Spice & Wolf Omnibus

by Isuna Hasekura

  Lawrence pulled Holo’s hand, going as far as the square. He got Holo a table slightly moistened from morning dew in front of an open-air stall where preparations to open were busily under way. The shopkeeper’s face looked amazed and more than a little jealous at Lawrence having a woman with him here in the morning, but in the end he smiled as he sold his goods. He tried to pay with the Praz copper coins he had obtained from the money changer in Lenos, but a frown came over the shopkeeper’s face at the sight of them. The coin total on his lips felt higher compared to money exchange tallies.

  But he had no time for haggling. The shopkeeper returned with hot milk with a good deal of honey put in and beer, placing them on Holo’s table. The sound of instruments from the square alternated stopping and starting as if the traveling musicians were practicing.

  It seemed like they would need some time before they got the music quite right, but it was the same for him. Lawrence watched as Holo seemed disinterested in the steaming cup and the bubbling mug, finally choosing the milk.

  Lawrence brought the cup to her mug largely one-sidedly and brought the beer to his lips. After eating that quite extravagant breakfast, slightly watered-down beer seemed like just the thing.

  Lesko really did seem full of life, with many people working tirelessly. At the buildings standing around the square, there were flowers in the windows, sitting in places with a lot of sunlight as if completely forgetting it was winter.

  To think the actual state of the town was so different from the stories he had heard.

  If that was so, no matter what thoughts filled his head, even if they felt completely at odds with what his eyes were actually seeing, it was certainly not strange. Holo was not a girl with flights of fancy. She had surely expected she was not going to meet Myuri and had braced for the shock as well as she could.

  That is why when Holo murmured to him, absentminded and barely touching the milk to her lips, Lawrence was not even slightly surprised.

  “I shall not smile this moment.”

  She was not looking at Lawrence.

  For his part, Lawrence only glanced at Holo slightly before immediately shifting his gaze to some practicing clowns.

  “I don’t mind.”

  “However, I am grateful.”

  Holo lightly scratched her face and neck like a little fox as she spoke.

  “It’s… good to hear you say that.”

  As he drank his beer, Lawrence thought that it might indeed be a little too watered down.

  “I always seem to be hitting wide of the mark, after all.”

  There was the incident in the alley in Lenos after all.

  For a moment he felt like Holo made a very slight smile, but as she made a heavy sigh, seemingly holding back tears, her fleeting smile simply vanished.

  “However…”

  “Better to avoid odd subjects?”

  Lawrence jumped out ahead of her.

  Holo looked at Lawrence, seemingly surprised a bit, but as she slowly shifted her gaze back to the milk in her cup, she nodded a little.

  “I don’t know any more than what Luward and I spoke about yesterday anyway. You heard us, didn’t you?”

  Holo nodded.

  “If you ask, I’m sure he’d tell you the old stories handed down through the company, down to all the little details. If you’re afraid to ask alone, I can ask with you.”

  The self-proclaimed wisewolf gave Lawrence a sharp look for a moment, but she immediately cast her eyes down and, as if that was insufficient, closed them.

  “I would ask this of you.”

  “A rare and commendable thing, coming from you.”

  As Lawrence spoke, Holo opened her eyes and glared at him. She did not smile, but Lawrence was relieved simply to see emotion clearly coming out of her eyes, enough that one could almost touch them with their finger.

  “Well, I don’t mind if you have stories to share, either.”

  He referred not to Myuri’s “later,” but rather about Holo when she had actually been in Yoitsu.

  But Holo sipped on her milk rather than replying.

  If she did not want to talk about it, that was fine, of course.

  As Lawrence thought about it, Holo spoke after a while.

  “Your jealousy is inconvenient.”

  Holo must have been trying her hardest to joke at the moment.

  Lawrence shrugged his shoulders and replied, “There’s an important saying about trade. If both traders want to think they made a good bargain, better to not know how much money the other made.”

  It was a saying oft repeated by merchants over wine.

  “Rubbish,” Holo scoffed, looking at the musicians. But even if it was just a little at the edge of her face, she seemed amused.

  “How about we go see the artisan district? Or… better to listen to the singing here?”

  He said it to try and draw Holo’s emotions out as with a rod and hook.

  Holo herself surely understood Lawrence was desperately trying to cheer her up.

  Though she seemed rather irritated, her tongue emerged from her lips just a little.

  “I suppose I’d like to take a look around, to be honest.”

  She seemed to be bad at being doted on like this. Normally she behaved so arrogantly; she actually seemed quite uncomfortable being cared for.

  She was a difficult-to-please wolf, but when she did smile, he was all the happier.

  “That works, too.”

  “Hmph.”

  Holo snorted and made a glug, glug sound as she drank her milk.

  The shopkeeper, looking at Holo’s smallness, had not poured a great amount into her cup, but she made quite a display of drinking it.

  And when she put the cup down on the table with a sharp sound, licking the back of her hand, Lawrence’s jaw wavered.

  “Me, too?”

  He was sure that had he made the excuse that his drink was beer instead, she had plotted to call him a boring male.

  He sighed at how he, too, was now foolish enough to glug beer in the morning. But for Holo’s sake, he would be a fool. In the first place, she had been treating him like one since the moment they had met.

  “… How about that?”

  He drank it all up and put his mug down. Holo leaned her body forward a little and sniffed the mug’s odor.

  “This is mostly water, ’tis it not?” she retorted.

  Though not sweetly whatsoever, she rose from the table and dangled her right hand, waiting for Lawrence’s hand to hold it.

  Bit by bit, Holo’s focus seemed to be shifting from memories of the past back to the present.

  Lawrence gripped her hand firmly, as if keeping her from being swept away by the raging current of her memories.

  This time she did not say that it hurt.

  Unlike the depraved souls assembled in the square, the artisan district had long since awoken.

  The sounds of metal being hammered, wood being hammered, leather being pounded, and craftsmen’s songs filled the air.

  Unlike the perfectly straight streets they had been on until now, here the streets merrily curved back and forth, though these, too, were stone paved. Lawrence was led to believe this atmosphere reached every corner of the south of the town.

  While the craftsmen worked inside the wide frontage buildings that lined the streets, children ran freely between them. A building with a mountain of firewood piled in front of it and a furnace inside the shop was apparently a production site for making nails.

  A girl who looked younger than Holo, dressed in a flowing skirt and wooden shoes, planted her feet and cast her entire body weight downward to elongate a nail.

  What made Holo stop in her tracks was a workshop where young craftsmen were earnestly pounding red metal.

  The way they pounded thin metal plates, working them into round pieces, was certainly fascinating. But what made Lawrence spontaneously laugh was that this factory was manufacturing stills for making hard liquor.

  “They boil
the alcohol in that big cauldron on the sheet copper; then when the steam runs through the pipe they attach, they cool it, and concentrated alcohol comes out of the end of the pipe. The finished product is inside, I’m sure.”

  As Lawrence pointed inside, Holo peered inside in with what appeared to be deep interest.

  Though many craftsmen at work were blunt and short-tempered, they were unlikely to be sour at a pretty girl gazing into their workplace.

  Pretending he did not have his eye on Holo himself, a young man who looked like the boss’s right-hand man scolded his subordinate workers.

  “I suppose we’re in the Debau Company’s backyard – no surprise there’s all this metalworking.”

  Besides the nail and distiller workshops, he could see shops for making chains, knives, bindings for barrels, and so forth. Furthermore, they were all fine products. Whether because of the high quality they boasted or because there were so many products lined up in front of the stores, it did not feel like some remote backwater of the north at all. Everything had polish to it.

  “It might be a migrant town.”

  With the Debau Company making profits from its mining business in every direction, lack of a place to put them to use would put its treasure to waste. If one is not living a good life, the only way to change that is to buy good things. If one is stocking things from long distance one by one, that takes time and that puts a person behind the latest fashions. In that case, enticing good craftsmen to gather together through the power of plentiful money was very much one way to go about it.

  As things progressed step-by-step, silverware- and silverwork-making workshops appeared. Lawrence was relieved that Holo held no interest in jewelry of any kind whatsoever. If Holo had been as infatuated with jewelry as she was with food, Lawrence would have gone bankrupt long ago.

  “… This place really is something, though…”

  Lawrence murmured without thinking. The silverwork of Fran, from who they had asked for a map from Kerube to Yoitsu, was quite something, yet the silverware here was quite impressive as well.

  Perhaps it was because of the bountiful minerals brought here from the mines. Even so, besides the silverwork masters being strict with their apprentices, there had to be a considerable amount of skill at work.

  But even if they were drawn in by the power of money, would not that put them at odds with the craftsmen guilds in other towns? Or perhaps the Debau Company was not simply and stupidly relying on the power of money, but was capable of bargaining in more subtle ways.

  Lawrence thought about that and other things before regaining his senses. He could not just lose himself in thoughts of trade alone like that.

  Fortunately, Holo was looking over a ceremonial sword with a bird and fox engraved into its hilt, taking no notice of Lawrence. As Holo lost interest, she shook her head side to side and rose back up.

  As the two of them walked around aimlessly, Lawrence’s thoughts drifted to things besides Holo once more; how even this artisan’s district was full of life, how it was such a rare thing, and so forth.

  These days, all towns suffered from excess growth in the number of craftsmen. Protection of a town’s existing craftsmen usually took the form of tariffs and import quotas. However, if everyone did that, the result was an excess of production with nowhere to sell one’s goods. It was one of the issues that had given guild masters headaches across many years.

  In the end, unless one limited the number of workshops, those finishing their hard periods of apprenticeship would inevitably come into conflict with their former masters. Many were dubbed journeymen craftsmen and sent away to “continue their training,” but this was really to reduce competition. There was no guarantee of any kind a journeyman could return and become a master. Besides, since the surest way to become a master was to marry a dead master’s widow, a living master had to watch his back – and his food.

  Though there were places that seemed lively on the surface but were quite strained on the inside, this place seemed genuinely full of life.

  He wondered if the economic conditions were good. As he walked around, reasoning that even if that was the case it had its limits, they came within sight of what looked like a building for a craftsmen’s guild.

  Lawrence and Holo stopped in their tracks together. He glanced at Holo, then shifted his gaze back once more. He was somewhat unsure if he could believe his own eyes.

  There was a town edict carved into slate. Literally written in stone.

  It read:

  “This town does not regulate craftsmen in any way whatsoever. Those of skill should open a workshop and employ whoever they wish. Lesko welcomes all craftsmen of excellence. Freedom to all people.”

  Lawrence was in a daze as his eyes met those of a seamstress passing by. The woman giggled and smiled, asking, “A traveler?”

  She did not look anywhere near as young as Holo was thought to be, wearing a kerchief made specially to hold sewing needles; below it, both face and body were plump, like bread that had risen.

  “I did not believe it at first, either, but it’s true.”

  As she spoke, she made a smile that seemed both truly happy and proud.

  What she held to her chest was no doubt fabric meant to be made into clothing, but it could also have been delight and hope.

  In truth, she probably held those, as well.

  As Lawrence internalized the meaning of that, the woman made a light wave and walked along.

  He had heard of unregulated towns, but they were few and far between. Freshly built towns that lacked the guilds to issue such regulations were among such cases.

  But this was the first time he had seen it with his own eyes.

  The situation in this town was quite literally one he could not have foreseen. A town with no regulations and no taxes was a paradise without peer. A few brief moments of thought listed a number of acquaintances he would love to tell about this. Of course, the young shepherdess Norah was among them. She had wanted to become a seamstress; surely that wish would be granted in a town like this. She should have been traveling on behalf of the Rowen Trade Guild, so if he sent a letter, it should arrive.

  Lawrence was thinking about that when Holo suddenly sighed.

  Talk concerning craftsmen was not something Holo found especially interesting; talk about Norah the shepherdess, even less so.

  As bringing her with him had no meaning if she was not having fun, Lawrence hurriedly restored his smile. “Let’s go,” he said, pulling Holo’s hand.

  The area ahead had seamstresses like the one before wandering all around, with a number of workshops for producing shoes and clothing.

  They sang songs in quiet places where strips of leather had been cut and sewn together to counteract the loud clanging and banging of physical labor in the workshops. This was not to entertain others, as clowns and musicians did. Quite the opposite; this was to demonstrate the joy they took in their own work.

  As they stepped around a corner, he saw Holo’s shoulders slowly sag.

  Emotions were contagious. When everyone around you was happy, that by itself invigorated you.

  But even as Holo’s face held a faint smile, she made a small sigh.

  Here everyone was doing the same work, singing the same song, living in the same town. No doubt that this was exactly what Norah yearned for.

  On the other hand, Holo’s “everyone” had vanished into the flow of time. Having finally found one slender thread, there was literally nothing left but a fragment.

  Lawrence thought of things to say but held all of them back. For her part, Holo was checking out hoods and capes and other townswomen clothes. She even tried on new scarves and gloves. Though several of them did not seem to displease Holo, she did not say, “I want this,” even once. As normally all she did was groom her tail, perhaps she had not had much interest to begin with.

  And just like that, he had exhausted all his options.

  Even though he knew all manner of techniques for attract
ing the attention of a merchant, he knew of no method to captivate a girl except with food. In that moment he hated himself.

  Furthermore, even if he could think of other places in the artisans’ district, Holo seemed to be tiring from all the walking. Of course, Holo had not complained, perhaps because she understood Lawrence had brought her along out of kindness. But that only pained Lawrence all the more.

  So pushing her to come with him out of her room had indeed failed. Perhaps Holo would have been happier simply relaxing around the square. Such thoughts bounced all around inside his head. It was too late for regrets. A merchant with time for regrets was better off using that time to deal with the present situation. Out of consideration for Holo, Lawrence shifted his gaze around for anywhere they could sit.

  But even though there seemed to be small taverns and restaurants nestled within the artisans’ district, he had little time to search. He had to find something before Holo’s mood worsened any further.

  Just as Lawrence was beginning to get desperate, they came to the end of the artisans’ district and began down a street lined with a mix of stores and houses.

  There, in the midst of typically heavy pedestrian traffic, was a wide, gaping hole in the liveliness.

  Lawrence and Holo stopped where they stood, as if squeezing into a gap in the crowd of people.

  There stood an unoccupied building, with no feeling of human presence whatsoever.

  All the same, it was not falling apart; someone was keeping it clean and tidy. The side had a place for packing and unloading cargo, with a gap in the frontage that went inside. One of the two front doors was open; inside, he saw tables and shelving provided.

  The building was four stories tall and had a fair number of rooms. It was a building built for trading; if someone brought merchandise in, the store could be opened on the spot. It was an unoccupied building, with no human presence within it; were it a residence, it would have lacked the feel of a home having been lived in by someone else.

  In other words, it looked like a throne waiting for its king.

  And this was not his imagination.

  What, in this bewildering town, finally made Lawrence completely forget about Holo as he stood there gaping was a paper attached to the other door, the one not open.