Chapter 14
Chapter 14
When she had taken the lost boy back to the village, she had held his hand without hesitation. She remembered it had been a very small and delicate hand back then. But now it was an adult hand large enough to cover all of Candice’s hand.
She had held the small hands of humans a few times besides Luke, but it was her first time with a robust grown man. At that unfamiliar difference, Candice felt uneasy for no reason.
Was this unease because it was bad? Or was it simply because it was unfamiliar? It was so strange that she couldn’t make a judgment.
* * *
In the dim evening, Creven, the owner of the village’s only sweets shop, let out an irritable sigh inside the empty store.
Today, everything got on his nerves. The wooden chair that wouldn’t stop making creaking noises for a single moment. The stains on the wall that he didn’t know how long they had been there. The glass window left neglected because they still hadn’t caught whatever brat had broken it and run. Everything was aggravating.
It had been quite a long time since the once-thriving shop had fallen into such a ruined state. At first, he hadn’t done repairs properly because he was reluctant to spend money, but now he couldn’t fix things because he had no money. It was because there were no customers.
“If this keeps up, I’ll really have to close down…”
Creven felt a sense of crisis. Not a single customer had come in the past week. Even the neighborhood kids who used to come with coin money to barely buy a single cookie had stopped coming altogether.
“The sweets at that shop are hard and tasteless!”
“Right. My mom’s carrot cake is way better!”
“Yuck. I’ve tried that too. But you’re right. The carrot cake is at least softer than that shop’s cookies.”
No customers came, but there were mocking voices passing by. They all cackled, saying he sold bread and cookies harder than pebbles.
When Creven, listening from inside the shop, couldn’t hold back and rushed out with a broom, they finally screamed and scattered.
“Damn it. Bratty kids who don’t know anything.”
Creven clicked his tongue, recalling what had happened during the day.
In truth, Creven’s sweets hadn’t received such harsh criticism from the beginning. His sweets had been recognized as the best taste in the village and were loved by customers. Until about ten years ago.
The reason the thriving shop had come to gather flies like this was because of his greed for greater profit. He reduced the sugar, and put in less and less butter and eggs.
“The taste somehow isn’t like before.”
Even when such talk came up one by one, he consistently ignored it, and in the end, it had reached this state.
Should he abandon the finicky village folk and try the business of directly supplying sweets to the lord? He tried to change the direction of his business, but that didn’t work either. The lord who supposedly liked sweets was very indifferent, perhaps due to wrong information.
If things kept going like this, the shop was in danger of going under.
“That can’t happen. Our shop is a traditional shop passed down from my grandfather’s time.”
Creven fell into worry about how to handle this crisis. As he sat thinking for a long while, the story his grandfather used to tell him in the old days suddenly came to mind.
The fantastical sweets that sold like hotcakes even when the price was raised tenfold!
Creven quickly ran to the warehouse. Thanks to not having opened it for a long time, the smell of dust stabbed his lungs the moment he opened the warehouse door. Creven frowned but went inside and searched for his grandfather’s journal.
His grandfather Dominic had been a person who wrote his journal in great detail. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that everything that had happened in the village during his lifetime was written down.
So surely, he must have written about those sweets as well. He placed a lamp beside him and began examining the piled-up journals one by one.
Two hours of painful time passed, flipping through papers that smelled of mold from being left in a damp and dark place. He finally found it.
“Yes. This is it!”
His hand, which had been roughly flipping through the papers, stopped on a certain page. The wondrous taste that witch had created! Cookies, chocolate, biscuits! The secrets to making all those sweets were contained in the witch’s secret recipe book.
How wonderful it would have been if they had succeeded in getting their hands on that book before chasing the witch into the Black Forest! If so, I would have become a rich man rivaling the lord by now. Reading through Dominic’s journal filled with regret and lingering attachment, Creven’s scruffy mustache twitched upward.
This was it. The witch’s secret recipe book. If he could make the witch’s sweets that had sold like hotcakes even at ten times the price, winning back the hearts of the customers who had turned away would be nothing.
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