Spice and Wolf, Vol. 5 Read online

  “Unfortunately, I don’t see any of that profit, but in exchange, I moved a respectable amount. But that’s all wiped out with the cancellation of the northern campaign. I’ve learned firsthand that no one hangs you out to dry faster than the Church.”

  It was hard to imagine a greater tragedy than carrying all your assets as heavy, unwieldy statues.

  Transport costs would rise. Places to sell were limited. If she had gotten together credit to make her transaction bigger, her business might well suffocate.

  Lawrence didn’t think a merchant of Eve’s stature would put all her risk in one place like that, so she probably wasn’t facing utter ruin—but it was still a serious blow.

  It would hardly be strange if, in her frustration, she turned her eye to speculation.

  “The Church’s influence is waning in the south, I hear. I’d been thinking it was time to stop loading my goods on a sinking ship—figured I’d make one last big deal, then make a break for it.”

  This suggested that she wouldn’t be able to make a break for it unless she was able to make that one last deal.

  “So,” continued Eve, “we were just talking about how if I manage to hit it big, we might as well head south.”

  Lawrence didn’t have to ask with whom.

  Beside her, Arold murmured, “Been thinking it’s about time for a pilgrimage.”

  A trip like that wouldn’t be much different than looking for a place to bury his old bones.

  Arold had been talking about going on a pilgrimage ever since Lawrence had started coming to his inn, but this time he sounded serious.

  “So, that’s how it is,” said Eve, pulling Lawrence’s gaze to her. “Want to lend me some coin?”

  The sudden request did not seem connected to anything.

  Yet Lawrence was not particularly surprised. He’d had a certain premonition that something like this was coming.

  “I’ve got some very accurate information about the content of the council meeting,” said Eve. “I can make all the arrangements. I just need money.”

  Her eyes were fixed steadily on Lawrence. She almost glared at him, but he could tell that it was something of an act.

  “If I look at the details of the investment and decide the risk is worth the profit—with pleasure.”

  “It’s the fur trade. You’ll double your money.” No merchant in the world would get on board with such a short explanation, but Eve seemed to understand that. She lowered her voice and continued calmly. “The Council of Fifty is going to provisionally allow fur sales to merchants.”

  “What’s your source?” It was probably useless to ask—like trying to get a barmaid to tell her real age.

  “The Church.”

  “Even though they turned their back on you?” Lawrence shot back.

  Eve shrugged, smiling. “We might have split on bad terms, but everyone knows to leave a few sympathetic contacts behind.”

  Lawrence obviously couldn’t trust her, but she didn’t seem to be lying, either. It was a lot easier to believe this explanation than if she had just claimed to have heard it from Rigolo. “So what’s the deal?”

  “The provision will be that anyone buying furs will have to do so with cash.”

  There on the brink of the possible monopolization of the town’s fur trade, Lawrence had wondered what decision would be handed down—but the cleverness of this particular plan made him speak without thinking.

  “So they’re not saying ‘no sales,’ but at the same time, merchants from distant places are hardly carrying significant coin.”

  “Exactly. But they can’t very well return empty-handed, so they’ll buy whatever fur they can afford with the miniscule cash they have on hand.”

  This meant that with cash, it would be possible to buy up the fine furs of Lenos and take them to some other town.

  But something bothered Lawrence.

  Now that Eve had told him this, there was nothing stopping him from cutting her out of the deal and doing it himself.

  “You seem strangely comfortable talking about this with me.”

  “If all you care about is making a little extra allowance, then by all means, go do this deal yourself.”

  Eve’s expression was unreadable beneath her cowl.

  Was she merely looking down on him, or was there some reason why this deal couldn’t work with just one person?

  He couldn’t say anything careless, Lawrence concluded, as he waited for her to continue.

  “In reality, you don’t actually have that much money, do you?”

  “I won’t disagree.”

  “Then you shouldn’t waste this opportunity. You didn’t even know Rigolo before I introduced you. Who in this town would be willing to lend you money?”

  She was quite correct.

  But something occurred to Lawrence, and it sent a chill down his spine.

  It was possible that the reason Eve approached him in the first place was in order to evaluate him as an investor. If so, there was a huge discrepancy in the information they had.

  Lawrence didn’t know anything about her.

  “True, but I could head back to a different city and raise the money there. But isn’t that what you’re counting on me doing anyway by proposing I invest in this opportunity?”

  He didn’t have a large amount of cash, and there was nowhere in this town where he could borrow the money, so that had to be it.

  But Eve shook her head slowly. “Naturally, I took a look at you and your companion, the way you paid for the inn, and I figured if you went all in, you’d be good for maybe a thousand pieces of trenni silver. But by the time you get it together, the furs will be bought up is my guess.”

  The back of the back was the front.

  The more careful Lawrence was to stay out of Eve’s trap, the more tangled up he felt his feet becoming.

  Wasn’t the decision of the council intended to prevent all the fur from being bought up?

  At a glance, the idea of limiting fur purchases to cash only had struck him as a clever plan.

  “You don’t actually think that all those merchants outside of town are just hanging out there separately for no reason, do you?”

  “Somebody with real money is using them to make an even bigger profit,” Lawrence suddenly realized.

  “Yup. This, friend, is a trade war.”

  “A trade…war?”

  It was an unfamiliar term and was the first time Lawrence had heard the phrase, but something about it made his merchant heart tremble.

  “I guess you don’t spend a lot of time near the sea. Go into any tavern in a port town and drink with the merchants there. You’ll hear talk of the trade wars, believe me. It’s not something that just happens out of nowhere. We’re merchants, not bandits. The attacker has to make preparations well in advance.”

  That stood to reason. There wasn’t a merchant in the world who didn’t carefully inspect his merchandise.

  “Odds are, the merchants camped outside the town are taking guesses at how the council decision is going to go and firming up their plans. How many people with money do you think there are in this town?”

  Posed this question out of the blue, there was no way to be sure—except Lawrence was a merchant.

  A rough estimate based on the size of the town appeared immediately in his head.

  “The number of trading firms worth mentioning…maybe twenty, of various sizes. Shops specializing in a particular kind of good…perhaps two or three hundred. Maybe the same number of prosperous craftsmen.”

  “Roughly, yes. And among those, the question is how many will put their own gain in front of the town’s.”

  Lawrence could not answer that question. Not because he lacked information about the town, but rather because people always hid their selfish desires even as they tried to fulfill them.

  “Anyway, if even one of those trading firms chooses treachery, they’ll sneak away with all the fur. If they operated through a branch office of another town, it
would be easy to hide what they were doing.”

  Merchants were a generally sociable group and would not lightly betray a town in which they had operated profitably for years. But enough profit would cause anyone’s loyalty to waver.

  “Of course,” continued Eve, “I doubt a large trading company would turn traitor. Nowadays everything’s recorded in account ledgers, so it would be easy to see what they’d done. If they secretly lent money to an outside merchant, it could be traced.”

  Lawrence understood immediately. “Even if they had a hidden, unrecorded source of money, the council could stop that with a single line, ‘The source of all money used to purchase furs must be confirmed.’”

  He had thought that the foreign merchant registration plaques being handed out at the town gates were to prevent foreign merchants from laying unexpected traps, but now the practice felt much more significant than that.

  Lawrence thought back to the strangely thorough inspection he and Holo had undergone. In retrospect, it had probably been to prevent travelers from bringing large amounts of money into the city.

  Had the council arrived at its decision even then?

  “But there are many, many other people with money outside of trading companies. The heads of the tanneries and the people who trade in the fur-tanning materials all have reason to be pessimistic about the future of the fur trade in this town. They’re going to be looking for capital in order to get into new businesses, and they’ll be happy to deal with the merchants that are threatening the town in order to raise that capital. The council’s policy probably is the best choice they have, but hardly anyone actually thinks that such a policy is going to stop the fur from being completely bought up. Let me say it again—”

  Eve’s voice was cold.

  “—this town’s fur will be completely bought out.”

  Was she suggesting that they close that gap and buy it themselves?

  Defeating the merchants who planned to monopolize Lenos’s fur trade meant being both inside and outside the town.

  They must have understood that as long as they tried to infiltrate the town, not only would the council decision not come down, but the defensive measures the town took would only be redoubled—so they made camp outside of town.

  In that case, even when the council’s decision did come out, the merchants wouldn’t immediately enter the town. They would only make their move after the public proclamation, ensuring it couldn’t be reversed.

  It was not impossible that Lawrence and Eve would be able to buy up the fur.

  “You know then that there’s no time to go to another city and borrow the money, so I can’t help you. As you said, I have no connections here,” said Lawrence.

  This was the most puzzling part.

  What was Eve planning?

  Blue eyes peered out from beneath her cowl.

  “Ah, but you do have one huge asset.”

  Lawrence quickly ran through the list of what he had on hand.

  Nothing that could be called a “huge asset” came to mind.

  In any case, if Eve knew about it, then it had to be something that was immediately obvious.

  The only thing Lawrence could think of was his horse.

  Then something else occurred to him. He looked back at Eve in disbelief.

  “That’s right. You have your lovely companion.”

  “…That’s absurd.”

  Lawrence was now completely honest.

  Though what he meant was not that he couldn’t possibly sell Holo, but rather that selling Holo could not possibly raise the amount of money they required.

  While it was true that Holo was a striking beauty, that was not something that could immediately be turned into a thousand silver pieces. If it could, beautiful girls everywhere would be constantly getting kidnapped.

  It was possible Eve had figured out Holo wasn’t human, but even if that was so, it didn’t change the situation.

  “I figured you’d think so. But there’s a reason I chose you.” Eve wore a thin smile for a reason Lawrence did not understand.

  Perhaps she was merely that confident in herself, or perhaps she was drunk on her own plan. Or perhaps—

  Eve removed her cowl, exposing her short, beautiful golden hair and blue eyes. “We’ll claim she’s a nobleman’s daughter and sell her.”

  “Wha—?”

  “Think it’s impossible?” Eve grinned, baring her right canine tooth.

  It was a smile of self-derision.

  “My name is Fleur Bolan. Formally, I am Fleur von Eiterzentel Bolan, eleventh heir to the Bolan clan, which swears fealty to the kingdom of Winfiel. We are title-bearing nobility.”

  Laughter seemed impossible in the face of so ridiculous a joke.

  The eyes and ears that were Lawrence’s most important tools told him that Eve was not lying.

  “Of course, we’re fallen nobility that have trouble even finding food, but the name is grand, isn’t it? Once we fell so low that we couldn’t afford even bread to feed ourselves, I was sold to a newly wealthy merchant.”

  That was often the path down which fallen nobility were forced, and it explained her bitter smile.

  Despite having fallen from grace, these proud nobles often had their titles and their bodies bought by wealthy merchants.

  If this was true, it would explain Eve’s strangely world-weary merchant’s mien.

  “That’s the kind of woman I am, so that’s why I know one or two places to sell a girl with a noble name. What say you?”

  This was business territory Lawrence had never entered before.

  Once he had amassed some wealth, the first thing a merchant would do was gild his own name. The massively wealthy owner of a successful trading company might once have been a garbage collector’s orphan; such things were not rare. And apparently there were noble titles that one could buy with enough money. Lawrence had heard of such things but had never come face-to-face with the phenomenon.

  But here in front of him was Eve, who had been bought in exactly that fashion.

  “Your companion can easily pass as nobility. I would know,” she said with a smile.

  Her voice had turned low and hoarse after she’d suffered such a cursed fate, no doubt.

  “Naturally, selling her is not the objective. As I said before, they’re going to limit fur purchases to cash only in order to prevent a run on the fur market, but the trading firms here won’t lend money to an outside merchant, right? But there’s more than one kind of trading firm. If you can give them a good enough reason to, they’ll float you a loan in exchange for a cut of the profits, and I happen to know one. ‘Selling a noble maiden’ is just a pretense, and the trading firm understands that. They just need her as collateral in case our deal falls through. That’s how I can guarantee it.”

  Lawrence found himself half-impressed at the convoluted explanation, but there was no way he was going to toss Holo into hock. It was far too dangerous. Even setting aside the issue of her own safety, if things went badly, there was no question that his life as a merchant would be over.

  “I—no, we’re not asking you to pawn off your precious companion.”

  “We?” repeated Lawrence, doubt in his voice. Eve shot a side-long glance at Arold, who had been silent the whole time.

  “I’m going on a pilgrimage,” said Arold abruptly.

  The old man had said it every time Lawrence stayed at the inn.

  But Eve had said “we.” That meant that Eve had joined up with Arold. It had to be that he really was going on a pilgrimage, and he was leaving Eve in charge of his assets and inn.

  And pilgrimages could last for years, sometimes more than a decade. For Arold to go on such a journey at his age meant that he would never again set foot in Lenos.

  Which meant—

  “This may well be my last chance to go on the journey. I’ve thought to do it many times in the past and have been able to put away some capital for it. But I was never able to work up the resolve…”

/>   Lawrence’s stomach hurt from the suspense.

  Arold gave a tired smile and looked at Eve.

  He must have weathered some heavy persuasion from the woman.

  Then from beneath his wrinkled eyelids, his blue eyes turned toward Lawrence.

  “I’ll hand over this inn.”

  Lawrence’s breath caught in his throat.

  “After all, don’t all merchants dream of the same thing?” asked Eve, her voice only now as bright as the noble maid she had once been.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Once he’d slept and woken, Lawrence found himself somewhat calmer.

  Though he had crawled into bed hoping for just that, Eve and Arold’s words were liquor that did not encourage sleep.

  “Let us know by tomorrow night whether you’re in or out.”

  The words had echoed through his head over and over.

  In exchange for Holo, who they would claim was the sole daughter of the Bolan clan, they would get two thousand, perhaps 2,500 pieces of trenni silver, with which they would buy furs to ship down the Roam River well ahead of anyone else.

  Given that it was high-quality Lenos fur, even allowing for tariffs, Eve claimed they would triple their investment.

  Despite feeling that this was overoptimistic, Lawrence couldn’t help doing a rough estimate in his head.

  Supposing that they were able to buy up two thousand silver pieces’ worth of fur and triple their money, that left four thousand pieces in profit. Eve, along with Arold, was demanding 80 percent of that. Then there were some needed preparations, along with information fees, and the inn building that Arold was putting up as collateral—which would be given to Lawrence outright.

  But the building alone was worth perhaps 1,500 silver, so immediately after he protested that 80 percent was too much, he fell silent.

  In addition to the building itself, if everything went well Arold would also turn the inn management rights over to Lawrence.

  There wasn’t a merchant in the world who didn’t understand the value of that.

  With an inn, as long as a person had a building, he could open up shop and anticipate steady income—which meant that existing inns had a vested interest in resisting new ones opening and did so vehemently. There was no telling how much it would cost for an outsider to buy the management rights to such an inn.