Page 1 of The Elves and the Shoemaker (The GriMM Tales #4)

Prologue

Elias

T

he rough patch of road they travelled along made for a particularly uncomfortable journey.

Elias’ now-too-frail frame ached fiercely as the carriage rocked, rattling his bones.

He took a deep breath in and exhaled, reminding himself that no good came from dwelling on his ailments.

It wouldn’t make the pain go away, and it would only cause his mood to plummet.

Henrik was miserable enough for the both of them, and he needed to keep them alive long enough to escape the hell they’d been thrown into.

Elias and Henrik hadn’t thought it could get much worse than the silk mill, but when it shut down due to their owners’ bankruptcy, the two of them and several others were sentenced to an even worse fate.

Bought and paid for, they, along with two dozen other slaves, were on their way to serve in the Queen’s castle, forced to bend the knee for the cold and unforgiving ruler herself.

The only things Elias knew about the Queen were based on rumours, but none of them were good.

While a famine was starving her people, she supposedly imported food from other lands and lived lavishly in her ivory tower.

She was infamously cruel for no reason beyond her own entertainment, and Elias felt sick at the thought of himself and Henrik being in her clutches.

The ten other elves, crammed into the small cage atop the carriage with them, were silent for the duration of the journey. Only two of them, Hans and Ansel, had also come from the silk mill; the others appeared more recently captured, their cheeks yet to become gaunt and their skin not yet sallow.

Equal numbers filled the second carriage; their transporters unconcerned with packing all the elves so tightly into a confined space for over a full day with neither food nor water.

By the time they entered the Dark Forest, darkness had fallen. The slavers driving the rickety carriage began ringing a bell. Despite not knowing its purpose, the eerie sound made all the fine hairs on Elias’ body stand on end.

He peered through the bars that trapped them inside.

The moon cast a silver glow through the tree branches, creating the illusion of glittering spiderwebs covering the road before them.

For a second, when Elias glanced ahead to the bushes in the distance, he was sure he spotted a flash of red fabric, but his eyes must have deceived him.

They hadn’t been in the forest long when they came to a sudden stop, and the slaver driving the carriage shouted, “Halt! Ten-minute break!”

The greasy-haired man stepped down from his driving seat, jostling all the elves inside in the process. He rattled the cage bars as he passed them, sneering before heading to the bushes to relieve himself.

As they waited, a warm body pressed extra closely against Elias’ side.

He glanced at his begrudging companion, Henrik, and smiled.

Rik had spent less time than Elias in captivity, and it showed.

He still retained some muscle on his exposed arms, and his face wasn’t quite as gaunt.

Despite the deep scowl that marred his face on a near-permanent basis, Henrik was stunning.

His pointed ears were unusually smooth where they poked out from his long, pale-white hair, and Elias frequently soothed himself by running a fingertip along them.

Predictably, Rik frowned at Elias’ wide smile. He rarely welcomed Elias’ endless optimism in the face of their dire circumstances, but Elias was fairly sure he would collapse under the weight of fear and dread if he didn’t cling to any shred of hope that he could.

Henrik had hoped for a while, too, but Elias remembered the night it’d died all too well—could still feel the way Henrik had shaken in his arms as he’d sobbed.

A year prior, Henrik had been captured upon returning from a fishing trip in the early hours of the morning back in their home country, Varinien.

During the first several months of his captivity, Henrik had regularly explained to Elias that his family would discover what had happened and rescue him at any moment, saving Elias as well.

Elias had agreed it was a nice thought but had never given it the weight that Henrik had, and so when nobody had appeared to rescue them a year later, Elias had been considerably less devastated by the fact than Henrik had been.

Elias pushed the memories of that night away and returned to peering out between the bars at their surroundings.

There was an unnatural stillness to the forest. Overseers at the mill had spoken of how empty the land had become in recent years—that hunters returned empty-handed more often than not—but witnessing the lack of life where there should be an abundance unsettled Elias.

The slavers laughed and bickered amongst themselves with a lightness that had anger burning like a furnace inside Elias.

He hoped he would never understand how a person could reach the point of being so callous about the lives of others.

The fact that the scariest things in this world were not the monsters from the frightening tales he’d been told as a child, but simple, ordinary men who would sell their souls for some coin, chipped away at Elias’ resolve that there were still good people to be found in this life.

“One minute, folks! Get ready to move out!” the slaver yelled to the others, startling Elias back to reality.

Elias shuffled from foot to foot in an attempt to ease the shooting pains that reverberated up his legs.

Another slaver approached them; Elias recognised him as the man who’d shoved them in here in the first place by the sinister smile revealing a mouth of mostly rotten black teeth.

“Thirsty, little elf?” he sneered.

Elias narrowed his eyes but didn’t reply.

“Here, have a drink,” he added before tugging his cock from his breeches and spraying a stream of piss through the bars. Elias grimaced as it landed mostly on his bare legs.

Elias seethed in silence, one more act of degradation to slice into whatever was left of his soul.

“Do not give him a reason,” Henrik whispered. Reason to kill you is what he meant.

The rest of the men were returning to the carriages when some sort of growling came from nearby.

“What was that noise?” Elias whispered to Henrik.

He was certain it could only have come from an animal.

He felt almost relieved at the sign of life, and his ears twitched, searching for the sound.

As if to confirm its presence, the animal let out the loudest howl Elias had ever heard, and Henrik tugged Elias away from the bars, embracing him protectively.

“Wolf,” Henrik replied, his voice shaky.

“You are sure?”

Elias felt more than saw Henrik’s nod in response. “They would often circle our village in the night when they ran out of food in the winter. I will recognise that sound on my deathbed.” Henrik gulped.

The horses began going wild, and the men were shouting things Elias couldn’t quite decipher, as fear made his brain feel like it had been stuffed with cotton.

There was a commotion outside, and Elias watched on as the slaver who’d been in charge suddenly collapsed to the ground when an arrow struck through his neck.

Blood poured from his mouth until he choked on it.

His body twitched a few times, and more blood pooled around his head before a stillness that only descended with death overcame him.

Elias stared in numb shock at what he’d just witnessed, although he was certain that a man as cruel as this one surely deserved a more prolonged death.

More yelling from the other slavers stole his attention, but then Elias spotted an arrow coming right for them and grabbed Henrik to duck down in the cage.

Despite the misery that surrounded Elias’ existence for the last few years, his impending death only seemed to spark a stubborn flame within him.

He was not prepared to die yet. He refused to allow for his life so far to be the grand total of his existence. Much to Elias’ surprise, though, the arrow struck the rope that bound the cage shut, severing it in two.

“Rik, Henrik! Now is our chance; we need to move quickly!” Elias yelled through the pandemonium. All of them within the cage threw themselves at the bars until they gave way, and collapsed off the carriage, freeing the contained elves.

Elias grabbed Henrik’s wrist and tried to drag him off the track towards the trees, but Henrik resisted.

“The wolf, Eli. There is a wolf out there. We can’t… we—”

“I’m taking the risk, Henrik. I… I will not survive our next owners, I know it. We need to run. Now!”

Elias sprinted for the trees, and he could only trust that Henrik would follow him. From what he could see in his periphery, the freed elves had all scattered in different directions. Their arms and legs remained chained in heavy irons that clanked noisily as they ran.

Elias knew that the adrenaline fuelling him would expire quickly; he needed to find somewhere to hide. When a familiar hand slid into his, it gave him the boost he required to keep running. Henrik had followed him.

Henrik tugged Elias in a change of direction, as one of the slavers who’d sprinted after them had almost caught up.

“Rik,” Elias panted. “I don’t know how much farther I can run. I’m so weak.” Tears ran down Elias’ cheeks as they raced for their lives. He knew Henrik could keep going and escape, but he wasn’t sure that he could.

Henrik must have heard the exhaustion and panic in Elias’ tone because the next thing he knew, he was being dragged into a large overgrowth of shrubs.

Once inside, they crawled farther in, as far and as quietly as they could.

Thorns and twigs scratched and tore at their skin, but it was a small price to pay for their freedom, and adrenaline pushed Elias far beyond his body’s limits.

When they reached a point deep within that was large enough for the two of them to curl up, they held onto each other and tried to catch their breath, all the while praying that the slaver had lost track of them.

It had been near silent for a while, except for their breaths; they hadn’t even dared to whisper to one another.

And then they heard, “You can either come out now, or we’ll be back with the dogs, and they’ll drag you out.

” It was the man who’d urinated on Elias just minutes earlier.

“It won’t take them long to track your stench, elves! ”

No thanks to you, Elias thought dryly.

Elias’ own heartbeat was a loud pulse in his ears as they held their breaths, clinging to one another in complete darkness. The sound of twigs snapping underfoot eventually became fainter, and they had to strain to hear the slaver’s voice in the distance.

Elias wasn’t sure exactly how long they remained there.

But several hours at least passed before either of them dared to utter a word.

They would have to move deeper into the Dark Forest soon because Elias did not doubt that the slavers would follow through on their threat and be back with the dogs.

“Is this real, Eli? Did that really happen?” Henrik whispered eventually.

“We’re… we’re really free, Rik.” Elias choked on a sob at the thought.