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Chapter 14: Ability

“How tall and wide, Your Highness?”

Karl had come prepared to argue against a winter build. The question he was now asking instead was a different kind entirely — a professional’s question, crisp and specificity-seeking. Roland felt something loosen in his chest.

“At minimum: fifteen feet high, six feet wide. Four men abreast along the top.”

Karl nodded without hesitation. “Then the foundation trench needs to be one man deep for stability. And a six-foot crown on a fifteen-foot wall requires the base to be at least double — twelve feet wide at minimum. The excavation alone will consume considerable labor.” He looked at Roland. “Give me a hundred and fifty men and I can have the trench finished before the Months of Demons arrive.”

“A trench won’t stop the beasts.”

“No,” Karl agreed. “Stone masonry to that height, however, takes three years. If you only need to stop the demon beasts, twelve feet is probably sufficient. Reduce the crown to four feet, and the base to six — with two hundred workers, trenching and building simultaneously, I can have it done by January. Before the beasts come.”

He paused, then pressed on: “Your Highness, I must say plainly — this is not a good time to begin. If construction falls behind schedule, the winter rains will soften whatever has been dug. When spring comes, you won’t be finishing the wall. You’ll be re-excavating a collapsed ditch.”

“Suppose we keep to twelve feet high and four feet wide. How long for just the trench?”

“One and a half months.”

“Then we build both simultaneously and finish a month before the Demons.” Roland waved off the objection before it could form. “I know what concerns you. But look at this first.”

He had no time to walk Karl through the firing process. Instead he produced the two test bricks from the previous morning — the ones Carter had failed to separate with a sword hilt — and set them on the table.

Karl van Bart picked them up. He turned them over. He pressed his thumb into the joint. His professional composure, which had survived Anna, which had survived the prince’s strange and direct manner, did not survive this.

Alchemical cement, Roland told him. The latest product of the Graycastle workshop. Sets overnight. Bonds stone to stone with no cutting or polishing required. Any irregular piece of rock becomes a viable building block.

The stonemason understood immediately what this meant. Half a lifetime spent fitting stone to stone, and here was a material that made the fitting irrelevant. The time consumed by the shaping stage — gone. The construction rate for anything he cared to build would jump to a level he had never worked at. He set the bricks down and looked at Roland with something that was almost reverence.

“Will three months be enough?” Roland asked.

Karl’s voice was slightly unsteady. “If what you have said — if the alchemical workshop described this accurately — I am willing to try.”

“Good. I’ll have the material specifications written up for you. Questions go to my assistant minister, Barov.” Roland smiled. “And Karl — from today, you hold the position of Chief of the Employees’ Office.”

The next afternoon, Nana Paien arrived.

She was fourteen, perhaps fifteen, with dark eyes that went wide when she saw Anna and stayed wide. She stood in the doorway of the courtyard and stared. Then, in a small voice: “Am I already dead?”

Roland noticed the effect she had on a room. He had noticed the same thing with Anna — the way a witch’s presence seemed to alter the quality of the light around her, a warmth of color that had nothing to do with clothing or gesture. Nana was younger, rounder-faced, quicker to expression, while Anna held herself with a stillness that read older than her years. They were entirely different types. But they shared that quality — that sense of color in a world of grey.

He let them speak. Anna said little and Nana said everything she had been holding back for days, and by the end of it Nana had relaxed enough to ignore the fourth prince of Graycastle entirely, which Roland found he did not mind. He leaned on the edge of the table, poured himself some ale, and watched.

When the conversation slowed enough, he cleared his throat. “Miss Paien. I understand you’ve awakened as a witch?”

He used awakened deliberately. The common word was fallen. He had thought about this. The choice was not naïve — he knew some people with power used it badly. Weapons could be turned either direction; what mattered was who held them. The Church’s catalogued massacres of witches were no doubt real, in the way that any record of violence is real, but they proved nothing about witches in general — only about individuals, only about circumstances. Using that record to condemn every witch who had ever lived was the oldest and ugliest of logical errors.

Nana’s face went guarded. “Will you hang me?”

“No. The gallows are for heinous criminals. You’re neither.”

She breathed out slowly. “The teacher said witches are forced by the devil — that sometimes their power looks good, but it’s a trap. A temptation.” She looked at her own hands. “I haven’t seen the devil. I swear.”

“You haven’t, because there is no devil to see. The Church deceived your teacher.” He said it plainly, without elaboration. She was young; explanations about institutional power and the logic of monotheism would land on nothing. He filed it away for later. “When did you first notice you were different?”

“About a week ago.” She tilted her head, remembering. “I found a bird with a broken leg. I wanted to help it. And then — something flowed out of my hands.”

“Something flowed out?”

“It wrapped around the bird. Like a sticky bubble of water. And the leg healed.”

A healer. Roland set down his ale very carefully and kept his face still. He knew exactly what healing magic meant in a world without antibiotics, without sterile equipment, without any of the tools that made modern trauma survivable. Wound infection killed more than the wound itself. This one ability, applied consistently, would save more lives in Border Town than anything else he could build or manufacture. It would not transform civilization — but for the individual person bleeding on a floor, it was the whole world.

He went to the door and called for a knight to bring a live chicken from the kitchens.

The tests that followed were methodical and, Roland suspected, somewhat upsetting to Nana. He worked through the range of injuries a chicken could be made to sustain: cuts, fractures, bruising, a severed claw reconnected, a leg reattached at the joint. What she could do: restore damaged tissue, mend breaks, seal cuts at a rate visible to the eye. What she could not do: regenerate lost parts from nothing; reverse death once it had set in.

At the end, when the chicken had finally given up, Nana sat with her arms crossed and her lower lip out, radiating the specific energy of a girl who had watched someone be cruel to an animal for science.

Roland summoned afternoon tea without being asked, on the principle that dessert had already worked on Anna. He was right. The pastries appeared; Nana’s expression shifted; the matter of the chicken was set aside.

When she left, Anna spoke from across the yard.

“Why did you let her go? She’s a witch, like me.”

“Her family hasn’t found out yet.”

“It’s only a matter of time.”

“Yes.” Roland sat down across from her. “It is. Which is why — and I know this is late — do you want to see your father?”

She shook her head. No hesitation, no waver. Whatever her father’s face meant to her now, it was settled. She had a friend. That was more than she’d had before.

“Nana will come back,” Roland said. “Every other day, to practice. I’m going to have her come regularly.”

Anna blinked, once, and nodded quickly.

“And — would you like to go back to Karl’s school? Learn with the other children?”

She didn’t answer. He thought he understood why.

“However long it takes,” he said. “As long as I’m here, you’ll one day be able to live like anyone else. Go anywhere. Fear no gallows.” He held her gaze. “I promise.”

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