Rewrite That Witch
CH143 · Rewrite
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Chapter 143: Migrants

The gangway had barely touched the pier before the crowd began to move.

They came off in the manner of people who had spent too long in a confined space — not rushing, but crowding forward with the unconscious urgency of those who have been waiting, their bags and bundles clutched close. Most were looking around them with the particular expression of someone encountering a place for the first time: not quite alarmed, not quite interested, caught between the two.

A woman in the middle of the line — middle-aged, carrying too much in both hands — missed her step on the gangway’s edge. She began to go over.

The woman beside her caught her wrist without hesitation, absorbing the stumble and pulling the woman back upright in a single motion, the way someone acts when their body has been trained for reflexes.

“Thank — thank you. Thank you so much—”

The woman who had caught her simply waved, as if the thing was already past.

Ferlin saw it from the pier.

He had been watching the gangway since the boat appeared around the river bend, which meant he had been watching it for a long time, which meant he had been telling himself to stand still and wait rather than wade into the crowd. He knew her white dress from fifty meters away — she had always worn white when she wasn’t performing, because she said the theater’s colors were already too much and she needed something quiet in between — and her hair was coiled up the way she coiled it when she wanted to look composed and was actually nervous.

She was the last one off the gangway.

He stopped being still.

He made it to her in the time it took the other passengers to complain about the man pushing through them, and when he got there he didn’t say anything, he just put his arms around her, and she made a sound against his shoulder that he had been hearing in his sleep for a month and that he had understood was not something he could have described to anyone.

“I was afraid,” she said, when she could speak. “When I heard about the Duke’s defeat I couldn’t get any word about you.”

“I was in the castle dungeon. They wouldn’t allow visitors.” He loosened his arms enough to look at her. She looked thinner. The theater, he knew, had not been kind in his absence. “The month — was it manageable?”

She was quiet for a moment in the way she was quiet when she was choosing her words carefully. “I left the theater.”

He had expected this. He had hoped it hadn’t been necessary. He knew it had been necessary.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, and meant it. “I have work here. The salary is decent.” He reached for her bag. “Come home first. We can talk on the way.”

“Home?” She looked at him with the wariness of someone who has learned to be cautious about the word. “We’re living separately, aren’t we? Prisoners and their families usually—”

“I’m a teacher,” he said. “Teachers get housing.”

The New Civilization district had gravel streets.

Irene walked beside him looking at them. She was a performer — she had spent her career noticing details, reading spaces, understanding what a thing was trying to say about itself. She crouched down and pressed one fingertip against a flat gray stone, then stood up and kept walking.

“The roads don’t get muddy,” she said.

“Drainage runs under the gutters. In Longsong Stronghold, after a heavy rain you couldn’t cross the market square without ruining your shoes.”

She looked at him. “How long have you been here?”

“Long enough to notice.”

The houses in the district were new — not refaced old buildings, but new construction, the same pale brick as the newer parts of Border Town proper, laid in uniform rows with the deliberate quality of a plan being executed rather than a settlement growing by accident. Irene was quiet for the last two turns, taking it in.

He stopped in front of a two-story building.

She looked at it, then at him, then at it again.

“Is this—”

“This is the teacher housing. Our rooms are on the second floor. Middle unit.”

“The whole building is for teachers?”

“There are four of us. Come inside.”

The key turned cleanly — good locks, new locks — and the door opened into a hallway that led to a set of stairs and a common landing. Their unit was the third door. Inside: a central hall, two bedrooms, two smaller rooms that could serve as study or storage. The walls were plain plaster, the floors swept, the windows facing south.

Irene went from room to room. He watched her the way he had been watching things for the past month — carefully, trying to memorize them in case they changed — and after she had been through all five rooms she came back to the central hall and sat down at the table and put both hands flat on the surface.

“Are you sure you were taken prisoner?” she said.

He laughed. It was the first time he had laughed since the battle.

He brought out bread and cheese from the cupboard — there was always bread and cheese now, a new thing he had stopped remarking on — and set them in front of her.

“You didn’t eat on the boat,” he said.

“No.” She pulled a piece of bread free and ate it, and when she had eaten enough to slow down she reached across the table and picked up the book he had left there that morning. She turned it over in her hands. “The teaching materials?”

“His Highness had them written. I’ll teach from them starting next week.”

“Who do you teach?”

“The town’s citizens. Reading and writing. His Highness wants everyone to be able to read.”

She looked at the book. She had been reading since she was six — her mother had taught her, out of a battered copy of a play, which Irene always said was why she had known from the beginning that she wanted to be in the theater. She turned to the first page.

Then the second. Then the third.

Ferlin watched her.

He had learned, over years, that when Irene was genuinely absorbed in something, the rest of the world ceased to exist for her. She read the way some people breathed.

After a while she said, without looking up: “The salary — you said it wasn’t low. How much?”

“Twenty silver royals a month. Five more per year.”

Another silence. She turned a page.

“There’s no theater here,” she said.

“No. Not yet.”

She closed the book, and when she looked at him there was something in her expression that he recognized as a decision already made, the conversation being the formality after the fact.

“Then I’m becoming a teacher too,” she said. “If they’ll have me.”

He had known, from the moment she caught the woman on the gangway, that she had already been the kind of person this place would eventually need. He reached across and took her hand.

“I think,” he said, “they’ll have you.”

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