Rewrite That Witch
CH107 · Rewrite
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Chapter 107: Asking for His Intention

After dinner Roland returned to his office and continued transcribing.

The project had started from a simple anxiety: his memory was not exceptional, and it would degrade with time. He had been an engineer, and engineering mathematics had stayed with him — the applied kind, the kind you use enough times that it becomes instinct. But history, biology, chemistry, most of geography — those had already retreated to their outlines. He needed to put what he still had onto paper before more of it receded, even if the timing was premature, even if there was no one yet who could make use of it.

Each completed page he handed to Scroll. For her it was instantaneous preservation — one reading and it was permanent, perfectly retained, retrievable in full. The limitation was that retaining information was not the same as understanding it. You could hold the words for limits and derivatives in your memory forever without knowing what a limit was. So whenever Roland had time, he would go back over what she had read and explain it.

He had discovered, somewhat to his own surprise, that he enjoyed this.

Scroll was forty years old and looked perhaps thirty, her magic having slowed the visible work of time — the skin at her cheeks still firm, her hair gathered back, a quality of settled competence in her bearing that the classroom context only emphasized. She was, in his private assessment, exactly what a teacher should look like. Which made it particularly satisfying when he put something in front of her that stopped her cold.

The moment when the confusion in her face reorganized itself into something focused, then broke open into recognition — he felt it as a specific kind of pleasure, and he was self-aware enough to know that the contrast was part of it. Here was a woman who had forgotten nothing in forty years, and he was showing her something she had never encountered.

Magic, he thought, while she worked through the problem he had set. What is it, actually?

He had been turning this over for months. The abilities he had seen varied so widely they resisted any single framework. Wendy bent wind. Nightingale moved through a parallel layer of the world and saw lies. Anna generated fire from her body’s interior at temperatures that could melt iron. Mystery Moon changed a material’s fundamental magnetic properties. These were not variations on a single process — they were different processes that seemed to draw from a common source.

If magic were energy, then witches were instruments that converted it. But that wasn’t quite right either — energy in his previous world came from somewhere specific, was conserved, moved between defined states. Magic didn’t seem to work that way. It seemed to come from everywhere simultaneously, accessible to those born with the capacity to touch it, unlimited in its variety of expression.

The origin of things, he thought. Whatever rule underlies all the other rules. The physics of his old world had been working toward something like that — a grand unified framework, a single mathematical structure that explained all four fundamental forces as aspects of one thing. If such a structure existed, would it hold across all universes, or only in the one it was derived from?

He pushed the thought aside. At his current technological level, these were questions for the far future. The path forward was the same as it had always been: industrial development, improved education, compounding capability over time. Someday the tools might exist to study magic empirically. Not yet.

“Your Highness?”

He surfaced. Scroll was watching him with the expression of someone who had been watching for a while.

“That’s enough for tonight,” he said, setting down the quill. The candle had burned down further than he’d noticed. “Come back tomorrow.”

She bowed and turned for the door.

He heard her footsteps slow. Then stop.

After half a minute, when the door had not closed, he looked up.

She was still in the doorway. Not looking at him, not quite looking away.

“Was there something else?”

“Your Highness.” A pause. “I want to ask you something.”

“Go ahead.” He set the cup down. She had the careful posture of someone who had thought about this for a while and decided to say it anyway. “I’m listening.”

She turned to face him. “Is it possible that you would ever marry a witch?”

The tea went down wrong. He managed not to spray it across the desk, but only just. He set the cup down and looked at her.

“Why do you ask?”

She opened her mouth. Something in the question’s architecture made her close it again. She looked at the door frame. She looked at him.

The honest answer assembled itself before he’d finished considering whether to give it. The first person the question had called up was Anna — her eyes in the cage, the particular quality of her stillness, the way she occupied a room like a decision that had already been made. Before a witch’s awakening she was an ordinary woman; after it she was something more, in ways that were visible and some ways that weren’t. If he were placing any of them in the world he’d come from, they would be remarkable by any standard he could name.

Why would I not?

He looked at Scroll. “Why would I not?”

The silence that followed was a different kind of silence than the question had made. Scroll stood with it for a moment, then bowed — a real bow, not the formal reflex — and left. The door closed.

Roland picked up his quill and looked at the page he’d been working on.

He sat there for a while before he resumed writing.

Wendy came home later than usual, working her shoulders as she climbed the stairs. Little Town was making demands on her back that she had not anticipated when she’d signed on as its wind source. The problem was architectural: to summon wind with enough force to move the barge, she had to raise her arms, and to keep her balance on the cabin roof she had to compensate by bending backward. After an hour this arrangement accumulated interest.

The upgrades helped. The shed Karl had built over her work station blocked wind and rain and most of the sun. The tree-bark bumpers along the hull softened the landings at port. The two cement cleats for the mooring ropes had been the smallest change and had probably saved the most time. She had also, over the past month, gotten considerably better at what she was doing — the calibration between her own output and the ambient wind, learning to work with the existing air rather than against it, had extended her effective range before exhaustion. She was not comfortable yet but she was competent.

She pushed open the room door.

Nightingale was already back, bathed, sitting on the edge of the bed in her nightclothes. Waiting. But there was something different in her face — Wendy noticed it immediately and then spent a moment figuring out what it was.

Nightingale was smiling. Not the small controlled expression she used in company — something that had gotten past her guard. Something she was not entirely managing.

“What happened?” Wendy asked.

Nightingale shook her head. Said nothing. The smile deepened slightly.

Wendy looked at her. The last time they had talked seriously — the night she had told Nightingale the truth about witches and kings and what a life like that could or could not contain — Nightingale had walked out of this room quieter than she’d walked in, and stayed that way for days. The card game had helped, because the card game gave everyone an excuse to concentrate on something that wasn’t themselves. But this was different. This was not the card game.

Wendy began unknotting her sleeves. She stepped behind the screen and began undoing her outer layer, listening to the ordinary sounds of the room — the fire, the building settling — and to Nightingale’s silence, which had a particular quality tonight that she couldn’t quite name.

Something was said tonight, Wendy thought. Something she heard that she wasn’t supposed to hear. She knew how Nightingale spent her evenings, the places she moved through invisibly, the things she was present for without being present.

She said nothing.

She stepped into the tub, felt the warm water close around her, and leaned back.

Some things you could not ask. Some things were better held the way you held a candle in a draft: with both hands, without moving, until you were somewhere more sheltered.

She closed her eyes.

Nightingale was still smiling when Wendy blew out the light.

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