Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1258: Air Combat Maneuver

The trainer aircraft lined up along the runway in a row, their propellers still, their noses all pointing the same direction like a class waiting to be called. Thirty official trainees stood in front of them and listened to Princess Tilly pace.

She was half the height of most of them. That had stopped being remarkable weeks ago.

“From today, your training enters a new phase.” She did not stop moving — back and forth, eyes on each face in turn. “Tell me what you’ve learned this past month. Patter. Go.”

“Lifting, Your Highness!”

“Next.”

“Hovering!”

“Magic Movie — ” A pause. The student who had said it heard himself. ”— I mean balance training. Your Highness.”

Further down the row, near the runway where those who hadn’t passed the entrance exam sat waiting for the trial flight observation, Finkin leaned toward the others. “Has anyone else noticed she’s easier to deal with lately?”

“She made us clean the bathrooms for a month,” Hinds said under his breath. “What part of that is easy?”

“That’s not what I mean.” Finkin looked at Good. “You feel it too, right?”

Good nodded. He had been trying to name the change for days. Princess Tilly was still precise and demanding; she still corrected every mistake without softening the correction. But the coiled tension that had been in her since he’d arrived at the Academy — the watchfulness of someone expecting disaster — had loosened slightly. He suspected it had something to do with what the numbers had cost: two hundred students had entered this program, and thirty had passed. And those thirty had destroyed most of the available aircraft doing it. Eagle Face, their primary flight instructor, had told them once that a single plane cost more than most ships — and ships ran into the thousands of gold royals. No wonder she had been unbearable.

But whatever had shifted had shifted.

“Discipline, Your Highness,” Finkin announced, straightening, when it reached him. “I learned the importance of discipline!”

“And responsibility!” Hinds added, helpfully.

Laughter from down the line. Someone in the group that had come up from the First Army muttered that these civilians should have been sent for army training first — let them learn to follow orders before touching an aircraft. Most of the people who’d made that argument loudest over the past month were those same army veterans.

Tilly didn’t react to the interruption. She continued down the row.

Good replied when she reached him: “Passion.”

A murmur. Finkin shot him a worried look. Someone near the back whispered: what does that even mean?

Tilly stopped for a moment. Then she moved on.

When the answers were done, she turned to face all of them. “You’ve learned more than you think. Now you apply it.” She let that settle. “I’m dividing you into two groups of three teams for a mock battle. Rule: if you can hold your opponent within your firing arc for ten continuous seconds without being shaken off, I count that as a hit. Until now you’ve only fired at stationary ground targets. Today you learn what aerial combat actually is.”

The excitement was immediate.

“Your Highness!” One student’s hand shot up.

“Yes.”

“The guns — they’re unloaded, aren’t they?”

“Idiot,” Finkin said, not quietly.

“They’re not just unloaded,” Tilly said. “There are no guns. The mounts on the planes are models. You could pull the trigger all day.” The tension in the crowd released as laughter. “Also: hitting someone in the air is harder than you think. Even with live ammunition, you’d miss most of the time. Questions?”

Good was now certain: she had changed. The Princess Tilly from his first weeks here would not have deflected tension with a shrug. Something had been resolved in her — or at least set down temporarily.

Finkin raised his hand. “Your Highness — how do we know if we’ve won? What if the other team won’t concede when we have them locked?”

The theoretical framework of aerial combat, as they’d learned it in class, depended on establishing a firing solution — getting the enemy into your arc and keeping them there. The rear-mounted machine guns existed primarily to help pilots escape from that situation, not to make kills. No one had worked out the rest of it yet. There was no rest of it to work out. This was new.

“I’ll make the calls,” Tilly said. She gestured toward the two women she had brought to stand at the edge of the field. “They’ll watch everything. Don’t think you can cheat.”

”…That’s Sylvie,” someone near Good said, recognizing the first woman.

“The other one’s from the Sleeping Spell,” another voice said. “The steward, I think.”

Tilly indicated the trainees waiting along the runway. “They’ll signal with flags. Each plane has a number. Green means operational. Red means shot down. If your number goes red, you leave the battlefield and land. Understood?”

“Yes!”

“Good.” She produced the list she’d already written. “Team assignments.”

Good and Finkin: Team 2.

“Fifteen minutes, Teams 1, 2, and 3 take off. Don’t hover over the Academy. Then Teams 3, 4, and 5. Once all planes are up, the battle begins.” She clapped once. “Show me what you’ve learned.”

Good closed his fingers around his own fist.

Finkin was already pulling him toward the plane, but he stopped and looked back at the team assignments — the pattern clicking into place. Teams 1, 2, and 3 were all civilians. Teams 4, 5, and 6 were all First Army.

Princess Tilly had not divided them randomly.

She wanted to see which half of her school could actually fly.

“Perfect,” Finkin said, rubbing his nose with the look of a man who had been saving up grievances. “I’ve been waiting for this. We’re aerial knights. Let’s fight in the air.”

Good didn’t answer. He looked down at his hands — they were trembling, slightly and continuously, the way they always did before he took the controls. He had come to understand that the trembling was not fear. It was the body’s way of saying soon.

“I’ll pilot,” Good said.

“I expected that,” Finkin said. “You know I won’t agree.”

They looked at each other.

“Rock, scissors, paper.”

Good’s hand came out flat. Finkin’s came out as a fist. A flicker of disbelief crossed Finkin’s face.

“Fine,” he said, deflated. “You fly this time. Plenty more training sessions.”

They walked to the plane. Hinds watched from the sidelines with the elaborate nonchalance of someone who very much wanted to be included and was performing not caring.

“You’ve got this,” Hinds said.

“You’ll see we didn’t train for nothing,” Finkin told him, pulling his goggles down, giving a thumbs-up with the confidence of someone who had already decided how this would end.

The ground crew pulled away the stairs. The propeller spun as the handle cranked — first slow, then a blur — and the radial engine coughed to life with a vibration that moved through the frame of the aircraft and into the seat and into Good’s spine and hands, as if the whole machine had just taken a breath.

All clear. OK to take off.

The ground crew saluted. Good raised his arm. Clean motion, no hesitation.

“Aircraft Number Two — go.”

The biplane rolled forward, gathered speed, and lifted off the runway into the sea wind. The Academy fell away beneath them. The Swirling Sea opened ahead, bright and enormous, the horizon a hard line between blue and blue.

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