Elias should probably have been more concerned by the growl himself, but for some reason, Johan’s dismissal of the noise was reassurance enough to him that they weren’t in any immediate danger. It shocked him a little to realise how much he trusted Johan.
Watching him now as he cried with laughter, Elias’ lover in his arms, scowling like an angry kitten, he began to wonder if maybe Johan had needed them as much as they had needed him. That maybe fate had given them the missing pieces of themselves that day outside the market.
Once Henrik was returned safely to the ground, he kicked a rock and sulked. “What is it, then, if it is not a wolf?”
Johan placed a hand on Henrik’s shoulder, smiling at him gently as he whispered, “Badger.”
Henrik’s cheeks pinkened as he registered how much he’d overreacted to a little badger in the woods, but Johan merely moved his hand to Henrik’s back and encouraged him to keep walking.
For the remainder of the day, Henrik walked between them instead of ahead.
E
lias was fighting tears when Johan finally gestured for them to stop and began setting up their camp for the night.
Johan connected a rope between two trees and used a rolled-up hide to create their shelter for the night. Clenching his jaw, Elias forced himself to help when Henrik began collecting firewood, but when he tripped over a tree root, the floodgates opened and he burst into tears.
“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” Henrik ran over, then started rubbing a hand over him as if to search for injury.
“I’m f-f-f-fine,” Elias stuttered and then hiccupped.
He wanted the earth to swallow him up. Too exhausted to do anything with the fury that swirled like a wild storm within him, he just wept angry tears.
Elias had barely been a participant of his own life. He was weak because his parents had sold him to evil men. Evil men who’d starved him and overworked him like he was a machine instead of a person. Elias seethed at the injustice before pushing it down, down, down like he always did. There was a well of anger in Elias that might be enough to tear a kingdom down one day, but for now, his fury joined the rest because it was the only way Elias could put one foot in front of the other.
Johan came over to them at a more sedate pace but looked at Elias with such a piercing stare he felt as though he were being laid bare. Instead of fussing, Johan walked back to where Eliashad dropped his bag and pulled out a blanket. He placed it down gently under the shelter and pointed at Elias and then to the makeshift bed. “Rest,” he rasped.
Henrik helped him over because there was no disguising his limp. He’d been stubborn and pushed himself too hard today.
“Tomorrow, you need to say if we need to slow down or take more breaks. You need to let us know, Eli. If it takes longer, so be it.”
Elias knew that Henrik meant to be kind, but he felt scolded nonetheless and was feeling quite sorry for himself as he plonked down onto the lumpy blanket.
He sat uselessly as Henrik and Johan built a fire together. Elias wasn’t entirely sure why it was bothering him so much. The last five years of his life had been far worse, and yet right then, he felt more broken than ever.
Johan smiled warmly at Elias as he passed him a mug of hot water with mint leaves.
“Thank you,” Elias whispered.
He sipped the mint tea and let the warmth seep into his bones and tried to convince himself that he was not, in fact, in agony. Unfortunately, minty water could only do so much.
Once they’d all had some dried meat and cheese for their supper, the three of them sat huddled together under the shelter but close enough to the fire to watch as the orange tongues slowly devoured the wood.
Although Johan being so near was helping, being back in the Dark Forest reminded Elias of all the nights they’d spent terrified that their captors might return to claim them once more. Every sound in the forest began to resemble footsteps, and Elias couldn’t take the silence anymore.
From a place within himself he’d long forgotten, he began to sing. It was a song his elder sister had sung to him as a child to lull him to sleep at night. The words spoken in his mother tongueweaved a mental tapestry of ships returning to the fjord, lovers reuniting, and fortune favouring his people. He sang despite his throat feeling like raw sandpaper from not drinking enough water that day; he sang despite the memories it dredged from a place he couldn’t afford to recall. He sang until Henrik’s face reflected his own, cheeks wet with tears and an anguish neither of them had let themselves feel in a very long time.
“You — you sing… in your language?” Johan asked.
“That song is in the old tongue, yes,” Henrik replied. “Now we all speak many different dialects.”
“Although we can mostly understand each other, overseers would beat elves who spoke with their mother tongue. We got out of the habit,” Elias explained.
Elias didn’t add that he hated speaking his own dialect. He connected it too closely to his own parents and could barely stand to hear it now, but he still loved the songs in the old tongue.
Wordlessly, Johan wrapped his arms around them, pulling them close on each side until they were tucked up against him. Elias hoarded every morsel of comfort the shoemaker offered, having learned the hard way that comfort was not a guarantee in this life. He’d always found it where he could, though.
A while later, when both Elias and Henrik were struggling to keep their eyes open, they crawled under the blanket and went to sleep, clinging to each other as Johan watched over them like the guardian angel he’d been since they met.
