The Genius Girl of the Rural Village
While Asty, newly aware of her status as the Saintess, was busy airing her grievances to a goddess who refused to answer, a very different kind of discontent was boiling over inside Montpellier’s Spinners’ Guild.
“So that water frame thing—or whatever the hell it’s called—is real? It actually works?”
“We can’t just sit here! The guild has to take action immediately!”
“We still don’t know for certain! Stop fretting already!”
The reason was obvious enough.
The rumors Asty had carefully seeded about the water frame had finally reached their ears.
And the artisan guilds of this era were exclusive, closed-off interest groups to the core—cliques of hidebound traditionalists whose entire purpose was market monopoly and the prevention of technological leakage. They had not a single reason to welcome a water frame.
Once a semi-automatic machine that spun thread entered commercial use, every spinner in the city would be out on the street.
How were they supposed to compete with a device that produced higher-quality yarn faster than any human hand ever could?
In an age when every industry still ran on pure manual labor, the water frame was less a new technology than a natural disaster—one that would obliterate both the pride and the livelihoods of craftsmen who had devoted their entire lives to a single craft.
And of the two, the latter usually mattered more.
Unlike the modern world, where governments at least pretended to care about the unemployed, the Middle Ages offered no relief programs of any kind. Lose your job and you plummeted straight into serfdom—or failed even at that and ended your days as a vagrant.
The moment I’m out of work, it’s over…!
What they felt, therefore, was closer to raw terror than mere jealousy. Even if only half the rumors about the water frame’s performance were true, their lives were finished.
The only reason the threatened craftsmen had not yet moved was that the water frame still existed solely as hearsay. A stubborn refusal to believe such a thing could be real, combined with the pride that would not let them be swayed by baseless gossip, had kept them from acting.
“E-emergency! Absolute emergency! A peddler from the Lodève circuit just bought up a massive amount of paper! Nails and tools too!”
“What?”
The problem was that Montpellier was not a particularly large city.
True, it boasted a population of fifty thousand and ranked as the greatest city in France—but that was only by medieval standards. Compared to the early modern or modern eras, it was little more than a newborn infant.
In a place this small, no “wall of silence” could possibly hold. Word that a peddler who regularly worked the Lodève region had bulk-purchased goods only engineers would need reached the spinners’ ears almost at once.
It was not as though the Spinners’ Guild had planted spies in the paper mill or the ironmonger’s shop. The city was simply so compact that everyone knew everyone else within three degrees of separation; the news traveled naturally.
Even that three-degree buffer was a luxury reserved for a metropolis the size of Montpellier. Anywhere smaller, two degrees would have been plenty.
“Paper? Nails? Tools? Why would some peddler headed for a backwater village need that kind of stuff?”
“How should I know? Probably looking for new customers because the old ones weren’t profitable.”
“That’s nonsense. Bread prices are climbing and he’s abandoning the farmers? I’d sooner believe the rumor that some farmer’s daughter built a spinning machine.”
“…Wait a second. Who was it that started that damned rumor in the first place?”
The peculiar report snagged the attention of spinners already stretched taut with anxiety, and they immediately connected the suspicious peddler to the water-frame gossip.
All that remained was to confirm the link between the two.
With their livelihoods under threat, the Spinners’ Guild mobilized every connection they possessed and reverse-traced the rumor to its source. It did not take long. As already noted, everyone knew everyone within three degrees.
The fact that the peddler who had sold paper and tools to a remote village was the same bastard who had spread the water-frame story came to light almost instantly.
“Those sons of bitches…!”
Enraged beyond measure, Montpellier’s spinners put their final contingency plan into motion—the last resort for protecting their rice bowls.
The sun that had painted the sky in sunset hues had long since set; only the feeble light of the moon now touched the earth. In the deep, quiet night, while every villager slept, a band of men slipped silently toward the wooded hill behind the settlement.
They wore black robes to hide their identities. These were not the spinners whose livelihoods had been threatened—of course not—but city peddlers hired by them.
“All right. That’s the miserable little village those yarn-spinning old bastards told us about. No mistakes. We finish this clean.”
“Should we start by setting fires?”
“No. No need to draw unnecessary eyes. We check whether this water-frame thing actually exists, grab the girl, and drag her back. Or kill her. Either works.”
The peddlers who had previously visited the village of Bédarieux west of Montpellier had simply altered their return route and now struck at the Lodève region instead.
Any objection that peddlers had no business turning into assassins was misplaced.
The moment one left the thin network of safe points and roads that connected settlements, wild beasts and bandit packs closed in. To shuttle goods between villages and cities through such a world, self-defense was not optional—it was mandatory.
And if a man was good with a blade, he could also eliminate competitors for a tidy side income.
Thus an experienced peddler was little different from a half-outlaw who knew how to use a sword. Those who could not fight never lived long enough to gain experience; they simply died with steel in their guts.
And these men were excellent peddlers—experienced ones who could turn outlaw at a moment’s notice.
“Caravan master, even so… this feels wrong. We’re not bandits—”
“Shut it. One brat out of the way and we get a twenty-percent discount on cloth for a whole year. That’s free money.”
The caravan’s last shred of conscience evaporated the instant the Spinners’ Guild laid out the terms.
It was not even especially immoral, they told themselves. The livelihoods of two entire groups hung in the balance—a caravan on the brink of bankruptcy and a Spinners’ Guild staring at ruin. Nearly a hundred lives were at stake. A holy war, of sorts.
“This building?”
“Practically a ruin. Nothing here.”
“Keep your voice down.”
The only pity was that they were not the only ones fighting a holy war.
The instant the peddlers-turned-bandits crossed the village fence, a tiny spark blossomed among them.
“What the hell? Who lit a fire? You trying to get us caught?”
“I-it wasn’t me.”
“Not me either. Wait—this is—”
By the time they felt the wrongness, it was already too late.
The spark swelled in a heartbeat, swallowed three men at once, and reduced them to ash before they could even scream.
“What…?”
The flames died as suddenly as they had risen, spitting out the ash that had once been human.
“What in the—”
Blinded by the sudden flare, the remaining peddlers lost their night vision completely.
One of them collapsed mid-sentence.
A girl in a loose brown robe stepped into view, golden hair streaming behind her.
“Uninvited guests in the dead of night.”
Rebecca, the Lantern Bearer charged by the goddess with the protection of the Saintess, fixed the intruders with a murderous gaze. The sacred lantern in her hand cast a soft, steady glow.
“What business brings so many of you here at this late hour…?”
Her question was not born of genuine curiosity. The reason dozens of grown men would sneak into a sleeping village was obvious enough. She might have been mildly interested in the details of these ruffians who had dared approach the Saintess’s dwelling, but that could wait until she had beaten them half to death and left them in pieces.
“…Would you care to answer? It would be easier for everyone.”
Two more heads dropped.
The duty of a Lantern Bearer was to guard the spark of faith—to preserve hope on earth until the day the goddess returned.
Rebecca had trained in martial arts and the use of the lantern since early childhood, preparing for the day she would become the next Lantern Bearer. Half-outlaws who moonlighted as bandits one day and peddlers the next were nothing she could not erase with a single finger.
“I will not speak! Better to die than betray—”
Cornered, the caravan master began thrashing wildly with his sword. It was not some noble professional code that forbade him from revealing his employer’s name; the real power behind the Spinners’ Guild who had ordered Asty’s assassination happened to be his own father-in-law. Even if he died, he would at least spare his family—a tear-jerking display of sacrifice.
“We came from Montpellier! The Spinners’ Guild ordered us to confirm whether the water frame actually exists and to kidnap a girl named Asty!”
“Not kidnap—eliminate! I heard them say it with my own ears!”
The others saw things differently.
When the man who had shared their meals moments earlier had just been turned into a pile of ash, loyalty to an employer evaporated. Faced with the terror of death, the unbelievers eagerly sold out their leader, somehow convinced that doing so would let them live.
“Is that so.”
But the Lantern Bearer had never intended to spare them.
Rebecca casually kindled flame and incinerated every last intruder—leaving not a single man, not even a single handful of ash.
Mercy was not her role.