Chapter 32
THE flowers were just starting to bloom the last time Yuki found herself in Fol. The beginning of spring had welcomed her into this world. At the time, she knew nothing about much of anything. She kept chasing down Ain and badgering him with questions about what this or that was and how things worked. The impression she had, swaying in the back of the carriage with her sole possession—her archery case—tightly clasped to her lap, was that poverty and tension permeated the city beyond the carriage window.
A whirlwind of challenges arose from there. She was forced into the attire of a Witch and marched into Fol Castle alongside Luca. And there she helped capture the slimeball Isis. That same night Luca admonished her and praised her a little bit. The following days were like a dream as Fol quickly regained a semblance of its former glory. When she left with Luca, relieved soldiers and city dwellers bid them farewell.
“…What happened here?” Yuki whispered, horror lacing her tone.
Ten days had passed since they left the border at Rvydom and arrived at the entrance to Fol. The stronghold called Fol Castle looked drastically different from her first visit. The direction they approached the town from made it look like the castle sat in the center of it. They had their horses trot around the desolate areas of the town until they came to the large town plaza of row houses where they stopped their horses to rest.
“Have you been here before, Yuki?” Selena asked, walking over to where Yuki stretched at the bone dry water fountain.
“…Yeah, once before. But…”
What happened here? What changed? Yuki wanted to ask someone, but not even a ghost dared wander the roads and abandoned buildings waiting to be repaired. The dead silent city roads were devoid of people and were eerily familiar to a graveyard.
“Fol’s a lot of things, but quiet and empty wasn’t one of them. Even under that maniac’s control…” Yuki murmured, surveying the desolate late afternoon plaza.
What happened?
She restlessly darted her eyes around for an open door somewhere or a straggler wandering the streets.
“Fol is relatively close to the frontlines. The people might be hiding in their houses out of fear of us,” Vigo observed.
They led their horses on foot behind them as they knocked on darkened house and shop doors. But not even a peep came from the other side of the stubbornly locked doors. They jiggled the doorknobs, which creaked in protest but didn’t budge—a sign people still lived inside. Bitterness started to form at their refusal to open the door.
“Well, time to test if any inns will let us in,” Vigo concluded and tossed his right leg over his horse to ride to the nearest inn.
✦ ✦ ✦
THEY visited several inns across Fol, but their expectations were met in the worst way—no doors opened to them. They also stopped at several private homes offering housing, with little luck. If inns weren’t opening their doors to strangers, private homes wouldn’t dare to either. By the time they searched most of Fol and the outlying area, the late afternoon sun had set, bringing darkness. With little other options, they decided they had no choice but to camp outdoors for the night and rush to the capital.
As they were about to gallop out of the city to camp in the covering of the nearby woods, footsteps caught Yuki’s ear.
“Yuki, is something wrong?” Selena asked when Yuki fell behind.
“Yeah…I think I just heard the sound of someone’s shoes.”
Is someone around?
The footsteps may have been the horses’ hooves on the cobblestone streets. But once the doubt was lodged in her mind, she didn’t want to ignore it.
“I’m going to check out the sound!”
“Ah! Hang on, Yuki!”
Yuki turned her reins toward the outskirts of the city where the sound came from and kicked her horse into a gallop. A world of difference existed in the speed a person could run versus a horse—the identity of the sound quickly became apparent.
It’s a person!
Around the street corner a woman in her forties was running with a large wooden bucket in her hands.
“Wait!” Yuki shouted. The woman jumped and liquid spilled from the bucket as she ran as fast as she could. “Hey! I asked you to wait!”
Why did the woman run? Why was everyone holed up inside their pitch-black houses? Flustered by the sheer number of questions she wanted to ask, Yuki couldn’t find the words to stop her with. At any rate, she needed to get her to stop running away before she lost sight of her. A horse raced past Yuki at wind-breaking speed while she hesitated to come up with a way to get the woman to talk with her.
The wind left in the horse’s trail whipped up Yuki’s hair. Selena dashingly leapt from her running horse in front of the woman.
“Eek!” shouted the woman as she crouched to the ground.
“Selena!”
Selena glanced up at Yuki’s shout.
“I haven’t done anything wrong…” the woman said in a quivering voice.
Yuki dismounted her horse once she caught up to them. The woman kept muttering apologies and sat with her head pressed against the dirt. Yuki crouched and put her hand on the woman’s shoulder.
She’s trembling.
Her shoulder shook uncontrollably against Yuki’s hand, conveying the woman’s fear. She tried to address her as gently as possible, “We have no intention of harming you. Please lift your head.”
The woman hesitantly lifted her head from the ground. Even in the evening darkness, her stark-white skin stood out.
“You’ll be in trouble if someone sees us, right? Vigo!” Selena called out.
Vigo raised his hand like he understood the signal and headed to the crossroad.
“U-Um…” the woman fumbled and sighed when she discovered a sixteen-year-old girl—Yuki—was who she dealt with.
“We have a lot of questions we would like to ask you. Would it be all right if we talked to you?” Yuki gently asked, and smiled reassuringly.
The woman’s eyes darted around the street and she sputtered, “N-N…ah, um…er…there is a child with the Ten Day Fever at my house… I cannot allow anyone inside.”
The Ten Day Fever had permeated Fol as well. Was that the cause of the graveyard-like silence?
Yuki offered the woman her brightest smile. “In that case, shall we make a deal? In return for curing the child’s Ten Day Fever, let us ask our questions. We are the assistants to a traveling doctor.”
The woman gasped and stared at Yuki. Then she glanced over Yuki at Selena and Vigo standing behind her. She gave a small nod of her head.