Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1145: A Deal and a Strange Phenomenon

Garde Clover made his speech from the center stage and received his applause with the practiced ease of a man who had been receiving applause his entire adult life. Roland watched from the crowd and noted the tells: the slight forward lean into the microphone, the wide slow gesture that invited the journalists to frame him a certain way, the careful mention of Garcia — present in her absence — timed precisely for the moment when enough wine had been circulated to make the room generous.

He does this well, Roland thought. And he knows exactly what he’s doing.

Garde worked the front tables after stepping down. He moved through the cluster of VIP guests with unhurried deliberation — each exchange brief, purposeful, carrying its own small weight of future obligation. Roland let him reach the natural pause between two groups, the half-second gap where a practiced host remembers the room is larger than the table he’s standing at.

Then he stepped forward.

“You’re—” Garde began, with the careful hesitation of a man who has met enough people to know he shouldn’t guess.

“Roland. Garcia’s proxy.”

Garde’s demeanor shifted — not visibly enough for the room to notice, but Roland had spent years reading rooms considerably more dangerous than this one. The man was calculating: proxy versus representative, what it signals, why Garcia would send someone new.

“Nice to meet you,” Garde said, accepting a glass from a passing waiter, the small rituals of politeness maintaining their own momentum. “You’re lucky to have the Force of Nature. Enviable, at your age.”

“I’d like to talk to you in private,” Roland said. “If you have a moment.”

This was, by any reasonable social measure, presumptuous. Roland was twenty years Garde’s junior, entirely unknown to him, and had arrived at a party he hadn’t been directly invited to. Garde’s eyebrows moved upward by exactly the amount they needed to convey that he’d noticed.

“I’m expected—”

“You haven’t spoken to Garcia in months,” Roland said, raising his voice slightly. Not loudly. Just enough. A nearby journalist’s head turned.

Garde looked at him. Then at the journalist. Then back at Roland.

“It won’t take long,” Roland said pleasantly.

The VIP room was quiet, sealed against the ambient noise of the hall. Garde’s secretary took a position near the wall — an elderly man, utterly still, who had clearly witnessed enough of these conversations to know when to be furniture and when to be witness.

“Does he need to be here?” Roland asked. “What I’m going to say concerns your company’s interests.”

“He’s been with my family for decades,” Garde said. He’d stopped performing now that there was no one to perform for. The pleasant veneer was still present, but it sat differently on him — like a coat worn indoors, retained by habit. “I’m more curious about the three girls you brought. This isn’t a charity dinner.”

“As it happens,” Roland said, “it concerns them.” He let that breathe for a moment. “I’ll be direct. They’re undocumented. I need you to help them obtain legal status and enrollment in a reputable school. Then I’ll need you to do the same for approximately three hundred others, spread over time.”

Garde was quiet for a long moment. Then: “Is that all?”

It was the right question. A businessman’s question — not is this unreasonable but is this the full invoice. Roland felt the tension of the room settle slightly.

“Yes,” Roland said. “I don’t imagine it’s beyond the Clover Group’s capacity.”

“You said it’s a deal. What are you offering?”

“Not Garcia’s support in the apartment dispute. I won’t trade her on that.”

Garde nodded, slowly. He’d expected this.

Roland produced his hunting license and held it out.

The secretary crossed the room, examined it in silence for long enough that the silence acquired its own meaning, and then said: “It’s legitimate.”

Garde looked at Roland differently.

“What it means,” Roland said, before Garde could reconstruct his estimates, “is not something I’m authorized to explain in detail. What it means in practical terms is that I have resources and methods that a legitimate business sometimes finds difficult to access.” He set the license on the table between them. “Companies of your scale encounter problems that don’t respond well to legal process. Criminal organizations that know exactly how long evidence collection takes and how to stay ahead of it. Assets that can’t be recovered through courts.” He let that settle. “I can address those. Not everyone — they have to be genuine criminal enterprises, genuine threats. I conduct my own verification. I won’t be led into anything that isn’t what it appears to be.”

Garde had gone very still in the way that men go still when they are listening more carefully than they want to appear to be listening.

“You’re suggesting,” he said at last, “an ongoing arrangement.”

“A long-term one. The three hundred people I mentioned won’t all arrive at once. Neither will your problems.”

Garde reached into his breast pocket and produced a cigar he didn’t light. He turned it between his fingers for a moment.

“This wouldn’t be a good deal for you,” he said finally. “If you’re serious.”

“I am serious,” Roland said. “And I prefer to determine what constitutes a good deal for myself.”

Something shifted in Garde’s expression — the first genuine thing Roland had seen from him all evening. A man who had negotiated with a thousand people recognizing that he was not, at this moment, in familiar territory.

“Three at first,” Roland said. “Then the rest, over whatever timeline the process requires.”

The secretary photographed the three witches’ faces against the window — Dawnen attempting to hold her expression professionally, Dido suppressing a smile, Saint Miran managing something close to dignity — and the deal closed without paper or signature. In Roland’s experience, the deals that held were often the paperless ones. Paper was evidence. Silence was trust.

He collected the three witches and turned toward the door.

“Wait.”

Roland stopped.

Garde stood in the center of the room with his unlit cigar and his careful face, and looked at Roland as though seeing something he hadn’t expected to see there.

“Garcia,” he said. “How is she?”

The question arrived without any of the performance that had surrounded everything else. Just the question, dry and direct, from a man who had stopped pretending for a moment.

Roland considered him.

“She’s doing very well,” he said. “She doesn’t regret anything.”

He didn’t add that Garcia had chosen to send him here rather than come herself, which was a kind of message — not reconciliation, but not silence either. Some things were better left for people to work out on their own schedule.

Back in the hall, Roland retrieved a glass of champagne from a passing tray and stood near the window, thinking.

The golden liquid turned.

Not quickly — slowly, the way dye dispersed in still water. A thread of red resolving itself at the surface into crooked, deliberate letters:

Don’t forget what you promised me.

Roland’s hand tightened on the stem. He felt the glass begin to give — thin crystal, too much pressure — and forced his grip to loosen.

By the time he breathed again, the champagne was pale and clear and ordinary. No trace. No residue. Just wine and refracted light.

He set the glass down on the nearest table.

The same person as the note in the book. Rose Café, No. 302. They wanted a meeting. And whoever they were, they had access to this world at a level that the Force of Nature didn’t explain — not because martialists couldn’t move objects or manipulate matter at the edges, but because what had just happened had left no fluctuation in the Force of Nature at all. Nothing he could have anticipated, nothing he could have defended against.

Which meant the Dream World itself had an architect who had noticed him.

When did it start? When he borrowed the book? When he found the face from the Reflection Church — dead for eight hundred years — living and breathing in Lan’s place? Or earlier — back in the Battle of Souls with Zero, when the boundaries between things had first become uncertain?

He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure knowing would help.

“Roland?” Dawnen’s voice came from somewhere behind him. “Are you all right?”

He turned. All three of them were watching him from the dessert table — Dawnen with a small pastry in one hand, Dido with a bag that had grown noticeably heavier, Saint Miran with her expression that always looked like she was deciding whether to say something.

“Fine,” he said. “I’m coming.”

He crossed to them, accepted the slice of foie gras Saint Miran pressed into his hand, and chewed it without tasting it while the party continued around them.

Behind him, the empty champagne glass sat on its table. Clear as water.

As if nothing had been written there at all.

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