Spice & Wolf Omnibus

by Isuna Hasekura

  “So you’re fine if I write one?”

  “Hmm. Well, it’s fine.”

  As she spoke, she rubbed her temple against him as she passed, just like a cat. Holo slipped past him and sat on the table once more, picking up a berry and bringing it to her mouth.

  Lawrence sighed a bit and began to put gold and silver coins in order atop the sheet of paper.

  “So, what are you doing there?”

  “Counting how much gold I have. Things haven’t been calm enough in town for it until now.”

  “Mmph.”

  Holo was no doubt making that noise because she thought it concerned travel expenses.

  She looked at the berries in her hand and then looked at Lawrence.

  “Perhaps I… eat too much?”

  As he thought, It’s bad If I laugh, he ended up laughing anyway.

  Sure enough, Holo kicked Lawrence without restraint.

  “Don’t be angry. It’s not that – these are revenue and expenditures for everything until now. It’s hard to calm down and make financial calculations with you making my eyes spin all the time.”

  He had a grasp on the rough outline, but he did not have a good understanding of the actual state of things. At the moment they were lodging for free, receiving gifts from various people, so they were not spending enough to be worth Holo’s concern.

  The loan from the guild was included, so of course his assets had grown significantly.

  As he counted by bending his fingers, somehow many of the deals he had made had been profitable. On the other hand, he had also let painstakingly obtained large profits slip through his fingers through his own failures.

  To be in the black even so was surely cause enough to give thanks to God.

  He had had so many of the pleasures of a traveling merchant’s life condensed into the last nearly half a year. Though that was profit in itself, besides that, he now had Holo by his side.

  “… What? You are making me ill…”

  Holo noticed Lawrence’s gaze and raised her eyebrow just so, but this was certainly not something for Lawrence to fear.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  At his words, Holo’s tail swished as she lost interest and ate her berries.

  Lawrence looked up at Holo, smiling.

  Holo gave Lawrence a fairly disgusted look, but made no move to get off the table.

  And so, looking over his revenues and expenditures, seeing that his financial assets were greater now than what he had saved before he met Holo, Lawrence thanked God.

  Seventeen hundred trenni silver pieces. In addition, he now had connections in this place and that he could not have even dreamed of before. With the two combined, he could purchase the store, prepare merchandise, hire employees, and still have an adequate surplus as he did business; this plan was a complete fantasy no longer.

  “What’s this? You are actually turning a profit.”

  Holo spoke as she peered at the sheet with the calculations on it, her tone of voice sounding like she was on the hunt. Lawrence put his hand between him and Holo as if guarding his dinner plate.

  “That money is precious.”

  The moment the words reached Holo’s ears, they sprung up.

  For an instant, there was a gap in Lawrence’s memories, for Holo’s hand had slapped his nose as if swatting a mosquito.

  “Of course it is! Who do you suppose I am?!”

  As she grumbled that he was truly a fool and knew nothing of courtesy, Lawrence was a bit happy in spite of being slapped.

  For Holo said with a serious look: “You went through much trouble to acquire this, did you not?”

  As embarrassed as he was happy, Lawrence averted his eyes at her words. “Your jokes are so difficult to comprehend.”

  Holo was expressionless as she pinched Lawrence’s nose, pulling it left and right.

  Even amid these kinds of exchanges, Holo had been by his side the whole time.

  Usually when Lawrence played the fool, she would groom her tail, entirely satisfied, but she did not do so here. As she scolded Lawrence and pushed away from him, she stared from the side as he made preparations to write a letter to Norah just as he had announced.

  One might think she simply wanted to be with Lawrence, but he guessed a different perspective was a bit closer to the mark. In other words, she was going to carefully inspect Lawrence’s letter to Norah, as if to guard against his saying anything untoward.

  Holo was a flaxen-haired wolf spirit; Norah was a golden-haired shepherdess.

  While Holo had taken little notice of the differing ancestry between herself and Eve, she was enveloped by an odd enmity toward Norah.

  Certainly the auras they exuded were polar opposites. If Norah was suited to conversation beside a gentle fireplace, Holo was suited to causing a ruckus at a tavern, splashing ale on all and sundry, laughing merrily all the way.

  As such unneeded distractions floated into his head, Lawrence began writing his letter to Norah. With Holo ensuring nothing slipped past her strict eyes as he wrote the letter, things moved slowly no matter how much he tried. Holo would make noises of assent, saying if she was writing she would write this and so forth.

  At any rate, given how they had bared their fangs at each other once before, he did not think of it as a joke.

  However, the fact that she did not interfere with his writing the letter in itself was because she knew all about being helped by someone to achieve her dreams, even if help was being directed toward Norah in this case.

  As Holo ate berries, she went out of the room here and there, saying things in a childish manner like “You truly do take a liking to that scrawny girl,” and so forth, but he noticed her mouth twitching impatiently from time to time.

  Finally, at length, Holo said what she had truly wanted to.

  “So, what do you think?”

  She spoke as Lawrence scattered sand onto the paper, absorbing excess ink, seemingly continuing the small talk to dress it up as something nonchalant.

  But it was undeniably artificial.

  Surely she was not asking him what he really thought about Norah; confirming the quantity of Lawrence’s assets was even less likely.

  No doubt Holo was sharp enough to understand at the first glance why Lawrence was counting his money. After all, she had been right there with him when he had completely lost himself when he had seen the shop on sale in town.

  Lawrence put the full breadth of his merchant-trained acting ability to use, acting as if he had just been asked about the weather.

  “Mm? Ah, it’d be nice to have a store if I could.”

  He thought that perhaps he should continue with the financial considerations but stopped, for he could see from the side of Holo’s face that she was thinking of something.

  “Hmmm.”

  Lawrence had come into conflict with Holo several times because Holo had not said what she was thinking. Often this was because Lawrence had not been considering her enough.

  The larger problem was that even when he was considering Holo, the premises of his logic had various flaws.

  Until even a short time ago, he would doubt himself, wondering what he should do.

  But this time was different.

  He could say with pride that Holo cared for him. That was not at all like saying, “The people of that village trust me,” “The people in that store are priceless treasures,” and so forth. This was not talk of profit and loss.

  He felt like his skull was tingling.

  “If I were to get a shop, where would be good?”

  He shook the sand off the paper. He felt like there were too few words and a bit too many blank spaces but imagined that Holo would probably be angry if he wrote of anything not strictly business.

  As Lawrence thought about that, Holo turned a seemingly sulking face toward him.

  “Did you suppose I would suggest aught else, after you made such a face in front of that store for sale?”

  Sure enough, that was what she said.


  But Lawrence replied indifferently, “I’m sure you wouldn’t. You’re too kind for that.”

  Holo wore a perturbed look, one she might put on when biting her own tongue in the middle of a meal.

  Her tail moved about in a tortuous manner.

  “… I concede you are good at that, at least.”

  “I’m a merchant, after all.”

  “Hmph.”

  Holo snorted and hopped off the table.

  “Well, if the Whatever Company here does do something that displeases me…”

  She cracked the bones of her neck, as though loosening up before a battle.

  “… I shall retire from the fray like a timid maiden.”

  The words timid maiden sounded absurd, but Holo was skilled at slipping subtle points just under a thin coating of ill-tempered personality.

  Lawrence nodded as he replied.

  “There are many towns. I don’t intend to obsess over this one. But…”

  Lawrence slipped the last part in to guard against Holo saying something. Even he could learn how to handle her to some degree.

  “… Do you mind my looking into it, at least?”

  Even though Holo spoke and behaved with absurd levels of selfishness herself, she was fond of calling other people selfish whenever she could. She liked to be relied upon; if someone offered a hand to be pulled along, she gladly took it.

  She was not one of those who thought that resolving to live alone, not accepting any help from anyone else, was right and natural.

  By the vagaries of fate, she had come to live alone and lonely in the village of Pasloe.

  Since leaving Yoitsu she had lived in isolation from her own kind.

  That was why, even as Holo put her hands on her hips, sighing as she gazed at Lawrence with her eyes narrowed, her tail swayed happily.

  “… Have you become wiser while I slept?”

  It seemed Holo recognized as well that there was little they could do but sniff out which way the Debau Company was heading. Her amber pupils said, “Quite conceited for a fool, are you not?”

  “Aye, I do not mind looking into it. I am with you either way.”

  Surely Holo was aware of what her tail was doing, but she still played her role to the hilt. She probably wanted to say something like, “Oh, so you like me like this, hmm?” but she did not, nor otherwise complain.

  “That’s a big help.”

  As Lawrence made a vaguely pained smile as he spoke, Holo spurt out a light “Hmh” as a brief reply.

  In reality, Lawrence’s preliminary inquiries when he was thinking of getting a store in this town and sniffing out the Debau Company’s plot were largely the same thing.

  The Debau Company was the de facto ruler of the town; one naturally investigated what the ruler was like in any town one might consider setting up a store in.

  And the quickest way to get one’s story straight about that was to ask the residents. The first place Lawrence and Holo went to together was the inn’s stable. The youngster was right there feeding leaves to Lawrence’s horse; he wielded courtesy to a disturbing degree the moment he noticed Lawrence.

  “This town, you say?”

  He was a cooperative lad like Col, but showed no desire to show anything of himself at all.

  In that respect, this youngster was the better one at receiving guests.

  “If you can answer, it would be grand, but…”

  “I think it’s a splendid town for trading, but I’m sure you’ve looked into that part. I don’t mind the atmosphere at all, either.”

  “Atmosphere, you say?”

  His hand came to a stop as he thought about it a bit.

  He diligently put the green feed down, tied it with rope, and swept waste up into a corner.

  Lawrence wondered if that was something drilled into him or if he had learned it himself. It was probably the latter.

  “Actually, I wasn’t born in this town but…”

  The lad paused there.

  “I came here on a ship from the south. It took weeks, and a plague broke out that killed my friends. But…”

  His jewellike blue eyes went from down to looking straight up at Lawrence.

  “If I were to write a letter, I’d write it to the town where I was born. I’d tell them everyone should come here.”

  The older a town, the less the young had any place in it.

  Amati, who had been after Holo previously, was one who had abandoned his town to come north.

  “What do you think makes it so good? The liveliness? Or is there something else?”

  As Lawrence asked, the lad was waddling while carrying a tub of green feed that looked heavier than he was. He put it down with a thud and made a smiling face befitting his age as he said, “This place has freedom.”

  The word he had seen in the artisans’ district. The word he had heard from Moizi. The word that so many failures had made Lawrence deeply distrust, so seductive that taking it in made him want to stagger.

  However, this was a town ruled by the Debau Company, of which tales abounded of it moving to conquer the northlands, clear-cutting forests and mountains in its eagerness to excavate minerals, and so forth.

  Of course, he did not think Moizi’s words were completely in error; Lawrence had not greatly resisted accepting his judgment either way.

  Even so, he absolutely had to avoid taking the opinions of those around him as gospel. In the first place, when he recalled when he had first heard of the Debau Company, the impression it gave was completely in conflict with that single word. Surely he was not being too cautious.

  Lawrence thanked the youngster and left the inn.

  Holo did not seem to place much stock in the youngster’s words.

  “Let’s try other places.”

  From there, Lawrence spoke to numerous people at the stalls on the way to the square. However, everyone had the same two words on their lips: freedom and liveliness. And while they had heard the talk of a war breaking out, everyone brushed it off with a laugh and a shake of the head side to side. The town was full of life, a perfect place for its de facto ruler, the Debau Company, to do business. It would never start a war that would be expensive, ruinous for the town, and earn the hatred of all others. Some even said that quite the contrary, the Debau Company was no doubt calming disputes in the vicinity.

  At any rate, everyone agreed this place was free, and Debau was the ally of the people.

  Lawrence and Holo finally came to adjust their impression of the Debau Company.

  “Maybe we just had a bad first impression.”

  Lawrence spoke as he and Holo sat on a stone step, taking a little break.

  “Not that I like blithely accepting it, though.”

  “However, I heard no lies in what the townspeople said to us.”

  Holo made her ears twitch under her hood. Lawrence nodded. There was a limit to what lies people could tell. Someone would eventually slip up, and moreover, they had felt no sign of the Debau Company itself while walking around the town, something they would have known of immediately.

  The Debau Company did have a building along a street a short distance from the square, but it seemed less of a warehouse and more a guild hall where people could come together and speak of whatever they wished.

  Furthermore, it looked neither cheap nor extravagant, a building calmly erected as a foothold. That was just all too ideal for the people.

  Moreover, wherever one looked, there was no sense of that ideal breaking down. The townspeople looked like they were singing songs, bathing in the sunlight of the indiscriminate sun called freedom.

  Lawrence was fairly inclined to break out in praise of the hands-off approach of this town right then and there. However, what kept Lawrence deeply suspicious was that it seemed literally too good to be true.

  After all, there was an underside to any seductive story. One usually paid dearly when they forgot that fact.

  “So, what will you do?”

  But H
olo asked her question somewhat dispirited.

  Whether the townspeople were being deceived or they were simply being unnecessarily suspicious, no good plan existed to eliminate doubt with one blow.

  She understood that without a truly pressing reason, it really was not enough to base a decision on.

  “What to do, I wonder…?”

  As Lawrence scratched his head, Holo made a small sneeze as if a puff of wind was tickling her cheek. When she raised her face, she rubbed her nose as she gazed at the state of the town with narrowed eyes.

  “What is it?”

  “Mm? Ah.”

  He had thought her excellent vision had been caught by something, but Holo crossed her hands behind her and shrugged her shoulders, seeming a little embarrassed as she spoke.

  “I thought that ’tis a waste to walk about a nice town like this filled with suspicions.”

  He did not respond immediately to the unexpected words, replying with “I suppose so” after a while.

  “’Tis indeed a rather enjoyable place.”

  “And it has good food?”

  “Good wine as well. ’Tis also lively. ’Tis such a shame to walk around trying to expose the evil works of the Whatever Company. You ceased to see all the enjoyable parts of the town the instant you thought you might well get a store here.”

  Holo squatted down next to Lawrence, making a small chuckle as she crooked her head with a smile.

  “You have put a lot of thinking into laying the groundwork to get a store. But one word can change how you think or the way you look at a town like this, can it not?”

  She rested her arms on her squatting knees, putting her palms around both cheeks as she gazed at the town.

  Holo’s eyes seemed to be gazing at something farther in the distance. Perhaps at the distant past or perhaps at something related to her journey with Lawrence.

  What Lawrence understood was that his thoughts were not in error and that Holo’s burden had diminished, even if just by a little.

  As Lawrence thought, even that was a blessing, he suddenly realized it.

  “To get a shop, huh. Ah yes. There’s something important I haven’t looked at yet.”

  “Mm? Something has come to mind?”

  If the Debau Company was keeping the town in this state with something in mind, there had to be distortions occurring somewhere.