Side Colors III

by Isuna Hasekura

  Copyright

  SPICE AND WOLF, Volume 13: Side Colors III

  ISUNA HASEKURA

  Cover art by Jyuu Ayakura

  Translation: Paul Starr

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  OOKAMI TO KOSHINRYO Vol. 13

  © ISUNA HASEKURA 2009

  Edited by ASCII MEDIA WORKS

  First published in Japan in 2009 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2014 by Yen Press, LLC

  Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Yen On eBook Edition: April 2017

  Originally published in paperback in December 2014 by Yen On.

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  ISBN: 978-0-316-55914-0

  E3-20170315-JV-PC

  THE WOLF AND THE HONEYED PEACH PRESERVES

  Even in a medium-small town, the luxuries of the location, which informed a decision to stay or push on, varied widely based on the town’s status as a trading hub.

  In this one, there were mountains and forests nearby, from which flowed a beautiful river. And being blessed with fertile soil, the town fairly overflowed with agricultural bounty.

  Hardy crops sold at a healthy price, and the resulting healthy profits led to a bountiful lifestyle, which in turn made bountiful harvests all the easier.

  This town was a perfect exemplar of this virtuous cycle, and come winter, it brimmed with a variety of goods, along with merchants come to buy the same, travelers laying in provisions, and entertainers and priests alike looking to practice their arts on the abundant visitors.

  The marketplace in such a town’s center was always raucous with this activity, as were the areas surrounding it filled with the hustle and bustle of townspeople plying their trades. Cobblers and tailors. Money changers running their businesses out of their wagons. Smiths selling travelers much-needed knives and swords—all were doing a flourishing business.

  Look to the left or look to the right—everywhere were people, people, people.

  Moreover, depending on the wind, delicious scents came wafting by—baked bread, frying fish—and one could hardly be blamed for being drawn to their sources, especially if days and days had been spent on the road in the cold, dry winter air, all the while eating nothing but stale bread and bad wine.

  Perhaps unwilling to beg Lawrence to stop in front of every single stall they passed, Holo sat next to him in the wagon’s driver’s seat, clinging to his sleeve.

  “Hare…catfish…roasted chestnuts…sausage…” She intoned every food they passed, like a child reciting words she had memorized.

  If given leave to sample the goods as she pleased, Holo could surely spend a full gold coin in a mere three days.

  The street was so crowded that Lawrence could not spare a sideways glance, but from Holo’s constant murmuring, he nonetheless had a good sense of what sorts of food could be had there. Being some distance from the sea, it seemed there was little in the way of fruit. Instead, meats of all kinds were abundant, and just as Lawrence felt an especially hard tug on his sleeve, he noticed they were passing a shop that was roasting a whole pig on a spit, slowly turning as oil was drizzled over it—a time-consuming and difficult task, but one that produced a fine product. The man doing the cooking, who seemed to be the shopkeeper, was stripped to the waist and sweating, despite the winter cold.

  Children licking their fingers gathered around, as did travelers, all anticipating a tasty treat.

  “…I want to eat something like that myself, once…just once,” said Holo wistfully, noticing Lawrence’s glance at the sight and evidently deciding it was an opportune moment to speak up.

  Lawrence merely straightened and cleared his throat. “If my memory is to be trusted, I’m quite sure I treated you to a whole roasted piglet at one point.” Holo had devoured it entirely on her own, getting her hands, mouth, and even her hair covered in grease.

  It was unlikely she had forgotten the experience, Lawrence thought, but Holo merely arranged herself in the driver’s seat.

  “Such a thing would fill my belly for only so long.”

  “…Perhaps, but there’s no way you could eat an entire roast pig.” It was not impossible that it weighed more than she did. Lawrence wondered if she would claim a readiness to assume her true form in order to manage the feat. Such would have been a serious case of misplaced priorities, but Holo only looked at Lawrence as though he were a very great fool.

  “That is not what I am saying,” she said.

  “Then what?” Lawrence asked. He truly did not understand the point at which Holo was angling.

  “You don’t get it? You’re a merchant, yet you don’t understand the wishes of another?” A certain amount of pity colored her expression, which wounded his merchant’s pride more than being called a fool or a dunce possibly could.

  “H-hang on.” Lawrence could not let this stand.

  Pigs. Pork. A piglet being insufficient for her. Given the way she had just spoken, this was not about meat.

  “Ah.”

  “Oh?” Holo cocked her head, as though wondering whether he had figured it out.

  “I suppose you didn’t get enough of the skin, then?”

  “…Wha…?”

  “It’s true, there’s less of it on a piglet. Still, well-roasted pork skin…it’s a luxury, that’s for certain. It’s crunchy, and when eaten with the meat, the oil spreads out in your mouth, and it’s even better with a good amount of salt…”

  “Fwa!” Holo had been watching Lawrence with her mouth wide-open. She hastily wiped the drool from it and then looked away sullenly.

  It was cruel talk to subject her to, after so many days of nothing but dry bread, salty pickled cabbage, and garlic. But from the way Holo coughed two or three times and wiped her mouth as though ridding it of an irritation, his guess had been off the mark.

  The expression displayed under her hood was most displeased as well.

  “What, that wasn’t it?”

  “Not even close. Still…,” Holo said, wiping her mouth one more time and pulling her chin in. “That does sound rather tasty…”

  “Well, you can’t get the skin unless you order a whole roast pig, and even with the two of us eating, too much meat would go to waste. I’ve even heard of nobles eating nothing but the skin and throwing the meat away, but…”

  “Oh ho.” Holo was always serious when discussing food.

  Lawrence smiled in spite of himself. “So,” he continued. “What could it be, then? You’re not satisfied with a piglet, which means…”

  �
�Mm?”

  “It’s not the skin, right? Sausage, then? Or boiled liver? That’s not my favorite, but liver can be quite popular.”

  For a moment, Lawrence wondered if she meant she wanted to eat the item in question raw on the spot. She was a wolf, after all; but if they asked for a whole pig liver raw, they would instantly be suspected of being pagans, and the Church would be notified.

  Still.

  “Fool,” said Holo abruptly, as though to negate everything he was thinking. “You truly are a fool.”

  “I don’t think someone who drools at every mention of food should be talking…,” he said, earning an immediate pinch to his thigh. Holo seemed determined to give him something to regret if he was going to lead her on with talk of food.

  Just as Lawrence was reflecting on having teased her too much, Holo sneered at him. “Even I don’t have such a large stomach. A piglet is more than enough for me,” she grumbled.

  So what was it, then? At this point, he could not very well ask her again or he’d have no cause to complain when she grabbed his face. Whenever Holo put a riddle to him, Lawrence could always solve it.

  He thought back again, and the answer came to him quite readily.

  Looking at Holo’s forward-facing, irritated profile, Lawrence laughed a quiet, defeated laugh. “So you want us to go together and have a meal we can’t possibly finish, is that it?”

  Holo glanced at him, then smiled a bashful smile. It was enough to make Lawrence want to pick her up in his arms.

  Wolves felt lonely so very easily, after all.

  “You see, then?”

  So, a meal tonight, too big for them to eat?

  When Holo smiled, her fangs were slightly visible behind her lips. Lawrence got the feeling he had seen something he should not have and hastily looked ahead. He did not want to erase Holo’s smile, and her proposal was a very charming one.

  However, such greed was the enemy of the merchant. An enjoyable meal came at a very unenjoyable price. Showing generosity like this was all well and good, but if it became a habit, it would soon be a problem.

  Did this make him a miserly person? No, no—as a merchant, he was right.

  Lawrence gripped the reins as he argued with himself, tightly enough for them to creak audibly. And then, he noticed something.

  Beside him Holo was doubled over as she tried to restrain her laughter.

  “…”

  Her tail swished to and fro from the effort.

  Irritated, Lawrence looked ahead, which made Holo burst out laughing. In the busy, bustling town, nobody noticed the laughter of one girl on a lone wagon.

  So Lawrence decided not to notice it, either. No, indeed, he would not. He swore to himself in no uncertain terms that he would ignore her. And yet he was perfectly aware that this action would itself amuse her to no end.

  Once Holo had finished her laughter at the expense of his tortured thought processes, she wiped the corners of her eyes—not her mouth. “My thanks for the meal!”

  “You’re quite welcome,” Lawrence answered with sincerity.

  “What? No rooms?”

  The first floor of the inn was set up to serve light meals, and now, shortly before sunset, it was already raucous with activity.

  A thick ledger book in one hand, the innkeeper scratched his head apologetically with his other. “There have just been so many people recently. My apologies, truly…”

  “So it’ll be like this at the other inns, too?”

  “Reckon it will. Times like this, it makes me wish the guild would loosen their rules a bit, but…”

  The more people the owners could pack in, the more profit an inn stood to make, so profit was generally limited by the number of boarders. But if an inn was overcrowded, the building could collapse or disease could break out. Such conditions also made it easier for untoward professionals like thieves and fortune-tellers to mingle, so restrictions on the number of guests tended to be very strict.

  For a guild member, defying the guild was like defying a king.

  The innkeeper closed the thick ledger. “If you’d like some food, that much I can manage,” he offered remorsefully.

  “We’ll come again later.”

  The innkeeper nodded in lieu of a reply, perhaps too used to hearing such promises. Given how crowded it was, there was no chance a room would open up, so Lawrence returned to the wagon. He faced Holo and wordlessly shook his head.

  Quite accustomed to travel herself, Holo nodded, as if to say she had expected as much. But under her hood, her features were showing a bit of strain.

  Well versed in this scenario, she was no doubt already imagining the camp they would have to make at the outskirts of the town if they failed to find a room. To avoid that, the only option was to find a place to park the wagon and borrow some bedclothes—someplace like a stable, a trading company, or a church.

  That would have been easier enough in a larger town, but in this middling one? It was hard to say.

  If they did not find a place to park the wagon by the time the market closed and the sun set, they would just have to leave town again, as Holo was fearing. Lawrence would not have minded this so much had he been alone, but it was more troublesome now that Holo was with him.

  Given the conditions, it was certain that many other travelers were preparing to do the same, and if it came to that, heavy drinking would certainly follow. A group of travelers weary of the asceticism forced on them by the journey could become rather rowdy once they began to drink. Lawrence did not even want to think about what could happen if a girl like Holo were added to the mix. Carousing was pleasant enough when times were good, but travel weariness like this called for care: weak wine slowly drunk, a hot meal, and a warm bed.

  Holding on to that hope, Lawrence continued down the inn-lined street.

  The second and third turned him away, and he arrived at the fourth just in time to see the people in front of him refused.

  When he returned to the wagon, Holo seemed to have already given up and was loosening her bootlaces and belt in the wagon bed.

  If he tried the fifth inn, the result would be the same surely.

  Yet there was a great difference between having a roof and lacking one.

  He pulled on the reins and wheeled the wagon about, threading a path through the hustle and bustle of people hurrying to finish the day’s work. In times like these, he envied those with a home to return to so much it angered him, and he felt a terrible misery at not being able to gain so much as a shabby inn’s room.

  Perhaps noticing his frustration, Holo purposefully drew close to him. Pathetically, he felt himself relax all over. Despite it all, he did have Holo by his side.

  Lawrence stroked her head through the hood, and she smiled, ticklish.

  It was a single, simple moment in their travel. And then, just then—

  “They’ll be ready to eat in a week, I hear,” came a voice from alongside the wagon.

  On the crowded street, there was little difference between wagon-drawn traffic and walking, so it was easy to overhear other conversations. From the white dust on the men’s faces and arms, Lawrence inferred that they were bakers taking a break from their work.

  They seemed to be talking about a shop somewhere along the street.

  “Ah, you’re talking about what the young master of the Ohm Company said? Still, I’m surprised the boss would accept the work of someone like that. And then to order us to put it on the bread we bake? Absurd, I say!”

  “Now, now. He pays us well and buys up the finest wheat bread we can bake. Even you like kneading the best wheat flour there is sometimes, eh?”

  “Aye, I suppose…still…”

  The one man seemed displeased with the item orders placed by a certain trading company’s young master. Bakers were a famously proud lot, even among craftsmen, so the order had to be something that went against his professional standards.

  It took long, hard effort to become a craftsman, and then there was a final te
st to become a master—covering everything from the weighing of flour to the difficult techniques necessary for shaping the dough for rolls. Given all that, they seemed to be discussing the matter at hand in the light of exceptional professional pride.

  But what was this bread being topped with?

  Still leaning against Lawrence, Holo was very still, he could tell, as she listened carefully.

  Lawrence followed the bakers’ gazes to their end, where the street was lined with the eaves of building after building.

  There was a candlemaker, a tallow seller, a needle maker, a button maker. Of those, only the tallow seller sold anything edible, and Lawrence could not imagine they were baking bread topped with hunks of fat.

  Then the answer came into his vision.

  The apothecary’s shop.

  One of the presumable bakers spoke, and everything was made clear. “Our bread’s at its tastiest when eaten alone! It’s a mistake to put such stuff on it. And anyway, it’s too expensive. Do the things turn into gold when preserved in honey? It’s absurd!”

  “Ha-ha. You’re just complaining because you can’t afford it yourself?”

  “L-like hell I am! I’ve no interest in the stuff! Honeyed peach preserves? Bah!”

  Lawrence’s gaze flicked back to Holo, whose ears pricked up as though they had been poked with a needle. He would not have been surprised had they shot right through her hood.

  Holo did not move. She was very, very still. But this was not some surprising display of self-control. It was quite the opposite.

  Her tail lashed to and fro beneath her robe almost painfully, as though it had been lit on fire. Pride, reason, and gluttony all warred within her in a terrible tug-of-war.

  The bakers continued their conversation about bread, and their quicker stride took them away from the wagon. Lawrence watched them go, then stole a sidelong glance at Holo beside him.

  He wondered if it would be best to pretend nothing had happened.

  The thought occurred to him for the merest instant, but the fact that Holo continued to simply sit there, not begging or pleading, was itself rather terrifying.

  If he was truly a skilled negotiator, then this would be the time to prove it. If his opponent would just say something, it would give him the chance to refute or deflect it. But so long as there was nothing, he had no room to maneuver.