Rewrite That Witch
CH001 · Rewrite
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Chapter 1: From Today Onwards, I Am a Royal Prince

The chair was iron. Cold in the way of metal that had never been warm — which was wrong, because Cheng Yan’s office chair was mesh with a lumbar adjustment that had taken him three weeks to dial in.

He opened his eyes.

Gone: the blueprints, the dual monitors, the wall of post-its color-coded by deadline. In their place: a public square enclosed by brick houses, a sky the color of old pewter, and at the center, a gallows. The crowd pressed three sides of the square like water finding a drain. Beside him at a long table, a row of nobles sat in various states of formal patience, and at least three of them were suppressing smiles.

Someone tugged his sleeve.

“Your Highness.” The man beside him was old, white-robed, long-faced, his expression the professional patience of a man who had spent decades repeating himself to people who weren’t listening. “Please declare your ruling.”

Cheng Yan licked his dry lips. The air tasted of cold and wood smoke and a great many people who had been standing in it for some time.

At the center of the square, on the gallows platform: a figure. Hooded. Wrists bound behind her back. Clothes that had once been grey and were now rags hanging from a frame assembled from the minimum viable components. Where her hem had ridden up, her ankle was the circumference of a man’s wrist. She was standing straight. Given the noose and the crowd and the stones someone had just thrown, that cost something.

She tilted her chin up slightly. Not defiance — something quieter. Just deciding not to look at the ground.

Witch, some part of him supplied. Servant of the devil. Evidence: none on record. Verdict: never in question.

The memories arrived like a crashed drive recovering — not graceful, not in order, but complete. He was Roland Wimbledon, fourth prince of the Kingdom of Graycastle, twenty-three years old, dispatched to govern this border town that sat at the westernmost edge of everything anyone at court considered worth governing. The old man with the documents was Barov, Assistant Minister of Finance, sent by the king to help manage what the capital regarded as an unmanageable posting.

He had been sent here to compete for the throne.

He set that aside. Present problem first.

“Your Highness—”

“I’m tired,” Cheng Yan said.

He took the sheaf of formal documents from Barov’s hands — the old man made a sound like a man watching his work fall down stairs — and dropped them without looking where they landed. “Court dismissed. Clear the square.”

The man to his left stood immediately. Armor, a build like someone had engineered a human being for one purpose and one purpose only, Knight Commander’s badge. Carter. The contempt on his face was better controlled than the nobles’, which made it worse.

“Your Highness.” Carter’s voice had the quality of a man who had trained himself not to shout and sometimes regretted it. “All witches must be executed upon identification. If the Church learns we’ve allowed one to survive—”

“You’re afraid,” Cheng Yan said.

Carter went still.

“You have armor. She has a rope.” He kept his voice careless, vaguely amused — the fourth prince at his most inconvenient, which was the only register he had documented. “If there are more of them, I’d rather catch them than kill the only lead I have.” He stood, waved a hand at the crowd. “Clear the square.”

He walked back toward the keep without waiting. Carter, after a beat, fell in behind him.

The nobles’ bows followed him across the square. He didn’t need to look to know what was in their eyes.

The keep sat south of the town, backed against the foothills. Stone stairs; his new legs knew them. He dismissed Barov at the chamber door — the minister’s face arranged itself into professional neutrality, which meant he was furious — and sat on the edge of the bed.

Cold walls. A window letting in the same pewter light as the square. A fire that needed wood.

He pressed his palms together and thought.

The succession contest had the shape of an enlightened idea that someone had built badly: five children, five territories, five years, and merit determines the heir. No defined metrics. No restrictions on method. He had spent enough time in design reviews to recognize a requirements document with no acceptance criteria — not a competition, just a permission slip for whoever was willing to use it. And this was the worst starting position of the five, the queen was five years dead, and there was no arbiter of method.

He wasn’t here to become king.

The thought arrived without ceremony. He’d been a mechanical engineer who’d worked himself to death at thirty-one, in a city on a continent that didn’t exist in this world’s atlases, and he had no opinions about inheriting medieval kingdoms. What he did have opinions about were starvation, assassination, and not dying twice in the same week — and avoiding all three would require this territory to actually function. Which meant he had work to do.

He crossed to the mirror. Small, bronze-backed, the kind that gave you just enough to confirm your hair was wrong. Cold came off the glass in a faint wave. His hair was grey — the Wimbledon family signature, the same grey as the sky over the square, which seemed either fitting or bleak depending on how you looked at it — and his face was pale from the crossing, and from three years of eating at his desk. Regular features. A jaw that had never been tested. Eyes that were currently doing the work of recalibrating an entire worldview and showing none of it.

He’d never governed a border town. Never managed a food supply through winter. Never negotiated with a church or fortified a wall.

On the other hand, he’d built everything he’d ever made from first principles, with insufficient resources, under deadline, for people who had already decided it was impossible.

Cheng Yan looked at the face in the mirror for a long moment.

“Alright,” he said. “From today onwards — I’m Roland.”

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