Rewrite That Witch
CH1105 · Rewrite

Chapter 1105: Leaf’s Heart

Two days later. Neverwinter, Graycastle.

“That’s how it went,” Ashes said. She had told it in order, in the kind of plain sentences a soldier uses to give a report — no embellishment, no quiet pauses where pauses might have been earned. “After the fire was out, Lightning followed the trail north. About a hundred kilometers. The traces looked like Spider Demons crossing the forest. Three of them, maybe four.”

The signal lines from the Misty Forest had been down through the afternoon, and Roland had not learned the rest of it until evening. The next morning he had sent Tilly and Wendy on the Skywings to the terminus station to fly Leaf and Ashes back to the king’s city.

Ashes had walked off the plane on her own. Leaf had not.

The mercy was the Seed of Symbiosis. Nightfall had grown it in her body weeks earlier, and while Leaf was still unconscious the symbiont read intact. Whatever had broken in her was not the body itself. It was something narrower — a connection, severed under pressure, that would have to find its own way back.

Roland stood at the desk with the big map of the Western Region laid out in front of him. He no longer needed Ashes to fill in the picture. He had already finished it in his head.

The demon commander had read the railway correctly. It had seen the line bend at the forest’s edge and continue toward the Taquila ruins, and it had understood that the trench and the wire at the terminus station were not the part of the position that mattered. The part that mattered was the witch who held the forest.

A small group — five hundred kilometers from the Taquila ruins, north through trackless country, Spider Demons setting the fire and laying the Red Mist as they came. The first true guerrilla operation the demons had ever attempted. The fire itself had been a fixture point. They had counted on Leaf staying to watch over what was burning, and they had been right about her in the way she would have been the easiest to be right about.

They thought, Roland believed, that if Leaf fell, the First Army would have to pull back from the front.

They were not entirely correct. But they had read the dependence accurately enough to plan around it, and that was what unsettled him. The route, the timing, the precise application of magic — all of it spoke of an enemy that had studied the shape of her ability and built an answer to it. To act on that kind of understanding required more than instinct. Someone, somewhere, had been thinking carefully.

He suspected that the demons had encountered something like Leaf before.

A pursuit was tempting and useless. The Magic Slayer could outrun any column they could send. The most likely outcome of chasing it was a handful of Spider Demons brought down at a price the rear could not afford. Better to acknowledge what he had: the witches who moved with the army — Leaf, Maggie, Lightning — were now confirmed targets. The God’s Punishment Witches could guard the ones who stayed in Neverwinter. The ones who flew or walked the front would need their own discipline. Most Senior Demons did not carry the Magic Slayer’s profile, and the mobile witches were sensitive enough to read magic shifts at distance. The rule would be simple: feel anything, leave.

What stayed with him was something Ashes had relayed near the end of her account, almost in passing.

The Magic Slayer had spoken to her.

He had not expected that. The demon could speak. Kabradhabi, in all its conversations with the Witch Union, had needed Camilla to channel it — its ability to communicate ran through her body the way a current runs through a wire. The Magic Slayer had not needed any wire. It had simply spoken.

Learning is the first step of evolution.

Thousands of things have changed in the past several hundred years. You still live in the old way.

And another fragment, this one from Pasha, recalled now in a different light: long before the first Battle of Divine Will, a man taught the demons what he knew.

Roland held the three lines together in his mind and felt the cold of a possibility he had not previously taken seriously.

The Magic Slayer had spoken of the past several hundred years as if it had been present for them.

A demon out of the Union Age. One who had lived long enough to acquire a human language and the habit of conversation. It was nearly unbelievable — and that was exactly the kind of nearly that warranted a second look.

Wendy’s voice cut through the half-formed thought.

“Your Majesty.” She had pushed the door open and was leaning in. “Leaf just woke up.”

He stood. “I’m coming.” Then, to Ashes: “Do you want to come along?”

The Extraordinary nodded.

He was already at the doorway when he stopped and turned back. “By the way — I forgot to thank you.”

Ashes did not look uninjured to him now that he was looking closely. There were shallow cuts on her face and across her knuckles, none of them deep, none of them already closed. An Extraordinary’s body normally healed inside a day. These had not. Which meant the wind that had taken Leaf had not been a wind a person could simply step around. It had been the kind of wind that, at one degree’s worse angle, would have been the end of her.

Whatever Ashes had described in her measured sentences had been narrower than she had let on.

Her face stayed flat. The golden eyes flicked toward him, then away. “Take care of Tilly,” she said.

“Naturally.” He pressed his lips together. He had not expected the blunt one to be the one to say the considerate thing. He filed the surprise without making it visible. “Let’s go.”

Leaf’s bedroom was already full when they reached it. Anna, Nightingale, Tilly, Scroll, Mystery Moon — almost the entire group that had come into the Union with Leaf, gathered around the bed without anyone having organized it. They parted to let Roland through.

She was sitting up. Her green hair was loose and disheveled, her face pale, but she was not crying and her eyes had not gone flat. They were doing what they always did — picking out the people in the room, registering them, returning the small focused warmth that had been hers from the start.

“Your Majesty.” Her voice was thinner than usual. “I’m sorry to make you come down here.”

“I’m glad you’re all right.” He meant it. The coma had been exhaustion, mostly — the body shutting down because the mind had been forcibly disconnected from something rooted deep in it. The curse on her was the same one Lightning carried. The Heart of Forest had been cut from her with violence. That she had survived the cut at all was its own small mercy. “Ashes told me everything. Rest. The forest can be handled by others. Your injuries —”

“No, Your Majesty.” She shook her head, slowly. “Please. Let me return to the front.”

“Leaf!” Nightingale’s voice, sharper than she meant it.

“I know everyone is worried. But staying in bed won’t help anyone, will it?” Leaf spoke each word distinctly, the way she did when she had thought a thing through before saying it. “The curse doesn’t go away whether I’m in the Misty Forest or here. There’s no reason to stay.”

“But —” Wendy began, quietly.

“If I’m in the forest, the communication line between the front and Neverwinter stays open. The testing field can keep producing. Supplies can keep moving. None of it is dramatic. But it’s something I can do, and the war is going to ask everyone for what they can do.” She paused for breath. Then she made the smile come, careful and a little fragile around its edges. “I won’t be stubborn. If I feel something coming, I’ll run.”

The room was quiet for a moment.

Roland let out a long breath. He had not expected to talk her out of it. Leaf was forest — soft until you tested her, and then not soft at all. A woman who had once walked her sisters out of the Impassable Mountain Range on bare feet did not surrender easily to an order to rest.

“All right,” he said at last. “But you’ll promise me something. Until the Magic Slayer is dead, no one moves alone. Not anywhere. Not for any reason.”

He looked at Ashes.

“Can you stay with her for now?”

Ashes glanced once at Tilly — a small look, brief and almost ordinary — and then back at him.

“Sure,” she said. “Leave her to me.”

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