Spring Log III

by Isuna Hasekura

  There was the name of a Nyohhira bathhouse on the decorative fabric.

  “…I understand why you are dressed that way now, but what is the meaning of this?”

  The question slipped from his mouth, but he realized that the Horse would not be serving as a courier if he was liable to leak the contents of a noble’s letter to any outsider. Lawrence smiled apologetically, but the Horse grinned and shook his head.

  “Don’t worry, it is nothing political. The noble who gave me the letter rather ordered me to spread word of this letter along the road.”

  “Huh?”

  Spread word of the letter?

  Lawrence stared back at the Horse, not understanding at all, and the Horse calmly closed his eyes and spoke, as though a herald announcing a notice on the street given to him by his lord.

  “Those that pass by, stop and listen. The Rosen Kingdom sends word in the name of the lord of the Subarb Territory. This is the tale of the hero who sailed on our ship.”

  The Horse, who held the envelope gently with both hands and a solemn expression, stood even straighter than the crisp creases on his clothes.

  “He voyaged on our boat, sent to us by God, and bravely sailed the seven seas. Through God’s command, he always kept bravery with him to protect those rowing out into the open ocean.”

  When he got that far, Lawrence remembered which bathhouse it was meant to go to and understood what sort of letter it was.

  That bathhouse had one of their sons leave on a journey after being asked to work for one of their guests, a territorial lord. This village was much too small for young people, and the world opened up the path to adventure and success.

  But what came back was a letter, and the one who was delivering it was the very picture of a stern courier.

  Had he accomplished and been successful in what he set out to do, he would have come back himself.

  Lawrence looked at the Horse.

  “He fought bravely and went to God’s side. In our name, we praise his glory.”

  And in the same manner, he had repeated his story before the bathhouse in question.

  It did seem to come out of nowhere, but they must have been somewhat prepared for it when they saw their son off.

  The bathhouse master had hung his head but quickly found composure and honored the esteemed messenger.

  It sounded as though the youngster who left the village had entered the service of a coastal country and had become a sailor to learn the ways of seabound knights. Since lords would not typically send notice directly to a vassal’s hometown if they were not of high standing, he must have distinguished himself appropriately in battle.

  “Therefore, in accordance with the rules of the sailors, we are sending you this remuneration from the ship.”

  The Horse had retrieved a pouch stuffed full of silver coins from his pocket and handed it to the master. The master had thanked him again and welcomed the Horse inside the house. There was nothing left for Lawrence to do, standing there. He gave the Horse a silent bow, turned on his heels, and left.

  Nyohhira was quiet again today, and the sky was clear.

  He, too, had come across misfortune once in a while during his own travels. There were many times he had to look away from those begging for help. He thought he had perfected the skill of meeting the cold, stinging wind with a blank expression long ago.

  But he shivered lightly in the autumn breeze.

  He now had too many things he did not want to lose.

  He understood this even more clearly when he looked at the Horse who had come to report the boy’s death.

  Lawrence quickly returned to his own bathhouse.

  He could not be the master of a bathhouse of happiness and smiles with such a hard expression.

  He smacked his cheeks and lifted his spirits before entering the bathhouse, and the sight before him caught him by surprise.

  There was Holo, lying on the floor of the big hall, a wet cloth on her forehead, her face bright red.

  “Sir Lawrence.”

  The Rabbit addressed him. He looked to be the type who would juggle as he sold sweet pastries to children if Lawrence saw him in town, perhaps because of his jolly features.

  The way he diligently fanned Holo with a blanket as she groaned seemed like a scene from a comedy routine.

  “Wh-what is all this?”

  “Oh dear, well, we were doing some drinking games with Lady Holo in the baths…”

  She must have overheated after drinking too much.

  It was great work for her to join guests as they partied, but it was all for nothing after drinking away her reason.

  “Hey, Holo.”

  Lawrence called her name, and it seemed as though she was conscious as she opened her eyes slightly. Holo was drunk, a sight he had seen many times on their journey and since they had opened the bathhouse.

  “…Water.”

  Her eyes wavered as she groaned quietly, and Lawrence sighed.

  “I’ll take care of her,” he said to the Rabbit, who seemed somewhat apologetic, perhaps feeling responsible for making Holo drink, but he bowed his head and left the hall.

  Lawrence sighed again, dropped to his knees beside Holo, and reached for the pitcher.

  It was empty.

  “How much did you drink?”

  Holo tried to answer, but burped instead.

  “Stay here. I’ll go draw some fresh water.”

  Lawrence stood as he spoke, and Holo opened her mouth.

  “…I…win…”

  He was caught by surprise, but in the end, he smiled.

  “You’re supposed to lose when you’re the host.”

  “…Fool…”

  She managed the single word before hiccuping loudly.

  Lawrence heaved another sigh as he took the pitcher and headed toward the kitchen—with Holo acting this way, that meant all the work would end up on Miss Selim’s shoulders again.

  They still had to pretreat, dry, and cure the mushrooms they gathered yesterday, and they still had to roast the chestnuts before bugs made their home in them, dip them in honey, or dry them and ground them into flour. As Lawrence thought about this and that, he found people busily running in and out of the kitchen, their sleeves rolled up.

  “Oh, Sir Lawrence.”

  “Erm…?”

  “Oh, water, I see.”

  Without any regard to his sheer bewilderment, the pitcher was plucked from his hand.

  “My, Lady Holo sure can drink. Those among us we called bottomless pits swiftly lost. They must be passed out in their rooms about now.”

  With a loud guffaw, the man jogged swiftly out to the well in the garden.

  Lawrence, rooted to the spot, had no idea what to say to the people doing the chores in the kitchen and stood there blankly. One person washed mushrooms, one cracked the rock salt, one meticulously peeled the chestnuts, and another stirred the pot of honey as sweat dripped from his forehead.

  Among them all was Hanna, giving out orders with great dignity.

  “Miss Hanna, what is all this?”

  Lawrence asked, and Hanna shrugged dramatically and approached him.

  “Lady Holo asked them to work in her drunken stead.”

  Lawrence’s mouth twisted bitterly, but the people working all looked up and grinned delightedly.

  “Lady Holo was the winner, after all.”

  “We promised.”

  “And what a magnificent drinker she proved to be!”

  Those compliments did not sound like lies, but it was now clear that Holo had participated in a drinking game to bet on the work she did not want to do. And since she could drink during the day, there was nothing better for her.

  There was a hint of the self-proclaimed wisewolf’s cunning.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, Sir Lawrence.”

  Lawrence took the pitcher with a word of thanks, then said to the others, “No need to work too hard,” and left the kitchen.

  The cold water chilled his
hands through the metal as Lawrence walked down the corridors, contemplating. He wondered if his hunch was correct, so instead of returning to the great hall, he went up to the second floor, and there the two women were merrily sweeping and cleaning the floors.

  “Ah, greetings, Master Lawrence!”

  He had thought they were both dressed as nuns in order to travel, but perhaps they were always this elegant. They were older than Holo, but yet not as docile as Selim—the kind of girls who would be allowed to hold candles at a town festival and be very popular with the young men.

  He thought he remembered them saying they were sisters at the banquet the day before.

  “…You didn’t make a bet with Holo, did you?”

  The two exchanged glances, then beamed.

  “We are the type who get restless when we cannot do work, actually.”

  Though they wore long robe-like dresses, their sleeves were rolled up, and their hems roughly tied up to their knees. Such a sloppy kind of look made them seem healthy, and at the same time, Lawrence found himself oddly flustered when he caught a glimpse of their long, bare legs, brimming with youthful, feminine vigor.

  He thought quietly to himself how thankful he was that Holo was asleep downstairs.

  As they worked, the two women finished collecting the dust, examined the hallway in satisfaction, and spoke.

  “I also heard we still have to clean the soot in the chimney and sweep the ash by the stove.”

  “Should we clean the silverware? I just adore it when things shine like that!”

  “We’ve been itching to do so the whole way here. Oh, how we wish we could clean!”

  They had a cheerfulness about them that was different from Myuri’s explosiveness and, of course, Holo’s. It seemed they genuinely enjoyed cleaning.

  Not only that but the hallway was spotless. Moreover, they had not neglected to open the windows and doors slightly to air it out. Their great skill suggested that they were used to working in large mansions. When they mentioned cleaning the silverware, he remembered that they were apparently embodiments of birds, and he somewhat understood. All the bird nests he saw in the forest were magnificent yet neat, and when jewelry went missing from town, the first places anyone searched were the nearby trees.

  That being said, he still wondered if it was okay to let guests do the dirty work. These were all originally Holo’s jobs, and he felt even more guilty when he thought about how she was currently sleeping on the floor, drunk.

  On the other hand, if the women had free time and wanted to work, then maybe it was the right decision to let them do so. The peak season had passed anyhow, so there were no musicians or dancers or acrobats and no other way to spend the time.

  Lawrence worried over it for a few moments, then raised the question.

  “…Is this all really okay?”

  The two women looked at each other and responded gleefully in unison, “Of course!”

  Besides the two who were passed out in their rooms after losing to Holo in the drinking game, there were eight total people working, and the bathhouse suddenly turned into one massive cleanup job.

  Most of the work Lawrence should have done had been taken from him, and he spotted Selim countless times, now with very little to do, wandering around aimlessly. In the end, she must have remembered that only she could do the bookkeeping, so she began her calculations for ordering and such at the counter.

  Lawrence sat by Holo in the great hall as he watched everyone while tending to the fire. Holo must have sobered up as she looked less pained, and he could hear her soft, comfortable snores. It was not beneath her dignity to show herself like this.

  He pulled the blanket back over her when it slipped off as she rolled over, and he brushed away the hair that stuck to her cheek. Her wolf ears twitched, slightly tickled, and her soft snores continued.

  He had braced himself when a whole group of guests came as they relaxed, thinking about how busy they would be afterward to prepare for winter, so though it was just a little bit, he would thank Holo for her craftiness.

  If their guests worked hard, then Lawrence and Holo would gain more time together.

  Lawrence smiled at Holo’s calm sleeping face, then turned his gaze to the fire in the stove. The big, fat log that was put in there this morning was burning as lazily as always. It looked as though it could burn forever.

  This was Nyohhira, a special village protected by the steams of the baths and the melodies of musicians. It had not been touched by war for hundreds of years and has always offered hot water and smiles to people. There were many who called this place the land of dreams, and many others worked hard to make it that way.

  But that did not mean they were free from reality.

  Lawrence sighed. He thought he understood this, but it just reminded him how the steam from the baths clouded his vision. Bad news could come suddenly one day. A messenger with crisp clothing and a grave expression would open the envelope with bright white gloves and read the words aloud. Lawrence would be able to do nothing but listen. The most he could do was, at the very least, cover his ears. At the end of his train of thought, he looked at Holo.

  That was the fate she was so afraid of.

  The moment when a sudden gust of freezing wind came from beyond the steam, long after they grew used to not wearing coats.

  Lawrence wordlessly looked at his hand, then suddenly remembered the letter, the one that Elsa sent them.

  It was still in his pocket. He pulled it out and opened the seal.

  On the page was a stiffly formal greeting, one that reminded him of Elsa’s beautiful honey-colored eyes that contrasted with the constant cross expression on her face. She wrote blandly about the recent goings-on and how she just had her third child.

  And then, “Let us meet again.”

  It was such a short sentence, but it bore most of the meaning of the letter.

  Elsa was fluent when it came to lecturing but typically a poor talker.

  Let us meet again.

  Before the cold wind withers all the trees.

  “Urgh…”

  Holo groaned, and Lawrence snapped back to reality.

  Her face collided with Lawrence’s foot when she rolled over, and she woke up.

  “Oh, ’tis you…”

  “Did you think I was a hunk of meat?”

  He stroked Holo’s cheek with the back of his finger as he smirked, and her tail thumped happily under the blanket.

  Holo lifted her head, and he thought she might rise, but she merely placed her face onto his foot and rustled around to get into a comfortable position. She had no intentions of getting up and working.

  Work in the bathhouse was proceeding with much more vigor than anything Holo could manage when she exerted herself, but that was as a result of her cunning. It would not be very good if he indulged her as she dozed about.

  Lawrence sighed, and it was just as he reached out to her back to get her up when she asked him a question.

  “What was in the letter?”

  Lawrence stopped because Holo’s voice sounded more conscious than he thought it would be. It was the voice of Holo the Wisewolf, no hint of inebriation present.

  But it did not sound as if she spoke that way because a letter had come from another woman. Holo knew very well how straitlaced Elsa was.

  Lawrence relaxed the hand that was going to push her up and instead placed it on her shoulder.

  “Greetings so stiff they would break if I smacked them.”

  He took a breath.

  “And she said, ‘Let us meet again.’”

  He had lived a life as a traveling merchant, where those words were accompanied with a wave as he parted with others and never saw them again.

  Perhaps that was why he felt so uneasy about Myuri.

  “Will you go see her?”

  Lawrence could not see Holo’s face as she lay on his foot.

  But he had a hunch her eyes were open and staring at the floor.

  He
did not know what her motives were, but Lawrence knew what his answer was.

  “Of course not.”

  No matter how he felt, the reality was that he could not go.

  Even with Selim in the bathhouse now, he did not know if she could manage it well when many guests came. Not only that, but more guests would come to Nyohhira in the near future from the pilgrimage village that her brothers were building. She had her hands full with chores. That was her life now.

  Time would pass as they busied themselves, and it would be impossible for them to even imagine leaving this land. Then someone, perhaps even a guest, would one day knock on the bathhouse door and speak.

  A letter for Sir Lawrence…

  That was life in human society, and the world was much too wide, the roads far too narrow.

  He could only take care of what lay within his reach, and even that could be called a luxury.

  Lawrence rubbed Holo’s shoulders, and she inhaled deeply, then exhaled.

  “You do nothing but worry about Myuri. Do you wish to see her as well?”

  Lawrence stopped moving.

  “I heard why that Horse came to this land. Can you imagine what sort of face you returned to the bathhouse with, you fretful fool?”

  And which one of us tends to think about the future in such gloomy terms? he thought, but her ears twitched about as though she was suppressing a giggle, so she must have known when she spoke.

  But that was why Lawrence did not smile.

  Because he did not know why she mentioned that.

  “…I know you have to squeeze out the pus in order for a wound to heal. Is that why you’re hitting me where it hurts?”

  “You fool,” Holo replied and rolled over.

  Her reddish-amber eyes were so kind he recoiled.

  “You see…”

  She started, then hesitated, her gaze shying away from Lawrence.

  Holo then suddenly chuckled, sitting up with grandeur that made it seem as though her pain was finally gone, and snuggled against the flustered Lawrence.

  “H-hey, you—”

  Holo was not angry, crying, or even annoyed, so he did not know how to respond.

  He leaned forward to hold her, and her scent, stronger than usual from sweating after drinking and bathing, tickled his nose.