Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 10: The Stonemason

The sky was the color of old pewter, and Karl van Bate walked beneath it without looking up.

He had stopped looking up when the sky was that color. It happened most mornings now.

The street was wet, the stones slick with the particular cold moisture that arrived in late autumn and didn’t leave. People greeted him as he passed—he registered their voices, nodded, kept walking. In Border Town he had a reputation: the teacher, the man who ran the school, the person you called when you needed something read that you couldn’t read yourself. He had cultivated it with care over three years, and it had given him something that resembled belonging. He had been grateful for it.

He was having trouble feeling grateful for anything at the moment.

He thought about Anna.

In the more than thirty children who had passed through his school in the last year, she had not stood out—not by appearance, not by behavior, not by anything that would have written itself into memory. Normal height, normal hair, few words. She sat in the middle of the group and did not raise her hand and did not cause trouble.

What stayed with him was the thing he had noticed only in retrospect: she never forgot anything.

Characters, history, the genealogy of the Holy Church, the structure of guild law—whatever Karl taught, she absorbed it on first hearing and kept it. She had never shown this off. She didn’t ask questions that would reveal what she knew. She just sat there, in the middle of the group, holding everything she’d been given, and said almost nothing.

He remembered seeing her once outside school. She was watching a neighbor’s sheep—sitting cross-legged in the sun with the animals around her, brushing one of them with the slow attention she seemed to apply to everything. The sheep leaned into the brush. Anna was smiling at it. Not performing a smile—just smiling, in the way that people smile when they’ve forgotten to manage their expression.

He could not make that girl into what the Holy Church said she was.

Later, there had been a fire at her house. Her mother did not survive. Anna stopped coming to school, and Karl had seen her occasionally in the market or the street and had thought about saying something and hadn’t, and eventually she had receded from his active attention the way people did when your life was busy and you were not responsible for them.

He had seen her again a week ago, standing on the gallows platform in the town square.

The crack in Karl’s world had started before Border Town—in Graycastle, in the theater that fell down. He had been a stonemason then, before he was a teacher. He had worked the theater project, had known the men who built it, had understood from the inside how it had been built—which was to say, badly, with materials stolen and replaced by the administrators who managed the contract and pocketed the difference. The building had failed at the foundation. Thirty-four masons died in the collapse.

The judge had ruled the lead stonemason negligent. The lead stonemason went into exile. The guild was dissolved. The administrators received a reprimand and kept their positions.

Karl left Graycastle. He walked west until he ran out of road, and Border Town was at the end of it, and he stayed.

He had rebuilt something here. A school, a reputation, a life that had room for his family and his students and the comfortable routines of a place where people needed him. He had used his work to fill the crack, and for a while the filling held. Then Nana had come to his door two days ago—Nana, who was twelve, who laughed at things that no one else thought were funny, who lay in the school grass watching ants fight grasshoppers—and she had stood at his door with all the laughter gone from her face and said: “Teacher. Will I be hanged too? Like Anna?”

The crack opened.

He was still walking when the crowd noise pulled him into the town square. The board at the center was surrounded—people crowding in, calling for someone to read it aloud, and when they saw Karl they made way.

He stood in front of the board and read.

The notice at the bottom bore the seal of Roland Wimbledon, the fourth prince.

The castle of Border Town requires skilled workers for construction projects. The following positions are being filled immediately.

He read the list aloud, methodically, his voice carrying:

Stone grinders—male, twenty to forty years old, fit. Twenty-five bronze royals per day. Mud craftsmen—any gender, eighteen or older, masonry experience required. Forty-five bronze royals per day. Handymen—male, eighteen or older. Twelve bronze royals per day. Stonemasons—any gender, any age. Experience with defensive construction preferred: fortifications, strongholds, civic structures. Monthly remuneration: one gold royal. Additional terms: exceptional workers to be considered for official appointments.

The crowd erupted. Karl heard the voices—“one gold royal a month, that’s cavalry pay,” “I can do masonry, my cousin taught me,” “is it serious, that number?”—and he heard them from a distance, from behind a pane of glass.

Monthly remuneration: one gold royal.

He read the notice again, from the signature. Roland Wimbledon. The fourth prince, who had arrived three months ago and had been universally dismissed as the kind of man who ended up in a border town for a reason. The man who had ordered Anna’s execution and—Karl had noticed this, though he could not have said why it mattered—had not looked comfortable doing it. Who had not, precisely, looked comfortable with anything that had happened in the town square that day.

And now this.

The Months of the Demons was two months away, perhaps less. Whatever the prince was trying to build, he was trying to build it under a deadline that Karl knew better than most was impossible. Defensive fortifications—the notice said fortifications specifically, which was not the language of a man building a storage shed—required time, labor, materials, and expertise that this border town did not have. Karl knew this to the marrow. He had built things in Graycastle under worse administrators than any prince, and he knew what was possible in what time.

But he was standing in front of a notice signed by a man who hated the Church—that was the rumor, that the fourth prince had never respected the Inquisition—and who was advertising for stonemasons with one hand while someone from his household was, according to the same rumor, still alive.

Karl had not meant to construct the argument this way. He found it assembled when he was done reading.

If the prince could declare the Church’s law invalid—if a royal, even a minor one, could say this order does not apply in my territory—then Nana had a chance. Not a guaranteed chance. A chance.

He would have to walk into the castle. Speak to the prince’s people, probably, and eventually to the prince. He would have to say something that, under the Church’s law, was grounds for the same gallows that had held Anna’s substitute.

The crowd around him was still arguing about pay rates and whether masonry experience counted if you’d only done residential work. Karl folded his hands, looked at the signature one more time, and thought about the theater in Graycastle. The masons who had gone down with it. The judge’s ruling. The way that what was true and what was decided were sometimes entirely different things, and how long he had spent pretending otherwise.

He closed his eyes and prayed, though he was no longer certain to what.

Then he turned from the board and started toward the castle.

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