Spring Log IV Read online

  The very ones who saved Selim and her companions after they all drifted north were none other than Holo and Lawrence.

  She couldn’t say no to any request of theirs.

  “Well, I guess it would be a shock for anyone, suddenly being told you’re in charge of a bathhouse. Those two live in their own fairy tale, after all.” Hanna’s words were a slight comfort. This was her way of being considerate. “Still, they’re leaving you in charge because from their perspective, there’s no problem. Sir Lawrence is a merchant who’s mastered the ways of the human world, and Lady Holo goes without saying—she’s the wisewolf. Of course, she acts cute in front of Sir Lawrence, but…she’s sharp. They’re not the kind to ask for anything unreasonable.”

  Logically, Selim understood what Hanna was saying.

  She was probably right.

  But there was something she could not quite swallow.

  “But I just can’t shake the feeling that they have the wrong idea…that they’re overestimating me…”

  “Really? I don’t think it can be considered anything less than good fortune that you’ve started working here.”

  Selim looked to Hanna, who shrugged and started counting with her fingers.

  “Look, you work from dawn till dusk without complaint, rarely taking breaks. Moreover, you can read and write. Even work involving numbers can be trusted to you. That’s not something I can do. I can’t count past ten.”

  Selim doubted that was true, but Hanna never budged from the kitchen, so perhaps she had the temperament of an artisan who wanted to focus on only one thing.

  “Plus, you settled in as Col’s replacement in the blink of an eye, taking over all that difficult writing stuff, no?”

  Selim did not know Col personally, but she could tell by the neat writings he left behind that he was methodical, capable, and likely a very kind young man.

  “That’s…only because they generously taught me how to do bookkeeping and put in orders…”

  “No, no, you heard how Col was. He was a pushover when it came to both Lady Holo and young Myuri. They sometimes made him add unnecessary extras to our orders. Their things used to occupy a whole shelf here in the kitchen just to keep them hidden from Sir Lawrence, and boy, did that bug me. All of that came to a grinding halt when you took charge, Miss Selim.”

  Selim had never met Lawrence and Holo’s only daughter, Myuri. From the stories she heard, Myuri seemed to be a wolf pup in her prime as a prankster, but that just went to show she was truly Holo’s daughter.

  To Selim’s understanding, once she had taken charge of the books, all that sly business came to an end. Since Selim was a fellow wolf, there were appearances that had to be upheld.

  “And to top it all off, you can make candles. You can do the mending. You know how to handle cheese, and you can brew liquor.”

  “We lived with meager means while constantly on the move, so that’s all just…”

  “What’re you talking about? I sometimes chat with the cooks in the other bathhouses, and they’re all full of chumps who won’t even peel a single onion.”

  Is that how it is?

  Selim was weak, so she tried to compensate by working as hard as she could, all so she wouldn’t be a burden on her older brother and the others.

  She had never considered it extraordinary, so to be complimented for it was like listening to fish talk at the bottom of a lake.

  “Anyway, those two figured that the bathhouse would be fine in your hands, Miss Selim.”

  “Sigh…”

  Selim was still not convinced, doubting she would be able to keep the bathhouse running properly.

  Most of the people she would be giving orders to were basically strangers to her. Worse, none of them ate meat. And even if she was technically more familiar with the bathhouse than they were, she had been here only six months longer, at most. And as if that wasn’t enough, she still had no experience with the approaching height of winter season, which was arguably the busiest time of year.

  Selim was beside herself with doubt, but when she heard Hanna’s heavy sigh, she lifted her head.

  What she found was a kind but troubled smile.

  “I guess the question is if you can gain some confidence…Let me tell you something fun.”

  “Fun?”

  An impish grin spread across Hanna’s face.

  “I said they’re living in their own fairy tale, didn’t I? Even if the bathhouse is a total mess when they come back from their trip, I doubt they would mind much.”

  “What?”

  Selim’s eyes widened, and Hanna shrugged.

  “What you’re worried about is whether you can take charge, keep the bathhouse running, and keep everything nice until they come back, right? I don’t think you need to worry too much about it.”

  “B-but that’s—”

  “That’s what I think after watching them for over a decade…But I guess you’ll just have to see it with your own eyes, too.”

  Selim was skeptical of Hanna’s claims. That was because while Hanna was reliable, her personality seemed to give rise to a tendency to not bother with minor details. Hanna appeared to be the type of person who would thrive no matter where or how she lived. The look on Hanna’s face made it clear that she could tell how Selim saw her.

  “Pretend you’re being duped and take a look at those two from that perspective. Besides, they’re in the middle of preparing for a journey. I think you’ll understand what I want to say.”

  “…”

  Selim still wasn’t convinced, but Hanna clapped her hands, almost like she was signaling that the conversation was over.

  “Well, then, finish your soup and hurry back to work. The bosses are getting ready to depart, and we need to teach the greenhorns their jobs. We have to start making arrangements for winter soon, too.”

  Right—Selim remembered her duties and snapped back to reality.

  She still harbored a great many questions and worries in her heart, but she washed them all down with the goat’s milk in her bowl.

  The sweet, warm drink was easy to finish, settling comfortably in her stomach.

  “Th-thank you for the meal.”

  She could feel it rising slightly, deep in her throat, since she had quaffed it all at once.

  “Don’t mention it. Good luck with work today.”

  Hanna would make lunch out of the untouched breakfast.

  As Selim threw herself into her daily tasks, she thought in the corner of her mind about what Hanna had told her.

  “Keep an eye on those two and you’ll see—” What exactly did she mean by that?

  Selim turned the thought over in her mind as she rubbed her stomach, full from swallowing so much at once.

  Then she burped because she had yet to fully digest her concerns.

  It wasn’t exactly a secret that the owners of Spice and Wolf were going on a trip.

  This was particularly true for Lawrence who, as a newcomer to the village, had to relay the news of their departure ahead of time because he wouldn’t be able to fulfill any village obligations while he was away.

  He brought Selim along to the village warehouse that also served as the meeting hall to introduce her to the rest of the bathhouse owners as Spice and Wolf’s interim caretaker.

  During her time on the road, Selim had gotten used to stares of contempt and suspicion that openly said, What can this little girl even do? That was because the only way she often managed to get work was by claiming she was an old hand at jobs she had never done before or by promising that she could do things that by all rights should’ve been impossible for her.

  Yet, she was more aware than the other bathhouse owners could ever possibly be that there was no way she could ever fill Lawrence’s shoes.

  Despite Selim’s certainty in this, Lawrence seemed to be completely unconcerned, and once she had been formally introduced, there was no going back. And, possibly thanks to Lawrence’s daily conduct, several bathhouse owners had voiced
their sympathies and offered to assist Selim.

  Though this was certainly not the first time she had to steel herself for an unavoidable task, Selim was feeling far tenser now than the various times her life had been in danger. She prayed that Lawrence and Holo’s journey would be delayed for just another day and that they would come home even one day earlier.

  But the world never worked the way people wanted it to.

  “Thirty silver suns from Mr. Henri, five gold lumione and twenty-three silver trenni from Mr. Dudley…”

  Lawrence sat beside Selim at the accounting desk, reading information out loud as she wrote it down on paper.

  The spacious desk was currently covered in items, and the pair sitting there were similarly getting buried by the amount of information that needed recording.

  Before Selim stood stacks of incredibly valuable gold and silver coins, something she rarely got to touch during her life on the road. There was also a number of deeds blotted with moist black ink that stood out starkly.

  “Fifty-three silver suns and fifteen silver ranburke from Mr. Hugo…”

  The names Lawrence was rattling off belonged to different bathhouse owners in Nyohhira, and the coins were the amount they were asking Lawrence to exchange while on his journey. Gold and high-quality silver currencies were much too valuable to use for regular shopping. This inconvenience naturally made their owners want to trade them for coppers and other coins of smaller denominations.

  The reason this task had fallen to Lawrence was because a worldwide boom in trade was apparently taking place, which in turn meant there was a systemic shortage in smaller coinage for making change and everyday shopping that affected every place of commerce, not just Nyohhira. The villagers wanted Lawrence to visit a money changer in the wider world if he was going to embark on a trip anyway.

  And so, due to Lawrence’s popularity, bags stuffed with money filled the bathhouse’s large accounting table.

  “…How much do we have now?”

  Lawrence examined the bond—an official record of all the coins given to him so there would be no arguing as to who gave how much—and pinched the bridge of his nose. They had spent the whole day in front of the scales, weighing the coins to see if there were any notable imperfections or forgeries.

  “Um…We have four hundred and twenty-two silver suns, forty-one gold lumione, twenty-two silver ryut, thirty-seven silver ranburke, twenty-two silvers of prince-bishop Tideryne…”

  Running along the page Selim held was an unending parade of silver coins that Selim had never seen or heard of before in her life. Not only that, but they had been given an odd number of these coins. At the very bottom of the page, there were even some silvers they had only one or two pieces of.

  Surely Lawrence hadn’t closed his eyes because they were tired.

  “…Everyone sure has some nerve to hoist the stuff they don’t want to deal with onto me…”

  I knew it, Selim silently thought to herself.

  Anyone who travels knows that the variety of coins they encounter far exceeds the number of towns they visit. Especially when traveling to another region, the same silver coin could end up buying much more or much less. There were even times when a currency wasn’t accepted at all, which made things complicated.

  In Nyohhira, where many patrons hailed from faraway lands, it was common for businesses to accumulate coins that were not in local circulation and were difficult to use in the region.

  “Well, I don’t really mind the coins…It’s not like I’ll be carrying them all with me.”

  Lawrence was a former traveling merchant, so he could draw upon plenty of mercantile magic.

  Selim had initially assumed that he was going to set off with a heavy bag of coins, but it turned out that Lawrence was simply going to write the value down on a paper called a “money order” and take only that with him. The money order apparently served as a guarantee that any company would accept the note and exchange it for the written value in cash. If he could skillfully use it in a situation where it was treated as a company’s bond when he was on his way to town, then it had the same effect as physically carrying a whole mass of coins.

  For someone who had spent such a long time traveling and had never been trusted by anyone she came across, the relationship of faith among merchants seemed like nothing less than magic.

  “The real problem is that thing over there…”

  Lawrence was looking at the horses and deer busily working beneath the eaves of the bathhouse, visible through the front door that had been left ajar. They were opening cloth bags of various shapes and sizes that had piled up outside, sniffing the insides, mixing the contents around, checking the weights, and jotting things down on the wax boards they held.

  “Are you going to be selling all of it?” Selim asked cautiously, and Lawrence turned to her with the face of a dog that had been tricked while he kept poking at the scales in front of him.

  “If I can’t sell all of it…I’ll still have to do something about it.”

  Lawrence was sighing about bags stuffed to the brim with sulfur powder.

  More precisely, it was not sulfur itself but a substance harvested from the waters of Nyohhira. It was a standard Nyohhira souvenir, since it gave people a chance to enjoy the feeling of the famous hot springs anywhere and anytime by simply adding it to their bathwater.

  As popular as it was, the substance literally bubbled up alongside the spring water, so the villagers could harvest as much as they wanted.

  The bathhouse masters, after getting word that Lawrence would be traveling, seized the opportunity to push onto Lawrence all the things that had piled up in their storehouses. They were hoping he would sell it off wherever he ended up going.

  There was no questioning that Lawrence was a good-natured man, but since he was the newest bathhouse owner to arrive in Nyohhira, he did not have the option of turning down the requests of his predecessors.

  Given her past life as a wanderer, Selim was keenly aware of how hard but also how important it was for a newcomer to adapt to a new place.

  The inquisitive gazes she was always subject to in front of the bread oven could easily, and at any time, transform into hostile glares.

  “Apparently, I can keep a portion of what I sell to cover my labor, which makes this a testimony to the other bathhouses’ trust in me. I’ll have to do my best to sell what I can,” the always-positive Lawrence said, a smile immediately crossing his face, before returning to his duty of weighing the coins.

  As Selim watched her boss busy himself with work, there was nothing she could say. Even she sometimes found herself growing restless around this painfully honest and reliable man. She wanted to be of help to her kindhearted boss, but it was upsetting that she could not come up with any specific thing that she could do.

  At the same time, she grew nervous again thinking about how easily she could ruin the trust that Lawrence had worked so hard to accrue in this village. If any problems cropped up while she was caring for the bathhouse, then Selim would have to deal with them as Lawrence’s representative when she was called for a meeting in town.

  Furthermore, Selim had slowly gotten a grasp on the state of affairs in the village. It seemed like one of the reasons that Lawrence of Spice and Wolf couldn’t shake the newcomer treatment no matter how much time passed was due to the exceptional success of his bathhouse, which surpassed over half the other bathhouses in the village despite its relatively recent establishment. There were many who were not comfortable with being confronted by the success of a new face.

  When Selim thought about how they shouldn’t give others a chance to take advantage of them in the first place, instead of holding it against the masters of the other bathhouses, she actually turned a slightly reproachful gaze toward her kind and wise boss.

  Don’t give me this kind of responsibility.

  In addition, now that Lawrence had been saddled with the sulfur powder and the duty of exchanging the large-denomination coins, it
was clear that he had to take care of most, if not all, of his obligations before he could return to the village. That would essentially delay their return.

  Even though she fully understood the situation, Selim wanted him and Holo to come back as soon as possible. She didn’t want to have to sit at this desk alone. While she wanted to live up to their expectations, that was exactly why she feared the vastness of the problem she had to face.

  If she failed in any way, it would immediately hurt the boss she so adored, and since she was not that confident to begin with, the very idea made her want to cry.

  As she thought about this and that, she heard familiar footsteps.

  When she looked up, she saw Holo coming down the stairs.

  “Well, that all seems rather important.”

  That was the first thing she said after seeing the state of the desk.

  Holo was in a slightly different state than usual—her wolf ears and tail were not hidden. She usually had a kerchief wrapped tightly around her head and kept her tail underneath her skirt.

  “The most important thing is over there.”

  Lawrence pointed outside. Holo sniffed and shrugged.

  “I have been watching from the second floor. I feel as though my sense of smell will be thrown off by the incessant odor of sulfur.”

  The baths were located in the back. Curiously, when no one was in the water, the strong scent of sulfur would waft into the rest of the building.

  “Honestly, you must learn to keep your generosity within bounds. Do you not know how to refuse others?”

  With less sulfur to sell and fewer coins to exchange, they would have been able to come back quicker. Selim mentally gave Holo’s words her full support.

  “This is evidence of responsibility and trust. This means I’ve somewhat made a place for myself here in the village.”

  Even though Lawrence was usually sharp, for some reason, he always seemed like an idiot in front of Holo.

  “You fool. ’Tis their nice way of making you an errand boy.”