“Only if he fears Death.”
Fritz didn’t understand this, but his teeth were freezingand it was making his head pound, so he closed his mouth and stopped talking. Something about Heike had changed since her journey into the woods. She’d gotten older, somehow. She saw things the rest of them didn’t.
The snow was already piled high, turning Greymist Fair into a field of white hills that glimmered faintly under a bright moon, visible now in a gap between the clouds. Fritz and Heike ran when they could, taking awkward, bowlegged leaps, but by the time they made it to the road to the lake, they were both panting. It didn’t feel quite so cold anymore, which Fritz found worrying. His father had always told him that was the time to be afraid, when the cold stopped being cold.
Finally they reached Grey Lake. Clouds had again obscured the moon, and the lake was a dark abyss before them. Fritz kicked his way to the snow-laden dock and found his little boat, flipped over on the shore, covered.
“We’ll have to clear this off,” he said, holding out the torch to Heike. “I can push most of it off the hull, then we can row to the inlet—”
“Fritz,” Heike said, taking the torch and looking off the side of the dock. Fritz followed her gaze. There was a powdering of snow on the surface of the water. Holding on to a post, Fritzlowered his leg over the side of the dock and kicked at the snow. Below was an icy sheet, and beneath that, darkness. When he set his foot down, the ice held. He kicked at it. The impact reverberated up his leg, and he’d only managed to scuff the surface.
Pulling himself back up, Fritz hurried to the end of the dock and leaned over, holding the torch out. A layer of snow covered everything as far as the light could reach. He paused there, breathless, until the clouds shifted and the moon emerged again. The lake glowed in the night, a great disc of haunting blue-white bordered by a black wall of trees.
Grey Lake had frozen.
Six
Heike ignored Fritz’s protestations—“But the lakeneverfreezes!”—and forced him to put together a list of things they would need, which was short. Something to break the ice, and his net. Heike unearthed his net from under the snowed-in boat while Fritz searched the ruins of the hut for his father’s iron fire poker. He found it only after shoving nearly a whole wall out of the way, ripping his right glove and slashing his skin open in the process.
Tools in hand, he led Heike out onto the ice. They stayed close to the shore in case the ice grew thin, but he never heard so much as a creak beneath the snow cover. His eyes watered; the wind had picked up, and they were walking directly into it. He tried to stay in front of Heike to block her from the worst. Reaching the inlet was a blessing; they ducked under the fallen tree and were immediately protected by the forest around them. Face chapped and numb, Fritz stepped out into the middle of the inlet, testing the ice.
“I don’t understand how this happened,” he said. “I was just here, and the lake was the same as always. It’s never frozen before, and now it’s completely solid only a few hours after I last saw it.”
“Fritz,” Heike said, sounding tired, “I don’t believe you’re as simpleminded as Hans thinks you are, and I need you to keep up now. This weather isn’t just weather. The forest isn’t just forest. Your fish isn’t just a fish. We have passed from the world of reason; this is the world of magic. I need you to know where you are. Do you?”
The torchlight cast Heike’s face in gold and bronze. She didn’t seem cold at all, and she looked at him with a steadiness that he’d rarely seen from adults, and never from his own father. He felt so small, so lost, he may as well have been a child again, crying when he wandered too far down the shore and lost sight of the hut. Right now, there was no time for crying or for questioning. There was only time for doing.
“I do,” he said. Heike nodded. Fritz handed her the torch so he could take the fire poker in both hands and began hacking his way through the ice.
The ice didn’t crack, but it did chip away. Fritz was able to carve a hole through the surface to the water beneath, widening it until the mouth of his net would slip through. He threw thefire poker aside and gasped when it tore his glove and some of his skin away with it; his blood had frozen everything together. The gasp chilled his teeth and made him feel as if his skull had frosted over beneath his skin. He took the net from Heike and thrust it through the hole in the ice.
They waited. Fritz kneeled by the hole, net handle in hand and eyes closed, praying nothing had happened to the flounder. His legs were going numb; he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to stand up again. There was no sense of anything under the ice except for the gentle ebb and flow of water, and the chill began to seep into the pit of Fritz’s stomach.
Then a tug on the net, so subtle it might have been nothing. Fritz opened his eyes, staring down into the dark water. A second tug, harder. He cried out and yanked the net up, hand over hand until he was wedging the curled body of the ugly flounder through the hole and onto the ice.
“’S cold,” the flounder said.
“I need another riddle,” Fritz said. “I need to put things back the way they were.”
“Don’t know if I can help you with that,” said the flounder. There was something glazed about the flounder’s eyes. It lifted the corner of its tail weakly. “I’m about out of magic, I think,” the flounder said. “End of the line. That last wish was a big one.I never actually thought about running out of magic, what it would be like. I guess it means dying. I never thought that it would mean dying. I was really looking forward to being human again.”
“You can’t grant the wish because you don’t have enough magic?” Heike asked.
“Hello. Didn’t know there was someone else there.”
Fritz shifted the net so the flounder could see Heike.
“Oh—you look like someone I knew once. I gave her a wish. I think she used it to turn me into a fish. It was a long time ago, though, and I probably deserved it. I think I was a bit of an ass.”
“You said you don’t have enough magic?” Heike asked again.
“I don’t think so,” said the flounder. “Doesn’t it seem a little silly, that you shouldrun out? Does everyone who has magic run out of it, or do you think that’s just me, maybe? I could see it just being me; I never deserved as much as I had in the first place. What an ass I was.”
Heike reached into the net and gently lifted the flounder out, drawing it into her lap, heedless of the icy water that soaked her dress. “What if you borrowed some magic? Could that work?”
The flounder, surprised, paused before answering. “You would do that? Just... give it to me?”
“For this, yes,” Heike said. “For Greymist Fair. I don’t know how much I have, but I can try.”
