Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 139: The Devil’s Power

When Barov returned to his office, he closed the door.

Then he stood with his back against it for a moment, breathing.

My God.

He crossed to his desk and sat down, then immediately stood up again, and finally pressed both hands flat on the surface and looked at nothing. Cold had moved up his spine during the walk from the third floor, and it hadn’t left. He reached up and gripped the God’s Stone of Retaliation hanging at his neck. The familiar weight of it steadied him.

The 4th Prince is possessed by the devil.

He had suspected it for some time. He had dismissed the suspicion as the product of stress, of adjustment to an unusual posting, of a man trying to explain what he didn’t understand. But sitting here now, with all of the Prince’s words still moving through his head in their relentless, interlocking way, he could no longer explain it otherwise.

It was not merely the character change — that alone he could have accepted. Mild eccentricity, habits formed in the border hardship, some private resolution taken after exile. Character changed. Barov had seen it happen. What could not be explained by character was knowledge.

He had worked for twenty years in the capital’s City Hall. He had risen to Finance Minister, not through birth alone but through competence — through an actual understanding of how a city moved money and manpower and supply. He had made arrangements he would not have wanted written down. He had navigated ministers and underground factions and the particular patience required when powerful men were being asked to stop doing things they enjoyed. He knew, in other words, what governing looked like. He knew all the varieties of it.

He had never encountered anything like what the Prince described.

The economy of coin-cycling. The idea that a low tax rate could generate more value than a high one. The measurement of farming practices as if they were an experiment with a controlled variable. The notion — and here Barov’s hands tightened on the Stone — that civilians should work in the Town Hall. Should work there. Not as an emergency measure or a disgraceful compromise but as a deliberate design choice, because they were more loyal and more enthusiastic.

And before that: the toilet project, which had seemed insane and now demonstrably was not. The cannons. The girls with strange abilities, whom the Church had spent centuries burning, being housed in the castle and given lessons. The battle plan that had destroyed a duke’s cavalry force with a line of miners and hired hunters.

Barov sat down properly and took a quill.

He wrote down everything the Prince had said in the meeting, quickly, from memory. Then he looked at what he’d written.

Nothing was missing. Nothing contradicted anything else. Every piece connected to the others with the smooth fit of a mechanism that had been designed as a whole rather than assembled in pieces.

He thought about the two new projects — civilians in the Town Hall, and a universal education program.

His imagination moved through the implications.

If His Highness succeeded in teaching all the civilians to read and write — and if the Town Hall then recruited from that educated pool — within one generation the entire distinction between those who could serve as administrators and those who could not would have dissolved. The nobility had held its administrative monopoly not because nobles were more intelligent but because literacy was expensive. Destroy the cost, destroy the monopoly. And once a civilian family understood that the Town Hall was a path to income, to status, to something better — they would send their children to school without being asked.

The cycle repeated itself. Everything the Prince designed repeated itself.

Only the Devil could devise something like this.

Barov gripped the Stone again, stared at the parchment, and sat with the question he had been avoiding.

Could the Devil also be something good?

He ran the evidence.

His Highness had bought enough food to carry all of Border Town’s civilians through the Months of Demons. He had paid for it from his own funds. The pills, the strange technologies, the techniques for building and agriculture — every application had been toward improving the lives of the people who lived here. The witches, who by every tradition the Church upheld should have been burned, were instead using their abilities to make brick and grow wheat and heal injuries.

Even the war against Duke Ryan — a war that by any conventional measure the Prince had no right to win — had been fought, and the terms afterward had been fair. Deliberately, demonstrably fair.

If Barov had been asked to describe the actions of a good king — not a king from the common chronicles, who generally managed their territories the way a man managed livestock, but a king from the old legends, the ones the priests cited as models of divine governance — he would have described something that looked like this.

He stared at the ceiling.

The Prince is possessed by the Devil. The Devil governs better than the King.

He could not unknow this. The question was what to do with it.

His father’s instruction surfaced: if you have nothing to say, say nothing; if you do not want to know the answer, do not ask the question. He had survived three Finance Ministers and two palace intrigues by applying this rule. He would apply it here.

The Church had already noticed Border Town. That much was obvious — the High Priest’s visit, the cautious circling of institutional attention. If the Church decided to expose the Prince, they would have no shortage of evidence. The witches alone would be sufficient.

But if the Church moved against Border Town and failed — and looking at the cannon emplacements on the North Slope, looking at the Army of the First, looking at what had happened to Duke Ryan’s knights — the cost of failure would be significant.

Barov picked up his quill and shook the bell on his desk.

Sirius Daly appeared in less than a minute — a young man from the Wolf Family who had come through the knight screening and ended up in the Town Hall as an apprentice. Unlike most of the knights, who carried their resentment in their posture like a visible garment, Sirius had the quality of someone who was actually paying attention to his surroundings.

Barov relayed the Prince’s instructions: a new Ministry of Agriculture, two apprentices assigned to recordkeeping, a search of the town’s population for candidates with farming experience.

“You may find the task straightforward,” Barov added, “given that the others assigned will be civilians. His Highness has insisted on it. If any of them show outstanding performance, they may eventually lead the ministry.” He let this sit. “You will be responsible for the records. When the spring plowing is finished, I’ll recall you.”

Sirius shifted his weight slightly. Something was happening in his expression — not defiance, more like a calculation being completed.

“Teacher,” he said, “I should tell you — I know farming.”

Barov looked at him.

“Before my knighthood, I helped my father manage the farmland. I know the full wheat cycle — plowing, spacing, planting depth, timing. All of it.” A pause. “When His Highness interviewed me, I didn’t mention it. I was afraid he’d assign me to work beside the serfs.”

Ah. Barov regarded him with something that had become, in the last thirty seconds, a great deal more interest. Here, then, was a candidate who could actually lead the ministry — educated, experienced, and already loyal to the Town Hall rather than to the Prince directly. A man in that position would carry the ministry’s influence back to Barov, at least for the foreseeable future.

“Do a good job,” Barov said, keeping his voice measured. “There may be more ahead of you than there appears.”

When Sirius had gone, Barov leaned back in his chair and allowed himself to hum quietly.

Whether the authority he accumulated served a king or a devil, the authority itself remained equally useful. This, too, was a principle his father had not needed to state explicitly.

The God’s Stone hung at his chest, cool and heavy.

He decided to leave it there.

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