Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1334: The Only Compensation

When Kabala woke, her arm had already been wrapped in thick gauze. A dull throb remained, but it was insignificant against the memory of the Red Mist’s touch — that was the word for it, insignificant, which meant someone had treated it. Which meant someone knew.

This surprised her.

The wound wasn’t life-threatening. By every standard she understood, it should have been treated last — or left entirely to the body’s own slow work. Every squad in the First Army had been briefed on the characteristics of Angel’s ability, and on why the critical cases needed to come first. She had not expected special treatment. If anything, a less serious injury being prioritized would have been a sign: a signal that someone had noticed what the wound really was.

Unless it hadn’t been Angel’s ability at all.

Which meant someone had already noticed.

The uneasiness arrived all at once.

She had to leave. Now.

“Farry?” A nurse had been watching and moved closer, glancing at the name tag on the bed’s frame. “How do you feel?”

“Nothing serious.” She turned over and swung her legs off the bed, making her expression indignant rather than careful. “My comrades are dying out there. I want to go back and make the demons pay.”

“My condolences.” The nurse nodded. “But first you need to go to the main tent. Miss Nana Pine would like to see you.”

Kabala went still. “She — wants to see me? My injury is practically—”

“I’m not sure of the reason. But she asked me specifically to pass it along.” The nurse’s smile was entirely unguarded, the smile of someone delivering good news. “Other soldiers would give anything to have a chance to see her. Come with me.”

Kabala looked at the nurse’s back as they walked. The back of someone who had no idea. After a moment she followed.

Through several checkpoints, and then she was standing before the fabled Angel.

From appearance alone, the rumors had been accurate: petite, clearly sheltered, skin clean and ruddy, eyes that had not yet lost their youth. The daughter of a noble family who had never known hardship. Kabala’s unease pulled back slightly. Perhaps things were not as bad as she’d feared.

“Um — you wanted to see me?”

Nana Pine’s first sentence closed every exit.

“I’m curious. You’re clearly a witch. Why did you conceal your identity to join the First Army as an ordinary soldier?”

“I don’t understand what you mean—” The denial came automatically, habitual, buying time. Did Jodel actually report this to someone above—

“Your wound.” Nana gestured toward the arm. “Most of the punctures were made by a sharp implement. A demon’s claw can’t produce that pattern — it would be a dagger, probably a bayonet. You did this yourself. And when I cleaned the wound I found traces of Red Mist erosion. It doesn’t stay at the surface; it penetrates beneath the skin into the muscle, in some cases reaching bone. Only a witch sustains that kind of injury. You deliberately altered the wound to disguise it, but you cannot falsify the corrosion.”

Kabala closed her mouth.

Nana hadn’t learned anything from Jodel. The logic was clean and narrow, a corridor with no side doors. Whatever Kabala might have tried — playing confused, playing ignorant — she could see, looking at the young woman’s composed face, that none of it would have worked.

She had been too quick to read Nana as soft.

After a long silence she asked, “You’ve treated witches who were corroded by Red Mist before?”

Nana’s lip curved. “I’m one myself.”

Kabala stared.

“Everyone knew the Red Mist causes serious damage to witches,” the young woman said, with the matter-of-fact quality of someone reading from notes they’ve already memorized. “No one knew how to cure it. So I experimented personally.” She paused. “If a sister of mine were harmed by it one day and I couldn’t do anything — I would never forgive myself for that.” Another pause, shorter. “Fortunately: as long as you don’t inhale a large amount or take it to a critical area like the head, it can be treated within a short window. So — for the future — if it ever happens again, the correct response is to amputate immediately.”

Kabala stared at her in silence. The pain of the Red Mist’s corrosion was not something a person forgot; it was the kind of experience that made you walk around its memory for the rest of your life. Yet from the way Nana had just described it, she had not experienced it once. She had experienced it several times, deliberately, and the subject seemed to bore her.

Nothing in those young, soft features was consistent with what she had just said.

A greenhouse flower from a noble family.

She almost laughed.

It was, she thought with some bitterness, a pattern she recognized. A Divine Lady was supposed to occupy the upper hand in any negotiation. In her experience, she never had. Not with the Queen of Clearwater. And apparently not now.

She let out a long breath. “My name is Kabala. I come from the Sandstone Clan. Farry is a false name.” The confession arrived steadily; there was no point in anything else. “At this point I cannot continue in the First Army. And because I once served the chief’s mortal enemy — Garcia Wimbledon, third princess of Graycastle — I expect to be taken to Neverwinter for questioning. Even if Roland Wimbledon treats witches with care, there is no reason he would extend that care to an enemy’s subordinate.”

She told it plainly, all of it: how she had followed the Queen of Clearwater north, how the Sandstone Clan had come apart afterward, how she had come back and found the First Army recruiting and understood it as the only path left to her. The fabricated identity, the trust she’d earned during the campaign against the Wildwave and Cut Bone clans, the hope of exchanging her contributions for an oasis her clanspeople could live in.

“You can do whatever you want with me,” she said finally, and her voice held steady. “But do not let your anger fall on the Sandstone Clan. There are only women and children left. They never served Garcia Wimbledon.”

“I understand,” Nana said.

Then: “You can go.”

Kabala blinked. “What?”

“I asked to see you because I wanted to know if you’d like to have the scars on your face removed.” Nana spread her hands. “From how you’ve answered, I think the answer is no. If that’s so, there’s nothing more I need to say.”

Kabala stood in the tent with her mouth open and no words behind it.

She had never come out ahead in a negotiation. She had been silenced by the Queen of Clearwater more times than she could count, left standing exactly like this, exactly this dumb. The feeling was familiar.

And yet the two were nothing alike. The thing Nana had just done carried none of the cold calculation behind the Queen’s silences. It was simply — what it was.

“Oh, one more thing.” Nana’s tone shifted into something lighter. “The Star Flower Troupe is performing tonight, right there in the campsite at the western pass.” A small laugh. “If you head back now, you might make the end of the show.”

Kabala pressed her lips together. Then, in the Sand Nation way, she bowed.

She turned and walked out of the main tent into the open air.

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