Rewrite That Witch
CH140 · Rewrite
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Chapter 140: Seeds

Shawn had been gone nearly a month, and the sun had found him.

Roland saw it in the man’s skin when he crossed the back garden — the darkening that came from weeks of open road rather than any single day’s exposure, and a thinness in his frame that spoke of inn meals taken in haste. He was already busy with the saddlebags when Roland came down, working the knots loose with hands that knew what they were doing.

He straightened when he saw the Prince and saluted.

“At ease.” Roland came forward and put a hand briefly on his shoulder. “Were all of these sacks seeds?”

“Pearl rice, earth eggs, sugar sticks.” Shawn crouched and opened the first bag. “Exactly as Your Highness described them. You can only find them in the Port of Clearwater — mostly coming up from the Fjords, where there are large farms growing them. The trader offered to sell me the pearl rods along with the rice, which would have been cheaper per unit, but the weight—”

“You made the right call.” Roland was already looking into the bag.

The corn was dried, as he’d expected — stored as winter rations, the kernels pulled from the cob and packed loose. He picked up a handful and held them in his palm. Some were pale yellow, some deep gold, a few nearly orange at the crown. Small compared to the cultivated varieties he remembered, but unmistakably themselves.

He was surprised by how strongly he recognized them. The color. The specific weight of a full kernel between thumb and forefinger. He had grown up taking corn for granted, which was not something he would do again.

The yield potential alone — three, four times what wheat produced per hectare, with significantly lower soil requirements — was enough to change Border Town’s entire food situation. With Leaves accelerating the growth cycle, the calculation became something else entirely. He set the handful down carefully.

Shawn opened the second bag.

“Earth eggs. I ate them at an inn in the Port — peeled, cut small, boiled until crisp. Light sweet taste.”

What came out of the bag was unmistakably potato, if somewhat more varied in size and shape than Roland was accustomed to. He found one that had elongated like a carrot and another that was nearly spherical, and he pressed a thumbnail into the skin of a larger one, opening a seam of pale yellow flesh.

“If you steam them and crush the flesh, the result is—”

“You’ve eaten them, Your Highness?”

A half-beat’s pause. “At the palace. The royal kitchen used a different name — potatoes.” He brushed the dirt from his hands. “The steamed version is called mashed potatoes. It’s more forgiving than boiling when the flesh is very fresh.”

“Ah. So Your Highness is quite familiar with these.”

“More than I expected to be,” Roland said, which was true in a way he couldn’t elaborate on.

The third bag was the one Shawn seemed most pleased with. He had the manner of a man who had carried something important a long distance and was arriving at the presentation of it.

“Sugar sticks. Your Highness — the honey in the Port of Clearwater was a fraction of its usual price, and this is the reason.” He held up one of the dark cane sections, the outer skin rough and jointed. “More and more farmers are switching their land to this crop. When you strip the outer skin and press it, what comes out is a syrup — one-tenth the price of honey, and when mixed into a drink, you cannot tell the difference.”

Roland had been letting Shawn find his pace on each reveal, but he had been aware of the sugarcane since the bag opened. The smell of it was distinct — faintly green, faintly sweet, the smell of something that had been alive recently.

He would not correct the name. Sugar sticks it was, already in common use in Clearwater, and the effort of renaming a crop that farmers had already adopted would accomplish nothing. What mattered was the material itself: sweetener at low cost, yes, but also ethanol, also feedstock for fermentation, also a quality-of-life improvement that would make every meal in Border Town meaningfully better. Flour bread tasted of obligation. Flour bread with sugar tasted of something else.

“Did you ask the traders about planting methods?”

“I asked.” Shawn’s expression acknowledged the difficulty. “They could only tell me that once these plants leave the South, cultivation becomes less reliable. Specific methods — they didn’t know them, or didn’t want to say.”

He would have to work it out empirically, then. Another task for the Ministry of Agriculture’s first growing season. He already knew the broad strokes — corn needed space, potatoes needed loose soil and mounding, cane needed warmth and wet. Leaves’ accelerated growth would let him run compressed trials before the summer window closed.

Shawn produced five smaller bags from somewhere inside his coat. “As Your Highness instructed — any crop I found that Border Town doesn’t already grow. These came from Fallen Dragon Ridge and Willow Town on the return journey. Grapes, soybeans, cotton, flax, and olive tree seeds.” He hesitated. “The farmers I asked said that grapevines don’t grow reliably from seed — you need to root cuttings, stick a branch section directly into soil. Seeds can germinate, but slowly, and the fruit is inferior.”

“That won’t be a problem here,” Roland said. Which was true: Leaves could solve the germination question, and if a grapevine seedling showed up, the black flame could accelerate what followed. He had been thinking about the wheat-tree experiment since Leaves had mentioned the concept months ago. Grapevine architecture might be the more tractable starting point — the genetics were already oriented toward fruit yield, and the growth pattern was something Leaves understood.

Soybeans, cotton, flax, olives. He turned them over in his mind. Soybean was protein and oil both. Cotton solved the fabric problem more completely than wool, in the right climate. Flax gave linen and linseed both. Olives were a long game — the trees took years — but the oil had no substitute in some applications, and the cultivation was well-matched to the territory above the Stronghold.

He would plant them at small scale in the reclaimed land west of town and let the Ministry of Agriculture log everything. The system was designed for exactly this.

“You’ve done well,” Roland said. “The gold royals left over from the seed purchase — keep them.”

Shawn’s face arranged itself into the expression of someone trying to respond appropriately to unexpected generosity. “Thank you, Your Highness.”

He had turned to go when he stopped.

“Your Highness — there is one more thing I should report. About the situation in Clearwater.”

Roland waited.

“I spent two weeks in the Port. Most of that time was in the pubs, listening. There were rumors that Her Majesty Garcia and the Sandpeople have reached an agreement — she has granted them territory at the southern edge of the kingdom, and they are following her orders, treating her as their Queen. During my time in the city I saw Sandpeople walking the streets openly.” He paused, organizing the next part. “On the day before I planned to depart, Garcia returned from Eagle City. The whole port was celebrating. But the next morning, the city guard found four or five bodies. One victim had been torn apart in the middle of a public street.”

Roland said nothing.

“The port was closed for three days. Everyone gathered in the inn lobbies. Most people assumed it was the King’s revenge — agents from Timothy’s side. But one fisherman claimed to have witnessed one of the killings.” Shawn’s voice dropped slightly, as if the memory of hearing it was still in him. “The attacker was not large. Not a Sandperson. But his speed and strength were not a normal man’s. The city guard had to cut him repeatedly before he went down — knife slashes, and still he kept moving. It was only when more guards arrived with spears and wore him down that he finally died.” He hesitated. “His blood was the wrong color, they said.”

Roland looked at the sacks of seeds laid out across the garden flagstones.

“You made the right decision to leave immediately,” he said. “Thank you, Shawn.”

The guard left, and the garden was quiet. Then:

“The strength and speed of something beyond ordinary.” Nightingale’s voice, close and unhurried. “Ignoring the pain of knife wounds. Dying slowly to sustained spear-work.” A pause. “Church pills.”

“I know.” Roland did not look up from the seeds. “Garcia received them before I did. The Church was supplying both sides of the succession war simultaneously.” He turned it over. “The question is what they actually want.”

Not stability in Graycastle — if they’d wanted stability, they would have backed one side and let it win. Not the throne for any particular candidate — Garcia and Timothy would cancel each other out if both were armed. They wanted the candidates weak enough to be managed, the kingdom exhausted enough not to resist what came after.

He thought of the news from the intelligence report — Eternal Winter fallen. The first domino. Garcia’s own words, which Shawn’s account now made more legible: a Church that could lose a pill-enhanced agent in the streets of a client city and still continue operating had assets it didn’t need to protect.

In the end, what is it they have in mind?

The corn kernels were still in his palm. He looked at them for a moment, then set them carefully back into the bag.

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