“I don’t even need your voice, Johan! But you do not speak to me at all, not with your eyes, not with your hands. You have both left me! Only your body is here, haunting me.” Henrik collapsedto the ground, all the fight leaving him like water spilling out of a cup.
Chest heaving, Henrik dug his fingernails into the frozen earth below, begging for it to open up and swallow him because he could not do this anymore.
He’d endured slavery for Elias, he would have endured the loss of the elf who owned half his heart for Johan, but he couldn’t endure this.
Heavy hands landed on his shoulders, and when he glanced up through wet lashes, Johan was kneeling in the mud in front of him, his face showing so much anguish that Henrik could barely stand to look at him.
Pressing their foreheads together, Johan wrapped his arms tightly around Henrik much like he had when they’d first met, and Henrik had had a fear attack that he was certain he’d almost died from.
Much like before, Henrik found it a little easier to breathe with the pressure of Johan’s strong arms squeezing him.
“Please don’t leave me too. Please, please, please,” Henrik begged, his words barely coherent.
Johan didn’t speak, but he did hold him a little tighter, he did run his fingers through Henrik’s tangled hair and stroke his head, and he did offer Henrik everything he could in that moment, and for that Henrik was grateful.
They remained that way until they were both shivering and needed to go inside to warm back up again with some hot tea. Johan still couldn’t speak with his voice, but Henrik soaked up even the simplest brush of Johan’s fingers against his own when he handed him his mug.
Later that day, once Henrik had done his daily walk to the spring and circled a wide perimeter of their home, he put his resentment to one side and joined Johan working on the house.They worked in silence, but Henrik no longer felt ignored, so it was okay. As okay as it could be given the circumstances.
The following day, once the sun had set and Henrik had come inside after relieving himself, he found Johan sitting at the table and spinning the kingfisher feather between his fingers.
Henrik approached him from behind and rested his chin on the shoemaker’s sturdy shoulder.
“I wish you could tell me what the feather means,” he whispered.
As Henrik expected, Johan didn’t reply at first, but then he cleared his throat and Henrik’s heartbeat sped up. “If—if—if I were a kingfisher,” he paused, coughing again as his voice was so raspy from disuse, “I w-w-would always come back to you.”
Henrik stared again at the spinning feather. “He said that to you?”
Johan nodded and reached to grasp Henrik’s hand from where it rested on his chest.
“Where are you, Elias? It’s time for you to come back to us,” he whispered into the air like magic herself might deliver his message to their love.
Twenty-Six
Elias
E
lias was quite certain he might never feel his poor toes again. He should have infused some magic into his shoes to keep them warm when he’d had the chance.
His hands shook as he tried to build a fire to fight off the endless chill.
After a while, the warmth from the flames and the sheer exhaustion, were enough for Elias to finally fall asleep, clinging to the hard brown rock which he’d given it all up for.
Running on barely more than a few hours of broken sleep, Elias struggled to put one foot in front of the other the next day. He’d run out of water and couldn’t find anything fresh that wasn’t frozen over and so he’d made his way towards the river to set up camp that night.
He hoped it was the combination of exhaustion, dehydration, and hunger that was making him paranoid, but he’d spent the entire day so far convinced that eyes were on him. All the hairs on his body had stood on end, screaming that there was a predator nearby, but hours had passed and nothing had leapedat him from the bushes, and so he did the only thing he could and kept plodding on.
When he stopped to rest, Elias pulled a face at the colour of the river water he was about to try and drink.
What have I been reduced to?
Looking away, he reached down with his water skin in hand, which turned out to be a mistake. The water level was lower than he’d estimated, and in his tired state, he lost his balance.
What felt like shards of ice stabbed him before he even registered that he’d fallen into the icy depths of the river. The shock of it stole his breath. He tried to fight his way back to the bank, but he was weak and the currents overpowered him. He kicked and kicked and kicked, desperate to keep his head above the water so he could breathe but it felt like a hand kept grabbing his ankles, dragging him down, down, down, towards the depths of the riverbed.
If he could have, he’d have wailed in frustration.
