Col nodded silently in response to Lawrence’s words.
“So that’s what he said.”
Claiming that if she removed the blanket, the smell from the salve that still lingered on her body would escape and cause her nose to fall off, Holo remained under it with only her face exposed. “Is that so?”
“Would you have understood what he was on about?”
Once Lawrence had returned to the room, the dozing Holo soon awoke. Whereupon she sat up like usual, her head cocked in a queer expression. She seemed physically uncomfortable, and Lawrence soon realized the reason.
Despite not being able to even properly sit up in the morning, the pain she’d felt then had disappeared so thoroughly she could barely remember it.
“That’s quite the medicine,” she said.
Thus it was that Holo decided to come along on the visit to the Jean Company.
However, they couldn’t very well go there immediately. She smelled so bad that she—along with Lawrence—would have to bathe first.
Their current topic of conversation, Col, had gone downstairs to arrange the hot water.
“I suppose I cannot blame you for failing to understand. ’Twould be like asking a butcher about fish,” said Holo, sitting atop a pillow as she yawned hugely.
Lawrence considered heaving another sigh at being made fun of yet again, but at this point, he had no intention of putting on airs and so capitulated quickly.
“At this point, I’ll readily admit that I’m the slow one. But having admitted that doesn’t suddenly give me any new insight. I still don’t understand.”
But even when Lawrence raised the white flag, Holo simply stared, tears welling up in her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Lawrence asked, whereupon a bitter smile slowly appeared on her face.
“Heh. Perhaps it is I who’s the unusually kind one.” She twitched one ear.
“What do you mean?”
“When you act so humble, I cannot very well laugh at your clumsiness.”
“…”
Regardless of how he should have answered, Holo seemed satisfied with the pained way he bobbed his head.
She grinned her usual malicious grin, showing her teeth. “Still, I suppose it would be hard for you to understand, as you already know the truth of the matter. Can you really not imagine what an outsider might think, watching what transpired between you and that vixen?”
Her malicious grin offered a clue to the correct interpretation of her statement. Merchants turned a profit based on their ability to correctly read people’s dispositions; thus Lawrence could not refuse this challenge.
Above all, the direction of the correct interpretation had already been made clear.
Lawrence considered his conversation with Eve from Col’s perspective.
She had struck him with a hatchet handle and even threatened his life, which Holo had raged at Eve for with terrible fury—and when Col had heard about this, he seemed deeply troubled, blushing scarlet with embarrassment.
“Oh.” A possibility occurred to Lawrence, a bitter taste suffusing his mouth.
Yet the bitterness was not distasteful; it was akin to a tart ale.
A bitterness at which he couldn’t help laughing.
“Heh. You’re quite the lucky one, eh?” asked Holo, pleased.
Her smile came from the fact that she knew full well that Col’s misunderstanding would never come to pass.
Lawrence brought his hand to his head again and heaved a sigh. He supposed that such misunderstandings did happen from time to time, but still—to think that he should find himself in a position to be thus miscomprehended! He couldn’t help but smile ruefully at himself.
“He thinks that I had an affair with Eve, which ended in a lovers’ quarrel. I never would’ve imagined it. That’s why he was going on about not thinking I was ‘in the wrong.’”
He wanted to say something about having an affair with Holo, but he was quite sure he would be risking his life to make such a joke.
“That vixen’s a female, and I’m a female, and you’re a male. If we’re speaking of conflicts that have come to blows, there can really be only one answer, can there not? That all of this fuss was actually over nothing more than gold is stranger by far. My price was sixty of those golden pieces, was it not? Honestly, I will never understand the human world,” declared Holo, exasperated.
And indeed, when Lawrence thought back on how he had struggled for her sake, he felt extremely ill at ease.
But she was still Holo, the Wisewolf of Yoitsu.
And she’d long since seen right through him.
“Still, your actions were the least understandable of all. Coming to see me off, of all things—what a total, utter fool,” said Holo, burying her amused face in her pillow.
And yet her eyes never left Lawrence.
Given her words and her actions, Lawrence could hardly be angry with her, nor could he look away.
His shoulders slumped as if to accentuate his defeat, and he lightly stroked Holo’s cheek.
“Is that all?” she asked quietly under his hand, closing one eye and twitching her ears happily.
Lawrence braced himself for a joke of some kind but then realized that Holo would surely be angry if he took her that way.
And yet he could not help looking around the room a little bit, despite knowing full well that nobody else was there.
He took a deep breath.
And then, just like in Lenos, he brought his face closer to Holo.
However, unlike in Lenos, just when he was so close to Holo that he could count the hairs of her eyebrows, there was a sudden knock at the door, at which Lawrence jumped in surprise.
“I brought the hot water!” echoed Col’s voice throughout the room.
He held the door open with his back as he carried the washtub in. It had to be heavy, and the steam that rose from it had collected on his face, covering it in droplets of water. There was no question the boy had labored mightily on Lawrence and Holo’s behalf.
What reason could there be for him to be angry at such a boy?
Still standing beside the bed, Lawrence smiled benevolently. “Good job,” he complimented.
Still, an unpleasant sweat ran down his back.
The moment the knock on the door had come, Holo had made a truly vicious expression.
Had her ears been twitching because she had heard Col’s approaching footsteps?
“What’s the matter?” Col asked.
While Lawrence’s serene expression had been perfect, the mood in the room could not be changed so quickly.
Col’s face looked a bit doubtful, but Lawrence feigned ignorance as best he could.
Holo was probably grinning atop her pillow behind him.
But the most irritating part of all of this was not Holo’s enjoyment of Lawrence having blundered into the trap she’d set for him.
Lawrence put his hand to his left cheek, pretending to scratch an itch.
“I had them make it quite hot, so if it’s too warm, I’ll fetch some cold water,” said Col, putting down the tub and placing two washcloths in it.
How much more pleasant travel would be, Lawrence mused, if he had an apprentice as thoughtful as Col.
“I understand. Thank you, Col.”
“No, I’m the one who forced myself along on your journey. This is the least I can do.”
His guileless smile made Lawrence muse that it would not be a bad idea to treat him to something tasty for dinner.
If Holo were to give Lawrence the same treatment, he reckoned he would be bankrupt within a month.
“Well, then, I shall help myself to the hot water straightaway. I can hardly believe how well this salve worked, but still, ’tis rather hard on my poor nose,” said Holo as she climbed out of bed, at which Col seemed taken aback.
It appeared he truly did not find the odor of the salve unpleasant at all.
“Aye, ’tis good and hot. I’ll douse myself in it before it turns luke
warm.”
Holo plunged her hand into the tub and swirled the water around. It was still steaming energetically, but because the room was rather cold, the water was probably not as hot as it seemed.
“Ah, yes. If you’re not careful, you’ll catch cold,” said Lawrence, and Holo took one of the washcloths, wrung it out, and lightly tossed it in his direction.
Catching it, he felt its damp warmth. Holo was right; it would be best to wipe himself clean sooner rather than later.
As the thought occurred to Lawrence, he went to remove the cloth from his right cheek, when he noticed Col, a short distance away, looking down uncomfortably.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, though there was no need to, as Col seemed to have mustered the courage to speak.
“E-er, I’ll just…be outside,” he said, finishing his words with a forced smile.
He was obviously apprehensive about something.
As he was going out into the hall, he even gave Lawrence a significant look, as though Col had been entrusted with a deep and serious secret. Lawrence now knew all too well what the boy was surely thinking.
At the klunk of the closing door, Lawrence looked at Holo, who was wringing the other washcloth out with a serious expression.
“If he’s in such a state, your talk with the vixen must have been friendly indeed.”
The reasoning behind Col’s serious expression went something like this.
For Col to have mistaken Lawrence and Eve’s past conflict as a lovers’ quarrel, Lawrence and Eve must have appeared to be quite close.
However, Lawrence knew full well that if he were to actually be involved with Eve, it would only amount to a loss for him.
“He looked at me like he was promising to keep my secret forever.”
Holo glanced up, her face softening. “Heh-heh-heh. When he looked at me, it was as though he felt some deep pity.” Squatting down, she brought her knees together and rested her chin atop them. “You’d have more charm if you were a bit more like him.”
Not immediately replying to the statement, Lawrence peeled the cloth from his face.
A ginger touch to his cheek revealed that the swelling had gone down considerably, and he felt essentially no pain.
The medicine had been so effective that he found himself wondering if there might be a profit in it somewhere.
“Well, you know what they say—a bit of vermilion turns everything red. I’ve spent so much time around you that all my charm’s gone.”
Lawrence wiped his cheek vigorously with the washcloth. Wiping his face with a cloth soaked in hot water was an indescribably pleasant sensation.
Holo followed his example, scrubbing her neck with the wrung-out washcloth and twitching her ears.
She seemed a bit surprised upon looking at the color of the cloth after giving her neck a once-over.
“’Tis true, and whoever said a bit of vermilion turns all red was wise indeed. After all, your face is always red.”
Lawrence wiped his face again with what portion of the washcloth was free of the salve, and once he was clean, looked at Holo. “Not so much recently, though, no?”
“And whose mouth would say so?” inquired Holo, seemingly taken aback. Though he knew he was being provoked, Lawrence could not help but sulk a bit.
But when he saw Holo’s mouth curl into a smile, he knew he had fallen into a snare.
“You claim otherwise, then? Well, since that boy’s so considerately left us alone…,” said Holo, rinsing her washcloth in the tub and wringing it clean before standing up.
Then she tossed the cloth at Lawrence and quickly stripped off the robe that covered her upper body.
Caught unawares, Lawrence was unavoidably startled.
Holo turned to him and put a hand on her shoulder. “Care to wash my back?” she offered flirtatiously.
While Holo thought nothing of showing her naked body, she was aware that the experience was different for Lawrence.
It was outrageous for her to capitalize on his sense of propriety.
Lawrence gave that excuse to his flustering, then balled up the washcloth and tossed it back at Holo.
The medicine Col made worked miraculously well.
While Holo still felt a bit shy of recovered, given how little time she’d had the salve on, it was almost unbelievably effective.
The swelling in Lawrence’s face was mostly gone, as well.
But since Holo had reached out and pinched his cheek, asking, “And just how are you feeling?” he could not deny that the redness had increased.
He thought he was going to see stars, but while she was being awfully spiteful, Holo also seemed frustrated and angry, so he made no counterattack.
Evidently, she could not stomach his tossing the washcloth back at her.
This didn’t seem to be an act, so she must have actually wanted him to wash her back.
From that perspective, he was the one in the wrong, and so Lawrence felt himself to be in a difficult place.
“So, what’s this? The trading company you’re about to visit is involved in some foolish scheme?”
They had ventured out along the most obvious street and were headed for the riverside marketplace. A marketplace implied stalls, and Lawrence had been prepared for Holo’s begging.
But he had not imagined that she would bolt for the very first stall she sniffed.
He followed her with his eyes, feeling something like a faint headache, and saw that the stall had heated stones atop of which sea snails sizzled and frothed as they were cooked in their shells.
“We’re going to figure out whether they are scheming, but according to Eve, there’s a good possibility that they are.”
Whether or not Holo was actually listening to him, her eyes shone as she wordlessly prodded him.
As she wasn’t going to take no for an answer, Lawrence decided to avoid a pointless struggle.
The shopkeeper was busily shaving skewers with a knife, and when Lawrence presented him with a blackened copper coin, he adroitly took a skewer and extracted the snail meat from a shell with it, and in no time at all, he had three snails skewered.
Lawrence ordered three servings of the same.
Just as he was thinking it was rather cheap, it turned out the salt that gave the shellfish their delightful flavor cost extra.
Lawrence grinned and gave some choice words of complaint to the shrewd shopkeeper, then asked where he could find the Jean Company.
He had to get his information fee’s worth.
“Even if we go, will they really talk to us?” asked Col after taking one of the skewers and giving his thanks.
Naturally, Lawrence had already cleared up the boy’s misunderstanding about Eve.
“That’s just as Eve said. It’ll depend on my skill.”
“I do not like our chances,” mocked Holo, but given Col’s nervous smile, Lawrence decided to play the clown.
“Still, though,” continued Holo as she looked at the opposite side of the river, “how different things can be, even in the same city.”
The inn in which Lawrence and company were staying was situated at the mouth of the Roam River, on the north side of the port town of Kerube, which was divided into north and south by the river that ran through it.
The marketplace and grander buildings were unsurprisingly concentrated along the river’s edges, and while they were moderately lively, this was only in comparison with the inn’s neighborhood.
A bit past the wide avenue that ran along the river was the strikingly pebbled riverbank itself. Since this was the river’s mouth, the bank was quite broad, with the water some distance away. Looking to the right, there was the sea, and even Lawrence’s nose could smell the salt. Across the river was the south side of the town, and before it, constructed on the river’s great delta, was the largest marketplace in the great port town of Kerube.
As to the question of which of the town’s three sections was the liveliest, it went without saying that it was the d
elta. And as to where the grandest buildings were, they were in the south.
The north side of the town, where Lawrence and his companions were, seemed rather drab by comparison.
Owing to the haze of distance, it was difficult to make out the number of ships berthed in the southern harbor and the amount of goods piled in the delta marketplace, but it was clear that across the river there was more of everything.
It sometimes happened that different places within a town were possessed of entirely different ambiences. And when that town was divided by a river, it might well seem like two separate towns entirely.
“If we cross over, there should be a Rowen Trade Guild house.”
“That was where merchants from your hometown all gather, aye?”
“Yes. However, since the place has a sort of branch office in the delta marketplace, I’ve never actually been to the central house.”
Lawrence pointed to the delta town that lay right where the river met the sea.
While the term town might not have been precisely accurate, to a merchant the place was a city unto itself.
Even from this distance, the overcrowding of the salt wind–grayed two- and three-story buildings there was obvious.
It felt like the clamor of the marketplace might be audible at any moment should the wind pick it up and carry it over the river.
If Holo lowered her hood and listened, she would probably have been able to make out the bustle.
“Seems rather more lively over there. Shall we go and see?”
“I imagine you’re only interested in the food,” said Lawrence, eliciting a childish scowl from Holo.
It had a purposefulness to it, as though Holo was saying she was wholly confident she would be able to get him to take her later anyway.
Lawrence’s shoulders slumped as if admitting he knew she was right, and he started walking but suddenly stopped.
This was because Col had been quiet for some time. He was staring out at the shoal.
“What’s wrong?”
Col spun around in response to Lawrence’s question. “Ah, er…nothing…”
“Nothing?” queried Holo, plucking Col’s skewer away and eating one of the two remaining snails on it. “Lies are a poor reprisal.” She made as though to plunge her fangs into the last morsel, her eyes on Col. “Still you have nothing to say?”
Town of Strife I Page 4
