Chapter 73

Kaiyan strode toward the threshold, his path cutting directly toward where Isaac stood. As he passed, his momentum seemed to ebb for the briefest of moments. He cast a single, lingering glance at Isaac before continuing forward without a word.

Thud.

Isaac remained rooted to the spot for several heartbeats, scrambling to follow only after Kaiyan had put significant distance between them. Beneath his breath, he caught the faint, murmuring drift of the prince’s voice.

“I thought you would be wearing that sort of face.”

The utterance vanished into the air so quickly that Isaac wondered if he had simply misheard. He rubbed a hand over his face and followed the prince out of the hall.

“We leave for Haylen early tomorrow.”

“Pardon?” Isaac’s head snapped up. “Did you say… tomorrow?”

They navigated the corridor beyond the banquet hall as Isaac’s mind raced. Kaiyan had announced his intent to visit Haylen only moments ago; did he truly mean to depart by dawn? Even a routine excursion required days of logistical preparation. Isaac had never heard of a royal family member setting out for a detached palace with such frantic, breakneck urgency. Yet Kaiyan never spoke in idle jests, so the household staff would undoubtedly be awake the entire night preparing.

Isaac realized he would be doing the same.

He had already resigned himself to the fact that proper packing was a lost cause and began mentally curating the few essentials he would need. Suddenly, Kaiyan stopped and wheeled around. Isaac halted in his tracks, blinking in confusion.

“Could those cats not heal your tongue?”

“Pardon?” Isaac blinked. “Ah… I don’t know. They might be able to, but I don’t want them licking my tongue.”

Speaking and eating had become a miserable ordeal, yet Isaac possessed no desire to offer up his tongue for the cats to groom.

Kaiyan seemed to grasp the implication. “Ah.” After a moment of silence, he added, “Then it will last a while.” His tone carried a note of faint displeasure, though Isaac could not be certain, as the prince had already turned his back to resume walking.

“Make no special preparations. Send word ahead to Haylen,” Kaiyan instructed. “Everything necessary will already be there. There is no need for the servants to accompany me.”

“Then… are you going alone?”

Isaac had begun calculating the swarm of servants about to be thrust into a panic. When he looked up, he found Kaiyan had stopped again, looming directly in front of him.

“You are coming, witch.”

“…Yes.”

Right. I forgot my primary function as the prince’s living painkiller.

The new moon was approaching. The sheer scale of the preparations he would have to cram into a single night, combined with the mess of appointments he now needed to cancel, briefly cast him into a pit of despair. Still, he offered a nod of compliance. Resistance was futile if Kaiyan intended to drag him along regardless.

Besides, he thought, there is something else.

“I will gladly accompany you.”

Though his swollen tongue blurred the edges of the vowels, his tone remained steady and resolute. He meant every word. Letting Kaiyan set out into the world alone felt inherently wrong, and Isaac knew he ought to follow.

The prince studied him with an intense, searching gaze, as if trying to decipher something hidden in his features. Then, he offered a curt nod and resumed walking, his pace noticeably moderated.

***

Haylen sat a little more than a day’s ride to the southwest of the capital. In official terms, a day’s ride referred to the breakneck speed of an express courier; depending on the conditions, the journey could stretch much further. An urgent dispatch might reach Haylen in half a day, but for nobles traveling for leisure, the trip generally required an extra day or two.

The residents of Haylen must have been caught in a state of utter shock when an express rider arrived after a sleepless night to announce that the prince would be arriving at the detached palace that very day. They could never have anticipated the royal party descending upon them that same afternoon. Isaac certainly had not.

No matter how firmly Kaiyan insisted he required neither servants nor preparations, a royal prince could not reasonably travel to a remote palace in total isolation. Even after paring the party down to the barest minimum, a dozen attendants still had to follow.

Kaiyan did not wait for them. Giving no advance notice, he left for Haylen less than a full day after announcing the journey, sending ripples of chaos through the palace. The servants of the Blue Shadow Palace scrambled to manage his sudden absence, while various administrative offices groaned under the burden of disrupted official business.

At the same time, many within the court quietly welcomed his departure to Haylen given the current, suffocating atmosphere of fear. No one dared voice opposition; they simply obeyed the decree without protest.

The servants argued that a stay in Haylen required far more preparation, but Kaiyan departed early the next morning, exactly as promised. Dressed with an austerity that belied the nature of his trip, he carried almost nothing, mounted his horse, and rode. The attendants were left to scramble, agreeing to follow within a day or two. Thus, the prince set out for the detached palace with an unprecedentedly small entourage: a handful of servants, and Isaac.

And yet…

Why am I riding out here by myself? Isaac had been grappling with that question for some time.

Twenty minutes ago, he had been able to glimpse the fading tip of the prince’s horse in the distance; now, even that had vanished. The other attendants, trailing somewhere far behind, had long since fallen out of sight.

Kaiyan’s horse ranked among the finest steeds in Freya, a region legendary for its bloodlines. Once such an animal was allowed to run without restraint, no ordinary mount could hope to bridge the gap.

Only through the prince’s favor had Isaac been granted one of the royal stable’s premier horses, the sole reason he had managed to keep Kaiyan in his sights for as long as he had. Otherwise, he would have been left choking on the dust of the other servants miles behind.

No one has ever told me I am a poor rider.

Isaac raised his canteen to his parched, aching throat without slackening his horse’s pace. He had fallen behind, but that did not mean he could surrender to the distance. He had to keep the gap from widening any further.

The approach of the new moon had left him in reasonably stable condition, yet riding without pause since dawn had wrung him dry. Worse, his desperate attempt to keep pace with Kaiyan had left him no time to eat.

“The scenery… is incredible,” he rasped.

Even through the agony of his swollen tongue, the words escaped him. He had heard tales of Haylen’s beauty, and the closer they drew, the more lush and vibrant the countryside became.

Across a sprawling, empty plain, a single road stretched endlessly toward mountains stained in the gold of a deepening autumn. The range was not particularly jagged, but it spanned the horizon, capped with the faint, pristine white of early snow. The sheer, open grandeur of the landscape was magnificent.

Still…

“A few roadside trees would have been nice.”

Isaac’s complaint came out as a weak, raspy sigh. The endless road provided no shelter from the sun. Although the mornings and evenings had grown crisp, the midday heat remained heavy and oppressive. He had been riding under the glaring sun for hours without finding a scrap of shade. He desperately wanted to stop and catch his breath, but he kept urging his horse forward, drawing ragged breaths into his lungs while the animal mirrored his exhaustion.

You really are one stubborn bastard.

A fellow guard had once said that to him, and in this moment, he could not help but agree.

It happened during the royal guard’s annual physical-training competition, a time when the squads traditionally split into teams to wager against one another. The event was intended to foster camaraderie, yet that morning, a member of Isaac’s squad had suffered a severe injury due to the opposing team’s flagrant cheating, souring the mood among his comrades into something vicious.

Everyone swore they would secure a victory at any cost, even if it destroyed them. Isaac alone remained quiet. He had never possessed much of a competitive spirit; in most things, he did only what seemed reasonable, caring little for the spoils of victory or the shame of defeat.

Yet, during the final event that day—a grueling long-distance race—Isaac had been the last man standing. He continued running even after his breath tore through his lungs and the dry, raw tissue of his throat began to bleed.

He outlasted everyone, eventually collapsing at the finish line. He had to be carried away while his comrades argued over whether he was actually dying. Until that moment, they had considered him an easygoing man who lived in moderation; afterward, they declared that no one living could match his vicious tenacity.

That memory returned to him now.

Thud.

Isaac was scorched, exhausted, and profoundly weary, every limb hanging with the leaden weight of fatigue. Kaiyan had ridden so far ahead that catching him seemed impossible, and if Isaac could not hope to overtake him, there was little logic in pushing himself toward an early grave.

A voice in his head urged him to slow down, but he refused to loosen the reins. The distance between them was undoubtedly growing, yet he felt a desperate, irrational need to reduce that gap by even the smallest margin. He did not want to leave Kaiyan alone.

I want to be beside him, at least.

Isaac did not know when that specific longing had taken root. Being near Kaiyan terrified him, keeping his nerves coiled tight like a spring, yet even so, he desired to remain at his side.

Isaac stared ahead blankly. What kind of strange sentiment is this?

Kaiyan himself would not care. He might even find Isaac’s presence bothersome—that seemed far more likely. The moment they left the Blue Shadow Palace, the prince had ridden off alone without once looking back. Moreover, Kaiyan hated witches with a bitterness that surpassed a man’s hatred for a thorn buried in his own eye; Isaac lingering nearby might only displease him further.

“He could have… ridden with the rest of us,” Isaac muttered.

They could have traveled more slowly, and a long road would have felt less tedious with company. Perhaps avoiding that very company was the exact reason Kaiyan had forged ahead. Still muttering through his slurred, strained speech, Isaac urged his horse faster.

Finally, the road left the barren plains and entered a wooded area. The trees were too few to create the cool, deep silence of a true forest, but their canopy finally cast shadows above, and a narrow stream ran along the right side of the road. The sight of shade and water made the air feel instantly cooler, and Isaac’s mind, dulled by hours under the relentless sun, began to clear.

It was only then that he fully noticed his horse’s labored, rattling breath. Sweat darkened its hide, and guilt pricked him. He might choose to endure this out of sheer, stubborn stupidity, but the horse had done nothing to deserve such torment.

Isaac decided to let it drink from the stream. The distance from Kaiyan would widen further, but he could not deny a voiceless animal a mouthful of water merely to close a gap he had no hope of bridging. He slowed his mount and searched for a suitable place to stop.

Beyond a dense thicket of brush, a massive bird suddenly flapped its wings and soared into the sky. This rare white raptor bore an uncanny resemblance to the prince’s falcon. Kaiyan had nurtured the bird since his time on the frontier; wild yet clever, it permitted only its master to touch it. Its feathers were a pristine white, free from any blemish, and it was nearly twice the size of a typical bird of prey. Finding another like it would be quite uncommon.

Why would that be here…?

Something then moved beneath the spot from which the bird had taken flight. Isaac caught a glimpse of a pale mane that also seemed deeply, disturbingly familiar.

“…Huh?”