Arc 3 - Chapter 3: Young Lady and the Butler (2/2)

Yurine grabbed Yu's hand again and they entered a town for their first shopping trip.

"Did you hear? They robbed the capital, they're talking about tens of thousands of gold coins..."

"You mean the circus? I heard this morning..."

As soon as he stepped into the butcher's shop, he overheard two customers talking to each other. They were talking about the theft Yu was responsible for.

"The fleeing robbers were all found dead, but the stolen goods were missing..."

"Since what they stole is missing, some of the robbers were found dead, not all of them..."

"But they're talking about hundreds of dead? What kind of monster could do this?"

"I don't know, but tens of thousands of gold coins, huh? The money I've touched in my lifetime is not even worth a thousand gold coins..."

Yurine could feel Yu tensing up. His cheeks hardened and the smile disappeared from his face, but it was only a glimpse. Immediately afterwards, he straightened his shoulders, smiled and, hiding his uneasiness, greeted the butcher behind the counter. All the while he was sniffing something.

"Good afternoon sir, what can I do for you?"

"A ton of beef jerky."

"A-a ton? Did I hear wrong?"

"No, I want a ton of meat."

"Yu, are we going to eat meat all day and night?"

Yurine made a righteous rebellion. Their wagons were already full of dried meat. How could they finish so much meat?

"I want it for the rinos, Yurine, one of them eats twenty kilos a day. We have a month ahead of us, what's in the wagon is not enough, and I don't want to keep replenishing supplies. For now, if there's enough meat for two and a half weeks. Then we can resupply on the road."

"Sir, I don't have that much meat..." said the butcher. "You can only get that much meat from farms outside the town. Since rinos are not very common, the meat produced for them is available in certain places."

Yu sighed and looked at the counter. Two magic stones were keeping the meat cold under the glass.

"So we're going anyway... Can you give me directions to this place?"

When the butcher gave him directions to where he could buy the meat for the rinos, Yu started looking for meat for them to eat.

"You clean the meat, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Let's buy breasts then, lose five kilos. Do you sell those things, they keep the meat cold..."

"Storage vault."

Yu couldn't remember the name of the device, so Yurine reminded him.

"Thank you, safe deposit box."

The butcher nodded and while he was cleaning the meat, his apprentice brought a small steel box. When he put the lid on the box, it closed so that no air could get in, and the blue magic stone on top cooled the inside.

"The stone will last three days," said the butcher's apprentice as he handed Yu the box.

When they came to İlonya, they bought one of the storage crates and tried to see if it really kept the cold.

Actually only Yu had tried it, Yurine already knew that the device was used.

But as the apprentice said, the magic stone on it was a special kind and didn't last very long. So you had to buy new magic stones all the time, and magic stones were expensive, making the tool a product for the rich.

"I was wondering where that familiar smell was coming from. Oh, right... Seussu is famous for its sujuk, right? To see it here... I can't believe my eyes."

"Genuine Seussu Sujuk, made from beef. And it tastes like marshmallows... But it's a bit expensive..."

"Fine, give me all the ones in that row. Those eggs look good too, I'll take those too."

"Eggs, huh? You're young and all, but you know your stuff."

"Shame on you, sujuk is our business."

The butcher made Yu five sujuks while Yu put the cleaned meat into the storage crate.

The butcher then told Yu how to cook the meat better and gave him some recipes. Yu then carried the meat with the sujuks to the wagon.

"It's big, but there's no room left... How did I fit it in the old wagon? If we could squeeze the meat we're going to buy in there... We'll manage."

Yu took Yurine's hand again and they started walking towards another shop.

"Let's buy some fresh bread, then we'll buy some fruit and vegetables, and after we've stocked up on water, we'll buy some meat from the place this man described and set off. It will be faster if we take the highway, but as a precaution we will use the ring road. There will be a few villages ahead of us, and when the animals run low on food, we will buy some more supplies there and continue on our way."

After Yu had finished, they loaded their purchases into the wagon and went into the driver's compartment. The rain had picked up, but thanks to the protection on the driver's side, they didn't get too wet.

***

"Yu, you sing beautifully."

"Thank you dear."

Yurine had asked him to sing. As Yu sang a song from the twenty-first century, they left the town and walked towards a bridge.

"Yu, you know what? My mom sings very well too."

"I thought so."

"She has a beautiful voice. Do you think so, Yu?"

"Yes." When he first heard Rie's voice, he thought it was beautiful. "You like saying my name, don't you?"

"Y-yes..."

It wasn't easy for Yurine to accept such things, but she took Yu's arm and said his name again.

Going around the river would have taken time and they would have had to go into the forest. They had to use the bridge here to reach Andromedia on schedule. The wagon was moving fast and Yu slowed down as soon as he saw the bridge.

"I knew it would be like this, but I came here for hope."

There were soldiers on the bridge. At least Yu guessed that they were soldiers. Before they realized they were approaching the bridge, Yu changed direction.

"What's going on?"

"There is a roadblock on the bridge, if we go there they will stop us and search the car."

And if they searched the wagon they would find the gold inside. There was twelve thousand gold coins inside, Yu had sent the rest to Andromedia with Sivina and Ana.

When the soldiers turned the wagon around and looked at the seven thousand pieces of gold inside, they would not have been able to prove that it was theirs.

When they brought the gold from Rolderhelm into İlonya, they had managed to get a document to confirm to the state that it was theirs, but there was no record of it. So the illegal gold was in their wagons and nobody was supposed to see it until they reached the Mora.

"Take out the map."

Yurine unfolded the map and brought it in front of Yu. She was holding it tightly to prevent the map from curling because of the wind.

"Oh, we'll have to go further down the road."

They would have to go around the river. For this, the wagon turned east and they started moving into the forest.

"There's a forest here, are we going into the forest again?"

"Yes, once we get out of the forest, we will reach the villages ahead. We'll replenish supplies there and then we'll head steadily north. We will be late, I hope we don't worry Sivina and Ana too much. We told them we would be back in a month."

Yu, of course, had not told Sivina and Ana that he was a swindler, and he could not tell them about his plan for a big score in İlonya. He didn't want to lose his servants, who he thought would be loyal to him anyway, by doing such a thing in their presence.

So he sent them ahead to Andromedia to announce the arrival of the new cardinal and to prepare the cathedral for them, telling them that they had business to attend to and that they would come to him in a month.

"We'll have to spend the night in the forest, we have to take turns again."

"Got it. Yu, you can trust me."

They would have to stay in the forest again. They had to keep watch to prevent their belongings from being stolen and to avoid being attacked.

There were not many people in these woods, and even if there were, there would only be a few hunters or foresters, and they would only steal a small amount of stuff. Yu's main fear was monsters.

"Yu, if we're going into the forest, wouldn't we be buying meat for the rinos for nothing? They could find rabbits there and eat them."

"These are tamed animals, maybe they will try to hunt if they have to because of their instincts, but I don't think they can hunt right now. Also, rinos are not supposed to taste blood. If they get used to the taste of blood, they might attack humans when they are hungry."

Then Yu started telling her things that even he didn't know.

Rhinos were carnivores and were hunted before humans domesticated them. When this hunting started to harm people's lives and property, people gathered and started hunting the rinos, and the surviving rinos were domesticated.

But then again, the ancestors of these animals once hunted humans. So it was better not to accustom them to blood.

As they entered the forest and the sun set, they began to have difficulty seeing ahead. Deciding that it might be dangerous to go any further into the forest in the dark, they stopped beside the river they had been following.

"How many days will it take us to cross this forest? It's hard to tell from the map..."

Yu took out the candles and put them in the candlesticks outside the wagon. With the help of a mechanism used as a lighter, he lit the candles to provide some illumination.

Then he gathered the brushwood he found in the neighborhood and built two campfires in front of the wagon. One to cook the soup and the other to cook the fresh meat they had bought.

"I've made soup before, but this is the first time I'm making meat, sorry if it's bad."

After she and Yu took out the stools and the dining table, Yurine placed the items on the table. When she was done, she sat down and waited for Yu to finish preparing dinner.

"I finally found it."

"Found what?"

"After I had the pasta, it occurred to me that there was something missing in this world, but I couldn't figure out what it was. I finally figured out what it was, there is no yogurt in this world."

Yu liked to eat pasta with yogurt and it was strange to eat pasta without yogurt. Even if there was no pasta for dinner today, there would be pasta on the table tomorrow or the day after, and there was no yogurt, no ketchup, no mayonnaise to eat it with. For Yu Valarfin this was a problem.

"Yu, what's yogurt?"

"It's white, it has to be eaten cold. İf you want can eat it with banana or strawberry."

Yu's favorite was cocoa, but he didn't find any cocoa here. So even if he managed to make yogurt, he couldn't eat yogurt with cocoa.

"But I don't know how yogurt is made. I've never wondered. I know it's made with milk, but how do they turn milk into yogurt? There was fermentation, but I don't know how fermentation works."

"Yu, forget about the yogurt. I feel something."

Yurine's ears on the top of her head twitched as the wind blew hard, blowing out the candles outside the wagon. Yu lifted the food from the fire and approached Yurine.

"PHUEL'LA!"

Yurine's warning shot traveled through the forest and hit the ground, lifting the soil into the air.