by Kumo Kagyu
She sipped hers daintily. He, however, swallowed his in a single gulp.
“Won’t it go to your head if you drink it all at once like that?”
“It’s not a problem,” he said very seriously. “Brandy wakes you up.”
“…Isn’t that just a way of saying you’re kind of out of it right now?”
“It’s not a way of saying anything.”
“Oh, really?” She detected a slightly cornered tone in his voice and snickered.
She was just teasing, just joking. If he had really been feeling ill, she would certainly have noticed. And then she would have dragged him back to his bed and tucked him in.
The festival was fun, yes—but all the more reason she didn’t want to ruin it by pushing him too hard.
“You sure were out late last night, though. What were you doing?”
“Finishing up something that needed to be done.”
She was all too used to these non-explanations by now. But she didn’t press him further, simply saying, “Huh.”
Warmth was spreading through her chest, and she was starting to feel cheery. She wasn’t sure if it was the alcohol.
“I thought you were asleep,” he said in the same aloof tone as ever. Did he notice how she was feeling? “Were you awake that whole time?”
“Oh, haha… I just kinda…couldn’t sleep.”
“I see.”
He didn’t press her, either. Together they merged back into the swirling, celebrating crowd.
There was never enough time.
An elf archer tossed plates into the air and shot them down to boisterous applause. A dwarf had set up a stall selling beautiful engraved swords he said he had made himself. A rhea musician played a stirring tune for all to hear.
Wherever they went, the familiar town had something new to show them.
They had been walking around for a while when he suddenly stopped.
“Huh? What’s up?”
She peered into his face but, of course, could see no expression there.
He only muttered, “Hm.” Then—
“…Wait a moment.”
“Well, sure, but…”
He pulled his gloved hand away from hers.
Suddenly alone, she did what she always did and leaned against a wall while she waited for him.
She held up her now empty hand in front of her face and breathed gently on it. She wasn’t exactly lonely or upset. But as she watched the throng of adventurers and travelers flow by, a thought occurred to her.
This relationship of him going, her waiting was not likely to change.
This was how it would always be.
They had seen different things.
Ten years.
Ten years since she had left her home and their village had been destroyed.
Five years since she had been reunited with him, now an adventurer.
She didn’t know how he had spent the five years they had been apart. She knew nothing of the days before he became Goblin Slayer. She didn’t even know what had happened in their village. She had heard the stories, of course, but that was only secondhand.
She remembered holding her uncle’s hand as empty caskets were put in the ground.
But that was all.
She didn’t really know what had happened, or why, or where everyone had gone.
Had there been fire? The fields, what about them? The animals? Her friends? Her father. Her mother.
What about the bird’s nest she had kept her own little secret, the treasure she had hidden in the knot of a tree?
Her mother’s apron, the one Cow Girl had been promised once she got older? Her favorite shoes? The cup she had gotten for her birthday, whose green color had faded though she had taken such care of it.
One after another, the precious memories came back to her, now almost like ghosts.
What did she have left? One small box, with the things she had found in town that day and determined to bring with her.
If—it was just her imagining. But if.
If she hadn’t left the village that day, what would have happened to her? Would she have seen the same things he did and survived?
Or would she have died and left him alone? And if so, would he have taken vengeance for her?
Or… What if he had died, and she had been the one to live?
What a terrible thought.
At that moment she heard, “Sorry to keep you waiting.” The familiar armored form appeared before her out of the crowd.
“No problem.”
She shook her head as she straightened her hat. He held a small object out to her.
“What’s this?” she said, peering at it.
“When we were small…in the village,” he murmured, “you liked things like this.”
He was holding out a small, handcrafted ring.
It was silver—or it appeared to be, anyway. She knew it had to be imitation silver. Something a roadside vendor had cooked up to part children from their pocket change.
In other words, just a toy.
She found herself smiling. Then laughing.
“Ha-ha-ha! …That was when I was a girl.”
“Was it?” he said in a small, clipped voice. And then, “I guess it was.”
“Yeah.”
She nodded. Nodded, and put on the ring.
It may have been handcrafted, but it was cheaply made. It didn’t even have a fake gem. Just a metal band.
But it caught the sunlight and glittered, bright enough to make her squint.
“…But,” she whispered, “I still like them.”
“…Do you?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you,” she managed to squeeze out, and then Cow Girl slipped the ring into the pocket of her dress.
She kept her left hand on it so that she wouldn’t lose it—her right hand, of course, was in his.
“Shall we?”
She smiled and started off, hand in hand.
She couldn’t see his face behind his helmet. But…
…He was smiling, too. She was pretty sure.
She trusted he was.
§
It was almost noon when a voice called out to the two of them.
“Well, if it isn’t old man Gob Killer!”
Cow Girl craned her neck to see who it was even as she fretted about what to do with her ring.
She didn’t recognize the relatively high-pitched voice, but the recipient seemed to.
The helmet turned around to look squarely at Scout Boy, who was pointing at them.
Beside him were the rhea Druid Girl, Rookie Warrior, and Apprentice Priestess.
Cow Girl realized the young adventurers even spent their time off together.
“Whoa, dude, are you on a date with the farm girl?!”
“Hey, you should be more polite to someone so much older!”
Rookie Warrior sounded very interested indeed, but Apprentice Priestess tugged on his sleeve.
Gob Killer? Leave it to a kid to come up with a nickname like that. Cow Girl smiled.
She grinned up at his helmet in a deliberately meaningful gesture.
“A date? I wonder. What do you think?”
“Hold on,” he said bluntly. “I’m only twenty.”
Her smile widened. He hadn’t denied it.
“Whaaaa?!”
The boys gave strange shrieks, and finally Cow Girl couldn’t hold herself back any longer.
“He sure is. But no one knows since he always has that helmet of his on.”
“…It’s a necessary measure.”
His voice sounded a bit more brusque than usual.
He was pouting. Her day kept getting better and better.
Everyone said they didn’t know what he was thinking because they couldn’t see his face. But for someone who had known him as long as she had, it was easy enough.
“Um, could you…give us some help?” Apprentice Priestess asked them hesitantly.
Vwip. Goblin Slayer’s steel
helmet turned toward her.
“Is it goblins?”
“No, not at all. Umm…”
“Oh…not goblins?”
His dull reply left Druid Girl glancing around uncertainly.
Next to her, Scout Boy said, “You’re pretty dense, man!” and guffawed. “No way any goblins are showing up here!”
“They will.”
“Huh?!”
“Goblins will come.”
“Really?!”
Yes. What? No way! Back and forth they went. Cow Girl watched them with a sort of helpless amusement.
“Let boys be boys. Did you two need something?”
She crouched down to eye level for Druid Girl and Apprentice Priestess.
They glanced at each other, then at Cow Girl’s chest, emphasized by the arm she was resting under it.
Then they each looked down at themselves and sighed. Easy enough to understand.
“Don’t worry. You’ll keep growing.”
“…That’s not really reassuring.”
“Yeah, it’s still…”
The two of them got red-faced and fidgety, staring hard at the ground.
Cow Girl smiled inside as she gave them both a pat on the head.
“Anyway, what’s on your minds?”
The girls nodded, then glanced back and pointed at the entrance to a tavern behind them.
A huge crowd had gathered there, and in the middle of the circle was a small table. On top of the table was a statue of an open-mouthed frog.
A drunk was standing at a white line drawn on the road, holding a jangling handful of silver balls.
“Hrah! Yaah! Haaah!”
He flung the balls one after another, but to no avail. Each one bounced off the table and onto the ground.
The shop owner standing next to the statue gathered up the balls with practiced ease and said in a loud voice:
“Step right up, ten balls for one bronze coin! Land one, get a mug of ale! Or lemonade for the boys and girls!”
“They won’t go in,” Scout Boy said with a huff.
He had been training with Heavy Warrior’s party, but he was still a child. Fifteen was the minimum age to become an adventurer, and that would have been several years before for this boy, but he still could not have been twenty yet.
Cow Girl realized he must have lied about his age, but she felt no inclination to bring that up.
“Yeah. I think those silver balls are rigged.”
“Now, now, kid. That’s not funny.”
The trainee warrior spoke half in jest as he handed over a bronze coin, and the owner responded with a smile and a tone that suggested he’d had this conversation before.
Then the two boys tossed the balls one after another, but they came nowhere near the target.
A great sigh… came from the girls with them.
“…They get caught up in these things so easily.”
“Boys stink, huh?”
They weren’t much more mature, but they tried to pretend they were.
Cow Girl heard out the girls’ complaints with an “Uh-huh, uh-huh.”
Boys. They’re trying to look cool…
“…and girls want them to,” she said, glancing at her old friend.
The expression behind the steel helmet was, as ever, impossible to see and yet easy to guess.
“What is it?”
“Give us a demonstration?”
“Hrm.”
Goblin Slayer swept his gaze over the four children and Cow Girl.
Then, with a small nod, he pulled a bronze coin from his pouch and went up to the tavern owner.
“Shopkeep.”
“Yessir!”
“One, please.”
What happened next was almost too quick for the eye to follow.
He rolled the balls around in his palm with a clink, then tossed them into the frog’s mouth.
There was nothing unusual about his technique.
He simply had his mark. But he was precise, and fast.
One went in. Two. Three, four. Then five and six.
For several seconds, the balls rolling down into the frog statue created a sound much like a ribbit.
“Wow!”
“Whoa…”
The amazement on the children’s faces was plain to see.
And not just the children.
The onlookers oohed appreciatively and began to clap.
Heh! Cow Girl stuck out her ample chest almost as if she were the one who had put on this stunning display.
People thought he was only good for goblin slaying.
But that wasn’t true. There was more to him than that.
“Geez, mister, ya couldn’t have held back? For my sake?”
“No.”
As he made his deeply serious reply to the owner, Cow Girl gave him a congratulatory pat on the back.
“You always were good at these games, even when we were kids.”
“Yes.”
There had been a tavern in their hometown as well, although the statue had not been a frog, but a woman with a water jug. At each festival, he had won three glasses of lemonade for her, himself, and his sister.
Come to think of it, I remember him practicing skipping stones in the river before every festival.
She realized with a rush of fondness that he had always been the type to prepare thoroughly.
“Wow, way to go, man!” a server said. “Six lemonades? Coming right up!”
“Yes.”
He dipped his helmet once, just as he always did.
Then he turned to the boys and explained in a measured tone.
“And that is what you do.”
“…R-right.”
“Now you try.”
Goblin Slayer passed the four remaining silver balls to the young boys with a jangle.
Scout Boy took two, at once frantic and stoic.
“D-don’t you have any other advice?”
“Practice.”
That was all he said.
“Bleh,” the boys whined. Goblin Slayer nodded at them and stood seriously.
“G-give it your best shot!”
“Hey, you gotta throw better than that!”
“Ha-ha-ha! Aww, don’t be so hard on him.”
So the girls watched the three boys—
“Oh…”
Cow Girl realized it wasn’t wrong to think of him with that word.
Was it strange?
No, it wasn’t. It really wasn’t.
Of course, it had been ten years since then. It was a lot of time to build experience. She had learned just as many things as he had.
But all that was just an accumulation.
The roots are still the same.
That was a principle she believed in… No—it was something she hoped was true.
“Drink?”
“Sure, thanks.”
She took the cold glass from his hand. It was well water with lemon and honey in it.
That refreshing chill, she thought, hadn’t changed in ten years.
“Oh, yeah,” she said, pretending something had just occurred to her as she watched the children determinedly toss the little balls out of the corner of her eye. “Since you got it for me, why don’t you put it on me? The ring.”
“Where?”
He gazed intently at her fingers from her thumb to her pinky.
“I mean…my ring finger,” she said, starting to regret she had said anything. “…How about it?”
“On which hand?”
“What do you mean, which? The—”
The left hand.
She shook her head, somehow unable to get the words out.
“Ri—”
She took a breath and searched in her pocket, pulling the ring out with her left hand.
“Right hand…please.”
“All right.”
And then he put the ring on her finger without a hint of ceremony.
She held it up to the sun, and it gleamed brightly.
>
Well, I guess I’ll have to take it off when I work.
But at least for the festival, she could leave it on.
With the sweet-sour taste of the lemonade in her mouth, Cow Girl resolved to have all the fun she could.
§
Now, let us leave behind the frog statue outside the door and follow the shopkeeper inside as he goes into the tavern for more lemonade.
“I shall not stick my nose in too far, but…” Lizard Priest nibbled luxuriously on a fried sausage covered with copious amounts of cheese. It was not rude in lizard culture to talk while enjoying one’s food. “I wonder if it will go well… Of course, I certainly hope it will.”
“Ahh, things in this world turn out for the best eight or nine times out of ten,” said Dwarf Shaman, pounding his belly like a drum as he took a gulp of his stiff drink and proclaimed, “It’s fine!” He glanced to the side with a sly smile as he said, “What I’m really worried about is…”
The last person at the table, High Elf Archer, glared like she was hunting prey.
“Grrr…”
“What are you groaning about, Long-Ears?”
“Because!” She pounded the table, pointing outside the tavern as her ears flounced. “I tried that earlier, and I didn’t get a single one in!”
“All that means is that shooting and throwing are different things.”
“It’s not fair! I’m a high elf! We’re descendants of the gods!”
Then she took a desperate swig of her lemonade.
She had blown one bronze coin after another and still ended up having to purchase her own drink. It was the sourest lemonade she’d ever had.
“Well, such is the way of the world. Milady Ranger and milord Goblin Slayer have different talents.”
Lizard Priest’s tone suggested he was talking to a child. And Dwarf Shaman was only too happy to add his opinion.
“Sure it ain’t just that you’re sore about losing to Beard-cutter?”
“Sniiiiff… I-I’m not sore.”
Lizard Priest hissed with amusement as High Elf Archer ground out the words between her teeth.
“…Oh, wait a second.”
The elf suddenly flitted her ears in surprise, raising her head and turning to the window.
“Something the matter, milady Ranger?”
“Look out. They’re moving.”
She was right. The two of them were leaving the ball game behind.
Cow Girl shuffled regretfully, while Goblin Slayer strode as boldly as ever.
“Um, they’re saying… ‘Say hi to Guild Girl for me’ and ‘Yes.’”