Wolf & Parchment: New Theory Spice & Wolf, Vol. 8, page 21
As Col wondered when they received a letter from Lutia, he realized she spoke of the letters she was exchanging with her allied scholars.
“Blondie’s letter came with the smell of travel. But Lutia’s didn’t smell like that. And that’s when I figured out she was lying about talking to important people who lived far away.”
Perhaps she had calmed somewhat as she spoke, or perhaps she found her resolve. Yet despite rising to her feet, she still did not look at him, likely out of guilt, and was turned to the side.
“What I didn’t understand was why Lutia would lie to us. She’s fighting for everyone, hiding her fangs and claws despite how painful that is, so why?”
The story of Lutia’s lord was necessary for answering that question. While the reason Le Roi looked into those details was because he felt no particular attachment to her, Col and Myuri did not question her at all because she was a wolf.
This was not a question of whether she was actively telling a lie, but whether she was telling the whole truth.
And while Lutia was not lying to them, she had very cleverly hidden her tracks.
“But I noticed something weird about how she was acting earlier. That’s why I knew she had to be hiding something.”
“What seemed strange?” Col asked in reply.
Myuri sighed, as though fed up with how slow-witted her brother was.
“She wasn’t happy when you were going to solve all her problems.”
“………”
Her foolish brother believed that she was simply surprised from watching him solve those difficult problems in one fell swoop. At that point, Myuri’s own eyes had been shining.
“And so when I figured out the letter, a lot of questions started floating in my head.”
That was when she realized Lutia did not, in fact, want any of the problems in this city to be resolved.
“…And so you already knew when I left with Canaan.”
Myuri had said she would be staying back to talk about saving the kids. Though Col noticed something was unusual about that, he figured she had simply been occupied with planning the operation, as she had been before.
But there was not a lot of time left to lead the benevolent sheep wielding powerful resolutions in their attempt to solve the city’s problems far, far away.
Lutia and Myuri had no choice but to resort to their roughhewn strategy.
“Yeah. Lutia doesn’t want any of these problems to be solved. She has nowhere to go home to. She said that if she stays here fighting forever, then it’d be like time stopped.”
There was no way to know if Lutia’s lord and lady were already on their deathbeds by the time she came to the Aquent.
Regardless, she was far too late to master ecclesiastic law and fight for the preservation of their land.
There was no point in gaining a degree at this point. But at the same time, to leave the city without gaining said degree felt like she was betraying the expectations of the noble couple who sent her here.
And much like the boys who reached for the alcohol in a desperate attempt to make the night last longer, afraid of the tomorrow that would come as they slept, Lutia collected massive problems to keep right in front of her.
“I can sort of understand why you sympathized with her. But…”
She could have told Col what was going on, and then they could have given up on the problems in this city and moved onto the next city for Lutia’s sake. There was no reason for her to orchestrate an attack, going so far to stoop to unknightly deeds all to hide Lutia’s circumstances.
That was when Myuri finally looked at Col. The understanding she was doing something bad, coupled with uncontainable irritation, bubbled up to the surface as tears brimming in her eyes.
“You’re…nice…, Brother.”
Her words and expression did not match.
“That’s why, if Lutia’s problems were never solved, you would keep trying all sorts of things to help her, right? That’s…what I wanted…”
“What…?”
He was sure that even God would not blame him for his mind shattering from this development.
He did not understand what Myuri was trying to say.
Had they not conspired to make sure Col would never try to solve Lutia’s problems?
Yet here Myuri was, saying she wanted him to keep trying to solve her problems.
This was like the ancient logic question—does the snake that eats its own tail ever get full?
“What does this…?”
As Col began to ask in return, Myuri shook her head, irritated.
“It’s just like I said. You’re nice, Brother. Even if we left this place behind, you would worry about Lutia forever, and you would try everything you could to help her solve her problems. Right?”
She was right. After the incident at the chapel, when he met up with Le Roi and the guard and Myuri was about to go back into the city, he had said the exact same thing to her to pass on to Lutia, all in an attempt to comfort the uneasy Myuri.
“You were so close to finding out when you gave me the message for Lutia, just like I hoped you would.”
She had been so anxious then, but she had also been so relieved when he said they would not abandon Lutia.
The outlines of his world blurred.
“But if you and everyone else leave the city, it would be so easy for the bad kids here to stay a step ahead of Lutia. That’s why…”
The look in Myuri’s eyes finally helped Col realize, despite how dense he was.
Myuri and Lutia were the same.
“If we keep helping Lutia with her unsolvable problems, then my journey with you will last forever.”
Crystal drops spilled from Myuri’s eyes. Col idly mused how her eyes, inherited from her mother, were bright red even though her tears were clear.
“If Canaan’s telling the truth, then once this council thing is over, our journey will be over, too. So when I learned what Lutia was doing, it hit me right in the heart. I didn’t realize that was also an option.”
It was not simply that they were both wolves.
She was like Lutia in the sense that she understood, from the very depths of her heart, how she felt.
“But that would mean…tricking you. And then I realized I would have to get in your way forever, so…” She gripped the hem of her clothes with one hand and furiously wiped away her tears with the other. “But…if we could help Lutia…and my journey with you lasted forever…then I thought…maybe…”
That was why she had removed her sword, decorated with her knight’s crest, and shoved her sash into the very bottom of her bag, and returned to wandering the chaotic streets of Aquent regardless of whether her plan would go well or not.
She was smart, attentive in many things, and she could see far into the future. Yet here she was.
Col looked down at her, sobbing after finishing her confession, and a memory of a time when the girl was no bigger than her own tail came back to him.
The power and vigor of her tail, roughly the same size of her body in those days, often meant that the rest of her was at its mercy. And even when she grew bigger, it still held considerable sway over her. Though she had logic and reasoning, it was never enough to suppress her ears and tail.
And Myuri’s confession made such perfect sense, it was astonishing. There was nothing beyond Col’s understanding, and all he could really say was it was completely understandable coming from Myuri.
The reason he felt disappointed, even, was because he sensed no malice from her.
And so he could not help his sigh, because it was not as though she was trying to deceive her big brother.
It was because the little black snowball she had tried to drop from the top of the mountain was rolled up in assumptions.
“Listen to me, Myuri.”
Myuri shrunk into herself and her tears stopped.
Col winced to see Myuri so thoroughly frightened, but he collected himself and maintained the angry look on his face.
“I already told you about the ecumenical council, didn’t I?”
Tears that had stopped from fear did not stay stopped for long, of course. They began to well in her eyes again.
Col tensed, steeling his emotions so he would not be swayed by them, and continued to speak.
“According to Canaan, the Church has decided to hold the ecumenical council because they are left with little choice. And so if we attend, perfectly positioned to do so, then it is entirely possible they may accept our demands—that means there is a chance this fighting between the kingdom and the Church will come to an end. That’s what I believed.”
That was, in essence, what had led him to leave Nyohhira. That would also mean his dreams would be coming true.
“But that will not be easy. Printing many copies of the scripture and distributing it across the world to sway everyone to our side is one thing we have to do. And doing that alone means we will have to keep visiting cities like this and keep running around to complete various tasks. I told you that would mean we would have to overcome many trials like this in the future, didn’t I?”
When Col had explained all that to her, Myuri had instead whined about not being able to go to the desert. Col had interpreted her demands to go to the desert literally, but Myuri’s concerns ran deeper than that.
Were they not going to the desert? Did they no longer have any plans to visit places that no one she knew had ever been, places that only existed in books, like the desert? Did they no longer need the impossible dream of the new continent? Did that mean the journey she thought would one day reach its destination was actually no more than a trip with an unceremonious end?
Col had thought he had realized that was the way Myuri thought.
But he had not thought it was something so important that it needed solving immediately. Though he had not believed he did not need to play along with Myuri’s typical naive dreams, their clear misunderstanding had been born from this.
And that was why, as Myuri listened to him speak, resentment had slowly been building inside her.
Though tears still spilled from her eyes, she lifted her head to look at him. The look in her eyes told him she had something to say.
Col stared at her in return—he was ready to listen.
What was it that led Myuri to abandon her path of knighthood, to collude with Lutia, all supposedly for the sake of making sure their journey lasted forever?
“When…”
As she spoke, her ears flicked about and the fur on her tail stood on end. She drew up her knees, lifted herself off the ground, and her pointed canines gleamed beneath her wet lips. Col almost could not help but glance at the pouch of wheat that hung around her neck, the one she received from her mother.
“When you defeat the Church…”
“When I defeat the Church?” he repeated, fully intending to maintain his dignity as her older brother.
“You’re going to work at Blondie’s place, aren’t you?”
“………”
If this was meant to be a surprise attack, it was masterful and incredibly effective.
“What? Y-you mean…Heir Hyland?”
He forgot to maintain his angry posturing, and his question made him sound like a fool.
Myuri apparently found that reaction itself unpleasant—she bared her fangs and began to growl.
He flinched at her threatening demeanor; Hyland’s name had come up much too suddenly. He wondered, though, if her jealousy toward Hyland was the cause of all of this, but that didn’t make much sense. When he considered how much she had warmed up to her as of late, it was hard to imagine that would be the source of her anger.
So Col working under Hyland served as the key for something else.
When he realized this, he finally managed to draw something from the banks of his memory.
“Could this be about…if I were to become a priest, you mean?”
Similar to the students who drifted into this city, Col had a dream when he so boldly set off from Nyohhira. Though it was not his primary objective, he thought Heir Hyland would reward him after they successfully righted the Church’s wrongs.
Originally, he had been motivated by the selfish desire to use the Church’s authority to protect the village he once lived in, only to find the teachings he had come to learn meshed so well with his personality. They were genuinely wonderful.
And that was why he thought it would be lovely if he could become a priest one day, so he could guide troubled people and lessen the hardships of this lamentable world. And it was his end goal of becoming a priest that had been his justification for why he could not marry Myuri.
But at some point on their dizzying adventure, he had completely forgotten about that.
Or, the other thing that had come to mind, was that perhaps she thought Col becoming a priest meant he would become an enemy of all nonhumans like her.
But Myuri herself, after all was said and done, seemed to have enjoyed dressing up as a saint, so she must have the intelligence to easily separate her true, inner feelings and what she showed to others.
In which case, what was it that Myuri thought about the prospect of Col becoming a priest?
Col held his breath as he stared back into those red eyes, and the silver wolf spoke.
“We won’t be adventuring, and you won’t make me your wife, but if you’re working at a church that Blondie builds then I’ll have nothing to do! You—you—” She leaned forward like a wolf ready to pounce. “You’d send me back home!”
“Oh, wait, My—”
He had no time to say the entirety of her name. Myuri rammed her head into his stomach.
The force alone sent him flying.
She had done so not to bite him, nor to get him out of the way so she could run.
She was just like a small child holding on with her skinny arms, refusing to let go, telling her brother that absolutely nothing had changed since then.
“I don’t want that! I don’t want to go back to the village alone!” she screamed.
Just as the words left her mouth, her tantrum began to build again, and before long she began to cry. It was a childish wail, unlike her crying from earlier.
Though it was a sight he had often seen back at the Nyohhira bathhouse, now it had been so long since he had last seen her like this that it felt surprisingly new. At the same time, he realized this showed just how much Myuri had been hiding her childishness, in the truest sense, for the entirety of their journey.
He looked down at her as she sobbed and clung to him, and he gave a deep, disappointed sigh. When he then wrapped his arm around her thin frame, he thought she might peel it away, but she only clung tighter.
Though she seemed wide open, the hidden parts of her were held deep down. Maybe that was why when he started talking about what knights should be like, that had caused her to push herself to grow up more quickly than was necessary.
The spark that had lit this mess of emotion on fire was the clash between the reality that this journey would one day end and her older brother’s dream of becoming a priest one day.
And the wolf, afraid of the blaze, had panicked as she lost her cool and concocted a fake attack.
But as Col watched Myuri sob in his arms, he was not frustrated with her, nor was he angry, of course. If anything, he was relieved.
Though she occasionally acted on the whims of her youth, Myuri was still a vigilant and coolheaded wolf, and though she was somewhat different from Col, she had still wrestled with a great deal over the course of their journey. Even though she often cried or got angry or had fits of selfishness, in the most crucial moments, her logic and reasoning never led her astray. Just like a wolf leaping unerringly at its prey.
And what of it?
When she noticed Lutia’s secret, she sympathized with her, schemed with her for questionable ends, put their plan in motion, and in the end, regretted it all.
Though it made logical sense as a series of events, the reasoning did not quite add up. Perhaps it would be a bit of an exaggeration if Col were to say that he was delighted to know that Myuri, too, had her foolish moments.
While she clearly felt guilty, at the end of the day she had been plotting to fool her brother. But that was not the true reason he was not ready to forgive the wailing girl. It was simpler than that. Myuri had overlooked something far more fundamental.
It was time to fulfil his role as older brother, a role which had remained unfilled these past few weeks.
“Listen to me, Myuri.”
After letting her cry for a little while, he rubbed her back and placed both hands on her shoulders, then peeled her away from him.
As he carefully moved her away, like peeling a scab from skin in a way to keep oneself from bleeding again, the silver girl looked up to him with the smoldering embers of her eyes once there was distance between them.
“Think about this simply.”
Myuri’s tears fell like hot springs as she hiccupped. Col continued.
“If I told you to go back to Nyohhira, would you do so without question?”
Col thought that perhaps there might have been a frown on his face.
Because he had pictured himself telling Myuri to go back to Nyohhira due to one reason or another, and the trouble that followed was so easy to imagine.
“Would you listen to me, no matter what sort of reason I gave you?”
There was a phrase: no matter what. When Col had been busy preparing for his departure, Myuri had insisted she would be coming along with him and had even gone as far to sink her teeth into his arms and legs. She had ultimately hidden herself in an empty barrel and followed him ever since. She would be coming along, no matter what. It was impossible to picture that same girl choosing to go back to Nyohhira of her own volition.
He was confident enough to swear to God.
No matter what, Myuri would never leave his side.
“I think you’ve been writing too many fantasy stories.”
Perhaps a weaker-willed girl might listen to her older brother’s request without question and return home in sadness.
But that was just a fictional girl that Myuri was picturing, or perhaps the sort of girl a bard might sing about. There was no doubt she had been so drawn in by Lutia’s story of loneliness that she, too, began to think she was the main character in a tragedy.
