Rewrite That Witch
CH1167 · Rewrite
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Chapter 1167: Woe

He learned it from Lightning.

Not the outcome of the battle — he had tracked that through Leaf and the Sigil of Listening, following what the instrument could show him from the remove of Neverwinter. He had known, by the time the telephone rang, that Taquila had been seized and the Magic Slayer confirmed destroyed. What he had not known, until Lightning’s voice came through the receiver in that particular flatness that meant she was reporting from somewhere past the point where inflection was possible —

He sat with the receiver in his hand for a moment after she finished speaking.

He had approved this plan. That was not self-pity and it was not guilt-seeking; it was arithmetic. Someone had to weigh the risk, and he was the one who had done it, and the calculation had included the possibility of this outcome, and the outcome had arrived. The weight was not a surprise. It was just heavier than projected.

“Was that Lightning?” Nightingale said.

She had come in at some point while he was on the call. She moved quietly enough that he couldn’t always track when she arrived.

“Yes,” he said. He kept his eyes closed. “The war is over. Taquila is ours. The Magic Slayer is dead.” He paused. “Ashes and Elena didn’t come back.”

Silence.

“That fool,” Nightingale said, and turned away.

Her voice had gone very flat. He understood: it was what you did when you couldn’t afford the alternative. You turned the feeling into something angular so the edges would hold.

He waited.

“She never made a reckless decision,” Nightingale said, still facing away. “In twelve years of watching her fight I made decisions I would have made differently, but never reckless ones. She wasn’t reckless.” A pause. “Neither was Elena.”

“I know.”

“Then you know this wasn’t your fault. I’m throwing your words back at you — the ones you said to Lightning just now.”

“I know that too.”

He did. That was not the problem. The problem was that knowing a thing didn’t change the weight of it, only gave you a more precise understanding of what you were carrying.

He thought about Tilly.

He hadn’t known how to be with people in their grief before he came to this world. He hadn’t learned it after. You didn’t learn it — you accumulated strategies for managing the distance between your capacity and what the moment required. Tilly was a leader, which meant she would have been holding herself together since Lightning’s message reached her. Which meant by the time she reached Neverwinter she would have been holding it together for a very long time.

He decided to say nothing, and wait to understand what she needed.

The Seagull landed at the airfield in the early afternoon.

Roland was there with the others — Nightingale, Anna, Agatha, the members of the Witch Union who had remained in Neverwinter and the clerks and all the others for whom this moment was above anything else a counting of the returned. The witches came down the jet bridge one by one and met the ones waiting, and the distinctions that mattered in other contexts stopped mattering. Combat and non-combat. Taquila and Neverwinter. Old witches in God’s Punishment bodies and those who had grown into their power the ordinary way. They held each other without much talking, which was the right thing.

Tilly was last.

She came down the steps slowly, which was unlike her — Tilly moved the way she thought, at pace, without hesitation. This was measured. She was managing something.

He walked forward to meet her.

“Brother,” she said. She glanced at the people around them.

“Of course,” he said.

He closed the office door behind them. He asked Nightingale to give them a moment; she understood and left without comment. He turned from the door and found Tilly standing in the center of the room.

“If you want to—” he started.

She crossed the room and held onto him.

He went still. Not from surprise, but from the understanding that whatever he said in this moment would be wrong, and what she needed was for him to not say anything and to not move. He felt her arms tighten. He felt her breathing change.

“Just stay there,” she said. Her voice had cracked. “Just for a moment. Just—”

She couldn’t finish.

The sound that came out of her was something he had never heard before. Not from Tilly, who had been the target of her older brother’s cruelty and had survived it with a dry precision and a way of never showing what it cost her. Not from anyone he’d known well. It was the sound of a person who has been holding something for days — who has been the thing other people leaned on, who has managed logistics and wounded and grief that was not her own — and who has finally arrived at a place where holding it is no longer required.

Her fingers found the back of his jacket and sank in.

He held on and waited. He did not know what to say and was not trying to find it. Sometimes the most honest thing was knowing you didn’t have the words and not pretending otherwise.

She cried for a long time.

He stayed.

At the front, Shavi came in with the medicine.

Andrea looked at the bowl with the expression she used for particularly offensive paperwork and said, “I won’t drink it without candies.”

“The field medics might have some,” Shavi offered.

“Field medics don’t have candies. This isn’t Neverwinter.” She held out her hand. “Help me sit up.”

She drank it in one motion, made a sound, set the bowl down.

“How much longer until Nana gets to me?”

“Three or four days. She said—” Shavi hesitated.

“Said what.”

“That your legs looked bad but the injuries weren’t fatal, so the medication should help you hold until she’s free.”

Andrea rolled her eyes. “Right. Because I’m not made of the same material they are.” She had meant it practically. She saw Shavi’s face change and realized how it had landed. “That was about anatomy, not — I wasn’t — forget it.”

“You just reminded me of her,” Shavi said quietly. “That’s all. I couldn’t help it.”

“I know.” Andrea looked at the canvas ceiling. “Go get some rest. Tell Lightning and Maggie I want honey on their next patrol. If I have to drink this three more times I need something to look forward to.”

“All right.”

“Thanks.”

She listened to Shavi’s footsteps recede.

She lay back.

“You wanted everyone out,” she said. “You decided that was the goal and then you went and achieved it in the most excessive way possible. Became a Transcendent. Killed the Magic Slayer. Dissolved into the air.” She was quiet for a moment. “You didn’t even leave anything behind except a melted sword.”

The canvas moved slightly in the wind outside.

“I had at least six more years before the gap closed,” Andrea said. “I had a plan. It was a reasonable plan. You didn’t give me the six years.” She put her hands over her face. “You didn’t even wait to see if I’d catch up.”

The tent was quiet.

“How am I supposed to surpass you now?”

She stayed like that for a long time, in the particular silence of someone who has asked a question they already know doesn’t have an answer.

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