Rewrite That Witch
CH104 · Rewrite
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Chapter 104: Planning and Entertainment

The afternoon was clear and Roland spent the first part of it keeping promises.

He conferred a viscountcy on Sir Payne — territory to the south of the Shishui River, rights to establish a village on the far bank once the jungle cleared. The land was currently forest, tangled and unmapped, but Roland had already slotted it into the development sequence. He explained that he would need to retain operational control of any industry established there — his technical involvement was simply unavoidable, he said, with the specific regret of a man who wished he could step back — and offered Payne shares in those industries instead, to run in perpetuity to his descendants. Income without administration. No decisions, no headaches, just returns.

Sir Payne agreed immediately and with evident relief. He was a man who liked horses and hunting and his daughter, in roughly that order, and the paperwork of territorial governance had never suited him. He also asked Roland, almost as an afterthought, if he would help him sell the Payne estate east of Longsong Stronghold — the family had fully relocated to Border Town and had no use for it.

Roland agreed to that as well.

Brian he awarded a knighthood. Then he gave Brian the choice: take a land grant and leave active service, or remain in the First Army and earn territory through military merit. Brian chose the army without needing time to think about it. Roland had expected nothing different.

With the titles dispensed, he finally had room to think about the territory as a whole.

He spread his maps. The Shishui River on one side; the Impassable Mountain Range on the other. The current inhabited area ran roughly three kilometers along the river by seven or eight across, enough for the existing population with room to grow. South of the Shishui was the logical development space — industrial zones, agricultural land — once the forest was cleared. The terrain sloped irregularly the further south you went, which would need addressing, but it was workable.

West of the garrison: the hiding forest, where the demonic beasts had sheltered during the Months. He had sent Lightning to survey it. She had flown thirty kilometers and not seen the far edge. The resource inventory was significant — timber, edible fungi, game, medicinal plants, a fuel supply that would outlast any reasonable planning horizon. He noted this with satisfaction and moved on.

Beyond the forest, between it and the mountain range: open country, uncharted, belonging to no one. He had no reliable sense of its scale other than that Lightning had given up trying to find the boundary and reported that it was very large. For now this land existed only as a notation: future. Population first.

He rolled up the maps and called for Soraya.

She arrived looking better than she had at the initial interview — some color in her face, less of the tightly-held quality he’d noticed in those first days. She had been working at the Town Hall, he knew, doing portraits for the new citizen registry.

“How is the registration work going?”

“I’ve never painted this many faces in one day.” She sat down across from him. “It’s strange, though — painting through a small window while the person sits on the other side, not knowing I’m there. They think it’s some kind of mechanical device.”

“Easier for now,” Roland said. “They know there are witches in Border Town, but familiarity takes time. The hidden setup avoids any accidents before people have had time to adjust.” He paused. “It’s working, though?”

“The portraits come out well.”

The citizen registry was one of the things he was quietly most pleased with. Every resident: name, age, address, family relations, occupation. All of it collected during the winter, expanded now, and — this was the part that had been impossible before Soraya — accompanied by an accurate portrait. An actual likeness, painted in the time it took to sit still for a minute, indistinguishable from a photograph to anyone who didn’t know how it had been made. For administration purposes, for law enforcement, for record-keeping: a census that actually meant something.

He had paid ten copper royals per household to get people to come in and provide their information, which had solved the compliance problem cleanly.

“Today I need something different.” He slid a stack of small paper rectangles across the desk — half a palm long, rectangular, uniform in size. “I want you to paint on these.”

Soraya picked one up and turned it over. “What are they for?”

“Entertainment. The witches have been practicing their abilities all day every day, and the snow won’t be gone for another two weeks. I want something for people to do in the evenings.”

She looked at the stack, then at him, waiting.

“We’re making a card game.” He had been thinking about this for a while — something from his previous world, something that could be reproduced here with Soraya’s ability as the printing mechanism. The right game: complex enough to be interesting, simple enough to explain in an evening, portable, reproducible. He had settled on a structure he knew well. “The cards represent different kinds of units — soldiers, artillery, specialists. Different abilities, different values. Two players build their own hands from a deck and play against each other over three rounds.”

“So I’m painting soldiers.”

“First one: a crossbowman. Heavy crossbow, full kit. The rest of the design details — armor style, age, background — up to you. I just need the crossbow to be clearly the defining element.”

Soraya closed her eyes. He watched her hands; the Magic Pen appeared and moved without hesitation, the light streaming from her fingers directly onto the paper. A soldier took shape: middle-aged, experienced-looking, crossbow shouldered, a look of patient readiness. Done in under a minute.

“That’s it,” Roland said.

She opened her eyes and looked at what she’d made. “What now?”

“Now small details. Upper left corner: a white circle with a gold border. Center: an orange circle with gold border. I’ll give you the numbers and symbols to add to each.”

Her ability to layer — to paint over existing work without obscuring it, to add elements precisely as if stacking transparent sheets — made her the ideal printing house. Each card would take her perhaps two minutes. He would need a minimum of two complete decks to start, more eventually.

He dictated the corner values, the rank markings, the faction symbol. She applied them with the same focused efficiency she brought to everything. When the crossbowman card was finished, he held it up.

There it is. He felt the particular quiet satisfaction of watching a thing that had existed only as a mental blueprint become an object you could hold.

“There are many more to go,” he said. “By the time we’re done you’ll have a full deck, and then I’ll show you all how to play.”

Soraya looked at the card in his hand, at the remaining blank stack, and then at him with the expression of someone doing arithmetic. “How many more?”

“Quite a few,” Roland said. “But we have time.”

She closed her eyes again and summoned the pen. He watched the light begin and thought that by next week, he’d be listening to the witches argue over hands and bluffing with the completely focused intensity that a genuinely good card game produced in almost everyone who learned it.

He was already looking forward to it.

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