I gave the wrapping around his ankle one final tug to tighten it, perhaps a little harder than I absolutely had to. Erik gave a yelp of pain, and I patted his bound leg. “Okay, all done,” I said, admiring my handiwork.

“Thanks. Now if you find me a stick or something, I’m pretty sure I can keep going for a couple more hours. The river is right over there,” he jerked a thumb behind him, “and we can follow it right into town. Once we get there, a doctor can get me fixed up properly.”

“I’m not finding you a stick,” I told him firmly. “You shouldn’t put any weight at all on your ankle, and we’ll move a lot faster if you aren’t hopping through the forest on one foot. Come on, I’ll support you.” I reached out to pull him to his feet, but he pushed my hands away.

“No way,” he denied, “You’re not carrying me all the way back to town.”

“Either swallow your pride,” I told him, “or I’ll leave without you, and you can crawl all the way to town for all I care. You just told me all I have to do is follow the river back there, I don’t need your help getting out of these woods anymore.”

Erik glared at me, and I glared right back.

He broke before I did, and his shoulders slumped with defeat. “Fine,” he snapped.

He insisted on struggling into a standing position on his own, using a tree for support and standing unsteadily on his good foot. Before he could protest anymore, I slipped under his arm and allowed him to lean heavily on me. He outweighed me by quite a bit, but he wasn’t much taller than I was, so I wasn’t totally overbalanced. It wouldn’t be an easy walk back to town, but I was sure I could do it.

We started to walk, hobbling along at a painfully awkward pace at first while we struggled to find a mutual rhythm to our steps. We didn’t get very far before Erik suddenly ground to a halt and turned his head to look at me with an utterly bemused expression.

“Wait, earlier, I wasn’t listening very clearly because you threw yourself on me and I was distracted by the terrible agony in my arm—did you say something about killing someone, or did I imagine that?”

Blood rushed to my cheeks, from shame and embarrassment. I couldn’t meet his eyes.

“Uh… yeah, I might have said something along those lines.”

“What—how did you—who did you-”

I took a deep breath, and explained the whole bizarre encounter.

Erik didn’t seem particularly phased that I met an old gnome in the woods who had offered me help in return for my firstborn child, but then again, he lived in a house gifted to him by a magical fairy he had met in the woods, so I supposed this kind of situation wasn’t exactly out of the ordinary in these parts.

He was, however, deeply shocked by the ending. I guessed your would-be rescuer spontaneously ripping themselves in half wasn’t as common an occurrence.

"You... you... made a guy so angry he tore himself in two? How the hell do you do that? Wh-what was his name? Rumpelstiltskin? You had to guess that? What kind of a name is that?”

“I’m a good guesser, okay?” I muttered. “That’s not the point, anyways.”

“And what exactly do you mean you have to rescue some girl stuck in a tower?” he demanded.

“I told you, without Rumpelstiltskin to help her, the miller’s daughter is going to be stuck in the tower by the king, and she won’t have anyone to come spin the straw into gold for her. And if she doesn’t, the king will have her executed, because… I don’t know, he’s a huge asshole, I guess. But I can’t let that happen to her. It’s my fault Rumpelstiltskin is too dead to help her, and I can’t just knowingly let some poor girl get executed because of a mistake I made!”

Erik groaned, and covered his face with his good hand. “If I’d have known how much trouble you were going to be,” he said, his voice partially muffled through his fingers, “I’d have let those wolves eat you.”

“Is there anything, anything at all, that you can do to help me help her?” I pleaded.

He just glared at me, unmoved.

"This poor girl, her father told the king she could weave hay into gold, and now the king will lock her away, and if she doesn't transform the whole room by sunrise, she’ll have her head cut off! It wasn’t even her own fault she got stuck in this situation, it wasn’t like she was making up lies to show off or anything. Her selfish dad got her into this mess, and now the only person that could possibly help her apart from us is dead! I can’t just leave her to that miserable fate!"

Erik's fierce expression faltered, and he bit his lip. A single tear, genuine but conveniently timed, ran down my cheek. He broke.

"Fine!" he spat. "Fine, I'll help you. But only a little! I don’t have the time or interest to go on some crazy quest to rescue random damsels in distress. I’ll do what I can to get you to whatever castle she’s being held in, but then I’m done," he warned.

I would have jumped for joy if I wasn’t supporting half of Erik’s weight. "Thank you so much!" I said. "I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t at least try to do something!"

Erik just grumbled. "Okay, okay. Whatever. I’ll never get rid of you at this rate." Then he stopped and peered at me intensely, as if he was trying to read my mind. "Wait... how do you know all that?" he demanded.

Oh, crap. Now was definitely not a good time to tell him about the Book, but I couldn't think of a good way to talk myself out of this. So I decided to do what came natural to me in times of stress: play dumb.

"All of what?" I asked, my eyes wide.

In contrast, Erik's eyes narrowed. "About the miller's daughter or whoever it is?" he said.

“I…eeeeeeee…” I drew out the word to an uncomfortable length, my mind whirling frantically to come up with a believable excuse. “…Eeeeee… am a… really good… guesser?” I failed.

Erik just looked at me as if I had something seriously wrong with my head. Maybe I did. Who was to say that this all wasn’t some incredibly realistic hallucination?

“How do you know?” Erik demanded again.

“I have… I have…” I floundered, and then I sighed. It was funny, whenever I was reading books where a relatively simple lie could easily get the main character out of a dangerous situation, I always got passionately frustrated that they couldn’t manage it. Yet in that moment, my mind was a complete blank, and I could think of absolutely nothing to help me avoid answering his question other than the truth.

“I have a magic book,” I muttered.

“You have a what now?”

“A magic book. It’s like a book of stories, except the things it in really happened. Or are going to happen? Will happen at some point in the near future? I’m not going to lie, I don’t entirely understand how it works.”

“And you found out all this stuff about the miller’s daughter from this magic book?” Erik repeated, not sounding quite as skeptical as I had expected him to. It was going to take me awhile to get used to the fact that magic wasn’t exactly a novelty around these parts.

“Yeah,” I agreed, not mentioning that I had actually known all that stuff would happen via a different copy of the same book, the one my mother had read to me from my childhood, one that had never sucked me into its pages to force me to live the stories I had once held so dear—which I didn’t realize at the time was something I should have been grateful for.

I wasn’t about to tell him all that, about having lived a completely ordinary life in Oregon until approximately three days ago when I wandered into a tiny bookstore that I thought, at worst, would be unbearably hipster, but actually ended up being unbearably supernatural.

It was hard to say which was worse.

“Where did you get a book like that?” he asked. “And why haven’t you mentioned it before?”

I recalled, with a slight shiver, the woman with the wolfish smile behind the counter of the book store. “It was… a gift. Probably from a witch or a fairy or something, like your story about your house. I don’t know why she gave it to me, but she did, so now I’m stuck with it. And I didn’t mention it because… why would I? I didn’t really think it was going to affect me this much until I ran into Rumpelstiltskin and realized that the entire trajectory of an innocent woman’s future has been thrown off course.”

“So this book tells you the way things should have happened? How it all would have ended up if you hadn’t interfered?”

“Uh… yes.”

At first Erik just stared at me, and then he made a funny coughing sound in the back of his throat. It bubbled up, until a roaring laugh escaped his lips. His body shook with laughter, even as he clutched his arm to his chest in pain.

I was seriously considering pushing him to the ground and running away. He caught my death glare, and tried to stifle his laughter. Erik struggled internally with himself for a few moments, then coughed lightly and wiped the grin off of his face, though his eyes were still dancing.

“I’m sorry, that’s just a little bit funny.”

“I really don’t think it is,” I replied coldly.

“That witch or fairy or whoever who gave you that book has a real twisted sense of humor.”

“I’m so glad you appreciate it, I should try to get you guys together sometime so you can bond over my suffering. Maybe you’ll start a club, the ‘Let’s Laugh at Rikki Because She’s Going to be an Accessory to Murder’ club.”

Sensing my feelings on the topic, Erik tried to put on a much more somber expression. “I can see how it’s all rather disturbing to you, of course. I’m not thrilled about it either, since it’s led to me having to get you started on your inevitably fruitless attempt to undo the damage you’ve inadvertently caused.”

“I feel so much worse now than I did before. I think I’m just going to leave you here after all.”

“Can I see this book of yours?”

I hesitated. “Why?”

“I’m curious now. Does it just foresee the future of this miller’s daughter? What other tales does it contain? I’m interested in seeing a book that supposedly records events before they’ve happened.”

I wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do, but I couldn’t think of an excuse as to why I couldn’t show the Book to him. Besides, what damage could it really do anyways?

I begrudgingly agreed and we stopped for a brief rest, and to take a look at the Book. After helping Erik lower himself onto a mossy stone as much as I could, I pulled off my backpack and unzipped it, taking out the weighty book.

It was dark, too dark to be able to read it, but Erik rummaged around in his pockets and withdrew a flintbox, with which he lit a small fire that he had built in the space of only five or ten minutes.

It was just a small, crude camp fire, and the flickering flames were almost too weak to read by, but I managed by leaning down until my nose was pressed almost to the pages and squinting a lot.

I opened the book to the table of contents and ran my finger down the list of stories until I found Rumpelstiltskin. I started to flip to that page, but froze abruptly.

“What?” Erik asked, noticing that something was up.

“The pages—they’re all blank,” I said slowly, not sure if I could trust my eyes. I quickly flipped through the entire book, only to find that every single page had inexplicably gone blank.

All the pages, except…

“The story of Rumpelstiltskin is still here,” I said, stopped at the beginning of that story. The page opposite was completely empty, and all the pages after the final line were as well, but somehow this one remained intact.

It was a short story, only a page and a half long, and I read it aloud.

RUMPLESTILTSKIN

Once upon a time there was a miller who was poor, but who had a beautiful daughter. Now it happened that he got into a conversation with the king, and to make an impression on him he said, "I have a daughter who can spin straw into gold."

The king said to the miller, "That is an art that I really like. If your daughter is as skillful as you say, then bring her to my castle tomorrow, and I will put her to the test."

When the girl was brought to him he led her into a room that was entirely filled with straw. Giving her a spinning wheel and a reel, he said, "Get to work now. Spin all night, and if by morning you have not spun this straw into gold, then you will have to die." Then he himself locked the room, and she was there all alone.

The poor miller's daughter sat there, and for her life she did not know what to do. She had no idea how to spin straw into gold. She became more and more afraid, and finally began to cry.

No one came to her aid, however, and she spent the long night locked away all alone in the tower, knowing that death surely awaited her.

The next morning the king unlocked the room and entered, only to find the miller’s daughter still surrounded by the piles of ordinary straw.

“Why, you haven’t spun a single piece of straw into gold! I warned you that if you did not spin all the straw in this room into gold, you would have to die!”

“Please spare me,” cried the miller’s daughter, throwing herself upon his mercy. “Give me one more day, and come back tomorrow! I will try my best to spin this straw into gold by then!”

The king, though displeased and beginning to think that the miller had lied about his daughter’s talent, felt pity for the girl and agreed to give her one more day to complete the task.

“If you have not succeeded by tomorrow,” he told her, “then you will have to die.”

And whether she dies or not, depends on you, Rikki Collins. For Rumpelstiltskin is dead, and no one else in the wide world knows of the predicament of the miller’s daughter. On this day, her father met the king and spun a thread of lies about her talent at the spindle. Tomorrow, her father brings her to the king’s castle, and at dawn the next morning the king comes to find that she has failed. She has one more day, until the following dawn, to spin the roomful of straw into gold, or her life is forfeit through no fault of her own.