Rewrite That Witch
CH1098 · Rewrite
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Chapter 1098: The Guardian

The soldiers dispersed. Broocher walked back to his train.

Lightning came in through the cab’s rear window, landing without sound on the compartment floor. The old man stood at the dashboard with his back to her, looking at something in his hands — not moving, not shifting, the way a man stands when he is trying to decide what his face is permitted to do.

She wanted to say something. Nothing she composed was adequate. She reached for the half-open blind instead.

He turned at the sound.

“Ah.” He blinked. “The girl from before.”

“Lightning.” She took a half-step back. “I’m sorry, I —”

“You came to comfort me.” He said it without inflection, then grinned — a wide, uncomplicated grin, the kind that cost something to produce. “It’s fine. I’m not so far gone I need a child doing it. It’s a little embarrassing, honestly. But that ability of yours — wherever you want, whenever you want. Convenient thing.”

The tension in her chest loosened by a fraction. “I’ll knock next time.”

“I’m not blaming you.” He unfolded a small desk from the wall, wiped it with his sleeve — a habitual gesture, the motion of a man who had always lived in small spaces and kept them orderly. “Sit. I’ll make tea. It’s all I have out here for guests.”

She sat. On the dashboard, face-up, lay a Neverwinter identification card.

“Broocher,” he said, setting down the cup. “Or Howler — the lads all use that one. Did you watch the memorial?”

“I watched part of it.” She curled her hands around the cup. “From the roof.”

“So you didn’t lose anyone.” He said it as a fact, not a question. “That’s good.”

A silence.

“Your son —” she started.

“Robert. Third of four.” Broocher folded himself into the opposite seat with the economy of a man who had sat in small compartments most of his life. “He died going for the artillery. The commander says he went in brave.”

“He was.” Sylvie had described the charge in enough detail that Lightning could reconstruct the geometry of it — demons with bone lances, no firearms, no God’s Punishment Witches in range. You had to choose to go anyway. “I heard about the battle.”

“Robert was the meek one,” Broocher said. “Timid. When he was at the mine, the foreman could say whatever he liked and Robert would swallow it and come home crying to me instead.” He looked out through the cab glass at the empty yard. “You’re wondering why I don’t seem sadder.”

“No — I —”

“It’s all right. My three sons told me something once.” He picked up his tea. “They said they wanted to defend Neverwinter. Everything they had built there, everything they had earned with their hands.”

Lightning turned this over.

“I didn’t understand it at first,” Broocher said. “I asked them why it had to be them. Why not someone else?”

Why not someone else. Lightning had been asking the same arithmetic for weeks.

“They told me,” Broocher said, “that others had already made their sacrifices.”

He set the cup down. His voice stayed level — the level of a man who had rehearsed this, who had held the words until they stopped shaking. “People died fighting the demonic beasts when we were still Militia. People died against Duke Ryan, against the Church. If everyone waited for someone else to step forward, we’d have been at the mine until the end. There’s no war without blood. Everyone’s turn comes. They knew that. They chose it.”

Lightning looked at the identification card on the dashboard.

“They were adults,” Broocher said. “They understood what they were doing. That’s enough for a father. Robert died known — by his commanders, by the army, by the stone that carries his name. My eldest went to a chill in the night with no one to write his name anywhere.” He folded his hands. “What would I have to mourn?”

The conductor’s words from the other night came back to her — they were like mice when they first came. Now look. She had heard it as a reflection on the army. Now she heard it differently. She heard it as testimony.

“I should thank you, actually,” Broocher said.

“Me?”

“Your warning saved more of them than would have lived otherwise.” He looked at her directly for the first time, a calm assessment, nothing maudlin in it. “I wondered if I’d ever get the chance to say so in person. And here you are behind me.”

Lightning nodded once, not trusting her voice.

She was still carrying the weight of it when she crossed back over the residential perimeter. The air hit her differently there — the smell of cook fires, voices, the prosaic density of a place people actually lived in.

Maggie materialized from somewhere above and hit her in a rib-cracking embrace.

“Where have you been, coo! You were supposed to be back ages ago, coo! Do you know what day this is, coo?”

”…What day is it?”

“Lorgar gets out of the hospital today, coo!” Maggie bounced twice on her shoulder. “Move move move!”

Lightning steadied the pigeon before she could take flight entirely. “All right, all right. Quiet down.”

Tower Station No. 1 had been rearranged after the night attack — barracks, hospital, and support facilities dropped underground, leaving only the platform, the yard, and the watchtower above the surface. The defensive ring had expanded. The station’s footprint read differently now, denser and more deliberate, like a settlement that had stopped pretending it was temporary.

They found Lorgar outside the hospital entrance, stretching with the frank pleasure of someone who had been horizontal for seven days.

“Hey.” The wolf girl shook her ears once. “Long time.”

“A week,” Lightning said.

“Goes slow when you’re asleep most of it.” Lorgar rolled her shoulders, assessing her own body the way a carpenter checks a joint. “Nana insisted on the full seven days. One more and I would have started healing backward just to give myself something to do.”

According to the Taquila witches, sleep-fern tolerance ran higher in witches than in ordinary people — a useful property that let Nana conserve her power during extended treatments. Lorgar had apparently pushed the limits of the arrangement in both directions.

“You heal like Lady Ashes, coo!” Maggie announced admiringly.

“Andrea put that in perspective for me,” Lorgar said, in a tone that did not invite elaboration. She walked up to Lightning — three steps, unhurried — reached down, and lifted her bodily off the ground.

“Oi — put me down —” Lightning squirmed. “People are watching —”

“Sylvie told me everything.” The wolf girl’s arms were iron. “Every last part of it.”

Lightning stopped squirming.

“I knew you could do it.” Lorgar pressed her closer, the grip somewhere between a hold and a shelter. “That’s the captain we chose.”

The warmth was involuntary — not the heat of exertion but something slower, settling into the places Lightning hadn’t realized were cold. After a moment she murmured, “I’m still a coward.”

“The fact that you can say it to me means you’ve already moved.” Lorgar set her down, studying her face with the candid assessment she applied to everything. “You’re not going to disappear on us again.”

Lightning looked at Maggie, hovering with her head cocked sideways — the image of perpetual, total ignorance of anything that had happened in the last several weeks. Then back at Lorgar.

“No,” she said.

The promise landed on her shoulders like a beam accepting a load. It was heavy. It was the good kind of heavy — the kind that told you the structure was real.

“Coo?” Maggie rotated her head further sideways. “What are you two talking about, coo?”

“The celebration,” Lorgar said smoothly, straightening to her full height. “We’re all alive. That deserves a drink.”

“Celebrate, coo! Celebrate, coo!”

“I have patrol tonight,” Lightning said.

“Then you provide the drinks and we’ll drink them on your behalf.” Lorgar’s tail swept a lazy arc. “Captain’s prerogative. It’s practically regulation.”

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