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

Three

Johan

J

ohan wasn’t entirely sure what had come over him.

When he’d spotted the homeless elves looking starved and scared outside the market entrance, the urge to help them had overwhelmed him.

He’d never seen elves up close before. The carriages that held them occasionally passed through town, and he knew there were a few who’d had the wealth to remain with the upper classes, but most were enslaved in the large factories behind closed doors.

They were smaller than he’d realised, and their pointed ears poked through their long, silky-white hair.

Despite their current state of malnourishment, they were striking to look at.

Alert amber eyes contained shadows that told of a life endured rather than lived, but they were not the eyes of people who had given up.

It wasn’t safe for them there; they were too vulnerable.

All it would take would be for one desperate man to spot their weakness and capture them into the slave trade that had become rife in this kingdom.

Leaving them there to fend for themselves felt as awful to Johan as offering them a death sentence himself.

My parents would have offered them a safe place to rest.

When Johan stepped into his shop, the floorboards creaked under his weight, but the elves trailed in silently behind him.

Their gaze darted around the room, wide eyes taking in every detail, and as Johan tried to see the place through their eyes, he was suddenly not entirely sure what he could actually offer them.

He was no knight in shining armour, nothing but a poor shoemaker.

Glancing at the two elves once more as they shivered, Johan could admit that while he didn’t have much, he could still help, and that was more than anyone else was offering.

After holding up a finger to indicate that he’d be back in a moment, he jogged up the stairs to his home to retrieve the spare mattress and his warmest wool blanket.

Upon his return, he found the elves exactly where he’d left them, huddled together near the door. Johan beckoned for them to follow and guided them towards his workshop in the back. It wasn’t warm, but it was warmer than being outside, and the wool blanket would help considerably.

He placed the mattress in the corner, topped it with the blanket, and managed to whisper “For you” to the elves.

Johan was quite proud of himself for having accomplished getting any words out at all to them. It had been a long while since he’d been able to speak in front of strangers, and this was an unusually tense situation, after all.

“Thank you, this is very kind,” the smaller and thinner of the two elves said to him. “Elias.” He pointed at himself. “Henrik,” the other elf said, his expression remaining understandably suspicious.

Johan offered them what he hoped was a friendly smile and stepped towards the door at the back; he opened it and gestured to the outhouse. Thankfully, they both peered outside to look, and Elias said, “The toilet?”

Johan nodded.

The sun had set, and with only the moon lighting the twilight sky; Johan lit two lamps to brighten the dim room.

He left one for the elves and took the other before pointing to himself and up at the ceiling to try to explain that he was going upstairs.

He couldn’t imagine that the elves would feel safe or comfortable with him looming over them.

Both elves nodded in understanding. “Thank you,” Henrik and Elias said at the same time.

Upstairs, Johan pottered around, restlessly cleaning and tidying his home as he fretted about the two elves in his workshop.

He’d only been up there for an hour, though, when it suddenly occurred to him that he hadn’t offered them anything to eat or drink, and he smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand, annoyed at himself for the grievous error.

His mother would turn in her grave if she knew he’d been so remiss.

Not wasting any more time, Johan located his bag from the market and pulled out the small loaf of bread and wedge of cheese.

He cut two pieces of bread and placed some thinly sliced cheese on top, assuming that, given how they had been living, eating too much at once would probably upset their stomachs.

Johan took the stairs quietly so as not to startle them, food on a small wooden tray in one hand and his oil lamp in the other. He knocked gently on the door to his workshop but got no response, so he eventually poked his head in.

The two elves were curled up together on the mattress, nose to nose as they slept. Johan wasn’t entirely sure why he was surprised by what he saw. He knew, though, he was witnessing something extremely intimate that wasn’t for his eyes and immediately felt guilty for intruding.

As quietly and quickly as he could, Johan placed the tray of food on a small table near their mattress in the hopes that mice wouldn’t come looking for it and filled up two cups of the home- brewed beer from the barrel in the corner of the room.

When he returned to place the cups on the table, Henrik’s eyes were wide, staring at Johan with guilt and fear written all over his face.

Johan placed the cups down and held his hands up in a gesture he hoped told Henrik that everything was okay. He smiled and pointed to the food and then to the two of them, and Henrik audibly swallowed before thanking Johan in a whisper.

With a final glance at the sweet elves, Johan made his way back up the stairs before helping himself to a little food and climbing into bed.

He tossed and turned for a while and found himself blushing when he thought of the way the two of them lay together, a tangle of limbs.

Johan knew enough about the world to understand that there were men who lay together, even if people didn’t talk about it much.

He knew, for example, that the baker and his wife had some kind of arrangement where she spent her nights with Miss Klein, the local teacher, and he frequented one of the alehouses that was infamous for the rooms they kept upstairs with young men available as “companions” for an evening.

One thing Johan had learned to appreciate over his life was that, despite his difficulties with speaking in public and to strangers, his quiet nature meant he often went unnoticed. It was as though people thought he couldn’t hear, either, their secrets spilling from their lips all around him.

Johan never did anything with the information he acquired; he merely enjoyed observing people and their relationships, even as he longed for one of his own.

The ache he felt at seeing Henrik and Elias together was a confusing one.

He knew he had no right to feel envious of the comfort they got from each other—people who had endured what they must have deserved all the comfort they could find in this life—but the ember of envy was alive in his stomach all the same.

The confusion came from a second feeling, one that almost made his heart swell like he could take his own contentment just from seeing them together. It was a strange sensation, and one that Johan decided he would shove to one side for the time being as he couldn’t quite decipher what it meant.

Sleep evaded him, and he spent a long time pondering his situation.

He had very little money even for himself, and now that he’d taken on providing food and shelter for two others, he needed to come up with a plan.

For once, though, the thought of needing to improve his prospects had some fire behind it.

Rather than just a heavy, daunting burden, he felt motivated, and he was fairly sure that he had Elias and Henrik to thank for that.