Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1302: Perspicacity

Five days later.

“Is that Your Highness?”

“Yes. The report just reached headquarters — we’re still confirming numbers, but at least six hundred people. The garrison at Gust Castle has taken them in; they’ll travel to Neverwinter overland once they’ve recovered from the journey.”

“No, this is our obligation.”

“Thank you. Please rest.”

Edith set the telephone handset down.

As the General Staff’s most advanced communication instrument, the wind-up telephone had become indispensable — but its reach was not unlimited. In the Cage Mountain area, service extended only as far as the Aerial Knights’ encampment outside Thorn Town. It was enough.

She turned and found her third brother staring at her.

“What is it?”

Lance Kant, unlike Cole — her second brother, whom she had left to prove himself through harder routes — had been hired directly into the General Staff after he passed his elementary education exam. He was loud and rash and, she had judged, in need of supervision. There was also the private satisfaction of watching him deflated when he failed. She had not let herself examine that reason too closely.

“Nothing,” Lance said, picking his way toward her with a stack of documents tucked under one arm. “I was just surprised to see you be so courteous to someone. You’ve never even spoken that way to father.”

“I thought growing up would make you sharper,” Edith said, without heat. “Father doesn’t need ceremony because I know he doesn’t care about it. Tilly Wimbledon is His Majesty’s sister. If she carries an unfavorable impression of me back to her brother, what do you imagine happens to the House of Kant?”

“But His Majesty doesn’t really seem to care about things like that either…”

“He’s a man. Which means sometimes initiative works better than deference.”

Lance blinked. “I don’t quite follow.”

“Understanding people is the hardest part of any enterprise,” Edith said, with a shrug that acknowledged the gap between them without apology. “Even exceptional talent falls short of a final victory without it. It’s perfectly normal that you don’t follow.”

“Could you teach me?”

She looked at him for a moment — genuinely, the way she rarely did. “Of course. Though lessons on the go carry more weight than lectures. Cole has become quite adept, in his way. You could learn from watching him.”

The color left Lance’s face at the thought of what Cole’s methods of learning had looked like at home. He swallowed. “I’ll… hold off on that.”

“As you like.”

He shifted the documents to his other arm, eager to change the subject. “Did you call Her Highness to tell her the refugees arrived safely?”

“She delegated the matter to the General Staff. It’s my obligation to report in a timely fashion.”

Lance nodded, and they both stood for a moment in the particular quiet that follows a nearly extraordinary thing.

The rescue operation had exceeded all projections. The Aerial Knights had reached a battlefield two hundred kilometers distant in under two hours, broken the demon forces, and returned the fleet intact — every plane, every pilot. Six hundred refugees, alive.

And it had not been an ordinary hunt. From the intelligence gathered in the days since, the picture had clarified into something more troubling than a straightforward ambush: the refugees were bait. The smaller demon troop had herded them southward while the real force waited in the forest. The plan had been designed for the First Army’s conventional response — a swift rescue column, riding light because of the distance, arriving exhausted, outnumbered before it realized it was surrounded, with nearly a hundred kilometers of snow between it and safety on the way back.

Perhaps not one soldier would have returned.

This was the demons’ opening move after the First Army reduced its exposed positions. Even if the army had simply ignored the refugees — turned away entirely — the demons lost nothing. They had identified that the men of Graycastle were not like the soldiers of Wolfheart or Everwinter, and they were probing the edges of that difference.

The Aerial Knights had caught them before they learned what they needed to know.

In its shape, the battle resembled the one at the Northbound Slope a year ago: both sides had made what seemed like the rational choice, and the outcome had been entirely different from what either calculated. Even if Tilly had not found the second troop hiding in the forest, the result would not have changed. The fleet returned; the refugees survived.

“The Aerial Knights are remarkable,” Lance said, half to himself. “Dozens of Mad Demons killed, a full Devilbeast siege broken — the Blessed Army of the Union couldn’t manage anything like it.”

“They are wonderful,” Edith agreed.

She said it sincerely. Then she propped her feet on the edge of the desk, leaned back in the swiveling chair, and stared at the ceiling with an expression that Lance — after a careful look — identified as something other than happiness.

“You don’t seem pleased.”

“I’m not displeased. But I’m beginning to feel that the General Staff may be growing somewhat… redundant.”

Lance’s eyes opened wide.

“Four planes repelled more than two hundred demons,” Edith said, a faint, dry smile at the corner of her mouth. “Imagine one hundred planes. Or a thousand. At that point, military tactics and strategy become unnecessary luxuries — anyone can command the Aerial Knights, because the equation is simple: send them where the enemy is. What purpose does the General Staff serve in that world?”

She had seen it from the first moment the automatic flying machines were demonstrated to her. She had discussed it at length with Roland, had founded a research group within the staff specifically dedicated to studying aerial doctrine, had spent considerable effort trying to think ahead of the technology rather than behind it. And then, in one real battle, the Aerial Knights had demonstrated their capability with such totality that every framework she had built to manage them felt like it was made of paper.

Overpowering force simplified everything. Before the aircraft, tactics and formations had been two of the three pillars of a war. Now they were diminished. The Aerial Knights could see the entire field from above while the demons below saw nothing — groping, unable to adapt, unable to form a countermeasure against an enemy that existed in a dimension they had never thought to defend.

And this was only the beginning. The Fire of Heaven was a crude first model, as different from what would come as the original flintlock was from the Mark I.

“Then… we could go back to the City of Evernight,” Lance said quietly.

“It’s probably too late for that,” Edith said, and her smile remained, though it shifted into something less readable. “I’ve offended a great many people on the way here. Do you think they’d simply let that go?”

She knew, with the cool part of her mind, that if Roland became the continent’s sole ruler it would all resolve cleanly. But she had learned to plan for outcomes other than the best one. Cruel words, once said, outlasted the arguments that had made them necessary.

“I’ll — I’ll protect you,” Lance said, biting his lip.

“With what? Your current rank? Your connections?” She heard the snap in her own voice and did not bother softening it — it was genuine, and Lance needed to hear genuine things. “Empty promises only help your enemies. If you can’t lead, save those words. The alternative is that your enemy arranges to humiliate me in front of you — ”

She stopped.

Footsteps in the corridor. Ferlin Eltek — Morning Light, as the staff called him — came through the door, scanning the room until he found her.

“Your ladyship. I’m glad you’re here.”

“What is it?”

“I wish it were good news.” He looked, as he often did lately, vaguely beleaguered. “I’ve been reviewing the Aerial Knights’ supply list. We may need to revise the logistics.”

“Go on.”

“They’ve burned through thousands of rounds in the past few days alone — not counting the actual engagement,” Ferlin said, his voice carrying the particular distress of a man who has discovered a structural problem in an elegant plan. “Twenty or thirty pilots requesting more ammunition than ten Gun Battalions combined. Then there’s the fuel, the spare parts — if enrollment doubles or triples, I genuinely don’t know what I’m supposed to do with the logistics chain.”

Lance noticed, in the quality of the following silence, that his sister’s expression had completely changed. The languid deflation of a moment ago was gone.

Edith stood. “Then figure it out,” she said, the same flat tone she used for anything that required solving rather than discussing. “Whatever it takes — the Aerial Knights must be supplied.” She turned to Lance. “Why are you still here?”

“Hm?” He blinked. He had, apparently, been watching his sister rather than thinking.

“Intelligence room.” She was already moving, one sharp swing of her hair before the door, and then she was through it. “It isn’t time to rest yet.”

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