Rewrite That Witch
CH106 · Rewrite
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Chapter 106: It’s Not the Same for Him

Scroll knocked once and heard the answer immediately.

Anna was at the table by the window, a book open in front of her, the sun falling across her hands and the page. The light at this angle made her look like something out of a painting that hadn’t been painted yet — the line of her neck, her flaxen hair catching the sun and giving it back as something warmer. Scroll had been living alongside her for a week and had still not entirely adjusted to how Anna occupied a room. It wasn’t beauty exactly, or not only beauty. It was the quality of her stillness. She was completely at peace with herself in a way that Scroll had not often encountered in women who had reason not to be.

“Why aren’t you with the others?” Scroll pulled a chair close. The card game had taken over. Every afternoon, the moment practice ended, most of her sisters descended on Soraya’s room with the intensity of people who had discovered something they hadn’t known they were missing. Even Nana came over from Sir Pine’s house for it.

“I wanted to read.” Anna turned the page. “I don’t have your ability. I have to spend the time.”

She envies me for this, Scroll thought, and found it almost funny. Anna, whose magic reserves were the largest Nightingale had ever measured in a witch, whose green flame could cut through iron, who had apparently held a besieged wall almost alone during the worst of the Months of Demons — and she wished she had the ability to read a book once and never have to read it again.

“Remind me,” Scroll said, “I have a new one for you later.”

If it hadn’t been for Anna, the survivors of the Association would not be sitting in this castle. It was a simple chain: Anna had drawn Nightingale to Border Town, Nightingale had found Wendy and Lightning, and the five of them together had eventually found their way back to us. Everything that had changed — the warmth, the room, the method for surviving the Awakening — ran back to this woman sitting at a window reading a book about folk poetry with the absorbed patience of someone who simply enjoyed things.

Scroll held that quietly.

“Your hair,” she said. The fringe had grown down past Anna’s eyebrows, the ends beginning to curl inward. “Has no one been cutting it?”

“I’ve been managing on my own.”

Scroll stood up. “I’ll do it. Give me a moment.”

She came back with the cloth bag she had carried since the Sea Wind Region: white cutting cloths, and the bronze scissors with the V-shaped handle, worn smooth on the grip and notched along one blade from years of use. She had cut hair for money when she was young, before the captain with the broken leg had taught her to read and after that she’d had no more need of the scissors professionally, but she had never stopped carrying them. Habits of survival were hard to put down even when you no longer needed them.

She draped the cloth around Anna’s neck and gathered her hair.

“I had some questions,” Anna said.

“Go ahead.” The scissors made their small sound. The first cluster of hair fell to the floor.

“The books you gave me yesterday — the stories. They all end the same way. Does a prince always have to marry a princess?”

Scroll’s hands slowed for a fraction of a second. Then continued.

She had assembled that collection deliberately. Tales she’d heard over ten years from sailors in the Sea Wind Region — not love stories in the romantic sense, but stories about princes and the marriages they made. She had chosen specifically the ones where every deviation from that pattern ended badly. She had given it to Anna knowing this question would come.

She had still not entirely decided how to answer it.

“Usually,” she said, keeping her voice even. “Sometimes a duke’s daughter or a grand duke’s daughter. Graycastle’s Wimbledon III — his queen was the daughter of the Duke of Silver City. But a princess more often than not.”

Anna was quiet for a moment. The scissors continued.

Scroll felt the sadness of it, which she had expected to feel, and kept working.

She had discussed Nightingale’s situation with Wendy. Nightingale was the larger concern in some ways — older, more self-aware, the feelings longer-established. But Nightingale also had a distance about her, a discipline that came from having spent years keeping herself controlled in conditions where losing control had consequences. She would process this correctly. She would hurt and be careful about it and eventually find a place to put it.

Anna was different. When she was with the other witches she was quiet, mostly a listener, present without pushing herself forward. But when Roland was in the room — Scroll had watched this from the first week — something shifted. She became more. And he watched her. He watched her the way people watched things they were trying to memorize.

Anna had her own room, still. Roland had not converted it to a double when the new witches arrived. He had explained this by saying Nana could share with her when she stayed over, as if the explanation were obvious, as if there were no other reading. Scroll was not sure he was aware of the decision he had made.

The scissors worked through the fringe.

“Even if he doesn’t want to,” Anna said. “Even if he doesn’t care about any of them. He still has to?”

“Yes.” Scroll set down the scissors briefly and smoothed the cut ends. “Because a king’s marriage is not only his own decision. It stabilizes his alliances, it appeases neighboring kingdoms, it produces heirs. None of those functions can be served by —” She stopped just before the word witch. “By someone without the right standing.”

Anna went quiet again.

The silence was the right kind — the kind that meant she was thinking rather than retreating. Scroll found this both more and less manageable than tears would have been. She worked the scissors around the back of Anna’s neck, careful at the curve of the ear.

One day she’ll understand it, Scroll thought. Not accept it — understand it. That’s all I can ask for right now. She would bring the Wolfsheart royal biographies next. More evidence, different context. Not force, just weight.

When the cutting was done, Scroll brushed the clippings from Anna’s shoulders and stepped back.

“There. Much better.”

Anna reached up and touched the ends. “Thank you.”

“I’ll find you the Wolfsheart book.” Scroll began gathering her things. The cloth, the scissors back into the bag. She was already thinking through the progression — the royal biographies, then a few of the political histories, then perhaps —

“I don’t think Roland is like the princes in your stories.”

Scroll stopped.

Anna was still facing the window. She held the cloth of the cutting drape in her lap and her voice was completely steady — not defiant, not hopeful, not self-consoling. Just a statement. The tone of someone reporting something they have observed and confirmed.

“He’ll do what he decides to do. Not what’s expected of him.”

Scroll stood for a moment. “Why do you think that?”

Anna turned to look at her then, and her blue eyes were clear.

“If he were one of those princes,” she said, “he would never have saved me.”

Scroll had no answer for this. She looked at Anna — at the certainty of her, the quiet immovable weight of it — and found that she could not construct one. She stood in the doorway for a moment longer than she needed to, and then she went to find the Wolfsheart book.

She walked slowly.

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