Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1142: Different Roads Lead to the Same Castle

The first thing that surprised him was how instinctively Garcia had reached for her phone — not to call the Martialist Association, but the police.

That told him something. The Association imposed its own discipline on its members, and that discipline was considerably harsher than anything a magistrate could arrange. Garcia had chosen the lighter punishment. She was angry, and she was trying to be lenient.

Roland set his face into an expression of mild confusion and let her finish.

She thinks I brought three minors home.

“Call the police?” he said, in a tone calibrated to sound genuinely puzzled. “Why?”

“You ask me?” Garcia’s voice went sharp at the edges. “I told you — an awakened man who loses control of himself loses everything else. It doesn’t matter how many women you take home. But these girls — they’re students, Roland. They’re children. That is the first sign of corruption, and you’re going to stand there and ask me why?”

She was angrier about the appearance of the thing than she was about him, Roland realized. Garcia cared about the moral architecture of the world and hated to see it crack. In that sense, she was exactly like the Garcia he had known across two lifetimes.

He waited a beat. Let the silence sharpen itself.

“If I were truly corrupted,” he said, slowly, “why would I invite you here?”

Garcia stopped.

“Think about it,” Roland said. “A man who actually meant harm would keep this quiet. He would be careful. He would not, under any circumstances, introduce his neighbor — a licensed martialist — to three girls he was doing something wrong with.” He let that land. “Doesn’t that strike you as a little strange?”

She held the phone. The sharp-edged certainty in her expression shifted, recalibrated.

“Then why?” she said at last.

Roland exhaled. “Because I need your help, Miss Garcia.”

Half an hour later she sat across from him with her arms folded and her eyes narrowed to careful lines.

“You’re their part-time tutor.”

“Exactly.”

“They’re college students living in the area.”

“Yes.”

“And you keep rotating them through so the neighbors don’t get suspicious.”

“I have to,” Roland said. “Girls their age should be in a classroom. If the same three faces appeared at my door every day, people would notice. So I vary the schedule.” He spread his hands. “It takes more time than I’d like.”

Garcia looked at the three witches — Dawnen, Saint Miran, Dido — who had found seats at the kitchen table and were examining his refrigerator with the focused intensity of archaeologists. Her expression softened without quite becoming warm.

“They’re from your hometown?”

“The same village. I left when they were still young.” He paused. “They heard I’d joined the Association. They didn’t want to spend the rest of their lives there.” Every word was technically a lie. None of it was, in any meaningful sense, untrue.

“Then why aren’t they in the registry?”

Roland met her eyes and said, very quietly: “Because of their gender.”

Garcia went still. The calculation she’d been running behind her expression resolved into something older and simpler than anger. She looked at the three young women at his kitchen table — ancient souls dressed in borrowed bodies, eating crackers from his cabinet — and something in her posture changed.

“Are there many?” she said. “People like them?”

“Quite a few,” Roland said. “It’s better than it used to be. But they still come looking for whatever safety they can find.”

“I want to go to school,” Dido said, helpfully, from the kitchen. The other two chimed in.

Garcia turned away. She was fighting with something internal — Roland could see it in the set of her jaw, the way she pressed her fingers flat against her knee.

“I can’t help you,” she said finally.

He started to speak.

“I know,” she said, sharper. “I know what you’re going to say. But if I go to my father now, he’ll use it. He’ll leverage it against the apartment, against the people who are counting on me to hold that line.” Her hands tightened. “I severed that relationship for a reason. If I reach across it for this, everything I’ve asked those tenants to risk becomes a transaction. I can’t do that to them.”

Roland looked at her. She is not refusing to help. She is explaining why she can’t afford to.

“I understand,” he said.

“But you can go yourself.” She reached into her coat and produced an envelope. “My father is holding a party tomorrow evening — top-floor function at Crown Hotel. Outstanding martialists, business contacts, the usual theater.” Her mouth curved without warmth. “He keeps sending me invitations because it makes good press for him to be seen trying. If I send a proxy, he reads it as a refusal. If Lan sent one, he’d read it as acceptance.” She held out the card. “You could go in my name.”

Roland took it.

He already knew what Garde Clover read in a room: not faces, but leverage. What Roland intended to bring him was a different kind entirely.

“Thank you,” he said.

Garcia rose. She offered her hand and he shook it — a clean, firm grip, neither prolonged nor brief. The handshake of two people with different problems and a coinciding direction.

“Don’t thank me,” she said. “You’re the one who has to walk in there.”

She paused at the door.

“Also — you’re on the right track,” she said, without looking back. “I’m proud to have you as a companion, Roland. Just don’t call me Miss Garcia anymore. It makes you sound like a student.”

The door closed behind her.

Roland stood in the quiet kitchen with the invitation in his hand while the three Taquila witches divided the last of his crackers among themselves. Outside, the city moved in its ordinary way, indifferent to everything.

Different roads, he thought. Same destination.

That had always been true.

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