Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 111: Battle of Eagle City (Part 2)

The first wave of freedmen met no resistance at all.

They climbed the earthen ramp without opposition — no arrows, no boiling oil, no spearpoints waiting in the gaps of the fence above. The fence itself stood exactly as it should have: a palisade of lashed timber with narrow openings for defenders to thrust through, the sort of fortification that made a slope cost lives. Duke Frances had estimated the first wave would lose half its men before the fence even cracked.

Instead, his axemen walked through the gaps unopposed. The defenders who should have been bracing those logs from behind were simply not there.

He watched from the rear as they wrenched apart the timber and opened the wall as easily as a man opens a cabinet. Then the main gate swung outward.

Thirty minutes, he thought, counting from his first order. Less.

He shook his reins and led his column through the gate.

Frances was not a young man. He had campaigned under Wimbledon III when the king was still worth following, and he had learned to read a battlefield the way some men read faces — the minor dissonances that meant something had been decided without your knowledge. What he read now troubled him. Garcia Wimbledon was not stupid. Her sweep through the south had been too clean, too fast, for a stupid commander. And stupid commanders did not abandon walled cities; they died in them, buying time with bodies. Even a bad general knew to leave someone at the fence.

So why hadn’t she?

He set his personal guard at the front. Let them take whatever was waiting.

They came back with nothing. No ambush, no tripwires, some barricades of wood and stone that the local inhabitants were already dismantling under instruction. The inner city was as empty of defenders as the walls.

Frances made his decision and rode forward.

The smell reached him before he could see anything wrong.

Not the smell of a battlefield — he knew that register well enough, the iron-and-rot of it, the particular sweetness of the second day. This was something else entirely: pine oil, and beneath that the ghost of tangerine rind, and something sweeter still that might have been incense. He inhaled without meaning to. Someone, somewhere, had used an extravagant amount of perfume.

He looked around. Nothing unusual. The streets were empty, the shutters closed. The drainage ditch along the main avenue was clogged — he noted it absently — and something dark and viscous had backed up out of its channel and lay pooling across the cobblestones. Where the sun touched it, the surface split into five colors.

From that, probably, he decided. He had smelled stranger things on campaign. He cleared the thought and rode toward the castle district.

The castle was where his certainty broke.

He had expected it to be plundered. Garcia would have stripped the treasury before retreating; he’d factored that loss into his accounting. What he found was something else. The treasury was empty, yes — but so was the basement. The grain store. Every wardrobe. The frescoes had been removed from their wall-hooks, leaving pale rectangles where the plaster hadn’t faded. The bookshelves were bare boards. Someone had taken the lord’s bed. The mattress. The bedframe.

Frances walked through room after room.

They had taken the mattress.

This was not a hasty retreat. This was a clearance — systematic, room by room, organized over days or weeks. And that meant Garcia had decided to abandon this city long before he had arrived at its walls.

Which means she already knows where she’s going.

He was still turning that over when the smoke appeared at the North Gate.

“What’s burning?” he said.

“I’ve sent Moliere to find out,” the captain of his guard answered.

Frances frowned at the rising column. Some of it could be deliberate — fire was a defensive weapon, and setting a gate ablaze could slow pursuit, pin troops in the street. But setting a fire with no defenders to exploit the resulting chaos was the same as building a fence with no one behind it. Meaningless. Unless—

The smoke appeared at the East Gate.

Then the West.

Then the South.

He turned his horse slowly in the intersection, watching all four columns rise. The smell he had noticed in the avenue was stronger now, pushed by the heat.

Pine oil.

The drainage ditches. They ran below every street in Eagle City. Someone had poured something into them — not just in one place but everywhere, systematically, the way you’d fill a lamp with oil before lighting the wick. And then they’d sealed the drains to let it back up. And then they’d left, taking everything that mattered, and the fire—

The fire was already spreading faster than fire had any right to spread.

He heard the first screams from the civilian quarter.

“Sir!” The knight — Moliere, breathless, her horse lathered — dismounted before it had stopped moving. “Sir. At the North Gate. The fire won’t go out.”

“Won’t go out,” he repeated.

“We brought buckets from the well. The water goes straight over the top of it. It spreads the fire.” She was breathing hard, controlling herself carefully. “The whole northern quarter is burning. The ditch is on fire. The cobblestones are on fire.”

Frances reached up and touched the God’s Stone of Retaliation at his throat.

The stone was cool against his fingers.

Demonic fire. The thought arrived with something almost like relief: a category he understood, with countermeasures he trusted. Not some engineering trick he had failed to anticipate. A witch — Garcia had bought a witch, or blackmailed one, or made the promises to one that the Church warned about. And against a witch’s fire, every man of his personal guard already wore the answer around their neck.

“Do not panic,” he said, loudly, for everyone near enough to hear. “This is Garcia Wimbledon’s doing — she has employed a witch to ignite that fire. A witch’s fire cannot touch us. Every man of this guard wears the Stone. The fire cannot hurt you. Hold your discipline.” He looked at Moliere. “Take the first group through the South Gate. Push through. I’ll wait here for the stragglers and follow.”

She didn’t hesitate.

“Sir.” She pressed her fist to her chest. “Watch yourself in there. Pay attention to the—”

Then she turned her horse and rode without another word toward the burning end of the street, into the wall of smoke and the shifting orange light beyond it, and was gone.

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