Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 132: The Knight of the Elk Family (Part 1)

Prius had been locked up for five days, and the waiting was worse than any of the rest of it.

The room they’d been put in had once been a house — proper walls, proper ceiling, no dampness — and someone had replaced the door with a wooden railing before the prisoners arrived. The furniture was gone, but they’d left the blankets. As impromptu prison cells went, Prius had seen worse, and he was aware that this was not necessarily to his advantage.

There were four others: two of the Duke’s knights, one young knight from the Wolf family who didn’t seem afraid of anything in particular, and Ferlin Eltek — the Morning Light, star of Longsong Stronghold’s tournament circuit, the man who had turned down three noble daughters and married a civilian woman, and who was apparently doing the same thing here as he did in every difficult situation, which was to appear completely composed and be a steadying influence on people who weren’t.

Halon, the older of the Duke’s knights, had been pacing since the second day.

“My fields haven’t even been sown,” he said, not for the first time. “The wheat. My woman doesn’t know how to manage it.”

“Your territory,” the Wolf knight said, with the flat tone of someone stating an obvious fact. “You think the Prince is going to give it back? He’s going to let you ride home and plant your wheat?” He leaned against the wall. “The Duke led a rebellion against the throne. The people who rode with him are accomplices. If he doesn’t hang us, we should consider ourselves fortunate.”

Halon grabbed him by the collar and lifted. Ferlin’s hand closed around Halon’s wrist from behind.

“Not here,” Ferlin said quietly. “Not like this.”

Halon let go. He sat down in a corner and was silent for a while, which was its own kind of relief.

Prius had been quiet through all of it, watching.

He knew what he was. He was not brave, not a skilled fighter, not politically savvy. He had been a knight of the Elk family the way some men are things by accident of birth — his father had held the rank, had drilled him through the necessary forms, and Prius had gotten through the physical requirements by virtue of being young and healthy rather than talented. What he actually liked was his small territory: the chickens, the duck pond, the fishing along the north edge of his land in the early morning when the light came level through the rushes and everything was quiet.

He had hung back during the charge. He was not proud of this and not ashamed of it. He was alive, and the men who had ridden at the front were not, and the arithmetic seemed clear even if the honor wasn’t.

What he’d been turning over for five days was a simpler question: What happens now?

Ferlin, he noticed, had never been near the front of the charge. He was the tournament star, the best swordsman in the Stronghold, the man every family wanted leading their cavalry — and he had managed to survive a battle where the front three rows had been effectively annihilated. Prius was certain this wasn’t coincidence, but he didn’t know what it meant, and he hadn’t asked.

On the morning of the sixth day, the guard came.

“Sirius Daly. With me.”

One of the Duke’s younger knights jumped up, waved to the room, and was gone. Halon was immediately at the railing.

“We want to go!”

The guard — Prius’s age, wearing the leather uniform he’d come to associate with the First Army, carrying one of those strange shortened rifles — looked at Halon without blinking and without using any honorific. “Your turn will come.” He locked the railing and left.

Halon stared after him with an expression of genuine confusion underneath the anger. A civilian guard who didn’t address a knight properly was simply not a category he could process without dissonance.

Prius had been watching that, too.

Half an hour later, the guard was back. “Prius Dessau.”

He stood too fast and caught his foot in a blanket. Ferlin’s hand steadied him by the elbow before he could go down.

“Good luck,” Ferlin said, which was either encouragement or exactly what it sounded like.

Prius followed the guard out into the morning air.

Border Town was not what he’d expected.

He had heard the word desolate used about it, had heard it described as a mining camp at the edge of nowhere, the kind of place a disgraced prince was sent to get him out of the capital’s way. What he saw was something else. The streets were busy in the way that cities are busy — not crowded, but purposeful, everyone moving with somewhere to go. The people he passed had the color and expression of people who were eating and sleeping. He saw men in the First Army uniform every hundred meters, moving through the foot traffic with the easy confidence of people who belonged here and knew it.

Near the castle district, a construction site had drawn a hundred workers together around a growing row of identical houses — small by noble standards, built in brick. He watched for a moment as he passed. The uniformity was strange. No lord built uniform housing for his people — it implied that every person within it had the same claim on shelter, which was not an idea the standard lord’s architecture expressed.

In the district beyond, he could see the cleared land running out to the mountain range, and figures moving through it. New settlers, from the look of them. The acreage looked recently burned clean.

He was still thinking about this when the guard stopped him at the castle door.

“Full search before you go in.”

Prius extended his arms without comment. The guard was thorough — soles included — and entirely indifferent to Prius’s rank, which was perhaps no longer operative anyway.

“This way.”

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