Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1058: No More Regret

The tavern on the Archduke Island dock was loud at this hour, which was the point.

Joe turned a wineglass in his hands without drinking it. He watched the door. He had never been a man given to fidgeting — the Judgement Army trained that out of you before your second year — but tonight he was all wires and waiting, crowded with feelings he had no better word for than dread.

When the hooded man came in and settled next to him, Joe felt a brief loosening in his chest. Then the nerves returned, worse.

“How is she?”

He fixed his eyes on the man’s lips, dreading the worst shape they could make.

“Still alive.” The man pulled his hood back. He was young, tired-looking. “But not well. The bishop wants something from her, so the questioning goes on every day. Some nights I can hear her from the hall.” He paused. “If it continues much longer—”

Joe made himself hear the rest.

He had seen this coming. After the plan failed, after Farrina was taken, he had traced the path forward with the bleak precision of someone counting exits that don’t exist. The traitor wanted the Holy Book. Farrina was the leader of their operation, the most likely to have answers. He would exhaust every method available to him.

She’s still alive.

Joe’s hand tightened around the glass. His nails pressed into his palm.

He tried to tell himself that her surviving this long meant the traitor still believed she had something to give — which meant he still needed her alive. But the reasoning held less comfort each time he used it.

Why did I let her be the diversion? The thought was not new. He had thought it every hour since the castle fight. He could have been the one to draw the guards while she went for Lorenzo. He could have stayed and died with her. The distinction between fighting to the last breath and surviving to fight alone felt very thin tonight, and he was on the wrong side of it.

“Sir,” the young man said carefully, “do you know what the bishop wants? If you gave it to him — if there’s anything that would free her—”

“There isn’t.” Joe’s voice stayed flat. “It was destroyed when the Hermes Cathedral fell. Even if it wasn’t — even if I had it — handing it to a traitor would be—” He stopped himself. “There’s nothing to give him.”

The man’s expression shifted at the word Hermes — the particular grief of a believer who had grown up certain the cathedrals were eternal. He murmured something about God’s mercy. Joe let it pass.

It was strange. A year ago he would not have given this man ten seconds of his attention. In the Judgement Army he had moved among the most exceptional people in the church — commanders, senior priests, warriors who had been forged by decades of discipline. An ordinary dock-side believer would have been invisible to him. Now this man was the only person on Archduke Island who came to find him. Who sat beside him in a tavern and asked how he was holding. The believer’s love for the church was simpler and more intact than anything Lorenzo had ever felt, and it had survived the betrayal with no armor but itself.

The man stood. He pulled his hood up. “The butler would notice if I stayed longer. Three days, same place?”

“Yes.”

“Pull yourself together.” The man’s voice was not unkind. “You’re the only one left who can save her.”

No, Joe did not say. I have nothing. I have no plan. God isn’t listening and I am walking in darkness.

He nodded.

The man turned to go, then paused. “Something happened in the castle lately. The bishop’s man — the butler, Hagrid — he left for the southwest. The coachman said they were heading toward Cage Mountain.” He hesitated. “I thought you might want to know.”

It was said with the uncertainty of someone offering a fact they cannot explain, hoping it has more use than it looks.

The man bowed and slipped out.

Joe drained the glass. The ale was flat and sour. He set the glass down and sat for a moment in the noise of the tavern.

Cage Mountain.

He had heard the name several times lately, always at the edge of different conversations. A distant border dispute, a Graycastle expedition, some kind of excavation — he hadn’t paid it attention. It had nothing to do with him.

Unless it does.

He sat still.

The idea arrived not as a plan but as a shape — incomplete, full of gaps, but with something solid at its center. He turned it over carefully.

Lorenzo had found something at Cage Mountain during the church’s campaign through Wolfheart. He had mentioned it in a report — a treasure, recovered from a lord’s family inventory, origin obscure. Joe remembered the report because it had struck him as odd at the time: Lorenzo had described the item with unusual care. Not the enthusiasm of a collector, but the caution of a man who thought the object might matter.

And now Roland Wimbledon’s people are at Cage Mountain.

And Lorenzo is sending Hagrid to Cage Mountain.

Which means Roland knows what’s there.

Which means it matters.

Joe returned to his rooms in the suburb — a rented room above a chandler’s shop, smelling of tallow. On the desk: a black book. Battered. The cover bore no title.

Tucker Thor had pressed it into his hands the morning of the fall of Hermes, before he walked to the wall. This is what you need to understand, he had said. Not the Holy Book — this one. Read it before you make any decisions.

Joe had read it on the road north. The book was not a scripture. It was a history: the origin of the Battle of Divine Will, the war between humanity and the demons, the question of what the church had been built for and whether the answers it gave were the right ones. He had read it with growing numbness, the kind that comes when the architecture of your certainties shifts under your feet.

Tucker hadn’t wanted revenge. Tucker had wanted them to live.

Farrina had known this and had come anyway, because she couldn’t accept that what they’d built was simply over. Joe understood the impulse. He had shared it, for a while.

But now there was Roland Wimbledon — the man who had dismantled the church, the man Lorenzo feared, the man whose forces were apparently at Cage Mountain for reasons that involved whatever Lorenzo had put in his warehouse.

Roland would not help the church. There was nothing in the king of Graycastle’s interest in rescuing survivors of the Judgement Army.

But directing him toward a traitor was different.

That was not help. That was just information. And if Graycastle moved on Archduke Island because of what Joe could tell them — if Lorenzo’s position collapsed as a result — then there was at least a chance Farrina survived the rubble. Even if she ended up in Graycastle’s custody, she would be alive. She would be away from the instruments of torture. She would be — for the moment — safe.

And if the worst happened, and she fell into Roland’s hands and did not survive — then Joe would be there. He would find a way to be there. He would not leave her alone in her final moments a second time.

He had spent too long in the Judgement Army convincing himself that attachment was a liability. That love made you slower and less certain. He had watched Farrina for years with the studied indifference of someone who had trained away the weakness.

He was done pretending.

He opened the black book. Found a blank page at the back.

He began to write.

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