“Cheers!”
Once the children had finished their dinner, Nina and the others headed to their usual little tavern. The owner was a local who knew all about what the girls had done for the town and so told them, “Have the first round on the house!”
Emily got overexcited. “Fill the largest tankard in this establishment to the brim with beer!”
“I thought you’d say that,” said the owner, “so I got this from the back shelf,” and produced a glass as big as Emily’s head.
She was thrilled.
“Ahhh! Nothing like a drink on the house!”
“Mmm! You can say that again.”
She and Astrid gulped down their beers.
It had been three days since the street stalls had set up shop, and they were off to a good start. In fact, business was booming.
Emily’s assessment of Côte Sud’s potential—“People don’t come here all the way from the capital just to eat the same stuff they get at restaurants back home. There’s for sure a market for local food!”—proved to be spot on. Tourists couldn’t get enough of the quick and easy snacks on offer at the stalls. The fact that they were run by children drew attention too.
Tien constructed the stalls, Astrid built the magical devices for cooking, Nina prepped the food, and Emily supervised the whole operation. All four of them felt a strong sense of accomplishment.
Naturally, the support from the locals had been indispensable. They hadn’t even asked—the locals had just suddenly shown up and started to pitch in. Nina and the others didn’t know about the conversation that had transpired with the dwarf at the bathhouse.
Locals hadn’t just donated building supplies for the stalls, but had also cleaned up the streets, prepared the banner, and even set up their own stalls. Two or three stalls was a good start, they said, but the more the merrier.
At some point, Emily got the idea to have the children go look for pretty seashells to sell—after they put in a little work, of course. The children went and did as she suggested, and later, some of the adults who were good with their hands drilled holes and threaded cords through them to make bracelets, anklets, and necklaces. These sold astonishingly well. To the locals who saw seashells every day, they were nothing special, but to tourists, they were beautiful treasures.
“Who knew you had such a head for business?”
“Emily, you’re amazing!”
“Chi has to hand it to you.”
“Not too shabby, huh?” Emily took the praise from Astrid, Nina, and Tien without mentioning that she’d seen it all at a resort she’d visited in her past life in Japan. Everyone liked to be complimented, and she was no exception.
“It’s great that the landlady at the Sable Fin Inn took in those children, isn’t it?” Astrid said after a while.
“For sure,” Emily agreed. “Now that they’ve got money, it won’t be long till they have to deal with grown-ups with less-than-noble intentions.”
Even before they’d built the new huts in the forest, Nina and the others had known that the children would need a proper place to live in the end—somewhere with other people around and locks on the doors. Now that the street stalls looked set to bring in more money than anyone expected, getting them lodgings sooner rather than later had become necessary in order to buy them security.
This miscalculation did mean that Nina and the others had to find somewhere else to stay, but no one minded. The huts, in the meantime, would serve as a base for the children when they went foraging in the forest.
Each morning, the children split into three groups. The first got the stalls ready to open for the day, the second cleaned up around the stalls with all the youngest children, and the third—the largest of the three groups—went out to the forest and the coast to gather that day’s wares. With the fruit, they made sauces and their own meals, turned the sugarcane and coconuts into juice, and grilled or deep-fried the little fish and octopuses that they caught.
They also used the leftover flesh from the coconuts they’d split open to make coconut oil. It was a relatively simple process—scraping out the flesh, mixing it up, and leaving it to ferment naturally resulted in the oil separating out, which they then fried with. Any other ingredients they were short on, they could just buy from other locals.
The children mastered all of this in no time. Their days as hungry, grimy urchins lurking in back alleys were over. They probably only needed a few more days of support before they’d be ready to make a go of it on their own.
“It really is...a relief...” Nina said sleepily. With this weight off her mind, she was dozing off.
“A relief... Yeah, I guess it is. So long as nothing else happens, anyway.” Emily turned to Astrid. “Hey, Nina’s about to pass out over here.”
“Gotcha. I’ll head back now.” Astrid got up to take Nina back to the inn. “Good luck, Emily. Though hopefully you won’t need it.”
“That’d be nice,” Emily agreed. “C’mon, Tien. Time to go.”
“All right.”
Once Astrid and Nina had left, Emily and Tien got up too and left the tavern.
The nighttime streets were quiet. There was no one around, and all that could be heard was the distant whisper of the waves. Although there weren’t any streetlights, the moon shone down to illuminate their way as they approached the DOWNTOWN STREET banner and the children’s street stalls...and in front of them, a group of men.
“Huh? Is this it?”
“We’ve just gotta smash these up? A bunch o’ ramshackle stalls?”
“Get a move on. We gotta wrap this up before anyone sees.”
Emily groaned under her breath. “Of course there had to be something,” she muttered, then raised her voice to address the men. “Talk about great timing, huh? I didn’t think you’d be here till later, but it looks like we nearly missed you!”
The men whirled around, but when they saw two young girls coming toward them, their looks of alarm turned into grins.
“Well hello there, girlies! Didn’t your mummy and daddy tell you not to wander around after dark?”
“Reckon they run one o’ these stalls? Word is it’s a bunch o’ kids.”
“Aw, who cares who they are? Let’s gram ’em before they squeal— Oof!”