or once, Johan had a smile on his face when he headed towards the front of the shop to open up for the day. He’d spent a long while during the night trying to come up with a way to help the elves get back on their feet, but it had never crossed his mind that they might wish to work for him.
Money would be tight, but Elias had made a good point; elf-made shoes were not available currently anywhere in the kingdom, and if he was able to get word out to the wealthy parts of town, possibly even the castle, then the three of them stood a chance at making good money.
Getting word out was the problem, though, because words were always a problem for Johan.
While Elias and Henrik were using the outhouse, Johan grabbed a few supplies from his workshop and began making a sign to put up outside the shop. Most folks in this town weren’t able to read, so it would take Johan the best part of the day to whittle an elf figurine to show to passersby that he was selling elf-made shoes now. It wasn’t a hardship, though. Johanenjoyed whittling, and he no longer had a pair of shoes to make that day since Henrik and Elias had already made a pair far better than he could ever dream of during the night.
Johan was making good progress on his little wooden elf when Henrik and Elias peered around the door to the shop, scanning the place with fresh eyes now that the sun was out. Johan smiled at them but then frowned when he spotted them wearing those flimsy, dirty potato sacks again. He knew full well that he didn’t currently have the coin to buy them new clothes, but then he remembered what Elias had said:Elves are gifted craftsmen.
With that thought in mind, Johan motioned for them to wait and hurried up the stairs. The wardrobe in the corner of the room had become an untouched relic in the years since his parents had passed. He’d never been quite able to part with all their belongings, but he felt good about giving the clothes to Henrik and Elias. His father’s clothes would be much too big, and his mother’s were skirts and dresses, but he was certain that with a sewing kit, Henrik and Elias would be more than capable of turning them into comfortable things for them to wear until they could afford something nicer.
Back down in the shop, Johan passed them the bundle of clothes and then rooted through his belongings in the workshop to locate his mother’s old sewing kit and passed it to Elias.
“These clothes are for us?” Elias asked.
Johan pointed to the sewing kit to try to explain that they could alter them.
“We can use the fabric to make our own clothes?” Henrik said, seeming to have an uncanny ability to understand Johan despite his lack of speech. Johan nodded and smiled.
“Wow, that is incredibly generous. Thank you,” Elias said, a grin stretching across his face.
“Yes, thank you,” Henrik added, eyes lighting up at the bundle of material in his arms.
They rummaged through the bundle of clothes with covetous eyes that made Johan smile. In no time at all, they’d organised it all into various piles, and he was fairly certain they’d forgotten he was still in the room. So, Johan left them to it and returned to whittling the elf in the shop. He felt good about the new home for his parents’ clothes, and he was now glad that he hadn’t parted with them sooner.
Several hours passed by and Johan’s carving was beginning to resemble a figurine, but his stomach was growling, so he closed the shop up for lunch.
When he stepped into the workshop with a tray of bread and dried meat for them all to eat, he’d expected to find Henrik and Elias under a mountain of fabric, but Elias was already wearing a pair of billowing wide-leg brown trousers with a tight cotton shirt and appeared to be adding the finishing touches to Henrik’s outfit.
Henrik’s clothing was more subdued than Elias’, which seemed fitting for him. They’d tailored his breeches in a way that Johan had only seen among the wealthiest men in the kingdom, and his shirt, while looser fitting than Elias’, seemed to complement his wider frame. The item Elias was adding the finishing touches to was a waistcoat made from the same fabric as the breeches.
It was fascinating to Johan how the clothes transformed them. While they were both still too thin, they were clean from bathing that morning and in fresh clothes that fit them like a glove; they looked refined in a way that made Johan’s tongue stick to the roof of his mouth.
A tiny voice in Johan’s head told him the word he was looking for washandsome.The two elves, though dressed completely differently, looked handsome in their new clothes, and the realisation made Johan blush furiously beneath his bushy beard.
“Is this okay?” Henrik asked when Johan had obviously been staring at him for longer than could ever be considered polite or respectable for a man to stare at another man.
Johan nodded and tried to busy himself by holding out the offering of food for them to see.
“Just one moment,” Elias said before snipping some thread and freeing Henrik from the needle.
“This looks delicious. Thank you,” Henrik said when they sat around the workbench to eat. Somehow, Henrik managed to frown and appear happy at the same time. Johan suspected that was just his face and didn’t read too much into it.
Johan smiled and noticed that, despite Elias being the much thinner of the two, he reached for far less food, and he worried that Elias didn’t like the dried meat. He pointed at Elias and the meat, then raised his eyebrow in question, but it was Henrik who spoke up for him.
“Elias has gone much longer than I have with little food. It will take him longer to adjust to richer foods like this.”
Johan felt a deep need in his bones to understand why that was, but the words got stuck as usual, and his shoulders slumped in defeat.
Six
Elias
E
lias’ cheeks bloomed with embarrassment, but he had no reason to be. It wasn’t as though he’d chosen to be starved for however long he’d endured this hunger for. “I enjoy the taste, though,” he added.
“Why?” Johan coughed and pointed at Elias. “Longer?” he asked, and it looked like a strain for him to force the words past his lips, more so than usual.
