Rewrite That Witch
CH1108 · Rewrite
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Chapter 1108: More than Enough

Seven lines.

Joe had scratched them into the floor with the buckle of his left boot — one per day, each one slightly more crooked than the last, as though his hand had been losing confidence in the project. He sat cross-legged in front of them now and stared at them the way you stare at a reckoning you can’t alter.

He was trying not to think about Farrina. He had been trying not to think about Farrina for seven days, which meant he had thought about almost nothing else.

*Lorenzo. What he might be doing. Whether she’s — *

He stopped himself again.

Sean had been as good as his word. The message had gone to the King of Graycastle. Joe had been treated reasonably, kept fed, kept chained — the chain on his ankle was nearly a man’s length, generous enough for him to reach the tent’s perimeter in every direction but not to go further. He had spent a considerable amount of time examining that chain. He had a few ideas about the chain.

But Graycastle was far from the Kingdom of Wolfheart. Receiving the message, deliberating, organizing a response, dispatching — a month was the optimistic case. Probably longer. And Roland Wimbledon was a king fighting a war at the same time; a political problem in a distant kingdom might reasonably rank below keeping his own territory intact.

Or he might simply refuse.

The curtain was pulled aside.

Sunlight came in and hit Joe’s adapted eyes at the worst possible angle. He raised a hand.

“You’re awake,” said Sean. “Good. Come with me.”

“Where?” Joe blinked the light into focus. His thoughts, which had been down a long dark tunnel, surfaced irregularly.

“The Kingdom of Wolfheart. Your girl. Didn’t you want to save her?”

Joe understood the words in the order he heard them, and the last one broke through the numbness before the first ones fully arrived. He found the key Sean had tossed him without quite deciding to reach for it, and his fingers were shaking on the lock — not fear, something else, the body recognizing good news faster than the mind does.

“Did the king — did he — ”

“His Majesty approved the rescue plan.” Sean had the unhurried manner of someone delivering information they’ve already processed. “You’re being transferred to Neverwinter for a formal hearing. The unit handling the operation arrived at Coral Bay this morning.”

“Already?”

Joe looked up from the shackle. He wasn’t sure what his face was doing.

“They’re already here?”

He couldn’t make the arithmetic work. The message, the response, the deployment — the timeline was impossible and yet Sean was standing in the entrance of his tent telling him to come, so either the timeline wasn’t impossible or Joe had miscounted the lines on the floor.

He scrambled to his feet and immediately discovered what a week of sitting in the same position does to a person’s legs. He staggered, caught himself on the tent pole.

“If you’re not well — ”

“Take me with you.” He said it before Sean could finish the offer to leave him behind. “Please.”

“Then come.”

Joe pulled his coat straight. He looked back once at the seven lines on the floor — they caught the morning light in their scratched grooves, thin silver marks, the record of a week he wanted to be done with.

He followed Sean out of the tent without looking at them again.

The Coral Bay harbor had the specific quietness of a place where commerce had retreated without entirely departing. Since the church’s conquest of Wolfheart and Everwinter, the local nobles had spent the intervening years fighting over the resulting vacancy. Trade followed stability; stability had not returned. Most of the ships at the dock carried pennants from the Fjords trading houses. The Kingdom of Wolfheart offered almost nothing.

One ship didn’t belong to any merchant.

It was made of stone, which was already wrong, and it had no sail, which was worse, and on each side a wooden paddle wheel stood idle above the waterline, and black smoke moved steadily from the chimney at its top. Joe had heard about the Graycastle concrete ships the way people heard about things from distant places — as a category of improbability that was technically true.

He had not expected them to look quite so practical.

Sean led him aboard, and two people came to meet them on the deck.

A man and a woman. Joe looked between them, working out the social geometry. The woman had the look of someone who had been somewhere distant and hadn’t entirely chosen to come back. Something in her face was familiar in a way Joe couldn’t source.

“Ms. Zooey, Ms. Betty.” Sean greeted them both without apparent difficulty. “His Majesty dispatched you, then.”

“I’d been to the Kingdom of Dawn before, which apparently made me qualified.” The woman — Zooey — shrugged with the resignation of someone who has stopped arguing with their employer’s logic. “We’re in the middle of a war. I should be at the front.”

“Also,” said the man, “Lady Betty rather than Ms. Betty, if it’s convenient. I was awakened only a little over a hundred years ago, so the Miss feels imprecise — ”

“You consider a century recent?” Zooey said, giving him the sideways look of someone who has had this conversation before.

“In the Dream World they called me Miss.” The man — Betty, apparently — grinned. “I didn’t mind that either. ‘Your Majesty’ would also have been acceptable.”

“Lady Betty,” Sean said, with the diplomatic exhaustion of a man who has learned when to stop negotiating. “Of course.”

Joe looked between them and decided that his confusion was not going to resolve itself through passive observation. He had no framework for a man who wanted to be called Betty and a woman who was annoyed about being away from the front lines of a war that — as far as Joe understood the situation — hadn’t started yet.

Zooey turned her attention to Joe with the directness of someone who has taken a reading on a situation and moved on.

“So this is the church’s last Priest.” She studied him for a moment, not unkindly. “The Queen of Starfall City’s dream reduced to a political instrument. The fools who used it probably thought they were being very clever.” She paused. “I feel sorry for her. She was our enemy, but she deserved better than that.”

“We can honor her by finishing what she started,” Betty said. “Something like justice, maybe. Shall we?”

Joe looked at the ship. He looked at the shore receding as the paddle wheels began to turn. He thought of the question he’d been trying not to ask for the past five minutes.

“Pardon me,” he said, to no one and to everyone. “Where is the rescue team?”

Zooey looked at him.

She pointed to herself.

She pointed to Betty.

“She and I,” she said, “are going to rescue your Farrina.”

The harbor sounds continued normally. The paddle wheels continued turning. Joe’s mouth opened and did not produce words.

“Sir — ” He turned to Sean, his voice arriving somewhere between hushed and frantic. “Lorenzo has a God’s Punishment Army — ”

“Five of them,” Sean said. “Perhaps six. No more than ten.”

“The God’s Punishment Warriors are — ” Joe stopped. He was aware, distantly, that he was failing to complete sentences. “They are not ordinary soldiers. You know this. Graycastle fought them at Coldwind Ridge, you know what they — ” He looked at the two of them: composed, unhurried, Zooey examining the horizon, Betty straightening a sleeve. “Why do you both look like this is routine?”

Nobody answered him directly. Betty tilted his head at the Archduke Island, still below the horizon.

Zooey said, “Because you have no idea what Lady Alice actually built. The God’s Punishment Warriors that you knew — they were an unfinished version. Hollow, compared to what they were designed to be.”

She looked at Joe with a patience that was not condescension, precisely, but something adjacent to it — the patience of someone who knows something important and is watching a person catch up.

“Two of us,” she said, “is more than enough.”

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