Chapter 9

Isaac swallowed the familiar ache along with his drink. If he had dwelled on every passing, careless remark, he never would have survived this long. Besides, he had made a promise to himself—to live bravely and, if possible, to find happiness.

“Those high-and-mighty types can do whatever they please.”

“I don’t even dare dream of someone as ethereal as Celiña. I’d be over the moon just to meet a decent girl. But every year I get older, and every time I return home, my mother nags me half to death, demanding to know why I’m still dawdling.”

“No kidding,” his companion grunted. “When am I going to finally settle down and have a kid of my own?”

Isaac’s colleagues, all roughly his age, clinked their glasses and sighed in a chorus of mutual complaint. They were men already drifting past the conventional age for marriage, and Isaac had been nodding along in solidarity until one of them suddenly smacked the back of his head.

“You’re aging right along with us, so what are you grinning about? Do you think you’re somehow immune to the march of time? Your best years are slipping away too, you idiot. When are you finally going to get hitched?”

Why are you taking out your mother’s nagging on me? Isaac thought, his irritation spiking. Refusing to take the slight lying down, he swatted the back of the man’s head in retaliation before answering, “Well, what if someone appears who is willing to accept me, even after I lay all my skeletons bare?”

“What could you possibly have to confess that’s so dire?”

“They say every house has a secret. Surely you have one or two things you’d rather keep buried. Could you honestly tell a prospective bride about the time you suffered from gonorrhea? Could you admit you had your head shaved clean by your father and were locked in the family storehouse after a gambling bender? And you—could you tell a soul about the time you got so plastered you stripped naked in the street and started—”

“Hey! Hey! Hey! Shut your damn mouth!”

His colleagues swarmed him in an instant, frantic to stifle his confessions, and Isaac ended up absorbing a light, scuffling beating from the group. As they huffed and puffed, casting anxious glances around to ensure no civilians had overheard, Isaac rubbed his aching shoulder and muttered, “Behold this bleak world, where truth is suppressed by violence. I really ought to retreat to some peaceful countryside, find a pretty wife, and live in a modest house raising chickens.”

“You honestly think moving to the countryside means anyone can just acquire a home and a wife? You don’t have a single coin to your name. You have to earn some money first.”

“Money… how does one actually rake that in?”

“Good question. If I knew the secret, I wouldn’t be sitting here rotting with the rest of you.”

THUD

The destitute royal guards huddled together and began wallowing in their collective misery.

“First, they tell you to live like a monk, spend nothing, and save every copper.”

“But our wages are public knowledge, aren’t they? We can’t even afford a single drink on payday.”

“Then I suppose the only logical answer is to resign from the royal guard and find work that actually pays.”

“See? This is why I keep insisting that gambling is the only path to overnight wealth! Don’t all curse me out at once. Think about it. Since ancient times, the road to riches has always been paved with gambling—”

“You’re begging for a beating.”

CRACK

Another man fell victim to a group thrashing. In the brief lull that followed, someone remarked dryly, “If a royal guard wants to get his hands on real wealth, wouldn’t the only way be to perform a major contribution and receive a royal bounty?”

At that, the table fell silent.

“A contribution, huh. Well, if you pull off some great service, it isn’t just the reward money. They say you can also petition for an artifact from His Majesty’s private treasury.”

“Exactly. Then you’d be rich in a single stroke.”

“But how does one even begin to make a contribution?”

Everyone went quiet again. It was a problem as insurmountable as figuring out how to win at a rigged game of chance.

“In times of peace, it isn’t easy to distinguish yourself. Maybe if we captured and surrendered a significant witch, it might count.”

A significant witch. Even if I stuck my own neck out and invited them to take me, a mixed-blood scrap like me wouldn’t be worth a copper, Isaac thought bitterly, smacking his lips.

“Or we could hunt down Roverni right now and drag him in. Someone of his reputation would certainly count as a major contribution.”

“…Shouldn’t I worry about keeping my own head attached to my neck first?”

Amidst the useless chatter, someone finally raised his glass and declared, “Come on, let’s just drink.” At that signal, everyone abandoned their pathetic fantasies and clinked their cups together.

Isaac, meanwhile, repeated his internal mantra: I should just live quietly. If you chase good fortune beyond your station, trouble always follows. The best life is one where you don’t stand out.

***

The new moon had arrived.

It was a pitch-black night, the kind of evening when folklore insisted the witches held their hidden banquets.

Isaac gazed up at the stars, which shimmered with such intensity they seemed ready to spill from the moonless void, and climbed the hill. His spirits felt light, adrift, his very steps swaying in sync with the rhythm of his own rising anticipation.

At the terminus of the hill road stood the old church, desolate and hollowed out like an abandoned dwelling. Isaac was nursing a private smile as he ascended the dark, eerie slope when a man emerged from the structure. It was Horden, dressed in his uniform and clearly heading out for his shift.

“Isaac. Looks like you’re returning from your rounds,” Horden remarked. “Have you been drinking? You look remarkably cheerful.”

“Mm, just a little,” Isaac replied. “Are you heading out to start your duty now?”

Although Isaac had not touched a single drop of alcohol, he offered a lazy, noncommittal smile. It was far simpler to feign indulgence than to articulate the buoyant excitement surging through his veins. It was always like this on the new moon; his body hummed with a strange vigor, and his mood soared as if he were genuinely intoxicated. In these moments, Isaac felt the visceral pulse of the witch blood flowing within him.

“Yeah. Until dawn. Blue Shadow Palace guard duty… Hah. Of all nights.”

The moment Horden pulled his cap low and exhaled a sigh heavy enough to anchor him to the earth, Isaac’s mood, which had been floating in the clouds, plummeted. It felt as though the phantom alcohol had abruptly drained from his system.

Blue Shadow Palace.

Tonight, there was a man within those walls who, for the same ancestral reason as Isaac, would be enduring a sensory experience of an entirely different nature. Unlike Isaac, whose night would be buoyed by the potency of witch blood, the prince would be suffering under the agonizing weight of the witches’ curse.

Horden trudged down the hill, casting a parting request for Isaac to pray for his safe return. Isaac watched his silhouette fade until the darkness consumed him, then resumed his climb. Even though that drunken buoyancy still flickered within him, a leaden gloom accompanied it now, and he exhaled a ragged breath as he ducked into his home.

When Isaac was a child, his mother had recounted the history like a haunting fable. A great witch-grandmother—a matriarch separated by generations of blood—had bestowed immense wealth upon the soldier who became the founder of the current royal family, commissioning him to retrieve her sacred treasure. But the man was a vessel of greed. That wicked soldier not only plundered the treasure but murdered the witch who had trusted him. He then used that stolen fortune to assassinate the sitting king, forcibly took the king’s daughter as his wife, and usurped the throne.

For that singular, monstrous sin, the soldier received a curse cast by the witch with her dying breath. From that day forth, his lineage was condemned to suffer every new moon, when the influence of witchcraft reached its zenith. That cursed bloodline was the current royal family. In truth, his mother had whispered, they were merely the descendants of a thief who had pilfered their most precious legacy.

His mother had lamented endlessly that these thieves, who never once contemplated the weight of their original sin, would hunt and slaughter witches with impunity.

“But even if that soldier deserved to suffer every new moon for the rest of his life, what did his descendants do wrong, Grandmother…?” Isaac murmured, sighing at the empty room.

He caught himself wondering, in the same breath, what the slaughtered witches had done to invite such systematic cruelty.

“This is why the cycle of vengeance never breaks…” Isaac let out another deep, weary sigh.

After standing in the stillness for a moment, he offered a soft, crooked laugh and tilted his head. What did it change? The world rotated along its preordained axis, and on the great wheel of fate, witches and humans alike could only submit to its rotation. Most of all, tonight was the new moon.

It was a night where he felt fulfilled without nourishment and ecstatic without cause. Isaac stepped toward his bedroom with a buoyant gait.

Mid-step, he flinched to a halt.

In the dim room, illuminated only by a solitary oil lamp, three cats had been lounging as if they owned the place. The moment the door swung open, they froze—one on the bed, one on the table, and one inside the food basket—and fixed him with three pairs of luminous, piercing eyes.

“…”

How strange. He was certain he had secured the window, so how did these creatures infiltrate his home every time? Had Horden forgotten to latch it?

Standing in the threshold of the gloom-filled room, Isaac engaged in a quiet standoff with the trio. He stepped inside and closed the door. Rolling up his sleeves, he intended to corral them and return them to the outdoors, but something about their demeanor felt unnatural. They sat with rigid precision, unmoving, staring directly at him.

“Are you hungry? Fine. I’m in an uncommonly good mood today, so I will spare a piece of cheese for each of you. Now, let’s go outside…”

Isaac murmured to them, reaching toward the nearest feline.

—”It is the new moon.”

—”Our night.”

A voice seemed to vibrate from the air itself.

Isaac stiffened and scanned the perimeter of the room. He could not pinpoint the origin of the sound, and there was no one present but himself. He remained paralyzed, waiting, but heard nothing save for the rustling of leaves against the pane.