The northern region of the royal capital was divided into numbered blocks, with the thirteenth being home to the Witches’ Forest. Few people ever referred to it as Block Thirteen. The commonly used name was Grand Witch Square.
Manors belonging to the seven witch families and their associates stood side by side around the forest that occupied most of the block. It turned the forest on the inside into a courtyard for use by witches. Naturally, ordinary people couldn’t gain access.
A thousand years ago, in the days of the empire, this spot had belonged to a general who was stationed on the White Wolf Peninsula. Back then, there’d only been one manor with fencing surrounding the wide swath of trees. The general and his subordinates had released animals on the land so they could enjoy hunting there whenever they had free time. In other words, it had once been a hunting ground.
After Shiyalta Shaltl had taken control as queen of the region, the forest had been offered to her. Later, she’d bestowed it upon the witches who’d accompanied her, and ever since then, it had served as a base of operations for witches and their like.
In the distant past, there had been seven witches who’d supported the empire’s founder, Shamo Shaltl. They’d worked as apothecaries, making medicines using animals they’d bought from hunters and herbs they’d collected from a forest north of the Black Sea. They had been revered as the wise inhabitants of the forest and had offered their support to Shamo Shaltl as her advisers, eventually becoming a key component of the empire.
A forest was a source of natural remedies. The seven witch families descended from those original seven witches considered it important to keep a bountiful forest close to their home, lest they forget their proud origins. While the warthogs and other beasts that had once been set free in the forest had been eradicated once the witches had inherited it, deer and small creatures, such as squirrels, remained—though those were also periodically culled.
The reason the deer hadn’t all been killed was because the newly budding antlers of fawn were an important ingredient in certain medicines. The witches’ justification was superficial, however, given that the more recent generations hadn’t preserved the practices of their founders in any meaningful way. The last group to hold the old traditions dear by making any medicines at all was the Yurumi family in the Kilhina Kingdom, but since such families were given no protection by the Shiyalta Kingdom, their old practices were now lost to history.
In the center of the Witches’ Forest, a space had been cleared among the carefully managed trees to make way for a small wooden house.
Closer examination revealed that the house was the work of a skilled carpenter who’d used the finest quality wood and lined the outer walls with cedar bark. Even the roof was special, in that it was covered with naturally flat stones rather than wood planks or tiles.
The stones had once been a famous export of the now-defunct Yalta Kingdom, collected from a place known as Beard Valley. The valley was home to a geological joint in a cliff face that was a source of pieces of andesite with a highly uniform thickness. The pieces could be used as roofing tiles without much further refinement.
But, of course, there were no longer any residences that used the stone because the Yalta Kingdom had fallen long ago. Such roofs had all since been replaced, or the buildings had been torn down entirely, except for this one remaining house. The stones it used had been bought in large quantities and stockpiled by ancestors of the current witches around the time of the Yalta Kingdom’s collapse.
It was a minor source of pride for the witches that they could maintain a building that used construction techniques from the days of the empire, despite the high cost. The house had a timber construction that lacked the durability of stone, which meant it had undergone many repairs and had even been completely rebuilt multiple times. However, for all that effort, it still looked much the same as when it had been built nine hundred years or so ago.
What had changed was one of the rooms within. Once known as the concoction room, it no longer contained medicinal ingredients or the tools needed to compound them. Now, it was known simply as the storage room.
Six witches were gathered inside the house: Vivila Marmoset, Sharun Charleville, Keagul Cursefit, Jula Lacramanus, Ghulah Temper, and Kiki Enfillet. They were all gathered under the same roof. Only the head of the Gudinveil family was absent.
The aged Keagul Cursefit was just finishing her story. “...And then he set me free telling me to carry this message.”
She wasn’t speaking in contemporary Shanish. They spoke Ancient Shanish here. It was customary to use the old tongue whenever they gathered for a sabbath in this building. Witches had long maintained traditions from the days of the empire, so it was a given that members of the seven witch families, being the highest ranking witches, had to be able to speak Ancient Shanish. Anyone too uneducated to speak the language had no right to be heard here.
“Well now... Sounds like you went through an awful lot,” Kiki Enfillet mused.
Kiki Enfillet would turn fifty-three that year. If Keagul Cursefit had spoken the truth, the disruption to the Enfillet family’s main line of business would be minimal. They held many offices in the royal castle, so it appeared a secure future lay before them.
“So what will we do now?”
“A good question. I don’t know.”