Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1074: An Unexpected Letter

The applause came through the study wall like warm weather — a rising swell, sustained, then fading.

Kajen Fels had finished the script at almost the same moment.

He set his glasses on the desk and pressed his fingertips against his eyes until the ache behind them softened. Then he closed the script and returned it to the shelf — to its place among the others May had given him, the slim stack of Neverwinter productions that his students had called an insult and he had read, by this point, three times each.

The Wolf Princess. The Witches’ Story. New City. Dawn.

His students were not entirely wrong. The plots were thin. The storytelling moved by direct statement, without deflection, without the layered ambiguity that a practiced playwright built into even minor scenes. The writer — whoever wrote them — clearly had no formal training. The stories went where they wanted to go and arrived where they said they would.

He kept reading them because he could not write.

This was the fact that occupied the center of his life and cast everything else into peripheral noise. He could pick up a quill. He could arrange paper. He could produce words in sequence. But whenever he assembled those words into the structure of a stage scene, something interrupted — the memory of light moving across a face in close-up, the precise and impossible intimacy of an image that took away the distance between the audience and the character, the way a widening frame had made separation feel like loss rather than merely depicting it.

Someone who had tasted honey found dew insufficient. He had thought this about other things before — about lesser playwrights, about provincial theaters, about audiences who laughed at the wrong moments. He had not thought it would happen to him.

He had been sitting in this chair for three weeks. The best playwright in the world, unable to write a play.

A knock at the door.

“Mr. Fels. You have letters.”

“Leave them outside. I’ll look later.”

A pause. “One of them has Graycastle’s royal seal. You told me—”

He had the door open before she finished the sentence.

The maid flinched. He took the stack of letters from her hands, pulled the one with the seal clear of the others, and returned the rest without looking at them. The door closed behind him before she had fully processed what had happened.

He sat at the desk.

The wax seal bore the royal arms of Graycastle. He cracked it carefully — a reflex, the habit of a man who had spent a career treating documents as objects worth preserving — and unfolded the letter.

His Majesty Roland Wimbledon.

Does the king know we came to Neverwinter? Does he know why?

If the king knows — if I can write to him directly — then there may still be a way in.

He read.

The students arrived at the usual hour, Egrepo first with the others behind him. They had come from the stage, still carrying the residual brightness of a finished performance — flowers in Roentgen’s hands, the particular looseness of people who had just been applauded and found the applause acceptable.

“Mr. Fels was waiting for—” Egrepo pushed the door open and stopped.

Kajen was standing by the desk. Not sitting. The chair was pushed back at an angle, as if he had risen quickly and not bothered to straighten it. He was holding a letter.

“Mr. Fels?” Bernis asked. “Is something wrong?”

“A letter from Neverwinter.” He set it on the desk and pushed it toward them. “Read it.”

A hesitation. Then Egrepo picked it up and the others gathered.

Kajen watched their faces. He had already experienced the arc of it — the first sentences, which suggested royal attention and acknowledgment; then the middle, where the actual content arrived; then the final paragraphs, which were gracious and careful and did not change what the middle had said. He watched his students run through this arc in compressed time, the excitement rising in the first third and then the quality of that excitement changing, becoming something more uncertain, before they reached the end.

The king’s letter was forthcoming. That was what Kajen found most disorienting about it — not cruelty, not dismissal, but a plainness that left no room for misreading.

The magical movie was made using a recording instrument — rare, operable only by witches, constructed from materials found in ancient relics. It was not possible to provide such an instrument to another troupe. Given the instrument’s unique capacity to reach large audiences, His Majesty had directed that all current magical movie production serve national information needs for the duration of the war. This was temporary. After the war, the form would become widely available. When that time came, he had every confidence that Kajen Troupe would produce outstanding work.

Regarding the coronation: His Majesty confirmed that he himself had decided not to include an external theater performance in the ceremony. He had not been informed that Kajen Troupe had made the journey to Neverwinter specifically to audition for the occasion. He was sorry to hear it.

Regarding the scripts: His Majesty had read the troupe’s submitted plays. They were not suitable for current production priorities.

Kajen had read the letter four times since it arrived. Each reading located the wound slightly differently, which was how he knew the letter was well-written — not its author’s intention, probably, but the effect was the same. A stage playwright would have put the apology at the front and the rejection at the end, cushioned. The king had done neither. He had simply answered the questions.

The coronation had never been an opportunity the king had offered.

It had been a journey Kajen had decided to make. The assumption had been his own. The belief that craft of sufficient quality compelled recognition — that had been his own as well.

He had blamed May.

He had blamed the Administrative Office.

He had constructed, over three weeks of productive blame, a clear account of how he had been wronged. The letter took that account apart with the methodical indifference of fact.

His students were finishing the last paragraph. He could see them searching for an angle on this that would let them be angry on his behalf. He appreciated the impulse. He had learned, in the career since he turned from acting to writing, that the right response to a student’s loyalty was not to make use of it.

“Well,” Egrepo said finally.

“Yes,” Kajen said. “Well.”

The applause from the next performance filtered through the study wall. Someone in the house had laughed — a genuine laugh, not polite, the kind that arrived without warning.

Kajen sat down in the chair and pulled it square to the desk.

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