“Oh, I wanna fish too!” shouted Kreiz.
“Me too!” Wren chimed in.
“All right, then!” said Musia. “We have plenty of rods, so we can all fish together!”
“Yeah!”
“Teach us how, okay, Musia?”
The twins and Musia happily went off to find a fishing spot. Shortly thereafter, Rosell said something about wanting to research a plant that was supposed to grow in the area and set off to find it. He’d recently come to the conclusion that sometimes learning through experience by seeing things in person was preferable to just reading books, apparently. Anyway, once he was gone, Licia and I found ourselves alone by the riverside.
“Why don’t we have a seat over here?” Licia suggested. She’d found us a nice, convenient stone to sit down on.
Licia seated herself first, and I plopped down next to her. I quietly took her hand in mine as I paused to bask in the cool riverside breeze.
“It feels wonderful, doesn’t it?” said Licia.
“It does, yeah,” I agreed.
“When things are calmer again, we should come here more often.”
“Agreed.”
Between the climate and the lovely scenery, this was the perfect place for a breather. Swimming in the summer was nice, but we could leave the swimsuits behind and come here in fall as well to go camping, maybe. Probably not in winter, though─it would be a little too cold then.
I felt Licia’s hand in mine, and gave it a squeeze.
“Ars…”
Licia squeezed my hand back. I turned to face her on a whim, and found that she’d turned to face me at the exact same moment. For a moment, we gazed into each other’s eyes. Licia blushed faintly. And, just as we were about to kiss…
Splooosh!
…a massive splashing noise rang out and what felt like a wall of water crashed into me and Licia. The wave was so powerful that it knocked me off the rock and onto the ground. It didn’t hurt, thankfully─the ground was soft and grassy─but it most certainly scared the living daylights out of me.
I sat up and looked around, trying to figure out just what on earth had happened.
“Oooh, nice! Just look at all those fish!” Charlotte cooed. She was holding a catalyzer in one hand, and it was pretty easy to guess that she’d just cast some sort of spell straight into the river, raising an enormous wave that we’d then fallen victim to.
Was she trying to fish, or something?
If she was, it had worked─fish that were either out cold or dead were now bobbing up to the river’s surface.
“I hope you have a good explanation for this,” I grumbled to Charlotte.
“Oh, Lord Ars! Look! I caught so many fish!” Charlotte said with innocent glee.
“Magic’s way too dangerous to use for fishing, so no more of that,” I said. “Also, catching too many fish like this is bad for the environment, in case you needed another good reason to cut it out.”
If she cast a few more spells like that into the river, then we’d have to say goodbye to all the beautiful, scenic nature here!
“Aww, but I caught so many! But fine─I won’t do it again, so can I at least pick all these fish up?”
I sighed. “Fine, fine. They’re all yours.”
“Woohoo!” Charlotte yelped with glee, then grabbed a net and started scooping fish out of the water.
Just when we had a nice mood going, she had to go and put us in the splash zone.
After that little incident, we joined the others for some fishing, then took a stroll around the river. Eventually, the sun began to set. I’d worked up a pretty big appetite at that point, so I suggested that we stop for a meal.
“We can go ahead and cook something, then!” Musia suggested. She was the most capable cook out of all of us, with Rietz coming in second─though to be fair, it was harder to find things that Rietz couldn’t do with a fair degree of competence. Licia and Rosell were decent cooks as well. Licia had started studying cookery with remarkable enthusiasm after we got married, so her repertoire had expanded quite a bit. I wasn’t completely helpless either, and could lend a hand in the kitchen, but it wasn’t my strongest suit.
“Oh, wow, we have so many ingredients!” said Musia. “Will we even be able to eat all of this? We’ll be making a feast tonight!”
We really did have a lot of ingredients to work with. Wren and Kreiz had apparently had some real beginner’s luck with their fishing, and had caught a very respectable haul. Wren had caught just a few more than her brother, it seemed, which explained why Kreiz was sulking. Most of the fish they’d caught were pretty small, and were suited for eating whole or simmering into a nice, fishy soup. Licia and I had only caught one fish between the two of us, by the way, though that hadn’t made the experience any less enjoyable. I was still willing to call it a success.
Rietz had gone out searching for more sapats, and had ended up with four of them in total. According to Musia, they were so rare that catching four of them in a single place was more or less a miracle. Rietz also picked up a few shellfish that were edible, and Rosell had plucked some edible grasses while he was looking into his plants. Finally, we had the fish that Charlotte had concussed with her magic. She’d scooped up fifteen of them, and they were all on the larger side of things, as well.
Okay, yeah, this is a lot of food. Are we even going to be able to eat all of this?
“No worries. We’ll never have to deal with leftovers as long as I’m around!” Charlotte boasted. She did tend to eat as much as several ordinary people, so that wasn’t empty bravado.
We split up the work and got to cooking. The skill with which Musia prepared her ingredients was something else. Rietz could cook pretty well too, but he recognized that she had him beat and took on a supporting role. I, meanwhile, occupied myself with the sort of grunt work that pretty much anyone could do. The last thing I wanted was to get in over my head and slow everyone down.
“What should I do with this?” asked Wren. She seemed to have an interest in cooking, and was asking Musia question after question about the ins and outs of kitchen work. Kreiz, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any interest at all and spent most of the time we were cooking grumbling about how long it was taking. Thanks to Musia’s skillful work, that didn’t end up being especially long at all.
We ended up with roasted sapat, a soup made from fish, shellfish, and wild herbs, a number of whole fish roasted on spits, and a variety of other delectable dishes. The roasted sapat ended up looking a lot like the eels I knew, though of course it wasn’t coated in the sauce we often used back in Japan. We had brought salt with us, though, so I sprinkled a little on a piece of the sapat and gave it a try. It was as fatty as it looked, and tasted superb. I sampled the soup as well, and found it to be just as good─the broth was about as delicious as fish soup could be.
“You truly are an incredible cook, Musia. You would make a wonderful bride,” Licia commented.
“Huh? O-Oh, thank you!” Musia stammered, blushing with a smile on her face.
“Sounds good─I’ll take her! Be mine, Musia!” Charlotte chimed in.
“Wh-What in the world are you even saying?!” Musia wailed.
By the time we’d finished our meal, we were exhausted. We started getting ready for bed right away, though since we’d set up our tents in advance, all we had to do was crawl inside and fall asleep. Licia and I were sharing a tent, naturally.
“Today was wonderful, wasn’t it?” said Licia.
“It was, yeah. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this relaxed,” I replied. My day-to-day life had been so packed with work lately, I hadn’t had any time for anything else. Having a day to actually indulge in leisure for once had been fun, plain and simple.
My plan was to take my time heading back to the castle tomorrow, then get back to work again the day after. These two days of rest, I knew, would do wonders for my efficiency when I was back on the job. I knew that things wouldn’t stay this busy forever. An end would come someday, and when it did, I figured I’d take little excursions like this more frequently.