Erik returned, and waved me over to the door he had come through. "Come on then. It's late, and I'm tired."

"I... what?"

"I'm going to bed, come on."

I spluttered. "I am not going to bed with you!"

Erik rolled his eyes, as if he had never heard such a ridiculous statement. "Obviously. I was going to sleep on the armchair out here and let you have the bed, since you're pretty badly banged up, but if you just keep standing there with your mouth hanging open—"

I felt my cheeks flush crimson. "Oh. Right. Yeah, of course. Um, thank you." Trying to hide the worst of my humiliation, I hurried past him into the small room on the other side of the door.

It was a very small bedroom, almost cramped, but unlike the main room of the cottage it was fairly clean. Some clothes thrown haphazardly around the floor—obviously just recently tossed there from where they had lain on the bed in Erik's weak attempt at clearing the bed for me—but not much else apart from the bed itself, and a bedside table with a jug of water and an empty basin on top. It was plain that Erik was only ever in this room to sleep, so there was little opportunity for it to get as filthy as the rest of the cottage.

I shuffled over to the bed and set my backpack down, turning back to Erik.

"Thanks," I said again, rather awkwardly. 

He just shrugged. "I end up sleeping in the armchair half the time anyway, it doesn't matter to me. You can use the basin to wash up if you want, you're an absolute mess."

"Thanks," I repeated, sourly.

Silence passed between us, long and awkward as we both mentally searched for a polite way out of this conversation.

"Well, get a good night's sleep. You'll be needing it, since you're going to start repairing the roof first thing in the morning."

"Goodnight," I said firmly, and he left, pulling the door closed behind him.

I stood in the middle of the room for a few long moments, until I was sure that he wasn't coming back. I used the basin to wash the worst of the blood and dirt off my face, and tried to comb through my thick, unruly curls with my fingers, loosening the worst of the tangles and dislodging enough twigs and leaves to make a bird's nest.

My clothes were filthy and sweat stained, but there wasn't much I could do about that. All I had in my backpack was my wallet—and I doubted my library card or the $8 of modern American money I had in there would be of any use to me now—a notebook and pen, a beat up and dog eared novel, and... the Book. With a capital "B", at least in my head.

I sat on the bed and pulled the Book out, running my hand over the embossed leather cover. The damn thing weight nearly ten pounds, or at least it felt like it did when it was weighing me down as I ran for my life with canine carnivores snapping at my heels. I let it fall open somewhere in the middle of the book, and began scanning the pages.

"The Frog King... The Twelve Brothers... Rapunzel... Hansel and Gretel... The White Snake... Little Red-Cape..." I muttered as I flipped through pages at random. Then I went back to the table of contents and inspected each title one by one, occasionally turning to the story itself and giving it a glance over if I didn't remember it clearly. I got all the way through the list, to the final story in the collection, The Golden Key. It was one of the shortest in the book, and was left on a cliffhanger, which felt strange from what I had come to expect in a fairy tale. It didn't matter though, it wasn't what I was looking for.

Nothing in the Book seemed to be what I was looking for. I'd grown up with these stories, I knew most of them back to front. And Erik just didn't fit into any of them.

Well, maybe it was too much to expect that I would run into a main character this early on. Surely the fairy tale world was fully populated by people who never appeared in any stories, or only as unnamed background characters, bodies to fill the world, to give the important people a backdrop against which the stories of their lives unfolded.

I glanced down at the torn red cloak draped around my shoulders. Actually, I guess I did meet a main character almost immediately. And look how that turned out for me. I guessed I should count my lucky stars that Erik's name hadn't appeared in any of the fairy tales in the Book after all.

I shut the Book and shoved it back into my backpack, leaning back onto the pillows and staring up at the ceiling, my mind wandering. The past day and a half had passed in a bizarre, dream-like blur. Perhaps this was all only a dream. I didn't see how it could be anything else, these sort of things just didn't happen in real life.

But as I laid in Erik's bed, feeling the coarse woolen blankets that itched the bare flesh of my arms, feeling the weight of the pease porridge nine days old in my stomach and the dull, throbbing ache in my ribs and back, I very much doubted that this was a dream.

I yawned, rolled over. There was no way I would be able to sleep tonight. Too much had happened, my thoughts were racing and so many questions were unanswered. I'll never fall asleep at this rate, I thought, as my leaden eyelids drooped closed, and I slipped into dreamless darkness.

                                                         *   *   *

I woke to several sharp raps on the door the next morning.

"I'm awake, I'm awake!" I slurred, sitting bolt upright as if I'd just been caught sleeping on the job. I peered around, my eyes blurred with sleep, momentarily uncertain as to where I was or how I'd gotten there.

Then the previous day's memories began to slot into place, and I groaned, falling back onto the bed.

I had no idea what time it was, but it felt early. Way too early to be awake. My body screamed for more sleep, about five more hours of sleep if I had to put a number on it. My back and ribs still hurt, and sitting up so suddenly had sent a wave of pain crashing over me. I could feel the ache down in my muscles now, and my bruised back and sides were painful to put pressure on, even just laying there. I had no idea how I'd slept through the night in this condition.

Another series of knocks, somehow more impatient than the first round if that were possible, pounded a staccato on the bedroom door.

"I said I'm up!" I groaned. "I'll be right out!" With a vague sense of dread as to what this day had in store for me, I sat back up and swung my feet out of bed.

Erik was waiting for me in the main room of the cottage, wearing a heavy cloak, with a wickedly long and sharp knife hanging conspicuously at his waist.

"What's that for?" I asked tentatively, not sure if I really wanted to know.

Erik gave me a look that made it plain that he felt sorry that someone had failed me in my basic education so badly.

"Do you think I'm going to carry all seven of those wolves whole on a half day walk through the woods to town? Or were you planning on carrying them for me?"

"You're pleasant in in the morning," I muttered, but only under my breath.

"I have to gut and skin the animals, I'll only be bringing their pelts when we go to town. Considering how big they are, that'll be a heavy enough load. I should have done it last night, but it was too late in the day. I went out after you went to bed and covered them, so hopefully no other animals got to the bodies in the night, but..." he shrugged in a 'what can you do about animals scavenging your fresh kills' sort of way.

"So you're planning on heading into town today then?" I asked hopefully.

"I'm planning on going to town whenever that's fixed," Erik corrected me, pointing up at the canvas-covered hole in the roof. "Just like I said yesterday. That's why I woke you up this early, so you have lots of time to get started before it starts to get hot this afternoon."

If I'd known Erik a little better, I would have felt confident in claiming that he said that with a hint of petty smugness.

I glanced at the curtained windows, and saw that there wasn't even a hint of morning light behind them.

"There's fresh straw behind the house, along with all the tools you should need, including a ladder. Be careful to stay on the beams while you're up there, the whole roof is old and weak in a lot of places, you don't want to fall through again and have another hole to fix."

Erik turned to head for the door while I gaped after him. "What—but—but, I don't know how to thatch a roof!" I spluttered after him.

"It's simple, you bind your small bundles of straw, then you tie those into large bundles, then you wire those to the beams in the roof. Make sure to trim the ends to they line up neatly," he said without even bothering to look back at me. "Pease porridge is already hot, help yourself." And with that, he slammed the door shut behind him, leaving me alone in the cottage.

I ate the week-and-one-day-old pease porridge, all the while fantasizing about sizzling bacon, fried potatoes, pancakes, and fresh orange juice. Why couldn't I have found myself magically transported to the Shire, in a Hobbit's larder? It hardly seems fair.

Then I braced myself and headed outside as well, not ready in the slightest to begin the day's work.

It was still dark out, I saw miserably. It must be four or five in the morning, well before dawn. There was the slightest lightening of the sky that could be glimpsed through the trees overhead, just enough that I could navigate my way to the rear of the house without feeling as though I needed a flashlight. It was cold too, despite it being late summer, and I was suddenly grateful for the heavy, red riding cloak that I wore around my shoulders.

I did find a lot of tools in back of the cottage, but since, despite Erik's oh-so-helpful instructions, I still had no idea how to actually thatch roofs, I couldn't even begin to guess which ones applied to my task.

I ended up dragging a huge pile of straw to the front of the house, dumping it beside the pile I had swept up after I brought it down with me. Sitting cross-legged in the dirt, I picked through the old stuff, trying to figure out exactly what Erik meant by "bundles tied into bundles", or whatever it had been.

The sun had risen by the time Erik returned, much less bloody than I had expected him to be. Not that he was entirely blood free, but he didn't resemble the horror movie scene I had been imagining.

He carried rolled up wolf pelts on each shoulder, and seeing how the tails almost dragged in the dirt behind him, I was reminded again how huge those monsters had been. I shuddered. Escaping them had been nothing short of a miracle.

He paused in front of me to inspect my work. I had maybe thirty paltry bundles of straw surrounding me, much more uneven in length and thickness than the ones Erik had presumably made himself that I was using as references. My fingertips were all nicked to hell and back, since my inexperienced hands kept slipping as I tried to trim the ends of the bundles with the knife I had found.

Erik grunted, then turned away and continued on back around the rear of the cottage, taking the pelts with him.

"What does that mean?" I called after him, red faced from exertion and sore from sitting in the dirt for so long. "Was that a good grunt, or a bad grunt?"

He returned ten or fifteen minutes later, sans pelts, and disappeared back into the woods without answering any of my questions as to how I was doing. This repeated three more times, until he had brought back all seven pelts.

Before he returned with the last one, I had slipped around the back of the house to see what he was doing with them back there, and found them stretched and presumably drying on racks that looked like a crossed between a medieval torture device and a laundry rack.

When he was finally finished, I'd made a somewhat more respectable collection of straw bundles, and was attempting to bind them together into larger sheets. He stood over me, arms crossed over his chest, silently appraising my work with a critical eye that I could feel boring into me.

"What about the meat?" I said, trying to keep my gaze focused on my work. "Are you going to bring that back too and eat it?"

Erik made a noise of obvious disgust. "Absolutely not. Not those bastards."

"Is wolf meat not edible?"

Erik shrugged. "It can be. The local wolves in these parts aren't too bad. The meat's tough, but you can eat it, and they taste alright during the summer, when they've been eating well. But those weren't local wolves. They reeked when I cut them open, even their blood stank. I wouldn't touch that meat if I was starving to death."

I dropped the bundles of hay and my knife and stretched, trying to loosen up my muscles which were starting to cramp from sitting hunched over all this time. "Just tell me already, how is this? Is this okay?"

Erik shrugged again. "It'll do."

"It'll do?"

"I could have done it better, but that's not the point here, is it? It'll do for now. I'll have to redo the entire roof come mid-autumn anyway, but I can live with this in the meantime."

"You mean you're just going to redo it all in a few months anyway?" I asked, aghast. Hours of hard work blew away like smoke, just like that.

"Look at the condition it's in. It's gotten so weak, it just lets random women fall right through into my living room."

"That's it, I'm taking a break." I threw my hands up into the air, and struggled to my feet. My legs were stiff. "It's got to be time for lunch, and please tell me there is something other than pease porridge to eat."

It wasn't even close to time for lunch, and there was nothing to eat besides pease porridge. But Erik finally seemed to take a smidgen of pity on me, and he fetched a bow and a quiver of arrows from inside and said he would see what he could find, as if he were just going to check if there was anything in the pantry or something.

When he finally returned from the forest with a couple of rabbits slung over his shoulder, it really was about midday. He found me on the roof, struggling to fix bundles of hay to more bundles of hay, balancing precariously on wooden beams that I couldn't see, and trying not to fall through a roof that definitely looked as though it had seen better days.

He vanished into the cottage for an indeterminate amount of time, but eventually he reappeared and called up to me.

"Come down then, if you're hungry."