From that day on, I sort of fell into a pattern of helping her with her hobby—that is, with taking care of the birds. It wasn’t that she had told me plainly that she wanted me to help her, but, well, I didn’t have anything else to do, and it seemed like there was nothing wrong with lending a hand.
“Hey, missy, I heard you’re looking for those goddess birds. Did you know there’s been a group of adventurers around here recently searching for the goddesses just like you? If you pay me some money, I could introduce you to them. Heh-heh-heh…”
“Huh? Really? Wow, thank you! How much?”
“Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh…let’s see, how much should I charge…?”
……
Well, I also stayed because I was worried about this girl who, say what you like, was far too easy to manipulate.
“Ashley, we’re going. You mustn’t pay any attention to people like that.” I dragged her forcefully away from the shop. When I glanced back, the suspicious shop owner was staring at Ashley as if he was appraising her.
Creepy…
“Hey, Elaina! What do you think you’re doing?! I was finally about to get a clue to the goddesses!”
But of course, I became subject to the offended girl’s protests after getting in her way.
“Any goddess you discover with a guy like that isn’t worth finding.”
Just like the men who had previously tried to coax Ashley to go with them, everyone looking for the goddesses had selfish motives.
At any rate, from that day on, I started to help her.
As for what we were doing, we repeated the same exact actions morning, noon, and night.
We went to the market, bought some meat, and delivered it to the birds. That was it. There was nothing difficult about it. There was nothing to think about. It was something that anyone could have done.
As long as they weren’t hopelessly unlucky, that is.
We left the city, and once we made it back to the bird chicks, Ashley began tearing up the meat she had just purchased earlier and giving it to them.
“Okay, good birdies. I brought you something to eat again today!”
The chicks hopped up and down in their nest like they were happy to see her.
Ashley’s face bloomed into a smile when she saw how they behaved.
“Oh no, they’re too cute!”
“They don’t look cute at all to me.”
“They’re so cute, I could just eat them up!”
“I think that’s a wildly inappropriate phrase to use when you’re talking about birds.”
Do these look like chickens to you?
“These little guys are just the apple of my eye…!”
Or maybe she’s experiencing some sort of maternal instinct.
Still holding the food, she reached out toward the next bird, and her eyes looked like they were full of affection.
By the way, in other news, the chicks seemed to be very hungry.
With great force, one of the chicks chomped down with determination on Ashley’s hand.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaahhh!”
Her screaming voice echoed around the mountains.
Maybe the bird chicks also thought that Ashley looked cute enough to eat. On the way back, I tried to cheer her up. “You all share a beautiful love for each other!”
When she ran out of extra money to feed the baby birds, she said, “Well, I am a master archer, after all. There’s no reason I can’t get some meat on my own, is there?” She forgot about paying for meat at the butcher’s shop and started taking the natural approach.
“Wow, can you really?”
“Since we’re out here, let me show you my skills.”
She said that and led me into the forest nearby. After hunting around a little, we saw that there was a baby deer standing by the water’s edge. Without a doubt, Ashley was excited to have the opportunity to show off the skills she had trained in her hometown, and from her hiding spot, she drew her bow. The look in her eyes was serious. There was none of the usual cheerfulness in her eyes as she stared intently at her prey.
Then she sucked in a breath, and the moment she let it back out, the arrow launched smoothly from her hand.
Plonk!
It stuck into a tree trunk.
“Awwwwww!”
All the creatures of the forest fled at once as she roared.
“So far, I feel like I’ve only seen the uncool parts of you.”
One evening, while I was eating a meal with her at a restaurant, I said that.
“Humph. Elaina, you just don’t know the real me yet,” Ashley replied with a haughty look on her face as she picked up the bottle that was sitting on the table and poured its contents into her own glass. “Do you want any water, Elaina? I’ll pour it for you.”
“No, I’m fine.”
I would like to meet this real Ashley you’ve mentioned.
“By the way, Ashley?”
“What is it?”
“That’s sauce.”
“Aaaaaaaaaaaahhh!”
The picture I had in my mind of Ashley was a picture of a person who couldn’t say no, who had been bitten by a baby bird she was rearing, who missed with her arrows and couldn’t tell bottles of sauce and water apart, and who boasted about how she naturally had extremely poor luck.
The way things stood, I wondered how on earth she had ever been adventuring for as long as she had. Through day after day of bad luck, she earnestly faced everything life set before her.
Supposedly, she had set out on her journey looking for goddesses. And yet here she was, suffering through the days, spending all her time traveling to see the baby birds, giving them food in place of their parents. Nobody had ordered her to do this; she was going because she wanted to.
As her days feeding these birds stretched on, she was sure to drift farther and farther from the goddesses.
After dinner, while we were chatting, I indirectly asked her about it.
I asked if there was anything on her mind.
“…There is one thing, something my father said.”
Ashley, whose eyelids were looking a little heavy as a result of eating her fill, told me with a foolish look on her face, “ ‘If you earnestly try your hardest, someday you’re sure to get the things you want,’ he said.”
That must have been why the troubled person before me couldn’t just overlook the baby birds.
“You’re too good-natured, you know.”
“Those words are wasted on a delinquent girl who argued with her grandfather and ran away from home.”
As she spoke, she smiled softly.
Not long after that, during a lull in the conversation, she fell fast asleep. Even though she was always smiling, she must have been exhausted, since she was also always getting roped into troublesome situations by people she didn’t even really know.
“No helping it, I guess.” I wasn’t inclined to interrupt her, now that she had started breathing pleasantly in her sleep.
However, apparently her bad luck was in effect even while she was sleeping.
“Are you the pair that’s been looking for the goddesses?”
……
Even when she’s asleep, weird men try to talk to her. What’s that all about? Is she giving off some sort of scent that summons weirdos to her?
A man with a calm demeanor suddenly appeared at our table. Without asking permission, he pulled out the chair beside me and took a seat.
“I heard about you from a friend of mine. He said that a witch and an archer were traveling together, searching for goddesses.”
He started talking all on his own.
Oh my, what a predicament this is.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have any intention of teaming up with anyone else to search for the goddesses,” I replied.
Actually, I’m not even searching for them at all.
“Are you sure? That’s too bad…” Even as the man said that, he showed no signs of leaving.
Far from it, he kept on talking in an overly familiar tone.
“If it’s goddesses you want, we’ve already found them ourselves,” he claimed.
“…What did you just say?”
Did I mishear him?
“I said, we’ve already discovered the whereabouts of the goddesses. All that’s left is to capture them, but in order to do that, we want at least one person on our crew with real power. So I decided to come speak to you two.”
After that, the man made us an extremely generous offer, one that seemed incongruous with his suspicious appearance. According to him, he was going to pay us with all the feathers and talons we could collect from the goddesses, plus a small monetary reward as well.
There could probably be no conditions more ideal than those for Ashley, who had so far spent her days unblessed by fate.
“What do you say?” the man asked me again.
“I’m sorry. I’m actually just helping her out—” I poked at the head of the girl who was fast asleep across from me. “It’s really up to her,” I said.
But she does have some seriously rotten luck, huh?
To be leisurely dozing away when someone comes to propose the perfect deal.
“Ah, is that so? Well then, I’ll come back when that girl wakes up—”
He was probably about to say something about coming to talk to us then, but the man suddenly froze, staring at Ashley in fascination.
Uh-oh, what’s this? Is this guy ultimately just another man attracted to her charms?
I looked at him distrustfully.
But the next word the man faintly murmured was something I’d never expected.
“…Ashley?”
He called her by her name.
His reaction to her was less like someone who had guessed her name right on their first meeting and more like he had known her name for a long time.
“……Hmm?”
Ashley awoke at the sound of the man’s voice.
Then immediately after opening her eyes, she gasped.
It wasn’t because there was a strange man there in front of her.
Just like the man, she also looked like she was seeing someone she knew from long ago.
“D-Dad…?”
He was the very person who had told her that if she earnestly tried her hardest, someday she was sure to get the things she wanted, and it turned out that her earnest efforts had reunited them in the end.