She looked up to yell at him, then noticed what he was actually doing. “Olar?” The falling rain blurred her vision. The road was a mire, nearly a swamp. The rain soon washed the horses’ white breath away.
Amid all that, Olar stopped his horse, facing off the edge of the road. “Milady, look!”
Fleur tugged on the reins and brought her horse around. Drawing alongside him, suddenly everything was clear.
Visibility was poor and the road surface was terrible. What might have happened if not for that miraculous jump? She now saw with her own eyes.
“So that was the cause of the hole.”
“It seems so.”
The large hole in the road seemed to have been scooped out by something – scooped out as a wagon, unable to make the turn, screamed out a terrible high groan, perhaps.
Fleur climbed off her horse and walked over to the edge of the road. Past it was a sudden downward slope, at the bottom of which was a small creek. It was swollen and mud colored thanks to the rain, and there in the space between slope and creek – there was a wagon missing wheels on one side and a horse on its back and utterly motionless.
It was the body of the same horse that Fleur had seen in front of her house.
“Milady.”
Fleur didn’t think there was any particular meaning to Olar’s address. He must just have thought it appropriate to call out to her. She unwrapped the scarf from around her head and carefully descended the slope.
Only a small amount of grass grew, and in this rain, footprints would be easily spotted, but she saw none. Perhaps Milton had lost consciousness in the crash, or–
Step by step, she went closer. The chilly rain continued to fall, and three steps away from the wagon, she noticed him.
Pinned beneath the wagon was a man.
His face was smeared with mud and blood, and at first glance he looked asleep.
“… So you… caught up with me…” A puff of white breath rose from his mouth as he spoke the stout-hearted words, proving he was still alive.
Fleur bounded the last three steps to the wagon and stood before Milton.
“… Even I… thought… I was being too selfish…”
His left arm was half torn off. He reached out with his remaining right arm, wringing the words out of himself.
“Help… me…”
He was very clearly beyond help. It did not seem as though Milton himself thought he could be saved, either. But humans are bad at letting go, even at the brink.
Fleur also doubted there would be any lies in Milton’s words anymore.
“It was just… panic… Th-they came to ask you… about my debt, didn’t… they?” His smile had to be a tearful one.
Fleur knelt down and put her hand to Milton’s cheek, and the drops running down his face were warm.
“I was… so scared, so I…”
Fleur glanced down at Milton’s chest, pinned under the wagon. The rain had softened the earth, sparing him a worse injury. And the grip he had on her leg was surprisingly strong.
If his left arm were immediately bandaged and a tourniquet applied, and his body kept warm with the clothes from the wagon bed, he might live long enough for Olar to fetch help and move the wagon.
“I swear… I’ll never betray you again. So…”
“So help you?” Fleur asked.
Her first words to him seemed to kindle hope in his eyes. Milton smiled very clearly. “P-please… I beg you.”
Fleur closed her eyes at his entreaties.
Milton tightened his grip. “We’re both nobles… aren’t we?”
When Fleur opened her eyes, she wasn’t looking at Milton.
“… Fleur?”
Ignoring his questioning tones, Fleur slowly reached for a stick that was stuck into the earth – perhaps a broken wheel spoke or some reinforcing brace on the wagon.
“Fleu…” Milton’s voice trailed off, and he merely looked at her.
“Olar,” Fleur called out to her faithful servant, who’d come down the hill. “What of the cargo?”
“It seems intact. The contents are safe. If it had fallen in the mud it would’ve been all over.”
“I see.”
So the cargo was safe.
Milton smiled – Fleur wondered if he thought that meant he would be safe, too.
But she knew all too well that his smile was not a true one. She was still holding the stick, and its tip was very sharp.
“You said it yourself,” she said almost contemplatively. “Black clothes won’t sell unless there’s… a funeral.”
Clever man.
Fleur took a deep breath.
“So that’s why… I thought you had such a lovely face.” Milton choked out a laugh – or maybe it was just more of a choke.
From the mud, cold, and blood loss, his face was the color of clay. His gaze was directed up at the sky.
He would soon be moving on to his next residence.
“I see… ha-ha…” Milton’s laugh was a tired one, and when he suddenly closed his eyes, he smiled a satisfied smile. “Sh-shit! I was pretending to be near death, but you’ve found me out!”
No amount of acting could give rise to that sort of pallor. And yet Fleur still hesitated. She had realized what he was trying to do.
“I-I never hesitated a second to deceive you! You, who couldn’t… rid yourself of the weakness of the nobility… you’ll never be a merchant! You have to delight in deception, have no conscience, fear no God–”
Milton was cut off in the middle of his speech by Fleur looming over him.
But his eyes still moved.
She hesitated – hesitated to plunge the stake into his doomed body.
“Hey.”
Fleur flinched at Milton’s sudden utterance.
“… If you don’t hurry, I’ll die before you can end me.”
At these words, spoken in a gentle voice, Fleur leaned her weight on the stake. She would never forget the sensation as it sank through.
“… Good. That’s good…”
The taste of blood filled her mouth. Milton put his quivering hand over hers.
“A good merchant has neither blood nor tears…”
Perhaps it had just been the sound of his final bloody gurgle.
Fleur stayed as she was. She did not know for how long. When she got up, she was a different person.
“Olar!” she called out, and the reply was immediate.
“Yes?”
“Get the goods on the horses. As soon as we’re home, we’ll make the black clothes and amber jewelry ready for sale.”
“Understood.”
Fleur gazed at the blood on her own hands and then gave a final instruction.
“He may have been cast out of his house, but this noble son died in an accident. For the funeral, people will need black clothing and amber jewelry the color of earth.”
“Yes, mil–” Olar started to say but caught himself. It was no act. He bowed sincerely to Fleur as she looked sharply over her shoulder at him.
“I am no longer a noble. I am a merchant. My name…”
It had been Milton who had given her the final push toward becoming a merchant who could turn even her heart’s peace into money. And so she decided to borrow his name.
“… Is Eve.”
“Wha–?”
It came from adding but a few lines and dots to Milton. Just as had been done to them.
“Eve Bolan, the merchant.”
The rain continued to fall.
Eve wrapped her scarf around her head once more and moved to help Olar load the horses.
There in the cold and pouring rain, Eve Bolan had taken her first step toward profit.
Afterword
It has been a while. This is Isuna Hasekura.
This is the eleventh volume, a collection of short stories – the second one so far.
Since I’ve written almost nothing but long works ever since my debut, I feel extremely unskilled when it comes to writing sh
ort stories. Also, all of my stories come from the same source, so I got it into my head that using a good idea on a short story was a waste and wound up not writing very many. But when I tried writing this one, I surprised myself. In particular, I found that depicting one of Lawrence’s and Holo’s ridiculous conversations from top to bottom was perfect for the short story format.
So the stories about Lawrence and Holo turned out very nicely. I will brook no complaints.
However, half of this volume is taken up by Eve’s story. Eve is the merchant who shows up in volumes five, eight, and nine. She was perfect for an idea I’d been wanting to use for a long time but just hadn’t found a place for, but the number of pages she took up kept increasing, and now here we are. So far we’ve seen her crafty, money-grubbing side, but this is a story from when she still hadn’t rid herself of her nobility. Personally, I think it’s interesting to go back and read her earlier appearances once you’ve read this story. Especially volumes eight and nine!
In any case, I’m an author who writes a lot of disposable side characters, but now that I’ve done Eve, I’m thinking of doing Norah next. Truth be told, I’d already written about a hundred and fifty manuscript pages of that before neglecting it. So maybe once that’s done, or… I have the plot worked out up to the climax, but… motivation… and sheep…
But I wrote steadily away, and thankfully the pages stacked up.
The next volume will be a long-form story. Hopefully it’ll be out just as the second season of the anime is at its peak!
– Isuna Hasekura
Prologue
Dawn was approaching far across the endless snowy plains. The air was painfully cold, and every breath brought the throb of a headache. The sheep had been let out in the predawn darkness and could be seen at the edge of the horizon.
This scene had repeated itself for centuries and would surely continue to do so for centuries to come – the clear sky; the rolling, snowy hills; and the flock of sheep that trod them.
Lawrence took a breath and then exhaled. The wind carried the vapor away in a swirl, and his eyes followed it as it went.
Beside him, his still-sleepy traveling companion crouched down and poked at the snow with her finger.
“It may be gone, I hear.”
The response to his sudden words was no great thing. “One can hardly lose what one does not already have.” She made a snowball with her small hands and then tossed it away.
It disappeared in the snow with a soft noise, leaving a hole behind.
“We humans can indeed lose again things we’ve lost already.”
Another snowball opened up a second hole before his companion replied to him. “Such reasoning’s beyond the likes of me.”
“Do you imagine things are over when you die? It’s not so. When we die, we either live on in heaven or die yet again in hell. Losing something already lost is not so very difficult.”
His companion decided against making a third snowball and breathed on her cold, red hands. “’Tis dreadful indeed to be a human.”
“It surely is.” Lawrence nodded.
After a moment passed, his companion put another question to him. “How does one lose such a thing?”
“It’s dug up, carved out, with not a trace left behind – or so people say.”
Lawrence heard the sound of rustling fabric and turned to see his companion bent over in laughter.
“Aye, ’tis dreadful to be human! Only a pup could dream up such a notion – I surely never could.” She straightened and was still fully two heads shorter than him.
Just as the adults’ faces he had looked up to as a child always seemed vaguely frightening, the face of any girl he looked down on now always seemed weak and ephemeral. But this girl seemed stouthearted and strong, despite her stature, which was surely no illusion.
“Still, ’tis a bit pleasing to hear as much.”
“… Pleasing?”
“Aye. The first time, I lost what I did utterly unbeknownst to me. It had nothing to do with me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it from happening.”
She took a step, two steps, leaving footprints in the snow, as though to prove the weight of her light-seeming body. The footprints were small but distinct.
“But this time–” The hem of her robe whirled around her, and now the morning sun was to her back as she smiled. “–This time I will be there. ’Twill be my life after death.”
She grinned, and from behind her lips peered her sharp fangs.
“I thought there was nothing I could do, but I have another chance. Such happy things do not often happen. I can act or not as I see fit. Much better that than having the matter settled entirely behind one’s back, don’t you think?”
There were two kinds of strength. One was the strength that came with having something to protect. The other was the strength of having nothing to lose.
“You seem strangely bold,” he teased, the breath puffing whitely from his mouth.
“’Tis because I’ve come upon a wonderful excuse. Regardless of the outcome, I’ll have participated in whatever happens. There’s a certain comfort in that. It might be even more important than whether things go well or not.”
Following her implication to its conclusion suggested that even if she lost out in the end, she might do so without suffering. But when someone seemed to be concealing something and then voiced such a sentiment aloud, one could hardly fail to extend a hand to them.
To lose was one thing, but the challenge of losing with grace was a far more difficult one.
“I must live a good long while yet. I need the hearth of a good excuse to sleep through the cold nights. Something to hold while I sleep that suffices to gaze at when I wake.”
It was a difficult thing to meet such words with a smile, yet he had to. Her fearlessness made it seem as though she was proposing they go and steal the great treasures of the world.
“I can’t stay with you forever. I can only do so much to aid you. But what I can do for you I will.”
She stood there in the snow, the morning sunlight shining down on her small back.
What she wanted to know was not what his stated goal was, but rather what he could actually accomplish. Her heart was a bit too tender to desire passionate proclamations of his willingness to make any effort or risk any danger.
Perhaps their mutual willingness to simply join hands and walk together without going to any great effort only proved that he was getting older. The smile that appeared on her face was a happy one.
“Well, then, perhaps I will use breakfast as an excuse to see just how far you’ll go for me, eh?” Her joke signaled the end of their melancholy conversation. She returned to his side with light, bounding steps, then clung flirtatiously to his arm.
“Just make sure you don’t eat so much that this breakfast becomes your last.”
Even under the best circumstances, the cost of feeding her was no joke. But what had to be taken even more seriously than said cost was the speed of her wit.
“Aye. After all, you love me so much you can hardly bear it – If I ate enough to please you, my belly would surely burst.”
The words that came out of her mouth were a fortress, and if he dared to counterattack, snakes would come slithering out of the grass that surrounded it. Surrender was his only option. He shrugged. “I have no particular desire to kill you.”
“Mm.” Her red-tinged amber eyes took in the sight of the snow-covered abbey and then closed. “’Tis well. I’d hate to die by your generosity.”
Lawrence wondered privately if dawn was the coldest time of day as a reminder from God that it would only become warmer from here.
Chapter One
I’ll call on you later.
Merchants rarely had the luxury of interpreting those words literally. Sometimes it meant perhaps if we’re lucky, we’ll talk, but it could easily be a year or even two before coincidence allowed the promise to be made good upon.
However, when the words came f
rom someone connected to a large economic alliance, they could be taken at face value. As Lawrence and company were on their way back from the great abbey of Brondel in the middle of the snowy plains, bound for the port where they would return to the mainland, they stopped at the same tavern they had used on the way in, and there they received a letter.
The letter came from Piasky, who had expended such effort during the turmoil surrounding the abbey, and it concerned that same abbey, which had attempted in vain to quickly reverse its own failing fortunes.
Long ago the abbey had produced many great saints, but it was tales of a certain holy relic that brought attention to it now.
The probability that the relic was pagan in nature was very high, as was the probability that it was real.
From the perspective of a traveling merchant like Lawrence, such stories belonged in taverns, told over wine. And yet by strange circumstance here he was, reading secret communications from the Ruvik Alliance concerning the great monastery. The Ruvik Alliance, which owned countless trading ships and held sway over even bishops and kings!
He had to laugh.
And yet upon reflection, Lawrence realized that no matter how vast their influence, such alliances were still made of people. And if during one’s travels one met a kindred spirit in even a lowly servant, it was worthy of a feast.
The meetings and encounters of humanity were arranged by God, so any number of mysterious things might happen. After all, by any normal standards, the idea of having the companion he did was utterly laughable, but there she was, standing next to him and peering curiously at the letter.
Her hair was chestnut, her chin fine. Her red-tinged amber eyes and her elegant lips. And if her noble beauty was rare, still rarer were the wolf ears beneath her hood. Lawrence’s serendipitous traveling companion Holo was neither noble nor human. Her true form was that of a great wolf large enough to devour a man in a single bite, a being from the age of spirits, where she once dwelled within the wheat and ensured its bountiful harvest.
Of course, she herself hated such grandiose descriptions, and as she impatiently swatted his legs with her swishing tail in an effort to hurry his letter reading, the term charming seemed much more appropriate than awe inspiring.
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