The Abandoned Duchess Seems to Want a Peaceful Life - Chapter 32

Chapter 32: Harvest Festival Preparations and the Werewolf Rumor

The newly completed square of Enkar Village was ample in size.

In its center stood a circular flower bed built of stacked bricks, but this year there had not been time to plant any flowers.

At the very center of that was a pedestal, and the top of it was empty too. Someday, if some stone statue symbolizing the village were placed there, it would look splendid.

As we gradually prepare what we need, it will naturally become something that feels like Enkar Village, she thought.

"Lady Melfina! We gathered straw!"

"We brought sticks too!"

She turned around at the children's voices, each talking over the others.

Today was preparation day for the harvest festival. The adults had fieldwork, so mainly the children and women with free hands had offered to help.

Since they were at it, they laid straw on the central pedestal and began arranging this year's harvest on it.

What had grown especially well this year was, needless to say, the corn.

Besides that, they used pumpkins, carrots, onions and leeks, bundles of wheat with the ears still attached, baskets of apples and pears, and walnuts, acorns and wild grapes that the children had gathered in the forest for the decorations.

A few pine cones were mixed in, but that only added to the charm.

With so many pumpkins, it looked less like a harvest festival and more like a Halloween festival from her previous life, which was part of the charm as well.

The pumpkins of this world came in all sorts of colors and shapes: a dazzling, magnificent orange, but also yellow, white, green and more.

Some were flat and some were long and narrow, but on the whole they were bigger than the ones she remembered from her previous life, and heavy enough that Melfina had real trouble carrying one whole in her arms.

The children crossed sticks to make a cross and tied straw to it to make scarecrows. They were simple in construction: one had long hair made of straw, and the other was finished by putting a hat made of rolled-up cloth on its head.

In this world a hat symbolized a trade, and stood for the male god, while the one with long hair stood for the goddess of blessings.

This was less a matter of faith than a lively festival decoration.

For food, Melfina decided to charge stall fees and let those who wished to open stalls do so. Already several quite well-made stalls stood near the square, some homemade and some built by the village's carpenters.

Since nearly all the stalls were selling flatbread sandwiches and vegetable dishes, Melfina decided that, as the lord's treat and so as not to interfere with their business, she would prepare soup and ale.

After all, there were a great many pumpkins.

It had been Melfina who suggested growing pumpkins in order to reduce the potato plantings even slightly, but she had not quite expected so many that they would be piled up in the front yard of the lord's manor.

Pumpkins were left to ripen for several months after harvest, so there was no need to eat them right away, but it was simply too much for the lord's manor to consume.

So when she sold the corn, she had asked Alexis whether he might buy some pumpkins too. He had said any food was welcome and bought most of them. Still, since these were pumpkins she had asked to have grown, saying they were her favorite, Melfina herself ought to enjoy them properly.

She decided on two soups: a salted soup with pumpkin, onion and chicken, and a milk soup with beans and pumpkin.

This year there were hardly any people in the Enkar region with thin purses, but still not everyone had plenty to spare. She judged it better to have food that even such people could freely enjoy.

She also set out many of the wooden crates used for the corn harvest, turned upside down, to serve as benches so that people could sit and eat what they bought at the stalls.

"It would have been nice to invite a band, but this year it's out of the question."

"Let's all sing and dance together."

When Marie, who was braiding straw beside her, said this, she laughed and nodded.

Even though it was called a festival, it was a first attempt and not a large-scale affair. Candles could not be wasted, and since it was a dry season she did not want to light many fires.

Unlike in her previous life, this world was not an environment where one could stroll along night roads casually, so it was planned to start before noon and end by evening.

The harvest displayed on the stage would be distributed to the villagers who performed entertainments.

"Will the villages and settlements be doing some kind of entertainment?"

"You see, we're going to sing a song, all together."

Lena, who was braiding a straw flower decoration beside her, said it with a little excitement.

"How lovely. What will you sing?"

"'Autumn Melody,' and 'The Forest Band,' and 'The Corn Song'!"

"'The Corn Song'?"

"Autumn Melody" and "The Forest Band" were nursery songs widely known across the Francesca Kingdom. Both had lyrics celebrating the autumn harvest, so they suited a harvest festival, but "The Corn Song" was a title she was hearing for the first time.

"We all made it together. We want Lady Mel to listen to it."

"Oh my. I'm looking forward to it!"

Beyond Lena, who laughed shyly, the village women were also chatting as they worked with their hands. Something in their conversation suddenly caught her ear.

"That's right, they say you often see them around autumn, don't you?"

"How frightening... I'll have to warn the children again."

"What do you see?"

When she joined the conversation, the women looked startled for a moment, but then nodded as if they understood.

"Lady Melfina, you only came here this spring, so you wouldn't know. It's a monster. More people see it at this time of year."

"A monster? The ice monster of the north, Pluina? I thought that one appeared in lands closer to the sea."

"No, not one of the famous ones. It's a monster that lives deep in the Forest of Moltre."

"Oh... come to think of it, I have heard that monsters appear in the Forest of Moltre, which is why no road connects to the neighboring country."

The women nodded solemnly.

In this world there was basically no war, but in its place monsters appeared as enemies of humankind.

In the south, the fire monster Plamia.

In the east, the water monster Acqua.

In the west, the wind monster Fratus.

And in the north, the ice monster Pluina.

These four were the most famous monsters in the country, ones whose names even children knew.

These four monsters had attendants and appeared in specific regions at fixed intervals. If left alone they caused enormous damage, but since the damage and the cycles were fairly predictable, they were treated much like natural disasters in her previous life, such as typhoons in autumn, torrential rain or heavy snowfalls.

In the game, depending on which capture target she chose, Saint Maria had a route in which she fought one of these.

Pluina appears on the plains near the sea even within the north, so the Enkar region is unlikely to have any dealings with it.

Even when a monster was defeated, a completely new one appeared the following year, so the usual practice was to send the knights when the time came and weaken its power to reduce the damage.

In the north, the House of Oldrand should be subduing it every year.

Countermeasures against Plamia were the duty of Melfina's family home, the House of Crawford, but it was comparatively easier to handle than the monsters of other regions. The places where the monster appeared were fixed, so merely having water mages flood that land in summer was enough to suppress its occurrence.

If this was not done properly, it would develop into a large-scale fire. Knowing this, the House of Crawford and the nobles governing the surrounding lands took thorough precautions, and as far as Melfina remembered, there had never been any serious damage.

Still, even if flooding was all it took, flooding part of one's territory was a loss, and the payments to the mages were considerable. Fortunately, the south governed by the House of Crawford was a great granary region, so there should be no trouble with funds.

After all, with its fertile soil and the blessings of the sun, wheat grew abundantly, and most of the territory was land suitable for both wheat farming and livestock.

Perhaps because of this origin, its knights were not very strong, and it was in a somewhat weak position when tensions rose with the neighboring country.

Though there was almost no chance of a real war, military strength was still better to have as a deterrent in negotiations.

"What sort of monster is the one in the Forest of Moltre?"

The women exchanged glances, hesitating, and eventually one of them said timidly, lowering her voice.

"It's a werewolf."

"A werewolf... a wolf that disguises itself as a human?"

In the image from her previous life, it was a human who turned into a wolf under the full moon, but in this world a werewolf seemed to be a man-eating wolf that mingled with human settlements.

According to the women, if you got lost in the forest and met a stranger, it might be a wolf in human form, so in that case you were to pretend not to notice and say that tonight your home was holding a feast and many people were gathering.

Then the stranger would offer to see you back to the village.

Werewolves had a habit of mingling with human groups to hunt prey efficiently, so rather than eating one person lost in the forest, they apparently chose places where many people gathered.

And once they reached the village, the one who had guided them would shout in a loud voice, "We have a guest, please give him a feast!"

This was a code meaning that someone suspected of being a werewolf had appeared. When they heard those words, the neighbors gathered with liquor and flattered the werewolf, making him drink to his heart's content.

When the werewolf got drunk and fell asleep, they would tie him up and prick him with a silver needle, and if he was burned, that was proof of a werewolf, and he would be put down.

Silver supposedly rarely causes allergies, and even if there were allergic symptoms, a sudden dramatic reaction should be extremely rare. If all those conditions were in place, there seemed to be no room for doubt.

If it were only a kindly person with a silver allergy, that would be a pity, though...

And when people tried to build a road through the forest, werewolves would apparently slip in among the laborers and engineers and eat the people one after another.

The Luxen Kingdom on the far side of the forest was in the same situation. They had tried to build a trade route time and again and failed each time, so at present the two countries traded by sea route.

A wolf disguising itself as a human to blend in and attack people, how very fantasy, she thought.

It was the first time in a while that she felt she was truly in an otome game world.

"Werewolves especially like the flesh of children, so when we were little, the adults drilled it into us before we went into the forest. If we ever met a stranger in the forest, we must always say, 'Tonight my home is having a feast. Everyone in the village will be gathering.'"

"I see. Have you ever actually encountered one?"

When she asked, the women giggled.

"Not at all, for our part. We were just told to be careful because they might come out in autumn."

"In other seasons they live deep in the forest where children never get to, so unless you're a hunter or a laborer building a road, I don't think you would ever see one."

Those words came as a relief.

Melfina had learned that monsters were close to natural disasters.

The thought of one calmly appearing in a village was nothing short of a nightmare.