wenzel turned a hurt look on her. “But you can’t go, either. It’s too dangerous. The cold could—or the forest—”
Heike, scanning him, hesitated and then reached out to take his hand. “We won’t be in the forest; we’ll be on the lake. You’rehurt. You can barely stand. We have to do this, or the town is going to destroy itself. I know you don’t remember, but there is something better than this.” Her hand moved up to his cheek and Fritz looked away, very conscious of his own presence. “You never like it when I go, but I always come back to you. I promise this time won’t be different. Okay?”
Wenzel muttered, “Okay.”
Heike was grabbing Fritz’s arm and yanking him toward the guardhouse door. “Let’s go,” she said. “And I hope you’re ready to run.”
They were halfway down the rise to the castle when fresh screaming pierced the air.
“Hans woke up,” Heike said over the wind. They slouched close together as they jogged through snowdrifts.
Fritz glanced back at the castle, terrified. The torch in his hand wavered. “What will they do with him? They clearly hate him. Will they really—really k-kill him?”
Heike thought for a moment, then said, “No. I think they’ll send him into the forest.”
“Isn’t that killing him?”
