Ch.70The Wolf Cub’s Tree (2)

“But, I’d really like you to know that this is going to be a very boring story…”

“Don’t worry about that. If the ending turns out to be too annoying, I’ll finish it with ‘and so that little boy grew up and was killed by a beautiful assassin lying on top of a carriage.'”

As if to show she wasn’t just making empty threats, Maria slightly rotated her wrist. She looked ready to draw a wrist blade at any moment.

“And if you keep stalling like this, I’ll tell you the story of ‘a young man who died by knife after angering a nun over a trivial story.’ How about that? Don’t you want to become the protagonist of that story?”

Kain cleared his throat.

“So, when I was young…”

“Wow. My goodness. I’m already bored. Should I end it with ‘but unfortunately the assassin killed everyone’?”

“…My family ran an orchard.”

“Persimmons?”

“No. Apples. I don’t know why everyone assumes persimmons first. Anyway…

My home is… well, I can’t say exactly where, but it’s in the countryside. Not in Imperial territory. It’s in a small county under a count. The count is neither good nor bad, just… average. I don’t even know his face well. I only occasionally see the tax collector.

The apples from our orchard, honestly, don’t taste that great. They’re quite bitter. But because of that, they attract fewer pests than other orchards, so our harvest is pretty good.

Plus, every year the monastery and breweries that make alcohol buy all our apples. They say when apple cider is made with them, it has a bitter taste that adds depth.

The Count apparently likes that alcohol too and refers to it as ‘the mole beside the lips’ or ‘the mole on the plump chest,’ though I’m not sure if those are appropriate expressions for food.

Thanks to that, our income was relatively stable, and we’ve been able to live as free farmers for generations. As long as we pay our taxes, we don’t get much interference. We used to hire many workers, but now my five younger siblings do the work instead, so the income is even better.”

“You have five younger siblings?”

Lily let out a small exclamation.

“I can’t quite imagine what that atmosphere would be like. It must have been fun. Bustling and crowded—that’s how I think a home should be.”

“Well. Fun? I’m not sure.” Kain shook his head with a smile.

“As you might guess, I’m the eldest son of the family. And there’s quite an age gap between me and my siblings. So before I entered the academy, it was always a battlefield. Someone was always spilling something, someone was always crying… but when I go home during vacations sometimes, I see them taking care of each other.”

Lily wanted to hear more about his family, but Maria looked completely uninterested.

“So when does this wolf cub or cub wolf or whatever actually appear in the story?”

“Ahem. I was just getting to that. Anyway… from a young age, I followed my parents around and helped with various tasks.

It was mostly just clearing small branches and cleaning here and there, but I think I did pretty well. You know how children tend to make two messes while cleaning up one? I wasn’t like that.

I think I was just quiet when I was young. I preferred imagining and thinking by myself, so I didn’t have much reason to talk or cause mischief out of boredom.”

“You must have been cute.”

Lily wore the sweetest expression. In truth, she was thinking about something else. If she were to have a child with Kain, or rather, a child who resembled Kain more than herself, wouldn’t she be able to catch a glimpse of his childhood… that kind of thought.

“Well… I think I was a bit peculiar. My mother mainly supervised the workers, and my father took me around everywhere, teaching me how to trim trees.

But he never just told me what to do. Instead of simply saying, ‘Branches that grow upward need to be cut in advance,’

He would explain, ‘Otherwise, the tree will grow tall and straight. The tree absorbs limited nutrients, and if it just grows taller, naturally less nutrients will go to the apples.’

‘Shouldn’t trees grow big?’

‘It makes it harder to pick the fruit.’

‘I feel sorry for the tree.’

Then my father would grin and ruffle my hair.

‘Well. Growing straight up isn’t always the best thing.’

Looking back, I think my father really respected me. He treated me more like an equal conversation partner than a child.

Still, kids will be kids. A week later, a monk from the village came to see my father. He was furious. I knew him—he mainly worked on brewing alcohol.

‘Your son has been spreading rumors about me to the village children. How are you raising this child?’

‘My child? What did he say?’

‘He told the village children that when I was young, all my hair was pulled out, which is why I’m short and have grown sideways and fat!’

Well, I really thought that was true. The monk wasn’t a mendicant friar; he was just bald. Being short was one thing, but being fat was partly because he secretly drank the alcohol he was brewing.

That’s why the villagers would say, ‘There goes the barrel monk rolling by.'”

“…How old were you when this happened?”

“Six or seven, I think.”

“The terrible sevens—that makes sense.” Maria nodded glumly. “Still, you were in the wrong. Then what?”

“Anyway… my father called for me. I had to explain why I thought that way. I honestly answered that I thought people, like trees, would grow sideways if their hair was cut.

The monk was still angry, but after hearing my explanation and what my father had taught me about trimming trees, he talked with my parents for a long time.

So a week later, I ended up studying under that barrel monk. I was so scared… but Brother Francisco was actually a very good person. He always smelled of alcohol, but he had a childlike side to him.

So I would learn to read and write in the mornings, and after lunch, I would help with the farm work. Neither was particularly difficult, I think. Sometimes when things got complicated, I would climb a tree and just watch the sky drift by. Judging by how well I climb buildings now, I think that experience helped.

Then… when I was about eleven, the monk’s expression didn’t look good one day. When I asked, ‘Is something wrong?’ he replied, ‘There are too many wolves, I hear.’

I wasn’t too worried. Wolves don’t usually come to orchards. They might steal chickens from farms occasionally, but that only happened during very cold winters. Normally, they didn’t come out of the forest.

But that year was… different, I think. I learned properly later. It was during the time when the former Emperor, Alexios I, carried out a bloody purge against rebellious nobles and their soldiers.”

It was a time when the conflict between the nobles and the Emperor reached its peak. The most powerful Elector at the time openly said, “The Emperor will not die a natural death, and I will wear his blood-stained crown.”

Emperor Alexios emerged victorious, and the rebellious nobles were dismembered and scattered throughout the Empire. If he had known that 10 years later he would have to face the Western and Northern pagans, the Eastern Alliance, and even the Demon King, he might not have carried out such a hasty purge. But even an Emperor cannot know the future.

“Anyway… corpses piled up throughout the Empire. As the number of small animals that feed on rotting and dead things increased, the number of wolves that hunt them also grew.

Of course, the monk didn’t tell me all that. He just said, ‘The wolves have increased.’ Fortunately, our count was on the Emperor’s side, so the territory was relatively unaffected.

But there were reports of wolf packs appearing on the outskirts of the village. Notices were posted warning not only children but also adults not to wander around at night, and if they absolutely had to, to move in groups of at least five.

Then one day, in early autumn, a big storm hit.”

The door kept rattling, and his younger siblings burst into tears in fear. That night, even his mother and father didn’t sleep. They placed a pitchfork by the door and kept the house brightly lit with candles.

“Since the storm hit just before harvest time, my parents were extremely worried. Even though we had some savings, it’s heartbreaking to see the fruits you’ve carefully nurtured for a year suddenly falling to the ground.

And if the trees get damaged, that’s when you really get a headache. It takes at least five years for a tree to bear proper fruit… At that time, my second sibling whispered to me that he could hear wolves howling. He had particularly sharp ears.

We immediately told our parents. They tried to reassure us. ‘The sound of a storm often resembles wolf howls. Besides, wolves don’t come down during this season, and there’s nothing for wolves to eat in our orchard.’

But my sibling and I didn’t believe them. We had just heard a fairy tale about wolves that transformed into humans and ate poor little children. I was the one who told the story, but to hear wolf howls on that very day…

My sibling looked up at me with frightened eyes. ‘Brother, what if the wolves eat us all? Our parents don’t seem to believe us. In the storybook, the children all died because of that.’

The other siblings were about to cry, so I promised to check it out as soon as it was light. Well, when you’re about eleven… you think you know everything. I wasn’t afraid.

I knew the orchard well, if not as well as my father, and I knew the village very well too. I didn’t know how scary wolves could be, but I thought if I took a small axe with me, I’d be fine.

So at dawn, while my parents were nodding off to sleep, I took an axe used for trimming small branches and walked through the orchard. The sun was just rising, but there was a thick fog, so visibility was poor.

The ground was covered with broken twigs, but by then I already knew how to walk without breaking branches, so I didn’t make the mistake of stepping on branches and startling myself with the noise. I walked quietly, carefully, looking around…

The trees were fortunately undamaged, but about a quarter of the apples had fallen to the ground, maybe more. Even the ones still on the branches had weakened stems between the fruit and the tree.

As I was walking and thinking, ‘What should I do in this situation?’ I heard a strange sound from somewhere. It sounded a bit like a puppy whimpering, but it was more fierce and sharp. Like the sound a hunting dog might make when injured.

I gripped the axe and walked, but didn’t see anything unusual, which I found strange. Then I reached the edge of the orchard.

There’s an old zelkova tree there. It’s a very old tree that looks like a hunched grandfather, so we all called it the Grandfather Tree.

Long ago, it was considered sacred by the druids of the Life Tree, but after the monastery honoring the prophet of life and death was established and the monks blessed it, it was treated as just a tree with nice shade.

Under that tree, there’s a small hole big enough for about three children to hide in. Kids often hid there during hide-and-seek. Occasionally cats or stray dogs would jump out from there, so the older kids would throw a stone in before entering.

That strange sound was coming from right there. I thought, though it seemed unlikely, what if there was a child left half-eaten from a fairy tale? That’s what I was thinking.

I gripped the axe firmly and stood in front of the hole. Two blue, ghostly lights were floating at about the height of my ankles.

Since I was expecting a monster, I wasn’t too surprised. I was a bit scared, but I didn’t back away because I thought I needed to protect our orchard.

Then the wind blew and the fog cleared. That’s when I saw it—a small wolf cub with a blood-red mouth growling at me.

So it’s you, I thought as I approached. Even though it was a cub, I thought it would grow up, transform into a human, and come to eat me and my siblings. And this was a place where village children often came; what if someone got hurt? So I approached…

“And then?”

“The creature couldn’t stand up and kept sitting back down. It was growling, but it could barely lift its head, unable to move forward or backward. Well… there was nothing like this in the fairy tales.

I wondered what my father would do. I thought he would say, ‘I would go closer to see what’s happening.’ After all, he taught me that I should know everything that happens in the orchard.

So I approached. Of course, I was ready to swing the axe at any moment. As I got closer, the sun rose higher, and the fog cleared more. That’s when I saw its broken front leg.

That small, fierce creature had spent the entire stormy night here alone. Separated from the other wolves.

But a wolf is still a wolf. It was trying hard to growl, but it looked in great pain. So I raised my axe and…”