We followed the farmer woman, Greta, into her house.
A private home built in an ordinary countryside like this was, more often than not, hard to call well-made to begin with, but this house was severe even by those standards.
The roof had half-collapsed, revealing the sky, and the few wooden pillars supporting the house were rotting away.
If the walls had at least been intact, it might have been somewhat livable, but seeing how one corner had cracked and crumbled, it seemed she had lived here without maintaining it for quite some time.
“I’m sorry the house is in such a state. I haven’t been repairing it lately…”
“Ah, no! It’s all right!”
Bella said with a smile, but when we had first stepped inside, even she had clearly worn an expression that questioned whether this was really a place where people lived.
Still, fortunately, there was at least a table, so though it was a little cramped, we sat around it.
There were only three chairs, though, so some of us had to bring over empty barrels lying nearby and sit on those.
“So, what was it you wanted to tell us?”
At Heiken’s question, Greta silently clasped her hands together, closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and spoke.
“Y-you are… searching for the witch, aren’t you…?”
“Yes.”
“May I ask… for what reason…?”
At that question, a brief silence fell, and then Draut answered.
“Assuming the witch truly exists… if that witch has had even the slightest hand in wicked deeds, then she ought to be subjugated.”
“But she is… a witch. Are you not… frightened…?”
This time, Bella answered.
“Even so, this is also for the sake of many people. I’m certain the Lord would wish it as well.”
At those words, Greta lowered her head once more, clasped her hands, closed her eyes in prayer, and murmured softly, “Thank you.”
When she opened her eyes again, there were faint tears in them, but she paid them no heed and began her story.
“That witch appeared… ten years ago. Back then, unlike now, there had been poor harvests for years, and many people starved to death.”
Greta quietly looked up at the sky through the hole in the ceiling as she continued.
“My husband, and both my first and second children, all passed away around that time. Even now, I cannot forget how they called for me so desperately as they died…”
Perhaps because recalling the past had overwhelmed her, the tears gathered in her eyes soon ran in a single stream down her cheek.
“All that remained was my third child, still a nursing infant. And the witch appeared around then.”
A young girl with long brown hair, wearing a robe so long it dragged along the ground, and a bizarre-looking hat—young enough that one would hesitate to believe she had even just come of age.
That was how Greta described the witch’s appearance.
“She did not look very powerful, but that witch possessed an indescribable, immense… immense power.”
The story moved on to what had happened when the witch first appeared.
With a single gesture, pillars made of soil shot up from the wide fields, and before anyone understood what was happening, all the fields had been plowed over.
And when the witch used her power, the flow of the river that had so often caused floods in the village every summer was twisted aside, and from the following year onward, the floods vanished.
She said that afterward, the land became so fertile that merely scattering seeds was enough for them to grow well on their own—fertile was not even enough to describe it.
“Back then, life was good. I worked with my third child on my back, but even so, I had hope for the future. But all of that… ended two years ago.”
Greta’s expression changed in an instant, becoming even darker than the haggard look she had shown outside earlier.
It was an expression closer to despair than sorrow.
“I heard the witch demanded that a child be offered every three years. But I thought that had nothing… to do with me.”
The two children offered until then had apparently been, respectively, a child who had happened to lose both parents, and a vagrant child no one knew the origins of.
But this time, there had been no such convenient sacrifice.
At the village meeting, the decision had been made to choose Greta’s child, as she had little interaction with those around her.
Greta said through tears that she had resisted desperately, but in the end, she could not protect her child.
“Since then, the people of the village have brought me food, they say, but what use is any of that…? If he had simply died, I could at least have buried him in my heart…”
When her story ended, a melancholy hung in the house, accompanied by the sound of quiet sobbing.
We had come lightly, hoping to find a clue that would lead to the witch, only to hear the tragedy of a family’s ruin, so it was only natural.
At first, I had wondered if perhaps it might be a fabricated story, but seeing the emotion that poured out of her, it was not something that could be faked.
The cold silence that had hung there for a while was broken by words that burst out without reading the room.
“…A regrettable matter. In that case, do you happen to know where that witch lives?”
“Heiken, have some tact…!”
It was certainly a remark lacking in tact, but what mattered was not whether the witch existed, but where she was.
After all, we had come to hear information, not a story.
Greta, who had been endlessly shedding tears, wiped them away with her hand and said,
“No, it’s all right… But I do not know for certain either. Only, whenever she left the village, she always vanished into the forest in the direction of the setting sun.”
The direction of the setting sun—in other words, the broad forest stretching west of this village.
The trees grew so densely that the inside was almost nothing but shade, so it could indeed be called the perfect place to hide a dwelling.
Greta, who had seemed to have barely calmed down, began to weep again as her emotions burst forth once more while she spoke, and she pleaded with us.
“I have nothing I can give you. But please, please… At least help me learn whether my son is dead or alive… I beg you, I beg you…”
◇
Bella, Heiken, and Draut were in the middle of investigating anyway, so they accepted her request.
I declined Bella’s invitation to join them.
Because I had something on my mind.
Evening, with still a little time left before sleep.
For some reason, Cassian came to my room.
No sooner had Cassian entered than Rutina, who had been playing with Iliana, slipped right into the backpack.
At this point, it seemed she had reached the level of openly teasing him.
Iliana, dissatisfied that their playing had been suddenly cut off, sat on the bed with a sullen face.
“What is it?”
“We won’t be able to sleep until late today anyway.”
A remark that came out of nowhere.
Of course, he couldn’t mean he wanted to sleep together like when he was little.
I wondered if there was some meaning behind it and racked my brain, but nothing came to mind.
“What are you talking about?”
“Hm? Are we going to go do it soon? I’d be happy if we finish early.”
“I’m asking what you’re talking about.”
“What else? That witch. We’re going to catch her, aren’t we?”
Only then did I realize what Cassian had been trying to say.
In other words, now that he knew there was a witch and had a rough idea of where she was, he seemed to have assumed we would go catch her tonight.
Whenever something like this happened, I had often treated it as a good opportunity, dragged Cassian along, and made him fight.
On top of that, it seemed he thought I had refused their offer to cooperate because I intended to move separately and deal with her myself.
However.
“No, I have no intention of doing that.”
I had no intention of going to catch that witch.
Why should I barge into the home of someone living perfectly well and dispose of them?
I did rather like justified private sanctions, but that did not mean I was a murderer who barged in and killed people indiscriminately.
“…Huh? Why?”
“What do you mean, why? I don’t have a hobby of invading and attacking the homes of perfectly normal people.”
“Uh, but she’s a bad guy, isn’t she?”
“What part of her is bad?”
When I asked that in return, Cassian became visibly flustered.
His reaction looked as if he had been certain I would go deal with that witch at any moment.
“What are you talking about? You saw that lady’s face earlier, didn’t you? She just took her child away as she pleased…”
“…It’s unfortunate even to me, but that’s something like a contract.”
“…A contract?”
“If that witch hadn’t been there, dozens more would have starved to death.”
I disliked weighing lives by numbers, but even in my eyes, the benefit the witch had given this village was clearly greater than the value of three children.
From the villagers’ perspective, if there had been no witch, even ten people might have starved to death in a year.
In exchange for hunger disappearing, one person every three years was a price they could bear. If that one person was someone else’s child and not their own family, they would not even need to think about it.
That was why I could not simply interfere without thought.
The fellow who poisoned that river had unilaterally deceived the villagers and secretly used them as what amounted to experimental subjects, so I could break his head without hesitation.
If that witch had likewise been someone who simply abducted children from the village, of course I would have gone to deal with her without a second thought.
But in a case like this, even if something weighed on my mind, it was difficult to interfere.
“Let’s say I take down the witch. Then, before long, a poor harvest will come again.”
That was the conclusion I had reached after secretly scooping up some soil from the edge of a field on the way back and examining it.
The village’s soil maintained a level of fertility that could not be explained naturally.
Especially considering that this was the end of the farming season.
The successive abundant harvests of the past several years were clearly due to artificial intervention, and it was obvious what would happen if that intervention disappeared.
Even if I had no intention of taking her down, there was a high chance that simply seeking her out would cause trouble.
Ever since the great subjugation of the past, witches had become extremely sensitive about having their dwellings discovered.
If, because of that, she hid herself deeper inside or cut off contact with the outside world, it would be no different from taking her down.
“Many people will starve to death again. …Can you bear that?”
If that happened, he would have to endure the fact that many people were suffering again because of him.
Even if he tried to turn his eyes away, the results caused by his actions would remain an unchangeable truth.
One might say that was how things had originally been, but for the people here, what could be called a long span of time had already passed.
If it had never existed from the beginning, it would not be a major problem, but once something already possessed was taken away, the story changed.
But Cassian seemed completely unconvinced, and his words began to spill out in a gradually more heated tone.
“…Master, don’t you feel anything?”
“…About what?”
“When that lady was crying and screaming like that, did you not feel anything at all?!”
It was not as if I felt nothing.
I knew better than anyone the pain of someone you poured love into leaving your arms forever.
If it had been right after I had lost my first disciple, I might even have shed tears along with her.
So.
“…In that case, try doing it on your own. I’ll wait for you.”