Jack dropped his head for a moment, apparently too overcome by his humiliation to look me in the face. I just sat there quietly, until he seemed to gather himself and looked back up.

“If I go,” he said slowly. “If I leave to make my own fortune, then my mother doesn’t have to worry about supporting me anymore. She doesn’t have to worry about keeping me fed, or leaving me the farm to inherit. She could sell the farm, and move in with my aunt and uncle. They couldn’t afford to take both her and me on, but if it was just her…” he trailed off, and left the question implied, hanging in the air.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t actually know this guy at all—okay, I guess I did in a way, but just because I’ve read a biography of Steve Jobs, it doesn’t make me his best friend.

Besides, I couldn’t let him come with me. If this was the day he got his magic beans, then tomorrow was the day he was supposed to climb the beanstalk for the first time. If he left his home now, he would lose all of that.

But how could I explain that to him? I was terrified of ruining yet another story. I was living the butterfly effect here, every story I touched had the potential to spiral out of control with the slightest change. Who knew what damage I could do to the future Jack was supposed to live?

“Um… I think that’s something you should probably talk to your mom about first,” I suggested as gently as I could. “I mean… she’d probably be pretty worried about you if you just skipped out without even saying goodbye, wouldn’t she? And just because you think she would be better off without you, doesn’t mean she wants that.”

Jack’s expression crumpled, just for a moment. Then he gathered himself and took a deep, albeit shaky, breath.

“You’re right. Of course you’re right.” He stood up suddenly, and looked around vaguely as if he was coming out of a dream. “I’d uh… I guess I’d better get going then. I should be getting back to the farm.”

“Oh… okay,” I said, a bit taken aback by the abruptness of his change of heart.

“Well, it was nice meeting you, Rikki,” Jack said, and he stuck out his hand.

I shook it, rather awkwardly. “Nice to meet you too. And Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t worry too much. You really never know when fate will come knocking at your door.”

“Sure, sure.”

Still distracted, still hardly seeming to hear my words, Jack hurried away from the inn, into town.

I watched him go, more than a little shocked by the extremely sudden nature of our parting.

But then again, I guess our meeting had been pretty sudden too, so maybe that was just in keeping with the theme.

Either way, now there really wasn’t any time to waste.

I finished shoveling the last few scraps of food into my mouth, then got up and ran. I shoved the empty plate into the surprised hands of Hans back in the kitchen, only pausing long enough to gasp out a hasty “thank you”, and then dashed back up the stairs to the room on the inn’s second story.

I bolted into Erik’s room without knocking, to find him much the same as I had found him earlier that morning: face down and fast asleep, snoring like a summer thunderstorm.

I shook him awake, which turned out to be a mistake because I had to quickly duck to avoid the swinging fist that missed my face by inches.

“Wha’s going on?” Erik grunted groggily, sitting up with his fists raised as if expecting to be attacked.

“Jesus, it’s me! Rikki!” I said, poking my head over the edge of the bed to see if it was safe to reappear.

Erik rubbed his eyes with his fists, and blinked blearily down at me. “Oh. What are you doing down there?”

“You tried to hit me!”

“I did? Well, you snuck up on me. Don’t sneak up on me.”

“You were sleeping!”

“You’d be amazed how many things sneak up on me when I’m sleeping. What are you doing here? I thought you were going to let me have a rest.”

“Change of plans. Time to leave. So pack your things, and let’s get out of here.”

“Woah, slow down. First of all, we’re not going anywhere, or doing anything, until I’ve had something to eat. I’m starving. Secondly, in case you’ve forgotten, my ankle is still sprained. Can’t you give me at least a day before making me haul you halfway across the countryside? And thirdly, why the sudden demand that we have to leave now? What happened?”

I had to hold back a groan at this waste of precious time. “You didn’t tell me that it takes almost two full days to get to the castle!” I said. “That means that we’ll only have one day to prepare for our rescue of the Miller’s Daughter, and that’s only if we leave right now. If we wait until tomorrow, then we won’t arrive until the night before she’ll be executed.”

“Two days of travel is going to involve a lot of downtime,” Erik pointed out. “We will have plenty of time to come up with a plan on the way there, trust me.”

“But that’s assuming it doesn’t take any time at all to put the plan into action! What if we need to find supplies, or to gradually befriend the servants until they show us a back way into the castle, or—”

Erik cut me off. “My ankle is sprained,” he repeated heatedly. “I can’t walk on it, I’ll damage it worse! I could cause serious lasting harm that I’ll never recover from!”

“And,” I said as if I hadn’t heard him, “I ran into someone—literally, I guess—and he suddenly wants to come with me on this stupid quest—which I didn’t tell him about, by the way, I kept my mouth shut about this whole mess—but he’s gotten it into his head that I’m on a quest and he wants to come along, but Jack has his own story that will be interrupted if he leaves now, so the sooner we skip town, the less risk there is of him—”

“Did you say Jack?” Erik asked.

“Yeah, I did. Jack, the nephew of the people who own this inn.”

Erik groaned. “Okay, fine. We’ll go today.”

“Now?”

“Soon,” he growled.

“What? Why? Do you not like Jack?”

“He just—we don’t—it’s not that I don’t like him; it’s just that he pisses me the hell off if I have to spend more than five minutes in his company.”

“That’s funny, he said something about you being… what was it, a ‘right pratt?”

“Get out of here Rikki, before I change my mind and tell you to find your own damn way to Kingsbury.”

I scurried out of the room, leaving Erik to hobble one-footed out of bed.

I really did feel bad for forcing him along before he had any time at all to recover, but one person (gnome?) was already dead because of me, and another was in serious danger. I had to get out of here before my presence could cause any more harm to innocent people.

It was already too late for Erik, he’ll be doomed to suffer from my company for at least a little longer, but with luck I wasn’t pulling him away from some vital place he needed to be during the next two days. Once the Miller’s Daughter was safe, he’d be free to go back to his weird, solitary life, and I’d be free to…

To…

Well. I hadn’t actually thought that far ahead. To find my way back to my own world, presumably, though how I was going to do that, I didn’t have the foggiest idea.

I shook that troubling thought away. I would cross that bridge when I came to it. Right now, I had more immediately pressing matters to attend to.

I half-ran into the room I’d slept in and grabbed all my stuff. Before shoving The Book into my backpack I flipped through it, only to find that the pages were still all blank, save for the rewritten tale of Rumpelstiltskin. I closed the Book without rereading it and stuffed it at the bottom of the backpack.

When I returned, packed and ready to go, to Erik’s room, he was just barely pulling on a pair of trousers.

Stammering apologies, I closed the door and waited in the hall for him to finish dressing.

It took forever.

Okay, it was probably only ten minutes at the most, but it felt like an hour before he finally appeared, his rucksack slung over one shoulder, his bow over the other, and half-hopping on his good foot.

I offered to help support him down the hall, but he refused point blank. Apparently accepting my help was only acceptable in the dark, at night, while completely alone in the middle of a forest where no one could see us.

He hobbled along, wincing every time he put too much weight of his bad foot. I winced each time too—I really did feel bad, and I was already beginning to regret rushing him, even if I was doing it to avoid potentially worse fallout with Jack’s story.

He had to stop for breath on one of the stools in the bar.

“Food,” he grunted, between slightly gasping breaths. “Breakfast. Anything, please.”

Back off to the kitchen I went straight away, argument free much to Erik’s pleasure I’m sure.

I obviously couldn’t admit to Hans the cook that I was returning for breakfast for Erik, not after the doozy of a tale he had only just told me not twenty minutes before. But it wasn’t hard to fake that I was still hungry and searching for seconds, especially since I was still hungry and seconds sounded pretty damn good right then.

Hans just laughed and loaded another plate. I thanked him and took it back out to the bar, hoping that Hans would spend the rest of the morning in the kitchen, at least until after Erik and I had left.

Erik ate almost as ravenously as I had, and I took advantage of the five or six minutes in which I had nothing to do but wait to look at him closely.

I thought about the story that Hans had told me about Erik’s past, his family. Then I thought about the tale that Erik himself had told me, about loving parents who had watched him head off to seek his fortune with tears in their eyes and pride in their hearts.

He could have been making all that up, or something terrible could have feasibly happened between that moment and their deaths soon after, but I remembered the look on Erik’s face when he had been telling me that part of his story. I hadn’t really understood it at the time, but now, looking back and knowing what I did then, I realized it was an expression of longing and pain he had been trying to conceal.

I hardly knew Erik. I’d dated guys in the past who had turned out to be real assholes after appearing absolutely delightful for the first few months. I certainly wasn’t in any position to be making judgments on whether or not he was potentially dangerous. But I had to say, my gut feeling was with Jack on this one. Erik just didn’t seem like the kind of person who would sic a pack of man-eating wolves on his own mother and sister, and then burn down his house with his father trapped inside.

Which is an insane sentence I never thought I’d hear myself think, but I guess that was the kind of life I was leading now.

As unsettling as Han’s rumors had been, dwelling on them wouldn’t make any difference now. I pushed the dark thoughts away, and tried not to let them taint my (admittedly not exactly sky-high) opinion of Erik.

He inhaled the final sausage, set his plate on the bar, and rose to his feet. Foot.

“Finally ready?” I said, jumping up eagerly.

“No,” Erik snapped, and I deflated.

“Why not?”

“Like I said before, I can’t walk like this, at least not for long. I need a stick or something.” He looked at me expectantly.

“Well, where am I supposed to find that?” I asked in frustration.

“I can think of somewhere full of sticks and branches where you might have some luck,” he suggested.

Fifteen minutes later I was kicking at bushes a little ways into the forest, trying to find a branch sturdy and straight enough to be used as a walking stick, and grumbling under my breath about it the entire time.

It took forever, and by the time I reappeared with a suitable specimen in the Drunken Mermaid, sweaty and panting, the sun was already high in the sky and I was painfully aware of how much time we had lost.

“Here’s your stick,” I snapped, shoving it into Erik’s hands. “Can we please go now?”

Erik held the stick in both hands, testing the weight and strength. “Not bad,” he said grudgingly. “It’ll do. All right then, let’s go.”

I heaved a sigh of relief, and then practically shoved Erik out the door of the Drunken Mermaid.

We took the southern road out of town, which meant we had to cross right through the middle of the village.

It had been more than a little awkward, since I was painfully aware of how many stares we got from everyone we passed in the street—some curious, others openly hostile. I alternated between attempting falsely cheery waves, and just keeping my head down and avoiding eye contact; but Erik hardly seemed to notice the attention at all.

However, I couldn’t help but notice that the moment we cleared the town proper and were back out into open farmland, the swift pace of his hobble abruptly decreased dramatically.

He was breathing a bit heavily, and I asked him with some concern if he wanted to sit down for a moment.

“No,” he grunted, his expression unyielding. “It’s almost all farmland from here to Kingsbury, but the forest cuts right through the land about halfway between. There’s only one wayhouse along the road about an hour’s walk into the forest, and if we don’t get there by nightfall, we’ll be spending another night sleeping outside, in the woods, at the mercy of whatever wild animals are in the neighborhood.” He glanced over at me, and his expression wasn’t exactly flattering. “I can take care of myself, but so far you’ve managed to get chased by wolves, killed a gnome, and doomed a peasant girl while left unsupervised in the woods. I think it would be best for everyone if we got to the wayhouse before dark.”

I briefly considered kicking his walking stick out from under him, but that seemed a little too mean.

Instead I focused on doing calculations in my head. It was mid August, and the sun didn’t set until a little after eight in the evening. It was maybe noon now, which meant that we had an…

Eight hour walk ahead of us. In order to get halfway to Kingsbury.

The sun was high in the sky, and the dark, green, cool forest had given way to flat yellow farmland that stretched all the way to the horizon on either side of the dusty road. A few straggly trees grew along the path’s edge, but they offered little shade from the blistering heat of the August sun.

This was going to be a long walk.