Holo did not ask if Lawrence had made any progress, and Lawrence got the sense that she was not running at top speed.
She could also tell that he was nodding off, so she deliberately landed hard on the ground with each step, keeping him awake.
She offered to carry him in her mouth, but he refused, so he fought off his drowsiness as best he could.
But he had his limits. Once the sky in the east started growing lighter, a warmth greater than that of the sun began to melt into his consciousness, and he almost fell from Holo’s back.
Many a time did Holo glance back to look at him, but nothing helped. She eventually dropped her speed, found a spot blocking the view from the road with hills and sparse copses, and let Lawrence down.
Slightly vexed, she lay on her stomach, poked Lawrence with her nose, drew him closer with her tail, and became his very own bed of fur.
She did not call him a fool. And she understood how sad that made him by the way he wilted.
When they first met, Lawrence did not stop for anything, even when he had gotten stabbed after running around underground catacombs.
Even though back then he could have kept fighting until his dying breath, now the strength in his hands waned, and it was a fight to summon what energy he did have.
As Lawrence sat within Holo’s fur and her sunlike warmth, he thought.
I think it will feel like this when I die.
Wait, I’m not actually dying, am I? came the unwitting question, and he opened his eyes.
It was then that Holo drew her red eyes away from the breaking dawn and to him.
“Sleep.”
It had always been Lawrence’s job in their travels to look after their well-being. But when Holo was like this, she most certainly earned her moniker as the Wisewolf.
Perhaps the reason Holo drank herself silly so often was so that they rarely had to switch their roles.
It was always Lawrence who marched forward in high spirits, dragging Holo along behind him.
They had not switched places; Holo was not looking back at Lawrence, paused in his tracks.
“…”
Lawrence mumbled something, something not even he understood, and Holo narrowed her eyes curiously.
He mustered all he could to speak as he pried his eyelids open, falling shut as he succumbed to drowsiness.
✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦
“We’re not…done…”
Holo did not ask with what.
Her lips parted to show her rows of teeth, and she rubbed the side of her nose against Lawrence’s shoulder, as though giving a dry laugh.
And after staring at him for a moment, she turned her gaze into the distance again.
The dazzling sunlight made the ground seem like golden fields of wheat; countless times had she greeted the morning with a sight like this before.
Lawrence had never been there, of course, but he felt like he had seen the sun rise over wheat many, many times in his life. That sensation most certainly came from when, after they had arrived in the hot spring village of Nyohhira, he found himself nuzzled among Holo’s fur, absorbing her warmth as they slept outside.
It was then, as Nyohhira’s bathhouse owners ridiculed them for even entertaining the thought of finding new springs, Holo scoffed and began searching the area, as though looking for a bone she had buried earlier. As she dug with such enthusiasm that Lawrence worried she might change the shape of the mountain entirely, she finally found a spring.
There Lawrence built a bathhouse, there they welcomed their only daughter, and there the boy they had collected on their journey grew into a fine young man. That was where, he knew, his bones would be laid to rest.
Holo might get fidgety over the scent of bones like a dog at times, but he would be perfectly happy if she chewed on his bones.
As those thoughts crossed his mind, he found himself grinning on the edge of reverie.
“Dear.”
Perhaps the reason Holo spoke to him to wake him up because she found that little smile of his revolting.
Though that was the thought that initially crossed his mind, he saw that when he squinted in the bright sunlight that the sun had completely cleared the horizon. He had slept longer than he thought; they would have to leave soon.
“I want to take a bath,” Lawrence muttered.
Holo frowned, deeply. It was as though she was reprimanding him for voicing that when she had worked so hard to keep the same sentiment to herself.
He wondered if they could dig up springs in Tonneburg, too. They had been told that springs appeared with surprising frequency in the plains, so perhaps it was more likely than gold. And when he put that thought together with the map he found in Salonia, then the possibility was—
“What?!”
He jolted upright, and not because Holo had nipped at his head.
Holo’s eyes went wide at Lawrence’s sudden movement, and she craned her head to look at him.
Lawrence looked around, then eventually met Holo’s gaze. Fragments of his memory swirled together like a tempest in his mind. It was in that moment that he suddenly realized he had a treasure map right in the palm of his hands.
Like a drunkard who suddenly sobered and was looking in his wallet, he felt around her front legs.
He eventually found her giant paw.
When they had first met, Lawrence had been paralyzed in shock when he saw her claws.
He wondered when it stopped scaring him. It felt like it was a very long time ago—not long after they started traveling together.
When he brushed her claws, Holo curled her paw in discomfort.
Lawrence looked up at her.
“You were more than willing to use your wolf powers this time, right?”
Her large ears pricked, and her large head whipped to look at him; it was an act powerful enough to create its own wind.
“What did you see in your dreams?”
Lawrence held his breath, adding everything they had gone through since their time in Salonia to his mental map. Behind Eve’s morality hid vast profits.
But it was not only people who hid things.
The earth, too, occasionally hid the flow of time.
“Eve is trying to string everyone up with her wool by being up front and above board.”
Holo sensed something in Lawrence’s tone; her eyes, as she looked at him, glinted strongly in the sunlight.
“Then why don’t we resort to…something more underhanded?”
Holo blinked once, twice, and her tail whipped through the air.
The sun began to rise even higher, signaling the start of a new day.
“I love it when you make that face.”
She rubbed her snout affectionately against his face, strong enough to knock him over; and as he burrowed into the fur on her stomach, he began to chart his plot. Though it was all firmly within the realm of possibility, Lawrence was confident, and he filled Holo in.
This had all started because of what happened in Salonia.
And since it had started in Salonia, the key to its end lay in Salonia, too.
“Yes.”
Holo’s eyes glinted in anticipation.
“Yeah.”
Lawrence could picture Eve’s shock already.
All they needed to do was collect their treasure-hunting party.