“These?” she asked. “They will be much too small.”
Johan shook his head and pushed them towards her. She looked sceptical but then sat down and began to unlace her fine leather boots.
Elias and Henrik had been working on this particular pair of shoes for half the night, getting reacquainted with magic to create things Johan didn’t even know were possible.
As the woman began to slip her foot into the shoe, which at first did appear to be much too small, they all watched in awe as the shoe expanded until it fit her perfectly.
“This is surely not possible… How?” she asked Johan.
Johan found he had no more remaining words left and could only smile apologetically.
“You havefreeelves?” The man sounded incredulous at the idea, but Johan nodded his head with a big grin, thinking of his free elves.
Well, nothiselves. He wasn’t entirely sure why he’d just thought of them that way.
“That’s certainly a first. I didn’t think anyone had found a way to get the elves to work when their magic was not suppressed.This is incredible,” the man said. “We are the Queen’s ambassadors over in Hallin, she will be extremely… curious, I’m sure, to hear about these.”
Johan feared that if the Queen ordered shoes from his little shop, he might faint from the shock of it, but he was starting to believe that with Elias and Henrik as his business partners, he wouldn’t have to worry about how to pay for another piece of leather or his next meal again.
The couple parted with what Johan thought was an obscene amount of money for a pair of shoes and a down payment to commission three more pairs that, in total, would earn Johan and the elves more than he usually made in an entire year.
It was so unbelievable that by the time Elias and Henrik returned from the bakery with lunch, Johan was counting the coins for the third time just to be sure.
They were both rosy-cheeked from the gusts of wind when they entered, and the sight of them made Johan’s stomach flip in a way he was unfamiliar with. It wasn’t a terrible feeling per se, but it was unsettling.
“Now, don’t be cross,” Elias began. “But to celebrate the fact we’re now actually free and we didn’t end up giving all of our money to the sorcerer, we may have been a little… indulgent at the bakery.”
Johan wasn’t cross at all. In fact, with the money he had stacked in front of him, he thought it would be a while until he had to be concerned with Elias’ and Henrik’s spending habits anywhere, let alone the bakery, which rarely had much food stocked these days anyway.
“What’s all this?” Henrik asked, pointing to the coins.
Johan coughed a few times before finding his words. “Sale. Plus,” he held up two fingers and pointed to the parchment with the rough sketches for the design. The elves grinned widely and nearly bashed their heads together trying to both look atthe drawings at the same time. “Queen’s… ambassador,” he squeezed out.
But then the look on the elves' faces suddenly changed like the wind outside had blown through the shop and taken their joy with it. Elias and Henrik both stared at each other, going white as a sheet, and Henrik audibly gulped.
Johan scrunched his brows together in question at them.
“The Queen can’t know about us being here,” Henrik practically whispered.
“When we escaped, we were travelling to our new owner, two dozen of us,” Elias explained, and the direction this conversation was heading already made a tight fist around Johan’s heart.
The slave trade as a whole made Johan sick to his stomach, but whenever he had to face the fact that Elias and Henrik had been stripped of their freedom and treated like replaceable cogs in a machine, anger would burn through him like a furnace. As he always did, he swallowed the feeling down, but it was bitter on his tongue.
Henrik continued on from Elias, “The person who had bought us… was the Queen. If she knows about us, it won’t be hard for her to connect that we are her slaves who escaped. It… might not be safe for us here anymore.” Henrik looked as devastated as Johan felt at the idea of the two elves not being here anymore.
Johan shook his head. “No. I’ll… I’ll… I’ll make sure. Safe.” And Johan meant it. He didn’t know how, but he meant it. Johan knew with every fibre of his being that he would die before he let anyone take Elias and Henrik back into captivity. They might not be his. But they were his to protect. And he’d be damned if anyone harmed even a strand of long white hair on their perfect heads.
L
ater that night, Johan was lying in bed, wide awake as he tried to come up with possible solutions for keeping Elias and Henrik away from prying eyes and getting them to safety. A permanent kind of safety. He was shivering because the gales from earlier that day had turned into a full-blown storm with the temperature dropping significantly.
Wrapping himself in the blanket, he scrubbed his hand over his face before trudging over to the fireplace; he wasn’t going to be able to get a wink of sleep without heating the place up a little. He hoped Elias and Henrik were okay downstairs, the workshop could get bitterly cold in winter, and there was no way to heat that room.
Maybe he could make them some hot tea, that might warm them up?
Just as Johan had placed a pot of water onto the now-blazing fire to boil, he heard the soft pad of feet coming up the stairs. He got up and headed for the door, opening it before they even had a chance to knock. They were standing with the blanket wrapped around their shoulders, shivering violently, and Johan ushered them inside and towards the fire.
“We’re… s-s-s-sorry. It got… t-t-t-too c-c-cold downstairs,” Elias stammered out.
