Dead streets and brittle trees. No one skating. No one out walking. No fall markt of autumn produce and bakes.

My skate toe caught on something and I sprawled forward, cracking my knees and elbows against the ice. Only once I skidded to a stop did I see the state of the canal. Ice had been hacked away from the bank, leaving treacherous caverns and gaps—one such crack being the culprit that caught my skate.

People were desperate for water.

I did this.

The canal was unskateable, so I marched along the bank on my skate guards. No people. No canal rats. The canals were their life source—where the crats got their water, where they built their homes, where they offered services to those boating or schaatsing.

But now they couldn’t live here because they had no water.

Where had they gone? I thought of the many dirty faces swarming our bread booth, and my traitorous imagination immediately drew up a scene of them dead in the forest, frozen in the canal water, starving or thirsting to death in city alleyways.

And what about my mother? Was Mutti even in Fairhoven? Had the frozen canal affected her?

I should have gone around the city. No. I needed to see what I’d done. And I needed to fix this. I stumbled back onto the ice, my determination to get to the schloss renewed.

As I set blade to ice, my eye caught on a paper nailed to a notice tree on the bank. The wind flapped the corners. I glided over and smoothed them flat.

My face stared back at me.

A sketch done by a deft hand and thorough description. The cheekbones were a little wider than mine and my eyes seemed cruel, but it was clearly me. Words adorned the top of the paper.

Wanted: Myrthe Valling

Guilty of freezing the canals, possible assassin of the king

Reward: 1,000 silver munten or Well water

Last seen in Fairhoven markt

The schloss offered Well water as a reward?

I glanced around, suddenly fearful of hidden eyes piecing together who I was with this poster they’d likely seen hundreds of times while I slept in a birdcage in the forest. If it was posted here, it was posted other places.

And if people were angry about the frozen canal, they likely had my face memorized as a target for their hatred. The wind changed its whistle and I thought I heard a noise, caught the brush of cloth on bark somewhere behind me.

I felt watched.

I tore the paper from the tree and skated out of there as fast as I could. The idea of marching right up to the schloss now seemed even more foolish. Oma’s warnings ricocheted in my memory.