Knife’s Edge
Part two for @queen-scribbles‘ prompts! Lenn gets a ficlet too, and that means I can’t do less for Anselm in turn, now can I? ;-)
6. A turning point in their life
“What do you think you’re going to do, elf? Knife me?”
Lenneth isn’t seriously considering it. For one thing, it’s not even the sort of knife for killing someone, she guesses, having never really had occasion to learn the difference. It’s small, for the delicate work of carving details into Dad’s fanciest clocks – she was trying to finish one, just now, hoping her skill can match up to his, hoping the customer who asked him for the embellishments will still want it now, three months after he died. Hoping they won’t notice the nicks where her hand slipped, those times she thought of his hands starting what she now tries to finish.
No one would probably believe her hand just slipped if the knife ended up in the landlord. Besides, a big, portly aumaua like him? No wonder he sneers at her little knife.
She does her best to keep all this from her face as she stares him down in the doorway, even when Tully’s whimper of hunger from behind her, and the tremor in Briella’s voice as she shushes him, remind her of the seriousness of the moment.
She puts on a brave smile, sticking her chin out, still staring the landlord down. “Just finishing up a commission. Takes time to do it right, but I’m almost there, and then we’ll have your rent –”
He sighs. “Last season’s rent, maybe. You know I can’t keep giving you kids more time.” He almost looks sorry. “It’ll be my own kids going hungry if I don’t let the place to someone who can afford it. You’ll have to find somewhere else.”
“But where are we supposed to go?” Lenneth wails, and then regrets it, for Tully’s sharp cry echoes her own.
The landlord shifts uncomfortably. “You got some other family to take you in, maybe? Back wherever your parents came from?”
If she does, Lenneth never heard either of her parents speak of them. She wouldn’t know where to start. And if they can’t pay rent, how are they supposed to pay for passage to go looking for this phantom family? If they even exist, they aren’t in Rauatai, she knows that much for sure. Dad wandered here from the Vailian Republics, Mom from the Living Lands – and Lenneth thinks that’s about as far apart in the world as a soul can get, anyway, so what if they pick the wrong direction and end up homeless on the far side of the world?
Well. At least they’d be seeing the far side of the world, then. She’s seen about enough of this harbor town and its giant people, who tolerated her elven parents well enough when they were useful, but who could care less now about a handful of elven orphans.
When she has no answer for him about their hypothetical distant relatives, the landlord reluctantly offers, “Or you might see if the inn’d have work for you. You’re…a resourceful lass. And the lot of you are small enough to make do with room and board for one, eh?” He chuckles. It falls flat. Lenneth was distracted (rather pleasantly) for a moment, thinking of seeing the far side of the world, but she can feel Bree’s glare from here and knows the landlord is getting the full force of it.
Not a bad time for negotiations, then. She holds up a finger of the hand not wielding the knife. “One more month,” she demands. “You know we’re doing our best to earn rent money. I’m in the middle of a dozen jobs Dad…left behind,” she reminds him, waving a hand around the cluttered room. She learned a fair bit about tinkering – and all the other odd jobs that sometimes found their way to their father – in the year since Mom died, but there was still so much she was figuring out, and now she has to do that all on her own, without pestering Dad to show her how to do it when he got too moody with missing Mom to do the jobs himself. They’ve gotten by like that for a year, but now… “Give me a month to finish those up and get paid. Then you get a little more of these last months’ rent before you kick us out, and we don’t have to lug so much of this with us to some room and board for one, eh?”
His eyes narrow with calculation as he glances from one project to the next in her working-and-living space. “One week,” he counters. “The sooner I have paying tenants in here again, the better.”
“Two weeks? Please?” Lenneth shifts to pleading, and shifts her stance out of the doorway where she’d stood as if to keep him out of their sanctum, turns to the side just enough for him to see Briella clutching their baby brother in her arms. “I’ve got my sister and brother to look after. And I’ve got to find work and somewhere else for us to stay, same time as I’m finishing up these jobs. Two weeks.”
The landlord braces himself as if to stick to his guns and turn them out on the streets this very minute, but Tully sniffles and Lenneth sees the aumaua’s expression soften. “Two weeks,” he sighs. “No more. I’m sorry, lass. I really am.”
And then it’s him who is out on the street, but only to march back to his own warm home, for which he owes no one rent. Lenneth closes the door and leans back against it with a sigh, content for a moment to soak in the illusion of security while they still have it.
“Lenni?” her sister asks, creeping closer with the baby tucked against her shoulder. “What’ll we do? It won’t be enough, even when you finish all this…this junk,” she frowns at the clutter on the table, “it won’t pay enough to rent another place either, will it?”
“Don’t you worry,” Lenneth says, and she barely has to crouch to gather them both in a hug; Bree’s managed a bit of a growth spurt since the baby was born, even with all of them getting by on half-rations most days, and she’ll catch up to Lenneth soon; probably even, because the universe is not fair, surpass her. But for now she’s still a girl little enough to need a parent’s protection, and lacking that, a sister’s will have to do.
Behind her sister’s back, mid-hug, Lenneth shifts her grip on the tiny knife. Not much for stabbing someone, but probably as handy at cutting a purse as the scrollwork on a fancy clock, she thinks. They don’t have many options left, but they have options. “He had one thing right, Bree; us Morellis are resourceful. We’ll get by, somehow,” she reassures Briella. One way, or another.