Rewrite That Witch
CH124 · Rewrite
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Chapter 124: Return to Border Town

Nightingale stepped out of the fog the moment Tylo’s footsteps faded in the corridor.

“I’ve never heard you lie that many times in one sitting,” she said.

“How did the High Priest read?”

“I couldn’t tell. His Stone blocked my sight entirely — wherever he was standing was just darkness.” She dropped into a chair. “So: do the pills actually do what he claimed?”

Roland turned them over in his palm. Red and black, both stamped with the Church’s sigil. He ran the pharmacology mechanically: pain suppression could be opioids or something analogous; the strength enhancement sounded like forced adrenaline, or something that mimicked it. Either suggested extraction and refinement processes that shouldn’t exist in this era.

Unless it isn’t chemistry at all.

“You can see magic flowing, yes?” He held the pills toward her. “Any traces?”

Nightingale took them and studied them in the way she studied things she was uncertain about — not long, but completely still. When she handed them back she had a slight crease between her brows.

“No magic visible. But they feel similar to a God’s Stone of Retaliation.”

“Similar how?”

“In my fog, the Stone reads as a particular kind of darkness — not just the absence of light, but the absence of something. Like a hole that doesn’t have edges.” She paused, searching for the word. “Nothingness. These pills give me the same feeling, but faint, and it isn’t a round hole. More like thin threads.”

“Does it block your ability? When you’re holding them?”

She vanished into the fog and returned in the same breath. “No effect.”

Roland wrapped the pills carefully in a fold of paper and put them in his pocket. He’d find condemned prisoners for the trial — not something he was comfortable with, but the alternative was guessing about Church pharmacology, which was worse.

“I wouldn’t have expected the Church to have such a high opinion of you,” Nightingale said. There was something subdued in her voice that he didn’t examine too carefully.

“If his Stone hadn’t been blocking you, I’d wager nine of his ten sentences were lies.” Roland leaned back. “Look at the arithmetic. What they’re offering — pills, material support, the implicit endorsement — against what they want: churches in every territory I govern, a king who took the throne with their help and therefore owes them the governance of his people’s belief. A stable country under a pliable ruler is worth more to them than whatever chaos the current civil war creates.”

“Maybe they genuinely believe you’d give people a better life.”

“Stability comes from unity or equilibrium, not from any particular ruler. Even a king who sleeps through his reign gives people better lives than an active war does. If that were their real criterion, they’d back Garcia right now — she just beat Timothy at Eagle City. She’s the strongest candidate in Graycastle.” He shook his head. “Instead they come to me, the weakest candidate from their perspective, and offer to help me start a three-way war. Ask yourself what a three-way war does to the population, to the wealth, to the unification timeline.”

Nightingale was quiet.

“It delays everything,” Roland said. “A prolonged, exhausting war that leaves all three factions depleted and the Church the only institution that remained intact throughout. At the end of it, whoever wins is holding a ruined country and owes the Church everything.” He looked at the pocket where the pills were. “The one thing I can’t explain is why they’d tell me any of this in person. Unless they’ve calculated I’ll accept anyway, eventually.”

“Perhaps you don’t think the way nobles think,” Nightingale said.

“No,” Roland agreed. “I don’t.”

A pause. Then, quietly: “Strange. That wasn’t a lie.”

Three days later he was on the river, watching Border Town come back into view.

The burned clearings Anna had opened along the western bank were full of people. He could see them from the boat — small figures moving along the new breaks in the forest, carrying tools, staking the beginnings of what would be field boundaries. The first serfs, already at work before he’d arrived to explain the terms.

Barov moves fast when money is involved.

Closer to the mountain range, a row of wooden sheds had gone up since he’d left — simple construction, tight walls against the spring wind, sized for families rather than individuals. Karl’s work, he guessed. The sheds were uniform and unlovely and exactly right.

He stood at the bow and felt the particular satisfaction of returning to a place that had gotten further along without him. It meant the systems were working. It meant he didn’t have to be present for everything to move.

The goal of every manager, he thought, is to make themselves unnecessary.

The dock was crowded — trading barges stacked three deep, sail-boats angled for position, the whole commerce of a city that had spent a winter cut off from the river and was now making up for it in a single furious week. Little Town drew too little water for a dock; they tied up on the bank and Roland walked up the slope to find Barov already waiting, with a rolled parchment and the expression of a man who has been rehearsing his report since dawn.

Fourteen thousand gold royals in coin alone.

Barov spread the accounting on the table and Roland let himself feel, briefly, the sheer scale of it. Twenty years of the Duke’s accumulated extraction from the Western territory. Enough, converted efficiently, to fund two years of Border Town’s development at current rates, or one year at the accelerated pace he was about to propose.

“The jewelry and metalwork?” he asked.

“Conservative estimate, another ten thousand. Higher at auction in King’s City. Currently in the castle basement — the original storage room is full.” Barov allowed himself a small satisfied expression. “I’d suggest expanding the warehouse footprint, Your Highness. We’re going to need the space.”

“Put it on the list.” Roland picked up a pen. “I want Karl this afternoon.”

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