Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1071: The Glider (II)

After the cabin door sealed, Tilly turned back and walked toward him.

“What’s wrong?” She stopped two paces away. “You still look like you’re at a funeral.”

“Do I?”

“A day hasn’t passed and everything you’ve said sounds like a farewell.” She shrugged, loose and easy, the way she always did when she was disarming a conversation. “Are you doubting my ability to pilot, or doubting Anna’s ability to build?”

It was the kind of question that had no good answer. Roland gave her a bitter smile instead.

The Seagull’s structure was simple — a handful of operating levers, corresponding control surfaces, nothing that would have surprised an apprentice engineer on a well-run project. Simpler, if anything, than the test model. With Anna’s work, the tolerances were tighter than they needed to be. They had run test flights. They had run an emergency landing simulation. Tilly’s control was as precise as a watchmaker’s hand, and Wendy had found, after enough practice, that she could hold a stable airflow against any of the aircraft’s surfaces without visible effort.

They had also brought Shavi and Molly.

He still felt sick with worry.

Half of Neverwinter’s witches were on a single aircraft. A brand-new aircraft. Heading five hundred kilometers into the Wild, alone, without him — and if anything went wrong out there, no one would reach them in time to matter.

He exhaled.

“It’s not about doubting anyone’s abilities,” he said. “I just care too much. I want all of you to reach the other side of this war. I want you to see what comes after.”

She looked at him. A moment went by — not uncomfortable, but weighted. Then she glanced away.

“You know I was mostly joking,” she said. “If I were you, I’d be losing my mind too.”

She was already moving toward the ramp before he could answer.

“In that case.” She paused at the top, backlit by the hangar lights, her tone going light and formal at once. “I’m off, Brother.”

The cabin door closed.

Somewhere behind Roland, a guard came to attention. “Your Majesty. Everything’s ready outside.”

He breathed in through his nose and pushed it out slow. “Let’s start.”

“Yes, Your Majesty!”

The order propagated outward through the airport like water finding channels. Commands called and answered in sequence — the stopper opened, the road cleared, all personnel off the runway, the hangar door — and then the great doors began to slide apart, mechanical and unhurried, and the morning came in.

Sunlight crossed the threshold and laid a bright stripe across the hangar floor.

The guides raised their green flags.

The Seagull can take off.

The steam whistle opened its throat across the whole airport — and Roland felt the wind begin.

That was the strange part. He was standing in a sheltered space, tucked behind the aircraft’s bulk, nowhere the ambient air should have found him. But he felt it anyway: a faint pressure against his cheeks, warmer than the morning and moving with direction. Wendy’s wind. Her control was fine enough that she could hold the precise volume of air a large wing needed on its upper surface — a gentle steady current where the physics demanded it, a strong crosswind where the physics did not. The wing did not know the difference. The lift was real.

It was not quite honest to call the Seagull a glider, Roland thought. Gliders chased something they lacked. The Seagull had begun from a different premise entirely.

The aircraft accelerated down the blackstone track.

By the time it passed the marker flags it was faster than a galloping horse, and still the speed climbed.

He watched it go.

Good had not expected to feel anything.

He had been standing in formation for forty minutes, eyes front, running through the morning’s lessons in the back of his mind to avoid thinking about the cold. Eagle Face had told them to stay still and so they stayed still, two rows of trainees along the edge of the great blackstone track, watching the far end of the road where the hangar doors had slid open.

The thing that came out was gray.

It took a moment to resolve: not a train, because there were no rails; not a cart, because the scale was wrong. It turned slowly — something with enormous flat wings, a long belly, a body that seemed too blunt and round to move quickly at all. It sat low on wheeled legs. Its wingspan stretched across half the road.

“Didn’t Her Highness Tilly’s book collection have something like that on one of the covers?” Good said. “A machine with long wings—”

“Like a bird,” Finkin said.

“Not quite.”

Nothing about its proportions suggested it belonged in the air. He had seen big things move before — caissons, loaded grain wagons, teams of oxen — but those were things that moved because they were pushed. This object sat at the far end of the road and seemed to require nothing, no obvious means of propulsion, no horse team, nothing. Just the slowly opening doors and the sunlight coming in.

And then it began to move.

The discussion in the formation died as the machine gathered speed. The distance between them and it compressed faster than the eye wanted to believe. Someone — Finkin — said oh my God, it’s going to hit us in the flat voice people use when fear has finished with them and they have nothing left but factual observation.

The rational answer was: stand still. The road was wide. The aircraft’s wheels tracked the center. Stand still and you would be fine.

Not everyone’s body agreed with rational answers.

The roar hit first — a pressure-wave of sound that stripped thought from the front of the mind and left the older stuff behind. The ground trembled. The trainee next to Good took half a step sideways without appearing to notice. The wind arrived before the wing did, a hard press of air that seemed to come from nowhere and hit from every angle at once — and then the Seagull was past them, enormous and thunderous and fast, the heat of its passage lasting less than a breath.

Good’s knees hit the ground. He did not know when he decided to kneel, or if he had decided at all.

He turned.

The Seagull lifted. Both wheels rose from the blackstone in the same instant, clean and level, the nose tilting up through a long arc until the aircraft pointed at the sky. Sunlight caught the wings and broke across them in rings of color — amber at the leading edge, white along the span, something that was almost blue where the metal curved.

Is this an Aerial Knight?

The thought was not his in the ordinary sense. It arrived fully formed from somewhere he couldn’t locate, and it moved through him like a current.

He wanted that. He wanted it more than he had ever wanted anything, more than the city, more than the training bonus, more than the years of careful small ambitions he had carried south from wherever he’d started. The Seagull climbed into the blue and kept climbing, growing smaller in the way that very large things do when distance finally takes them — not shrinking but receding, becoming part of something too wide to hold — until there was only sky.

Good’s hands were clenched at his sides.

He did not unclench them for a long time.

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