Spice & Wolf Omnibus

by Isuna Hasekura

  “So, what happened to the witch?” Lawrence asked.

  Vino sighed resentfully. “Who knows? No one’s seen her for years, so maybe she’s gone somewhere else… But since no one will venture to check, there’s no way to be sure. It’s best to let sleeping dogs lie, after all, don’t you think?”

  Lawrence nodded slowly. Things were different for a traveling merchant who could easily move from one town to another. They could have a look and move on if conditions looked dangerous – but such options were not available to villagers.

  “We don’t want to invite any extra trouble, so we’ve just stopped going to the forest. Will you all really be all right staying the night there?”

  Only those who had never faced the mountains at night and the true terror of the forest would mock their fear of the so-called witch. Even supposing the term witch was no more than a name they had settled on, fear was a natural reaction.

  So Lawrence made sure to respond brightly, “Oh yes. After all, three of us are servants of God.”

  Fran and Holo looked the part, but Vino seemed not to understand about Col.

  “He’s an apprentice scribe, you see, training to copy the scriptures. It’s a blessed vocation.”

  Vino seemed surprised and apologized. “Ah, excuse my rudeness.”

  “If anything, it’s more dangerous for them to spend the night with me.” It was a more obvious joke than it was clever. Vino laughed aloud, but Lawrence made a serious face. “Ah, that said…”

  “Hmm?”

  “If the worst happens and we return to the village during the night, please don’t mistake us for the witch and chase us off, eh?”

  Vino looked at Lawrence blankly for a moment. He then burst again into laughter. “Ha-ha, of course not! We’re used to life in the mountains, and even some of us have come crying home after our first night in the charcoal cottage. Our own children have to go into the mountains, so we smack them hard and send them back out. We won’t treat you the same way, though.”

  Lawrence remembered the first time he went into the forest with his old master.

  “The night road is dangerous, but every night has its dawn. I can tell you that much as a man of the mountains myself.”

  He was a good villager. Lawrence nodded at his words with a smile.

  “Well, then,” said Vino, taking a breath and bringing the jovial conversation to an end.

  The scenery itself was a normal riverside road, which did not change for as far as it could be seen, up until the river took a turn out of sight, taking the road with it.

  “If you follow this up, you’ll come to the waterfall. Beyond that is the lake, and right before the waterfall should be the charcoal cottage. And if you decide you can’t manage the stay, you can just come back to the village.” These last words he spoke in a calm voice, every bit the practical village farmer. “God’s blessing be with you.”

  Just what you would expect from a villager whose forest harbored the legend of an angel, Lawrence thought.

  The earthen path that emerged from the forest by the riverside was very smooth. What bumps existed were smoothed by snow, such that the wagon traveled very easily over them.

  Once Vino passed out of view, Holo hopped up to the driver’s seat.

  “I don’t like it,” were the first words out of her mouth. She had a small cask in her hand, which, if Lawrence’s memory served, was distilled liquor for emergency purposes.

  He tried to snatch it away from her, but Holo bared her teeth intimidatingly. “We’ve gotten all she asked, and still she’s so haughty.”

  Fran had taken the lead, as though she felt hurried. It was true they’d had no trouble getting the villagers to tell them their stories, but as Fran had said and Holo agreed, they had yet to learn the truth.

  From that perspective, it was hardly surprising that Fran had little to say, but that did not improve Holo’s mood. “Are you not irritated yourself?” she asked.

  Lawrence drew back slightly. “If I got angry at every little thing, my body wouldn’t be able to hold it all.”

  Holo shot him a glare as she gnawed at the edge of the cask, but she no doubt understood his logic.

  Perhaps she was already drunk. Lawrence sighed heavily as the thought occurred to him. The cask was thrust roughly at him.

  “You’re too kind,” said Holo.

  “–Hey!”

  Before Lawrence could stop her, Holo had returned to the wagon bed.

  Lawrence wondered what she was on about, then he looked at the cask and realized. The plug had been removed but little of the contents had been emptied, so it seemed unlikely that Holo was drunk.

  But Holo did have a selfish streak, and he decided she was merely being uncooperative. He replaced the plug in the cask and picked the reins back up.

  Thereafter progress was steady, and when Fran finally stopped her horse, they found themselves in front of the little charcoal cottage that commanded a fine view of the waterfall, which despite the small volume of water was quite impressive.

  The cottage was huddled beneath two large trees, perhaps because there could be heavy snowfall here. “Don’t build a roof on a roof,” the old saying went, but in this case Lawrence felt it could be forgiven. The tree branches would handle snow removal themselves as they bent under the weight of accumulated snow.

  Fran climbed down from her horse and approached the cottage without any particular hesitation. Given Vino’s story about how the villagers had been driven away by dogs, Lawrence hastily came down from the driver’s seat of the wagon.

  “It’s fine,” said Fran as she opened the doors. She did it so smoothly and quickly that there was no chance to stop her.

  Lawrence stood there stunned, and Holo came over, dragging Col behind her, whose gaze flicked around their surroundings worriedly.

  “She seems to be rather certain of herself.”

  While he did not find Fran’s every move to be irritating the way Holo did, Lawrence had to agree with her in this case. It seemed as though this was not Fran’s first visit here.

  Moreover, while the cottage seemed ancient, it didn’t have the dusty, dingy feeling of a place that had gone unused for long years. Vino claimed that the villagers no longer entered the forest, but Lawrence was postponing his belief in that particular story.

  “Mr. Lawrence, our things,” said Fran, her head emerging from within the cottage.

  Lawrence felt as though he had returned to his apprentice days. “I’ll get them right away,” he replied. And then, as he passed Holo on the way – “Don’t fight with her.”

  He got a kick for his trouble, but Col’s face brightened at this when previously he had been visibly scared of the witch, so perhaps it was for the best.

  Lawrence carried item after item back from the wagon bed, arranging them inside the cottage according to Fran’s direction. Food, wine, blankets, and firewood for four people was quite a lot of material, so when he finished bringing it all in, he had worked up a good sweat – but it all fit perfectly in the cottage, neither too much nor too little.

  Moreover, while the interior of the cottage was a bit dusty, there were no spider webs, and the planks were free from rot, and the tidy little roof was even without holes.

  Someone had to be visiting regularly to perform maintenance and cleaning. Had the last visit been before the snowfall?

  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 silver-smithing 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 b
ack 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 seeme
d 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 kind-hearted 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.