Chapter 69

The slow, low address made Isaac flinch. The secret that should never have been unearthed had finally come to light, and now his position was… Isaac’s shoulders sagged.

“I can’t say I feel much of anything about it, Your Highness.”

Kaiyan stared straight through him. Isaac kept his gaze lowered, but the silence soon grew suffocating. Hesitantly, he added, “However… I swore an oath concerning the new moon. Whether I like it or not, I will come to you whenever it arrives. Could you perhaps refrain from imprisoning me? Dungeons are terribly bad for one’s physical and mental health. If my health deteriorates, the freshness of my blood will suffer. Furthermore, keeping prisoners means a greater expenditure from the royal treasury, and…”

As Isaac piled on every practical argument he could muster, Kaiyan tilted his head. “You dislike captivity.”

“Who would ever enjoy it?”

“Is that the reason you chose to deceive me?”

“I apologize.”

Isaac immediately fell silent. So I’m heading straight to the dungeon after all. My free life ends here. I’ll spend the rest of my days languishing behind bars…

Kaiyan watched Isaac’s shoulders droop lower and lower, examining him from head to toe as if studying some bizarre, newfound species. Only after a long while did Isaac cautiously lift his gaze. Their eyes met.

“So this is your true face,” Kaiyan murmured. Only now was he properly seeing what the Witch of the New Moon looked like.

Feeling both awkward and strangely sheepish, Isaac merely dipped his head.

“Then what lies in your mind?” Kaiyan asked. “A witch’s nature, or a human’s?”

Isaac could not answer at once. He considered the question for a long moment before finally shaking his head. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know your own mind?”

“Do you happen to know exactly what you are, Lord Kaiyan?” Isaac replied.

Kaiyan paused, looking at Isaac without an immediate response. One eyebrow slightly arched. Isaac couldn’t discern if the prince was genuinely pondering the question, finding it impertinent, taking offense, or perhaps feeling a hint of amusement.

“What I know for certain is that I am the son of Gaia and Kalina, a guard at Blue Shadow Palace, and I wish to live quietly and peaceably wherever I may be. That is all,” Isaac stated, his voice remaining soft and steady.

Whether he was a witch or a human was a question he had long since abandoned. There had been a time when he often brooded over it, but eventually, he realized that neither he nor anyone else had the right or ability to decide, so he had simply stopped asking.

Kaiyan leaned back in his chair, studying Isaac. His narrowed eyes, the hand supporting his chin, and his languid posture were so still that he might have been carved from stone.

Then, suddenly, the prince spoke. “I see.” He stood up. “It makes no difference whether the creature guarding a house is a gatekeeper or a simple dog, as long as it performs its duty.”

Isaac was just beginning to think the comparison was less than flattering when Kaiyan drew his sword. His entire body tensed. The prince approached, raised the blade without ceremony, and swung.

Isaac closed his eyes and held his breath. A cold, slicing sensation brushed past his ankle. Several seconds later, he cautiously opened his eyes. The heavy iron shackle that had bound him lay severed in two.

He cut through solid iron… and didn’t leave so much as a thread-thin scratch on my skin. Isaac already knew both the sword and the hand wielding it were terrifying, yet the sight still made his skin crawl. He rubbed his ankle, which felt inexplicably chilled despite remaining perfectly intact.

Kaiyan cast him a brief, sharp glance that clearly meant follow me, then turned toward the door. Isaac hurried to his feet and rushed after him, only to stop abruptly at the threshold and look back. Three cats stared at him with eyes round and enormous from within their hanging cages.

“He could have just crammed all three of you into one,” Isaac muttered, lowering the cages and threading the curtain cord through their handles. Once slung over his shoulder, the combined weight dragged heavily against him. To make matters worse, all three cats began yowling at once, loudly insisting that they were wronged, furious, suffocating, and on the verge of death from pure indignity.

By the time Isaac stepped outside, Kaiyan was waiting in front of the door. His indifferent gaze swept over Isaac and then each cage in turn before he turned away without comment. Isaac flinched, then followed quietly. Only the cats continued their senseless wailing.

「Why did you wake up so late? Why did you take so long?」

「Do you have any idea how many times a day that handsome one sat beside your bed wearing the most murderous expression imaginable?」

「He said the most atrocious things to us too! He demanded to know whether we had licked your heart properly, and threatened to burn us witches in animal form alive if you didn’t wake up!」

「And that’s not all. He fed us crow meat for three whole days. Crow meat! Even goat would have been better. What in the world is crow meat?」

「That foul-smelling, dry, miserable flesh that no witch would touch unless she were wretchedly poor and destitute! And he served it to noble and elegant witches like us!」

「He did it deliberately!」

「Without question! It was deliberate!」

「Humiliating!」

「Release us at once! We’ll chew that insolent handsome one’s head to pieces!」

The three cats had been pouring out several days’ worth of accumulated resentment in a continuous torrent when Kaiyan, walking a few paces ahead, suddenly stopped and looked back. All three snapped their mouths shut. The silence descended so completely that Isaac could almost hear their eyes rolling.

“They seem delighted now that their owner is awake,” Kaiyan observed. “They spent the last three days curled up in misery.”

“These things?” Isaac looked at them in disbelief. These creatures, who make enough noise to be in two places at once?

The cats puffed out their cheeks and muttered only, 「Not our owner,」 and, 「He’s not our owner,」 their expressions swollen with resentment.

Isaac studied them, then turned to Kaiyan with utmost seriousness. “Lord Kaiyan, forgive my impertinence, but could you perhaps bestow these exceptionally useful and practical cages upon me?”

Hiss!

「Don’t! Do not be impertinent! And do not bestow them upon him either!」

The cats erupted into chaos inside the confinement of their cages.

Isaac felt a malicious grin tugging at his lips as the metal crates rattled sharply against his spine. He hurried to compose his expression into something more neutral the moment he caught Kaiyan’s gaze fixed upon him.

The prince studied him with an unreadable intensity. A heartbeat later, Isaac faltered under that weight.

For the briefest of instants, Kaiyan’s mouth seemed to loosen into the faintest shadow of a smile, or perhaps it was merely a trick of the light. His expressions were so incredibly subtle to begin with that when he turned away almost immediately, Isaac was left unable to be certain of what he had seen.

“I borrowed them temporarily from the High Priest, so I cannot give them to you,” the prince stated, his voice cool and detached. “I can, however, request that another set be fashioned for your use.”

“Thank you,” Isaac replied, keeping his head bowed. “I would be most grateful.”

Isaac hurried to follow in his wake. Behind them, the cats continued their frantic chanting, urging him not to accept a replacement and not to show gratitude, but their high-pitched protests were swallowed by the metallic clattering of the cages.

Once they emerged into the open air, Isaac realized with a start that the building he had assumed to be a grim dungeon was, in fact, an annex attached to the Blue Shadow Palace. Standing directly beside the palace proper, the secluded structure had been constructed to house visiting dignitaries, though it was rarely put to use. Only guests of exceptional rank were ever granted the privilege of staying there.

I was lying in a place reserved for the highest dignitaries? I should be relieved enough that it wasn’t a dungeon, but this is almost too great an honor for someone like me…

Isaac’s steps faltered as he followed the prince. A vast sheet of black mourning cloth hung heavily over the main entrance of Blue Shadow Palace. Beneath it lay a collection of white flowers, one for every individual who had perished without warning only days prior. An unfamiliar guard, clearly one of the replacements for the men who had fallen, now stood watch beside the memorial.

That’s right. That nightmare actually happened. So many lives extinguished without any crime to justify their deaths.

Isaac stopped before the entrance, gazing at the white blossoms beneath the black drapery. Their pale color looked stark against the dark fabric. One by one, he matched the flowers to the faces he had last seen that night, following the line of large and small blossoms until he finally raised his head.

Kaiyan stood before the door, looking back at him. He had waited in complete silence. Only after their eyes locked did the prince turn away to lead the way inside.

Isaac followed him through the corridors. The building was already familiar to him, yet today it felt entirely foreign, if only because every face he encountered among the staff was new.

Kaiyan went directly to the study. Once the prince sat, Isaac moved to his customary position a short distance away, slightly to the side. Unsure what else to do with the heavy cages still slung over his shoulder, he quietly set them down. The cats began yowling demands to know how long they would remain imprisoned, but one icy glance from Kaiyan silenced them instantly. They shut their mouths, their faces brimming with indignant discontent.

If I cannot borrow the cages, perhaps I could borrow that stare…

No sooner had the thought crossed Isaac’s mind than Kaiyan’s gaze shifted from the cats to his face. Isaac immediately straightened his posture. No. I take that back. Keeping that stare nearby would probably be disastrous for my own heart.

“Did you rest well for the past three days?” the prince inquired.

“Yes, thanks to…” Isaac trailed off as the sheer passage of time struck him anew. He had closed his eyes for what felt like a fleeting moment and had only just opened them three days later. Once, after working himself nearly to death for three days and nights, he had slept through an entire day, but never had he remained unconscious for this long.

Had mending a severed heart truly placed such a monumental burden on his spirit? Even then, he should have surfaced at least once to regain his senses. Instead, he had lain insensible, as dead to the world as a corpse.

“Your heart healed perfectly, and the healers found no impairment in any bodily function, yet you continued to sleep,” Kaiyan noted. “I was beginning to consider less conventional methods of rousing you.”

Isaac, who had been instinctively rubbing the skin over his own heart, dipped his head in an awkward gesture of apology. “I apologize for causing such concern.”

“I was not concerned,” Kaiyan countered sharply.

“…Of course.” Naturally, you wouldn’t be.

Kaiyan’s gaze shifted casually toward the cats. “Those beasts occasionally chattered among themselves, but showed no other sign of alarm, so I assumed nothing serious had occurred. Had I understood their speech, I might have learned why you continued sleeping, but I do not know the language of animals.” His eyes returned to Isaac. “Why were you unconscious for three days?”