Sugar Apple Fairytale - Volume 7 - Chapter 6.1

Chapter 6

SPINDLES AND SILVER THREAD

“Anne, where did you hear about exactly how long Lulu has left to live? I was trying to keep that under wraps. So was Lulu. Today was the first time I said anything about it, and I only mentioned it once. Just that one time. Were you eavesdropping?”

She had been completely exposed. There was nothing she could do but admit it.

“I’m sorry. I overheard you. I was worried about Lulu’s condition. I wanted to know the truth.”

Hugh heaved a sigh, then turned away from Anne and looked out the window.

“You and?”

“Me and Challe.”

“Well, I suppose I don’t have to worry about Challe. He won’t say anything he shouldn’t. You either, Anne. And at this point, it’s all right for you to talk about the time that Lulu has left. But you must forget everything else you saw in that room.”

Anne understood that “everything else” referred to the situation between Hugh and the queen.

“I understand… But, Hugh, aren’t you taking a risk? If someone found out how things really are…”

That was what she was worried about. If the Silver Sugar Viscount was developing an intimate personal friendship with the queen, that would surely be seen as an act of betrayal toward His Majesty, a major crime that could end in death for both Hugh and the queen. And it wouldn’t be a simple beheading. It would be the punishment given to the most wicked criminals in the Kingdom of Highland—they would be burned at the stake.

In Highland, where there was a custom of returning the body to the earth, burning someone alive, until even their corpse was reduced to ash and had disappeared from the world, was the most serious punishment there was.

“You’ve misunderstood. Don’t worry.”

The light of the setting sun hit Hugh’s face, etching complex shadows into his features.

“The queen was the daughter of the Cabot family, a branch of the Millsland family. I visited the Cabot household frequently as a crafter for the Mercury Workshop, that’s all. His Majesty knows that. I had friendly chats with her while I was there. But ultimately, I was a candy crafter, and she was a noblewoman. The difference in our stations was clear, you see? She has always considered me a friend, but I could never take that step, not in my mind anyway.”

Before Hugh became Silver Sugar Viscount, he’d apparently had a reputation among the aristocracy as a skilled candy crafter with the Mercury Workshop. He’d also had regular dealings with Lord Alburn, for whom Anne had made sugar candy before.

“‘A friend.’” The queen had used the same words, and Anne wondered if she was just imagining that there was something hidden in them.

At the very least, before she was married, the queen must have harbored some kind of feelings for Hugh. And how had Hugh felt? The reason Anne was thinking so much about it was that she was always calling Challe her friend while yearning for something more.

“It would be awful if someone misunderstood, so I won’t tell anyone.”

“Please don’t. Now you go on up, too, and talk to the other candy crafters. Also, tell everyone this: Lulu will resume teaching you starting tomorrow. Come to the Cocoon Tower at the same time you did today.”

“In her condition?!”

“She has no choice. She must do as she is ordered.”

Hugh said that, then turned his gaze back toward the window. His expression revealed a melancholy that was not typical of him.

After a few moments of silence, Hugh dug through his pocket as if he had suddenly remembered something. “I almost forgot,” he said. “Lulu has homework for you five. ‘How would you go about shaping silver sugar dough into something using a different method than you ever have before? Think about it,’ she said. So look at this, and think it over. Take it.”

He presented Anne with a slender rod about half as long as his arm.

At one end of the rod, a small stone weight was attached to the tip. A wooden disk was affixed to it about one finger length from the weight, the rod passing through the disk’s center.

“A spindle?”

It was a tool used for spinning cotton or wool into thread. As soon as Anne took it, Hugh waved her away.

“Go.”

As she rushed up the stairs, Anne couldn’t suppress the feelings that were swelling up inside her chest.

This is too much.

It was overwhelming to think that a woman who had been enslaved for five hundred whole years was just going to vanish.

Even if she wasn’t going to get any recompense for the five hundred years that had been taken from her, they—the candy crafters who were learning from her—needed to do something for her. If they didn’t, humanity as a whole would become an ugly, wretched mass in Lulu’s eyes.

And on top of all that, homework…

She didn’t understand what to do with the spindle.

When she arrived in front of the big room that the candy crafters used as both dining hall and living room, she heard Elliott’s voice coming from behind the door.

“One or two months?!”

“Yes. That’s why I thought we ought to get Lulu to make and eat some sugar candy. If she did that, her life would lengthen.”

“But fairies’ lives cannot be so easily extended. Even if it was sugar candy made by the Silver Sugar Viscount, I’ve heard that it wouldn’t lengthen a fairy’s life more than a few months,” Killean said with composure.

Then she heard Keith’s frantic voice.

“The Silver Sugar Viscount only makes normal sugar candy, right? But Lulu said it herself. The sugar candy sculpture that she showed us was something even stronger, made using the fairies’ best techniques. If the candy was made using those methods, it might lengthen her life even more. Surely it would give her years instead of months.”

“But the Silver Sugar Viscount can’t make sugar candy for anyone other than His Majesty the King.”

“Couldn’t we make it? In the coming days, while we’re studying under Lulu, we could make something for her.”

Stella’s apathetic voice interrupted Keith’s impassioned speech. “Am I included in this ‘we’ you’re talking about?” he asked.

“Not confident enough, Stella?” Keith replied provocatively.

“What?”

“If we can’t adequately master the skills we’re taught, we won’t be able to make anything good. Lulu’s recovery will tell us whether we’ve made good candy or not. There can be no clearer assessment than that, can there? Are you afraid of the results coming to light?”

“I never said I wasn’t confident. What’s with you, Keith? You’ve got some attitude.”

“Sorry, but I thought this was a good opportunity. If you’re going to take such a defiant stance, you’ll lose your chance to grow as a candy crafter,” Keith asserted decisively.

Elliott whistled at him lightheartedly. “What’s happened to you, Keith? You’ve turned into a real man all of a sudden.”

“Please don’t tease me.”

“Fine. Anyway, the question is whether or not Lulu will recover enough to be able to teach us, right? For the time being, how about we make some normal sugar candy and get her to eat that? She’d probably get at least a little bit better. Also, the Silver Sugar Viscount has already learned Lulu’s techniques, hasn’t he? That raises the question of whether we can learn from him.”

Killean answered Elliott’s questions thoughtfully. “I talked to the Viscount yesterday, but it sounds like it will be difficult for us to learn from him. The Viscount has learned the techniques from Lulu. But they’re apparently rather tricky. The Viscount is more or less able to make candy with them. But even he is slow at it and still makes mistakes. He told me that he is not proficient enough to teach the skills himself. Lulu is the only one who can teach us.”

“I guess we’re stuck learning from her, then, huh? But with Lulu in that condition…” Keith groaned.

“She’s going to start teaching us again tomorrow. Hugh…the Silver Sugar Viscount said so.”

Anne answered him as she opened the door and stepped into the room. Everyone turned to her simultaneously. Elliott, who was sitting cross-legged in front of the hearth, frowned when he heard her report.

“In that state?” he asked. “Is she really in teaching shape?”

Anne shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “But the Viscount said that she has to do as she’s ordered… But I do want to learn the techniques that Lulu knows—I really want to learn them. And I want to make sugar candy for Lulu. After all, she’s done nothing but make candy for humans for so long. So if she’ll teach me, I’ll learn from her and make candy for her. I’ll do it alone if I have to. Also, we have homework from Lulu.”

The first person to react to the word homework was Stella. He raised an eyebrow with a twitch and looked at Anne.

“What do you mean, ‘homework’?” Stella asked.

“She told us to look at this tool and think about this question: ‘How would you go about shaping silver sugar dough into something using a different method than you ever have before?’”

Anne held up the spindle to show them, and the crafters all made the same quizzical expression. Spinning cotton and wool into thread was women’s work, so the men were not familiar with the tool.

“It’s a spindle. You use it to spin cotton and wool and stuff into thread.”

Keith cocked his head. “We’re to look at this and think? I wonder if you can use it in place of spatulas and knives?”

“Isn’t that something you would use to form the core of a candy sculpture? The shape looks like it would be easy to pull back out,” Stella said dismissively.

Elliott stroked his chin. “It’s not that simple a solution, I’m sure.”

Killean wiped his monocle and put it back on, then stared intensely at the spindle. “Maybe you don’t use the thing itself, maybe the word spindle is a hint…”

Anne looked down at the spindle in her hand.

She didn’t know. Even if the word was a hint, she couldn’t even begin to understand what it was suggesting.

Humans could not easily grasp techniques that fairies had spent hundreds of years mastering. She had a feeling that Lulu was making sure they all appreciated that fact.

That night, Challe did not come back to the room. But no tears came. Before Anne got swept away in such emotions, there was something she had to do.

If Lulu was going to teach them even when she was so weak, then Anne and the others needed to take in everything she had to teach them without missing the tiniest detail. And if it was possible for them to make the highest-quality sugar candy, then she felt that they ought to, for Lulu’s sake.

Everything will work out great.

She wanted to believe that.

What worried her was Mithril. He wasn’t in the room. He had left a note on the bed that said, I’m stepping out for a bit. Don’t worry! But she was anxious about where he was and what he was doing there.

He didn’t come back, no matter how long she waited, so Anne slipped out of bed in the middle of the night, intending to look for Mithril. She walked all around the inside of the castle keep, and once she confirmed that he wasn’t there, she went outside. She followed the castle wall all the way around. After that, she thought about going to look in some other places, but she was relying on the dim light of a candle and feared that she would get lost in the labyrinthine castle.

Even though she was wearing a stole on top of her nightgown, the night air was still chilly. Her fingertips and toes were frozen, and she was ready to give up and go quietly back to bed.

“Mithril Lid Pod…where could you have gone…?”

When Anne stepped into the hallway of the castle keep, she saw a human figure. She stopped and held the candle aloft, revealing a man in a blue jacket standing at the back door of the keep with his back to her. He was looking up at the Cocoon Tower from the doorway.

Anne had seen him before. It was Eddie, the queen’s attendant. The light of the first-quarter moon cast his faint shadow onto the stone walkway. Illuminated by the cheerful moonlight, he somehow looked terribly lonesome.

“Out for a walk again tonight, Mr. Eddie?”

When she approached him quietly and spoke to him, Eddie turned around with a sad smile on his face. Anne curtsied and greeted him once more.

“That’s right, out for a walk. I wasn’t planning to, but then I heard that the silver sugar fairy has only one or two months left to live. What a shock… I ended up here. I suppose the Silver Sugar Viscount must have known about this, and that’s why he proposed that we should train her successors four months back. Do the candy crafters know that the silver sugar fairy’s life is coming to an end?”

“Yes, we learned about it today.”

The flame of the candle she was holding flickered in the breeze that blew past them.

“What kind of person is the silver sugar fairy, Miss Halford?” Eddie asked, turning back to look at the Cocoon Tower.

“What kind of person? Well, let me see… She’s a splendid candy crafter.”

“‘Splendid,’ huh…? Generation after generation of queens have been responsible for the silver sugar fairies. Other people have nothing to do with them ordinarily. Even I’ve only met her once. It was fifteen years ago, when she was called on to make a piece of candy. The royal family needed some good fortune when the Chamber Rebellion happened, you see. It was Downing’s suggestion.”

The eyes of the queen’s attendant were incredibly clear. They had a sincere glint to them, as if the man was trying not to overlook anything important. That quality made them all the more beautiful. In his expression, Anne sensed a youthful strength.

“Why did they go to the silver sugar fairy and not the Silver Sugar Viscount?” Anne asked. “They had a Silver Sugar Viscount in those days, too, right? Back then, Master Powell was the Viscount. Let’s see, that was probably about five years after he assumed the office.”

“The candy that the silver sugar fairy made with the fairies’ techniques was more beautiful than anything that the Viscount could make himself. The fairies’ candy had greater potential to bring good fortune. It’s what allowed the royal family to emerge victorious. The Chambers were known for their outstanding military prowess, you see.”

“Lulu—the silver sugar fairy—told me something. She said that fairies have a keener intuition for sugar candy than humans do. That’s why they’re better suited for crafting sugar candy.”

“But it’s so unfortunate. To think, that silver sugar fairy won’t be with us anymore.”

“But if we teach her techniques to other fairy candy crafters…”

“Are there other fairy candy crafters?”

“There aren’t. But Lulu said that if we get lots of fairies involved in the work of candy crafting, just like humans, then there’s a possibility that some fairies with the right talents will stand out from the rest. If lots of fairies work as crafting apprentices in the workshops just like humans do, surely that will produce other silver sugar fairies on Lulu’s level.”

When Eddie heard that, his eyes widened a little. “That’s an interesting idea,” he said. “Fairies apprenticing at workshops, huh? But fairies are all supposed to be slaves.”

“Was that a mandate established by a previous ruler a long time ago? I’ve always thought it was strange.”

As long as Anne had been aware of the world, fairies had been hunted, had their wings torn from them, and been made into slaves. When she asked the adults around her how long things had been like that, they could only say that it had been that way since many, many years ago.

Fairies were slaves. But who had decided things would be that way and when? Why did most people accept this arrangement as the natural order of things, as Stella did? She couldn’t help but wonder.

“No. It wasn’t a decision made by the state. Fairies are simply handled the way they are out of custom.”

“So it’s not a rule?”

“It’s a custom. But those can be even more bothersome than laws sometimes. The king can’t simply change things by handing down an order.”

“So magnificent sugar candy is going to disappear from the world because humans are set in their ways…?”

Even though it had no justification, humankind was tied down by this custom. Moreover, the fairies were oppressed by it. In a way, the custom was like a plague—intangible yet dreadful in its effects.

“Probably, yes. And that, too, is unfortunate. That the light of five hundred years of mastery will just…vanish.”

After a brief, hesitant silence, Eddie suddenly let out a long yawn.

“I’m tired. I think I’ll go back. You should get some sleep, too, Miss Halford.”

Eddie slowly turned his back on her and walked away. He looked really worn out.

The following morning, Anne headed for the workspace in the Cocoon Tower along with the other candy crafters.

Lulu was already there, waiting in the workroom, which was flooded with morning light. She was sitting comfortably in a chair in the corner with her legs crossed, and she greeted the crafters as they came up the stairs.

“Good morning, everyone.”

Challe was standing next to Lulu, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, wearing a sullen expression. Seeing him like that, Anne felt a little jolt of pain shoot through her chest. Challe must have spent the previous night with Lulu.

If Challe has become Lulu’s lover, I will make a piece of sugar candy to extend Lulu’s life.

Anne felt heartbroken, but she encouraged herself with that thought and stood up straight.

“We’ll get started immediately. You now understand why the colors on the sugar candy piece that I showed you were more vivid than on a normal candy sculpture, right? That was the first lesson. Now for the second. Let me teach you how I put it together, using a method I’m sure you’ve never encountered. I gave you homework yesterday. Did any of you get any ideas when you were looking at that spindle?”

Lulu pulled out a spindle and looked around at each of the candy crafters.

No one could answer her, including Anne. Ultimately, none of the five of them had hit upon anything.

The silence seemed like a harsh rebuke from Lulu. Stella was chewing on his lip a little, looking frustrated.

After a little while, Lulu finally spoke. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. “I’d be embarrassed if you all grasped in a single night a skill that took fairies hundreds of years to develop.”

Lulu skillfully twirled the spindle around in her palm. “We’ll use this to shape the sugar candy. Spreading, cutting, and twisting aren’t the only methods for assembling sugar candy sculptures.”

Lulu signaled to Challe with her eyes. Then he handed Lulu a piece of kneaded sugar dough about the size of her palm that was sitting on one of the workbenches. Lulu stretched it into a long snake. She folded it in half, stretched it out long again, and folded it in half again.

As she repeated those steps, several thin, glimmering streaks began to appear in the silver sugar dough.

“After it was boiled out of the sugar apples and dried, this silver sugar was milled five times.”

“Five times?!” Killean shouted hysterically.

“That’s on the low end,” Lulu said, as if it were perfectly normal. “When I was still full of energy, I milled silver sugar as many as ten times. When you mill it many times over, the texture of the silver sugar changes. I’m sure you all noticed yesterday that the feel of this silver sugar is different.”

As she talked, Lulu kept on folding and stretching, folding and stretching the silver sugar dough, and after a little while, she called to Challe again. He carried over a small jar, and Lulu dipped her fingers into the liquid inside.

“This is oil pressed from sugar apple seeds.”

With fingers coated in a thin film of oil, Lulu pulled out one end of the silver sugar dough, which was streaked with fine stripes of luster, and twisted it with little tugs like she was making rope.

Once that piece was as thin as string, she wound it around and around the shaft of the spindle.

She stood up slowly and suspended the spindle from the thread of silver sugar.

Then she gently gave the spindle a twist.

“Ah!” Anne exclaimed quietly, gasping.

The spindle, which had a weight attached to it, spun around and around in the air. With every rotation, the thread that was being pulled from the lump of sugar dough in Lulu’s other hand wound around the shaft. As the thread was pulled, the silver sugar stretched smoothly into more thread, which continued winding around the shaft.

Silver sugar thread was being drawn from the lump of sugar dough.

The candy crafters stared at this in wonder. No one moved, as though they were enchanted.

“So this is how fairies make silver sugar candy…”

As if he was feeling a chill, Stella hugged his shoulders with both arms and leaned back against the wall. The spectacle seemed to have shocked him.

Smoothly, the silvery thread streamed through the gap between Lulu’s fingers. It was a magical, awe-inspiring sight. But they probably would have been less surprised if it actually were magic.

The silver sugar was turning into real thread, right from Lulu’s fingertips, and winding itself on the spindle. This was an unmistakable show of her expertise. This was a technique the fairies had devised.

It was something humankind had not achieved even after five hundred years of making sugar candy.

Anne was astonished by the astoundingly special technique.

All night, some of the best candy crafters in the kingdom had puzzled over the spindle, yet they hadn’t even been able to imagine using it like this.

Amazing.

Emma kneading silver sugar dough. The movement of the knives as Emma used them. The movement of her fingers. Her use of color. When Anne first began to appreciate how difficult it all was, she had stared at her mother’s fingers and felt the same sort of wonder she was experiencing now.

Amazing. Truly amazing!

She was astonished, and inspired, and most of all—