Lawrence wondered about it as he wiped sweat from his brow. Holo looked into the room from a passage that led to another room farther in, her head pushing aside a hanging animal skin that divided the two rooms and could not have been there for very long.
“Where’s the fool?”
She meant Fran. Lawrence pointed outside. “She went to fetch her silversmithing tools from the wagon. I suppose she didn’t want me touching them.”
“Mm.” Holo nodded, cracking her neck audibly.
“Where’s Col?” Lawrence did not joke about her having again left him somewhere.
“You’ll find out when you come back here.” Holo let the skin partition fall and hide her face, and Lawrence heard her footsteps disappear farther into the room.
Just as he was wondering what was back there, Fran returned. Her chisel, hammer, rasp, bellows, and anvil were each small, but taken together accounted for a goodly weight. Fran had impressively packed them all up and hefted them over her shoulder. When she traveled alone, just what sorts of treacherous mountain roads did she face with such aplomb?
She seemed so well accustomed to the load that Lawrence could easily imagine it.
“The other two are in the back?”
“Yes. Ah, let me help you.” It was harder to set down a heavy load than it was to carry it.
But Fran shook her head and bent at the knees, well used to the process of setting the tools down.
How many times had Lawrence’s master scolded him for picking up or putting down heavy loads with his back? It was all too easy for such labor to result in pain. Physical labor had its own sort of wisdom to it, and Lawrence wondered where she had picked it up.
“Is there something more back there?” Lawrence asked Fran as she got out the straw and flint needed to light a fire, but she did not immediately answer. Instead, she faced him with the straw and flint and then looked meaningfully at the hearth. Lawrence could only assume she meant him to busy himself with starting a fire, but seen from outside, he imagined it looked rather pathetic for him to be ordered around so.
But he took the stone and straw and knelt down in front of the hearth to attend to the fire. It was then that she answered him.
“You’ll understand when you see. Anyway, I’ll need to borrow something.”
“…Huh?” Lawrence did not even have time to ask what she wanted to borrow before Fran disappeared behind the skin partition. He wondered what she could be referring to as he started the fire. Presently, two sets of footsteps approached him.
“You’ll be cold dressed like that. Put these on.” Fran produced a pair of fine boots from her things and presented them to Col.
They were made from several layers of beautifully tanned leather, and buying them would have cost a good amount. Col accepted the boots, looking at Lawrence uncertainly. Lawrence nodded—it was not as though Fran was going to eat the boy when he put them on.
“We’ll be back before sunset. Can I leave dinner in your hands?”
Lawrence was the one who needed her to draw him a map of the northlands, so he had little room to refuse her. Far from it—that she had said anything at all made it feel like she was opening up a little bit, so Lawrence answered in a pleasant affirmative. Holo might have been irritated at him had she been there, but Fran nodded and took Col’s hand, leading him outside, his boots clunking against the floor as he went.
Once Lawrence had the fire good and lit, he stood up and headed for the back room.
The floor of the hallway was plain earth, and even with boots on, he could tell how cold the air was. And yet, here too it was neat and tidy and free from cobwebs. Strangely, there was not even a single mouse hole gnawed in the walls.
Lawrence looked this way and that as he entered the room where the hallway led, and there he found Holo, sitting on a chair, regarding an old Church crest that was leaning against the wall.
“Huh?” That was all wrong—Holo was standing in front of the bookshelf, sniffing at the dusty books there.
So who was sitting in the chair?
Lawrence looked back again, and thanks to the sliver of light that made it through a crack in the wooden window, he realized that the figure in the chair was slightly taller than Holo, her hood was worn, and the hem of her robe was riddled with patches.
“I expect this is the ‘witch’ the villagers were on about,” Holo said casually, returning a book to the shelf and then poking the figure in the head.
“H-hey!”
“What? It’s fine. She’s long since dried out. I thought Col might be frightened, but he’s a stronger lad than I reckoned.”
In places closed off by snow, it was not uncommon to encounter desiccated corpses from time to time. This led Lawrence to wonder if Col had been taken out on a mountain search.
“Still, to die gazing at a symbol of the Church…hard to imagine she was a witch.”
“Col says she was a rather well-known person.”
“Oh?”
The shelves in the room were all full of books and bundles of parchment. There was no mistaking it any longer.
After the nun came here on her eccentric journey, there was someone else who had come to adore her and was still coming to this place even after her death. Otherwise the books would not be so orderly, the cottage so clean and tidy.
Lawrence put his hands together lightly and offered a short prayer for the dead nun before turning his attention to the papers on the desk. They were dusty and aging, but the letters on them could still be made out. Evidently there had been an inquiry into her faith. It seemed that while she was alive her religious fervor had caused her to be viewed with suspicion, but she may very well have been a simple nun.
A single look at the wildflower arranged at the corner of the desk dismissed all worries of her being a witch.
“Still, you.”
“Hmm?”
Holo was again looking intently at the contents of the bookshelf, and she pointed to one of the shelves in particular.
“Have a look at this.”
“Where?”
Lawrence looked at the shelf, where there was a space just large enough for one missing volume.
“It must be somewhere else, right?”
“Fool. Have a look at the dust. It’s different there than elsewhere.”
No matter how thoroughly a room was cleaned, dust would settle in it. And when Lawrence looked closely at the gap, he saw that while there was indeed a thin layer of dust there, it was less than elsewhere.
“I don’t know how long ago, but at some point someone took a single volume from here.”
“So what are you saying?”
Holo gave the room another brief look and then regarded Lawrence suspiciously.
“You’ve figured it out, haven’t you? Someone’s been coming here.”
She was referring to the onetime residence of the nun. Vino the villager had said no one would approach it. But as Holo had not called him out, there was no reason to believe he was lying. Which meant it had to be someone unrelated to the village. Or a villager of whose actions Vino was unaware.
And what book had been taken?
“That little fool knew of this place before we came here,” said Holo finally, glaring at Lawrence. “Don’t let your guard down,” her eyes said.
“I know. But where did she say she was going with Col?”
“Hmm. She said she was going to have a look at the lake.”
“The lake?”
“Don’t ask me why. I’ve no idea.”
Given her displeasure, Holo was probably irritated at Fran’s ordering around of not only Lawrence, but Col as well. But then he hit upon an idea.
“Shall we go look as well?” he said, at which Holo brightened.
“Mm. You seem to have gotten a bit cleverer,” she said, taking his arm cheerily.
Lawrence had but a moment to chuckle at Holo’s rare moment of misunderstanding before she began to drag him bodily out of the cottage. “H-hey!”
She refused listen to him and paid the redly burning hearth no mind, silently making for the front door. Holo only stopped when Lawrence found his vision blurred by the brightly shining snow.
“What do you make of the dried-out nun, eh?”
It was not that bright outside. His vision blurred from the reflected light only because it had been so dim inside the cottage. Lawrence held a hand up to shade his eyes, squinting to look at Holo. “What do you mean, ‘What’?”
“I can’t imagine the term witch is very apt, myself.”
Holo did not know much about the Church or the faith of its adherents, but her impression seemed to be very clear. And yet Lawrence had gotten quite a strong impression from the single dried flower on the nun’s desk, and he was similarly unable to see her as a witch.
“Nor do I. You saw the flower on her desk, right?” said Lawrence, but Holo did not seem to understand what he was getting at. Perhaps it didn’t much matter to her one way or another if the woman had been a witch.
Holo tugged again on his arm as he thought on it. “I’ve seen human females of her like many times before. The word kindhearted may as well have been invented to describe them.”
Come to think of it, Lawrence seemed to recall Holo saying something similar when they had first met. He nodded, and Holo slowly began to walk—her face downcast as usual.
“She was one of their like. Or so I suppose.”
“Ah,” said Lawrence, but instead of prompting her to go on, he simply took her hand.
“And, you know…”
“Hmm?”
Holo nodded and went on. “They say she led her wild dogs into the forest.” She looked up with an unexpectedly hard expression. Something about it made Lawrence feel she was fighting to hold back tears. “But they may just as well have been wolves, eh? So tread lightly, you.”
Lawrence’s heart skipped a beat.
Holo let go of his arm and went skipping off ahead. Knowing full well there were no other people nearby, she let her tail slip free from beneath the hem of her robe. Its white tip was as beautiful as the white snow over which it danced, like a fairy’s sash of light.
“Well, I must say I understand our dried-out nun’s feelings.” She clasped her hands behind her and then spun around to face Lawrence with her usual invincible, good-humored smile. White snow fell on mossy rocks with a background of an aquamarine waterfall. For a path supposedly taken by an angel ascending to the heavens, it certainly looked the part.
“Why’s that?” Lawrence asked, taking her small, chilly hand and following her.
“We’re both patient but overreact in equal measure to our stored-up frustration,” said Holo with a self-reproachful smile.
Lawrence looked at a rock that was jutting so far out it seemed about to fall at any moment and replied, “Like jumping naked into the wagon bed of a traveling merchant?”
“Or heading south in search of a friend.”
Lawrence wanted to reach his hand out to Holo’s face but thought better of it. Ever since arriving in the snowy mountains, Holo had surely been thinking about it. What would she do after they arrived in Yoitsu? The remains of one possible choice lay back in that cottage and in the reaction of the surrounding villagers. He just could not get used to her lightly frolicsome mood.
Lawrence and Holo held hands and made their way slowly around the waterfall. It seemed as though they might walk without any particular goal, but Fran’s and Col’s footprints ran there, so Lawrence and Holo followed them.
It was as though they were looking for some kind of precedent, any kind—but to say it aloud would be far too sentimental. As the thought occurred to Lawrence, he looked at Holo, and she lifted her gaze from the footprints in front of them and met his. He wondered if she was thinking the same thing.
She had long since kicked such worries aside, though.
That was the right answer, but above all they would avoid regret this way.
Lawrence squeezed Holo’s hand a bit tighter as the thought struck him.
“So, is the story that an angel passed this way true?”
The path that led to the lake wound around the side of the waterfall, and it seemed Fran and Col were up at its head.
Holo and Lawrence ran up the shortcut, and as they came suddenly face-to-face with the waterfall, Holo spoke. “If they were anything like you or Mr. Hugues, they might have been mistaken for an angel.”
“Mmm…I did see a bird once on the island.” Holo sniffed the air.
“How long would a scent even last?”
“Hmph. It was just a try. And anyway, even years later, I can still get a sense of the place. This doesn’t have that feel. ’Tis a weak forest that humans might easily do as they wish to it.”
The statement had a certain level of authority behind it, given that Holo had once led a pack that protected such a forest.
Holo seemed to notice Lawrence’s concern and smiled a deliberately sharp-fanged smile. “It was probably just a drift of snow blown up into the air. You humans are cowards, but cowards invent the best monsters.”
She sounded so amused as she said it that Lawrence wondered if she had personal experience. “Do you know of any?”
The path that zigzagged up the slope behind the waterfall was surprisingly well made. Since they were following Col and Fran, progress was comparatively easy to make.
“Plenty from back when I lived among the wheat. When night fell, youngsters would get up to mischief in the fields. I’d say there were ten kinds of wheat monsters, at least.”
Lawrence felt bad for the mischief-making youngsters but suddenly understood where many eerie stories must have originated.
“Though sometimes they saw monsters that had nothing to do with my kind.” Holo had a nostalgic look in her eye.
“For example?”
“The one I’m remembering now was a boy who tripped and fell in the mountains and thought the sound of his own crying as it echoed through the valley was the howl of a monster. So then he got even more scared and cried louder.”
“Oh, like that. But…ah…I see.”
“Hmm?”
The path wound left, then right, and before they knew it, they were making good progress up the steep slope. Whoever had come up with this way of constructing a trail was very clever. They had come a good distance but were still only halfway.
“I just remembered the story of a famous miracle whose trick was revealed.”
“Oh ho.” A large tree root formed a steep step, so Lawrence climbed it first and then held out a hand to pull Holo up.
“It has to do with the northern campaign. Every traveler knows the story.” Just as Lawrence began to talk, he suddenly paused. “But it involves the Church, so don’t tell Col.”
Holo’s blank expression shifted to a mischievous smile. “Fortunately there’s nothing else between us that needs to be kept a secret.”
Lawrence could only smile ruefully, and at Holo’s urging, he continued his story. “A famous troupe of knights was participating in the campaign and was losing a fierce battle to pagan forces. As the sky grew red with approaching night, the knights’ commander was about to order the retreat—when suddenly, a huge shadow covered the battlefield. The moment he looked up to see what it was, everyone there seemed to spot it. A huge, white Church crest drifting across the sky.”
Lawrence looked up at the sky, which prompted Holo to do the same. She looked back down, her voice thoughtful. “Birds, weren’t they?”
Always so clever. Lawrence nodded and continued, “That’s right. A flock of birds migrating. But the knights took it as a sign that victory was assured and somehow, in the small amount of daylight left, managed to escape their poor position and win the day. The flag of the nation that was founded on that land has a red background with a white Church crest on it to commemorate that day. And thus had a miracle occurred. The end!”
So there was no small possibility that the angel legend had come from some sort of natural phenomenon.
No doubt Fran had taken Col along to investigate just that possibility.
“Mm. But if so, how might one summon the angel again?”
They came around the last switchback and continued on to the top of the hill. Looking down, the waterfall’s splash pool was strangely tiny.
“What a beautiful lake,” said Holo in a bright voice, not the least bit winded.
The lake was like a mirror bordering the mountains, reflecting the gray clouds that threatened snow at any moment.
Unlike the riverbank below, there were many small rocks fringing the lake. The dusting of snow atop the small black rocks made for a lovely contrast.
The lake was mostly free of reeds and quite transparent, and it seemed entirely possible to walk all the way around its edge. It would be easily navigable by boat and easy, too, to catch fish.
“I’d rather come in summertime,” said Holo, and Lawrence could understand why.
“Can you swim?” Lawrence asked.
“Aye. ’Tis a lovely feeling, having most of one’s weight borne by the water.”
Lawrence could not help but smile at the thought of a wolf so huge it could eat a human in a single bite jumping into a lake and swimming about like a dog. “But if you jumped into the lake in that huge body of yours, all the water would overflow.”
In reality, it was the water from the waterfall that caused the lake to overflow. Lawrence had meant it as a little joke, but Holo fell silent, her expression serious.
“But if I were to jump in with this body, then you’d be the one to overflow.”
She was like a boomerang. Lawrence ignored her; she replied with a deep breath, which she then exhaled.
Taking a walk around such a beautiful lakefront was quite a luxury for a busy traveling merchant. “I suppose Col and Fran must have gone quite a ways.”
Their footprints seemed to go all the way around to the foggy opposite shore that lay at the foot of a tall mountain, its peak entirely obscured by clouds.
“Mm,” Holo muttered noncommittally, looking at the waterfall to which they had walked.
“Is something the matter?”
“Mm. This waterfall may be quite new.”
Spice and Wolf, Vol. 12 Page 9
