Logically speaking, that was true enough, yet Lawrence was about to insist that it was still too dangerous—and oddly enough, it was Holo who restrained him. Moreover, she then suggested that Fran take Col with her.
Col readily agreed, of course, since he also felt that Fran should not go alone, which Lawrence found strange.
This was a complete change from Holo’s previous state of finding everything Fran said irritating. Had their conversation with Fran last night changed her view so much?
What had become clear the previous night was that Fran had planned to take advantage of them all along when she brought them here, which ought to have worsened their impression of her—and certainly wouldn’t improve it.
When Lawrence came back from seeing Col and Fran off, he found Holo slowly and deliberately grooming her tail.
Lawrence watched her and decided to try a mildly probing statement.
“I imagine she was thinking only of the legend last night, eh?”
After finger combing the whole of her tail, she began to pluck individual pests off and toss them into the hearth. She gave Lawrence only a desultory ear’s worth of attention.
“Mm?”
“She said as much to Col, didn’t she? ‘Let’s not miss any hints of the legend,’ she said.”
“Ah, mm.”
Fran, too, seemed to have concluded that the angel had to have been some sort of natural phenomenon and had listed all sorts of possibilities to Col—from accumulated snow blowing off a tree branch to water from a hot spring flowing into the lake and causing steam to rise in a wing-shaped pattern.
And it was true that the angel wing phenomenon had to be caused either by something falling from a high place or rising from a low place.
If falling, then the top of the waterfall, with the great difference from top to bottom, seemed the likelier candidate. If rising, then either steam, mist, or billowing snow was not difficult to imagine.
His assistance requested, Col had listened intently to each possibility in turn, nodding as though promising not to miss a single detail as he headed out with Fran.
“It’s true that so long as she seems so serious, neither the villagers nor the landlord can very well come out and quibble with her,” said Lawrence.
He expected Holo to come back with a complaint about Fran being perfectly willing to order her around, but evidently she was not in the mood.
If anything, Holo seemed pleased as she spoke. “’Tis rather absurd for her to have such a reputation as a perverse, stubborn silversmith.”
“…Oh?’
Fran was entirely unlike what he had imagined when he first heard of her, but she was the very image of a serious artisan. She had probably been up thinking about her plans all night and had gone out immediately upon the arrival of morning, without any concern for the danger.
Lawrence said as much to Holo, but she only chewed at the roots of her tail fur, flashing a sharp smile when it was properly fluffy. “I expect she’s simply chasing after whoever it is she’s in love with. That strikes me as neither perverse nor particularly stubborn.”
Holo was talking about the person Fran had mentioned the previous night—the one who had first told her the legend of the angel. Whether or not it was true romance or simply unrequited love on Fran’s part, Holo and Lawrence seemed to be of a mind on the subject.
And to put it as flatly as Holo did, it was true that perversely stubborn was not, perhaps, the right term. In Fran’s position, girls the world over could more accurately be described as “single-minded.”
“’Tis rather charming, is it not?”
“I suppose.” Lawrence very much doubted that Fran had been lying the previous night. Given that, she started to seem to him like a maiden who goes on pilgrimage to pray for her love, who’s gone off to war.
And yet Lawrence still did not understand something. Why had her confession taken the form of an apology for her poor treatment of him at the trading company, and why had Holo’s disposition toward Fran improved so much despite the knowledge that she had set out to trap them from the beginning?
He idly poked at the fire in the hearth as he turned the matter over in his mind. It was then that Holo spoke up.
“And to use an apology to deliver such a story. Rather clever of her, was it not?” A large spark flew up into the air—mostly coincidentally—but it looked as though it had jumped in reaction to his own fluster, which was also true.
Lawrence directed his gaze from the hearth to Holo, who was grinning widely, though it was a stiff, unnatural smile.
“Of course, you do know why it was so clever, don’t you?”
Lawrence realized it was the height of presumption to think he had been able to hide his ignorance from her. If he had to confess, sooner was better. “…Sorry. I have no idea.”
“Fool!” Her face turned so fierce it seemed it would blow all the sparks in the hearth up at once. Her stiff smile vanished, replaced by a look of utter anger.
“Wh-why are you so—”
“Fool! So you’re saying you’ve no notion of why I found her so irritating, either?!”
If she had shouted at him with such force in her wolf form, she would have destroyed the cottage from the inside. Holo’s anger was enough to cause such irrelevant thoughts to cross his mind. He had never seen her tail as puffed up as it suddenly was.
“…Yes.”
He had gone too far, and this was the fall.
Holo’s lips trembled in outrage, and she finally slumped, as though defeated. It was as though she had burst a blood vessel out of sheer rage.
Lawrence hastily tried to say something, but she gave him such a sharp glare from underneath her bangs that he snapped his mouth shut almost as soon as he opened it.
“Well…I suppose that’s the sort of dunce you always were…” Holo sighed a long-suffering sigh and closed her eyes, whereupon the malice seemed to drain out of her. “I was the only one who was angry. She was the only one who was worried she’d gone too far. And you’re not so much generous as you are about as insensitive as a corpse.”
At this point, Lawrence could hardly help but feel irritated, despite still not knowing what this was all about. But before he could reply, Holo continued.
“You were utterly disgraced!”
Lawrence thought back to the trading company, but still did not understand and looked at Holo with eyes more pleading than Col would ever direct at her. Holo the Wisewolf bared her fangs in contempt and then turned away.
“And right in front of me, no less.”
“—Ah…” In that instant, everything connected in his mind.
“Yet still you flail around like some sort of simpleton…”
Holo slumped in utter frustration, seemingly about to collapse sideways at any moment. It was Lawrence, meanwhile, who wanted to stand, but Holo’s eyes stitched him in place, like a dog ordered to sit.
“If you dare speak now, I’ll show you my true ire.”
Lawrence’s mouth snapped shut as though nailed that way, but the words swirled around in his chest with such energy that his hands trembled of their own accord.
Holo was angry that he had been so easily outmaneuvered by Fran back at Hugues’s shop, yes—but what she was truly furious at was that he had done so in front of her very eyes. Given that, he started to see why she had agreed to Fran’s vague conditions. It was not out of amusement at Fran’s cleverness. Holo was planning to intervene.
This was why she had complained at Fran’s silence during the entire time Lawrence had so shrewdly gotten Vino to tell them the whole story and guide them all the way out here—because she was angry not only at Fran but also at the clueless Lawrence.
Aren’t you angry at being made such a fool of? she had been thinking. Aren’t you angry at being made the fool in front of none other than me?
And then had come the conversation last night.
Lawrence recalled every word Fran spoke, along with every one of Holo’s reactions. Immed
iately, he held his head in his hands, as though enduring a terrible headache, overwhelmed at his own stupidity.
Fran was chasing the legend of the angel because of someone she loved. That was why she had confessed that fact as an apology—because Lawrence was chasing a map of the northlands for the very same reason.
No wonder Holo’s mood had improved. And he could certainly understand why she felt the way she did now.
“…I’m sorry.” He had been the only one blind to his own foolishness. He could neither blame Holo for her anger nor her exasperation.
“You truly do seem to move from one foolish act to the next.”
He had nothing to say in his defense, but Holo seemed to have no further anger to express. It seemed his stupidity really had exhausted her rage.
Holo heaved a sigh and deliberately looked down at her tail. “That was surely more effective than any tiresome grooming.” Her anger had caused it to puff up such that it was much fluffier than usual.
Lawrence knew that if he laughed he was likely to get his throat torn out, so he simply listened.
“Still, I suppose this sort of thing is not so uncommon in life,” she said, arching her back in a stretch.
Lawrence was not so idiotic as to think they were still discussing the same topic, but he was idiotic enough not to know what she was actually talking about. “…I don’t follow you,” he said.
Holo looked at him and smiled a self-deprecating smile. “Oh, just that even the ones that get worshipped as gods had the same troubles, that’s all.”
“Huh?”
“It happened quite often. I didn’t much care one way or the other, but the village elders would scold the younger villagers if they bungled the festival preparations, striking them and saying they’d been rude to me, entirely unconcerned with how I might actually feel. I’d watch this all at a loss…and to think that I’d end up doing just the same thing.”
Lawrence knew such situations arose when each party valued the other. But what was he supposed to say? Should he apologize? Or thank her?
Either one seemed foolish.
Lawrence remained silent, and Holo smiled a dry, little smile, then stood. “Though I suppose ’tis better to carefully consider the other’s feelings and then act with the best of intentions. Though perhaps it will suffice to say that the person in question needn’t worry about that.”
She wore a malicious smile as she spoke, obviously still scolding Lawrence—though as punishment for making her look a fool, it was a cheap thing.
“The problem is,” continued Holo, glancing at the hanging skin partition, “what to do when they’re already a silent corpse.”
Blasphemy against the dead was not so different from hearing about the oppression of innocent people—it demanded righteous anger.
Holo had said as much when they had started looking for the wolf bones: No matter how strong they had been, her kind couldn’t bite back in death. Yet somehow, Sister Katerina had happily accepted being called a witch. Perhaps she had just been eccentric.
But Lawrence did not think so, and neither, evidently, did Holo.
She had been kind, and she had accepted it.
“So—that is my reason for wanting to help the girl.”
Back in the village of Pasloe, Holo had been forgotten, rendered as mute as a corpse. In the end, she was unable to endure this indignity. She had kicked the dust from her feet and left. But Katerina’s name could still be restored.
As Lawrence thought about it, he noted a certain circular logic. Looking at Holo, he saw that the wisewolf had already realized this.
“Though if we go around saying this or that about someone who’s died, we’re no better than the villagers. And that dried-out corpse doesn’t care what people call it. So my lending a hand is not much different than whoever it is that comes and cleans the cottage.”
“It’s useful for the living, though.” After all, one could no more peer into the minds of the living than one could the dead, and there was certainly no way to act solely in the interests of another.
If you dug deeply enough, you would always arrive at the conclusion that you had acted in your own interests. The only problem was acting in such a way that you could live with yourself afterward.
“’Tis hard indeed to continue moving forward as you live. I do feel for the villagers and their landlord. And of course…,” Holo said as she tucked her tail back underneath her robe and then hid her ears in her hood. “…You can’t help but cheer for the girl who goes to such efforts for the sake of the one she loves, eh?”
Her words came with that same nasty smile, but they were not wrong. And if this was an indication of a desire to be properly mourned after death, then one had to laugh that they had decided to help Fran.
Lawrence and Holo smiled at each other from across the hearth.
Lawrence bet that if he said he had put too much firewood in the hearth, Holo would laugh and laugh.
Midday came, and soon Fran and Col returned.
Lawrence assumed they had come back for food, but that seemed not to be the case. No sooner did Fran enter the cottage than she pressed Lawrence with a question.
“Will you go to the village and have them draw me a map?”
“…A map?”
“Yes.”
Despite the cold, Lawrence could see the sweat on her brow, which made it clear just how hurried they had been. Col had sat down immediately upon returning to the cottage and gulped water noisily from a water skin.
Holo brushed the snow off him like he was an unruly little boy, but he was too tired even to thank her.
Given the state Fran and Col were in, there were not very many possibilities as to the cause.
“Did you find a clue to the legend of the angel?”
No sooner had he asked the question than Lawrence found himself very surprised indeed. He imagined that applied to Holo as well, though she was still tending to Col.
The reason was Fran. As soon as she heard Lawrence’s question, she smiled in genuine, unself-conscious delight. It was as though she could not hold it back any longer. The perversely stubborn silversmith. The silversmith of constant and unpleasant rumor. For this innocent, lovely smile to be waiting beneath all that, it had to be her true self.
For a woman to have traveled alone for so long and to have been so successful on the way, she must have suffered greatly. Even someone like Eve had to wear a scarf while doing business to hide the fact that she was a woman. Fran wore the rumors of her nastiness and intractability like a suit of armor.
Col seemed to have caught his breath, so Holo took the water skin to Fran. It would have been unimaginable not long before, but Fran smiled a grateful smile, which Holo returned.
Fran drank, paused to breathe, then drank more.
They must have run hard. Toward the legend of the angel.
“When you say ‘map,’ what sort of map do you mean?”
Fran, having caught her breath, started slightly at Lawrence’s question. “Hmm?” She looked at him blankly before comprehension finally seemed to dawn on her. She must have planned to tell him what kind of map she needed. “I’m sorry. I need…I need a map that shows how the rivers flow out from the lake.”
“The river?” Lawrence asked. It was a strange map to ask for.
“Yes. Walking around the lake, something occurred to me. When it snows and the temperature drops suddenly, all the rivers and streams will freeze. Which means the destination of their flow is lost. Even that waterfall would freeze solid if there were enough snow and cold. But then eventually—well, no barrier will last forever. So I need a map that shows the flow of every stream, no matter how small.”
The formerly taciturn Fran, who always seemed as though she were thinking two or three steps ahead of the conversation, was now energetic and voluble. Her expression was serious, but from her rambling words and rapid arm and leg movements, it was obvious she was in a hurry.
“The water would be full of ice and snow, a
nd it would break through and overflow all at once. And it would look like—”
“It would look like the wings of an angel, I should think,” said Fran, looking steadily at Lawrence.
She was full of conviction but so happy that she could not believe it herself—that was what she looked like.
The water and snow had been blocked up, unable to flow, and had then broken free one moonlit night. It would’ve been beautiful, Lawrence thought, and it was an entirely appropriate thing to have been mistaken for an angel’s wings. Even knowing the truth, he could imagine calling the scene a miracle nonetheless.
Lawrence excused himself by reminding himself that he would normally never say such an irresponsible thing, and then he spoke to Fran. “I think that’s probably it,” he said.
Fran was nearly crying from happiness.
“I hope we get to see it.”
It seemed to Lawrence that everyone who had ever single-mindedly pursued a goal had something in common: this smile.
“Yes!” replied Fran quickly and clearly.
Fran and Col headed out to the lake again. It seemed she could not bear to spare even the short amount of time it would take to fetch the map.
Col seemed to have been infected with Fran’s excitement and followed her out, carrying their things with a seriousness he had never exhibited before.
Holo watched them go, a faintly sad smile playing about her lips. Perhaps she felt as though her favorite little brother were being stolen away.
“Well, then, I suppose we should be off ourselves,” said Lawrence, putting his foot in the horse’s stirrup.
Holo kept watching Fran and Col, but at these words she turned and came over, taking hold of Lawrence’s arm.
He took a breath at the same time she did and lifted her up onto the horse’s back. Lawrence followed her up, sitting right in front of her. Taking hold of the reins, he had the horse walk forward.
“She was like a child.” Lawrence had to smile at the memory of Fran. Even if he went back to Kerube and told Hugues of it, he doubted the man would believe him.
“’Tis even more childish to believe that an adult should greet a happy event with a calm face.” Holo’s arms were wrapped around Lawrence and her cheek pressed against his back so that when she talked, the movement of her ear and chin moved ticklishly against him.
Spice and Wolf, Vol. 12 Page 11
