Chapter 3

“Thank God,” one whispered. “Imagine if that bastard had caught wind of us. If he’d scampered off to tattle, we’d have been beheaded for insulting the royal line before the sun even set.”

“It’s not like I lied,” the outspoken guard hissed. “It’s a cold fact that His Majesty only lives half as long as the rest of us. And it’s not just him—the entire royal lot shares the same pathetic fate.”

“You little fool! That loose tongue of yours is going to invite disaster down upon your head!”

The squad leader delivered a stinging slap to the guard’s back. As the man howled in protest, the others joined in, raining smacks upon him to drive home the point.

Every man in the kingdom knew the truth: the direct descendants of the royal line were birthed under a witch’s curse. It was the price paid by the founding king for murdering a witch and plundering her hoard. Upon her death, she had laid a blight upon his lineage, condemning every future king to agonizing torment on the nights of the new moon. During those nights, their blood would boil and their flesh would feel as if it were being carved from their bones. Countless royals, unable to endure the cycle of madness and agony, had taken their own lives.

An oracle had once demanded the total annihilation of all witches to break the spell. A frenzy of witch hunts had swept the nation, resulting in a gruesome, thorough slaughter that effectively cleansed the land. Yet, even as the last of the witches were hunted down, the curse remained.

Eventually, the royals turned to magicians. In exchange for the ability to fall into a magically induced slumber during the new moon to escape the pain, the royals sacrificed half their time. They spent their lives in a perpetual state of half-waking, sleeping through the other half of every day.

They chose the shorter life over the hellish agony of the curse. It was an open secret, a tragedy whispered by everyone and acknowledged by no one.

“That tongue will get you killed long before any witch ever does!” the squad leader scolded, gesturing toward the path where the flamboyant soldier had disappeared. “If you want to keep your head on your shoulders, you will keep such thoughts locked behind your teeth. Do you have any idea who might be listening?”

The guard rubbed his back, muttering sullenly, “Even so, that bastard will likely drop dead before I do. What is the point of sucking up to some high lord and drowning in gold when the man granting all that luxury—Lord Kaiyan—is the very embodiment of the God of Death?”

“Hey, no! That is enough! Gag him!”

Startled into a frenzy, the squad leader lunged, clamping a hand over the guard’s mouth. The other men swarmed in as if they had been waiting for the signal, binding a handkerchief over the man’s face and securing it tight with rope. The guard let out a muffled protest, but it was useless. They each dealt a swift kick to his backside, hissing for him to remain silent.

“Are you a moron? Do you truly want to die? How can you throw that name around like it’s nothing?”

“Don’t you understand his name is forbidden? If you keep this up, you’ll have no right to complain when they hack your limbs off tomorrow.”

As the men cast terrified glances toward the road, even the gagged guard seemed to comprehend the magnitude of his error, his eyes widening in belated realization. He fell silent, rolling his eyes in surrender. Isaac, still stretched out in the sun, finally shifted, lifting the handkerchief from his face to survey his surroundings. Despite the blistering heat, a sudden, piercing chill took hold of him, and he instinctively rubbed his arms.

Kaiyan.

He was a man who required no surname to be identified. He was royalty among royalty, the current king’s direct, legitimate heir.

Prince Kaiyan.

“And of course,” one guard whispered, his voice trembling, “no one who catches his eye keeps their springtime for very long…”

Of course, that guy might be living in luxury now as a bedwarmer or whatever, but he won’t last a month. He’ll be lucky if he’s even tossed out with his life intact. The last one who called himself a bedwarmer died quite miserably, too. The guards leaned in, their voices dropping to jagged, hushed tones. One of them shuddered as he muttered, “Hey, I was the one who cleaned up that corpse. I still have nightmares about it.”

Listening with his back turned, Isaac pulled the handkerchief back over his face and mumbled, “You may have cleaned up the corpse, but I was the one who dug the grave.”

Because he lived on the grounds of an old church, Isaac often dug graves in the front yard for bodies with nowhere else to go. Of course, the capital’s security was not so abysmal that one could casually claim he often buried corpses. On the contrary, the castle town overlooked by the royal palace remained quite safe, and the vast majority of deaths involved elderly individuals succumbing to natural causes. Yet, Isaac had been digging graves every couple of months since last year. Ever since Prince Kaiyan had returned to the castle.

The prince had been absent from the capital for more than a decade, having spent those years on the far western frontier. He had fought barbarians, magical beasts, and monsters that haunted the harsh mountain ranges and periodically raided the cities. Rumors of him drifted all the way to the capital from that distant border, all praising our prince, so young yet so fearsomely brave, who had subdued and commanded the rough, unruly frontier soldiers—a force said to possess the finest military strength in the kingdom despite his youth.

Then, astonishingly, last year, the splendid and magnificent prince severed the head of the thousand-year-old Imugi that ruled the monsters of the western mountains. His great name echoed through the land, the long war reached its end, and the prince finally returned to the capital in triumph.

And then.

Isaac and everyone else in the palace learned all too well how beautifully and gracefully the rumors from the distant west had been refined during their long journey to the capital. To the common people outside the castle, who had no occasion to meet royalty directly, the elusive prince remained as our splendid and magnificent prince.

But that man…

“Is he really human?”

The instant someone muttered those words, an icy silence settled over the group. None of them would have dared say it aloud, yet most were likely harboring the same thought.

“That bodyguard he kept by his side before, you know, the one he slept with every night—”

“Call it what it is. What bodyguard? Does putting a bodyguard uniform on someone make him a bodyguard? As if he could guard His Highness. As if His Highness needs guarding.”

“Well, sure, in practice he was a bedwarmer, but officially he was kept by the prince as a bodyguard. Anyway, what was his name? The one right before this. You know, the kid who used to run little errands inside the palace, then happened to catch His Highness’s eye and got called in as a bodyguard.”

“Martin?”

“Right, Martin! His Highness fucked him night after night for almost two whole months until the poor kid could barely walk during the day, then cut his head off overnight.”

“That was because the idiot got caught running his mouth, saying it must be nice that witches can stay young and live for ages, and that he envied them.”

“He was insane. Saying that where His Highness could hear him? He might as well have begged to be killed.”

“Hey, but still. All he did was say that one little thing, and His Highness lopped off the head of a bedwarmer he’d been sleeping with—”

“Drop it. You weren’t even there. I was unlucky enough to be standing right there when it happened. Isaac, you remember, don’t you?”

One of the guards who had been whispering with his head close to the others called out to Isaac. A few steps away, Isaac lay with the handkerchief over his face and mumbled, “Yeah.”

As if he could ever forget.

At the time, Isaac had been on guard duty in the rear garden with that very guard. The prince sat on the terrace of the detached palace with his bodyguard—who was, in truth, his bedwarmer. As the pretty boy chatted away over tea, the prince only turned the pages of his book with indifference, as if he were listening and yet as if he were not. Isaac had been privately marveling that it must take real skill to have such a lovable bedwarmer chattering so sweetly right beside him and still turn the pages with such dry indifference, without so much as glancing over once.

Then it happened.

“I cannot tell you how happy I am to spend time with you like this, Lord Kaiyan. If only we could go on like this forever… If only I could stay beautiful and be loved by you forever. In that one respect, I almost envy those wicked witches. They say witches can live eternally young…”

At the bedwarmer’s breathy murmur, Isaac flinched inwardly and moved only his eyes toward the prince. Is it all right to say something like that?

The prince showed no reaction. He simply turned a page, lifted his teacup, and took a sip. Compared to most of the prince’s bedwarmers, who were replaced after half a month to a month at most, this one had unusually held his place for nearly two whole months. People had whispered that he must be terribly favored, and perhaps that really was true. After all, only someone who trusted in the prince’s affection would dare murmur about witches so coyly.

Isaac had just begun to relax, patting down his heart in relief.

Then the prince set down his cup. With the same hand, he drew the sword from the soldier standing beside him and cut off the bedwarmer’s head.

SLICE

It happened in a brief instant, with astonishing ease. Even then, the prince’s eyes never left the book, and his expression did not change in the slightest. He merely severed the bedwarmer’s head without a flicker of emotion, slid the bloodied sword back into the soldier’s scabbard, and spoke a single word as if nothing at all had occurred.

“Dispose of it.”

That was the end.

That afternoon, the prince took a pretty royal guard as his new bodyguard, and nothing else changed. The only difference was that another mound of dirt with a cross stuck in it appeared in front of Isaac’s window that night.

Isaac tugged the handkerchief down to cover the nape of his neck and clicked his tongue bitterly.

He had been trying to forget the sight of a person’s head flying off right in front of him, and that bastard had gone and brought it all back. Then again, apparently the bastard still had nightmares about it too.

“That’s why he shouldn’t have brought up witches. Especially not in front of His Highness, of all people. Among all the royals, no one hates witches more than he does. He won’t even deal with magicians because he says they’re similar creatures to witches. I hear his relationship with the head of the Magicians’ Guild is terrible, too. If the guild weren’t powerful enough to make even flying birds fall from the sky, His Highness would have wiped them all out already.”

“He’s the only royal who hasn’t contracted with a magician, right?”

“Yeah. He says he has no intention of handing his time over to someone else. Even now, magicians desperate to contract with him are lined up in droves, but he ignores them all. They say the pain on every new moon is so horrible that blood seeps from his whole body instead of sweat. I heard from someone who stood guard at the prince’s palace on a new-moon night that just seeing him like that made his skin crawl and his knees go weak. He spent the whole night frozen in place, trembling.”

“And he still refuses to contract and takes all that pain head-on? Ruthless. He’s ruthless… I’m more scared of him than I am of witches…”

“Me too…”

“Same here.”

“Me too.”

As those secretive whispers kept piling up, Isaac finally pulled the handkerchief off his face and half sat up.

“You bunch of masochists. If you’re that scared, why have you been chewing over the same topic this whole time? Talk about something else. Something else. Why are you babbling ghost stories in broad daylight and keeping people from sleeping?”

“You’re scared too, so why are you taking it out on us?!”

“I’m telling you to stop because I’m scared!”