Chapter 15: Flattering Oneself

“You can heal small animals,” Roland said when the knight had gone. “Why would you believe what you do is evil?”

Nana twisted her hands in her lap. “The teacher said — witches can do things ordinary people can’t. And sometimes it doesn’t look bad. But that’s the trap. The devil sets it to tempt people.” She looked up, then quickly away. “I really haven’t seen the devil. I swear I haven’t.”

“I know you haven’t. Because there is no devil. The Church lied, and your teacher believed them.”

Her jaw dropped. “The Church lies? But why would they—”

Roland shook his head. There was no short answer that would make sense to her; there wasn’t a short answer that would make sense to most people. Before a civilization reached a certain level of development, this kind of thing was inevitable. When people encountered something they couldn’t explain — plague, drought, fire, the strange light in someone’s hands — they needed an author. Invisible hands. Someone pulling strings behind the curtain. It was a human reflex, and history had used it against women disproportionately, stacking the incomprehensible onto their backs and calling it guilt.

In this world, witches with measurable, repeatable powers of unknown origin had made themselves a perfect target. The Church had faced a binary choice: consecrate them as saints, or condemn them as devils. Consecration was impossible — the moment a witch outside the Church’s jurisdiction appeared, the Church’s claim to exclusive divine authority cracked. Monotheism could not accommodate a second source. So: extermination. Not because of faith, not because of evidence, but because of institutional logic. Simple and ugly.

He would not explain this to a fourteen-year-old girl who had been through enough already.

The knight returned with the chicken.

What followed was methodical. Nana’s expression shifted from confused to resigned to actively aggrieved over the course of half an hour. Roland noted everything: the range of injuries she could address, the speed of healing, the limits at the margin. No regeneration of missing tissue from nothing. No reversal of death. But within those limits — remarkable. The healing was visible, real, continuous. When she laid her hand against a wound, the wound closed.

He watched her energy level. She was not sweating the way Anna did after training. The exertion was there but not ruinous. That was important.

When the chicken finally died, Nana fixed Roland with a look that communicated, across all barriers of rank and age, that she found him personally responsible for the afternoon’s events.

He summoned tea.

It worked. He had run the same experiment on Anna and established the principle: very few girls of this age could maintain moral outrage in the face of quality pastries. Nana’s expression softened within thirty seconds of the first bite. By the second she had entirely reclassified him from monster to merely eccentric.

He let her finish, then let her go.

After she left, Anna appeared at his elbow. She had been sitting across the yard, quiet through all of it, watching.

“Why didn’t you keep her here?” she asked. “She’s a witch.”

“Her family doesn’t know yet. As long as they don’t, she has a normal life.”

“It’s only a matter of time.”

“Yes.” He looked at her. “So — it’s a little late to ask. But do you want to see your father?”

Nothing moved in her face. She shook her head.

He understood the shape of it without pressing further. Her father had handed her to the gallows. Whatever that door had been, she had closed it from the inside. She had nothing to go back to, but she had something she hadn’t had before. It would have to be enough.

“Nana will be here every other day,” he said. “To practice.”

Anna’s eyes changed slightly — not much, just a brightening at the edges. She nodded.

“And Karl’s school is still running. If you wanted to study with the other children—”

She didn’t answer. He didn’t push. Some things required time to grow back into.

“These circumstances won’t last forever,” he said instead. “As long as I’m here, you will have a normal life — the ability to go anywhere, be anywhere, without fear of anyone’s justice. I promise.” He said each word with weight, the way a man says something he intends to be remembered. “That day will come.”

Once Karl van Bart took charge of the wall, Roland’s days settled.

He spent his afternoons in the castle garden with Anna and Nana. Anna no longer needed the fireproof training uniform — her control had become fine enough that she could run flame along each fingertip without so much as scorching the hem of her sleeve. The frightening miscalculations of the early sessions were behind her. Now Nana came in her own witch’s uniform as well, reluctantly at first, won over quickly by the afternoon tea sessions that had become a fixed institution.

Roland, sitting in the garden with a cup in his hand and two witches practicing in the afternoon light, felt the particular satisfaction of something going right that had taken a great deal of effort to arrange.

Occasionally he rode out to check on the wall. After two weeks of work under Karl’s direction, a hundred yards of foundation had been laid — properly this time, even, correctly proportioned. In the absence of surveying tools, Karl had invented a workaround: every morning, at the same hour, he had craftsmen use a wooden pole and its shadow to verify alignment and distance. Watchtowers were planned at regular intervals to anchor the sections.

The town’s minor nobility had noticed the project, as anyone with eyes would notice six hundred yards of trenching. Their response was to visit Barov and ask questions, then return to their houses and do nothing further. Their real estates were in Longsong Stronghold. Border Town’s survival was not their problem. Roland did not blame them for it. He imagined the conversations they were having — the fourth prince overreaching, the wall a vanity project, the whole enterprise good entertainment for the winter. He minded less than he expected to.

What stung slightly more was the merchants. The traveling traders who came each autumn for the fur market had found the market gone — diverted, delayed, the usual arrangements disrupted by the construction. They left for the stronghold empty-handed, and on their way downriver they apparently spoke at length about the fourth prince’s eccentric defense plan. The news spread along the Chishui River: Roland Wimbledon was trying to hold Border Town against the demon beasts. With a wall. The consensus, from what Barov reported, was that this was the behavior of someone who would eventually lose his nerve and flee to the stronghold like everyone else.

No one in Border Town itself really believed he would stay either.

In this manner, with rumors traveling one direction and cement curing in the other, Roland welcomed his first winter after crossing over.

Chapter 15 Flattering oneself

Seeing the knight accept his order and leave, Roland returned to the table, “You can heal small animals, so why would you think witches are evil?”

“The teacher said, witches can do what ordinary people cannot do, and sometimes it may not look bad, but that would be only a trap, set up by the devil to tempt more people… “The girl trailed off. “I really have not seen the devil, I swear.”

“Of course you haven’t seen him, that’s merely the church’s lie, your teacher was also deceived by them,” Roland soothed.

“The Church lies?” Nana’s jaw dropped down, “Why?”

Roland shook his head, giving no explanation. Even if he explained it, they wouldn’t understand it. Before a civilization develops to a certain extent, these kind of outlandish things always happened always happened. Even when no one benefited from it, people would automatically contribute natural disasters, man-made disasters, or incomprehensible phenomenons as a product controlled by someone behind the curtains – from historical point of view, this was a boulder which in majority women had to carry on their back.

And in this world, witches who owned a feasible power of unknown origin became an easy target for the church. Thinking about it, it was absolutely impossible for the church to ignore this kind of extraordinary appearances, no matter what. They would have to confer all witches as Saints, naming their powers as the gift of God; or kill all of the witches, stating they were the devil’s spokesperson. However, once you choose the former, the majesty of monotheism would receive a heavy blow – as soon as a witch not belonging to the church emerges. In the case of all religions believing in

other gods labeling the witches as Saints, they would all be people chosen by God, and so whose god would be the only true god?

Polytheism could only exist on the premise that all gods truly exist, capable of restricting each other. Since God was nonexistent, this was all symbolic crap that someone had created by running off their mouth, so why permit the opposite side to exist and share this world with them? So anyone would claim their god as the true god and believe in monotheism. And when it come to a member of another religion, there was only one way to go – liquidation. In the end, they could only choose the latter option, to spare no effort in killing all the witches.

There was absolutely no relation to the devil; it was only for their own benefits.

A living chicken was prepared by the castle kitchen right away, and then the knight carried it by the wings, while it still fluttered and kicked in confusion.

The next thing made Nana dumbfounded; Roland took the silver knife from his waist and had the knight grab it so that he could stab the chicken’s body. When the chicken was wounded, Roland allowed Nana to come up and treat it, after curing it another stab followed… this way they proceeded over and over again.

After half a day, when the chicken finally took it lasts breath, Roland had a general understanding of Nana’s ability.

She could restore damaged parts, including cuts, tears, fractures and bruises. In case a part was missing, such as a cut off chicken leg, she could not make it grow new one. However, under full use of her ability the broken claw could be reconnected again, allowing the cut to be healed. Ultimately, she could not reverse death, once the chickens died, her treatment was ineffective.

During the entire course of treatment Roland did not see any trace of the “sticky water”, instead, she simply put her hand on the chicken’s wound, and the wounds would heal at a rate visible to the naked eye. After these series of

tests, Nana’s physical exertion was not large; she was at least not sweating like Anna after her training.

Only Nana herself was dissatisfied, she felt that the treatment of the chicken was unfair, to such an extent, that at the end of the experiment she widened her eyes and pouted at Roland.

“Well, don’t just stare there, come and have something to eat,” upon seeing her, Roland without any better option had to summon the” afternoon tea” to shift her attention. This move was already tested against Anna; he thought that very few girls of their age could resist the temptation of delicious desserts. As it turned out, Nana’s performance in front of the pastries was not much better than the former’s.

After eating the cake, Roland allowed Nana to leave.

Anna asked, “Why did you allow her to leave? Just like me, she’s also a witch, right?”

“She still has her family, and at the present time her family has not found out, that she has become a witch.”

Anna whispered, “It’s just a matter of time.”

“Right, sooner or later,” Roland sighed, “so, it’s a little late, but… Do you want to see your father?”

She shook her head; no wavering was seen in her lake-like eyes. It seemed that the betrayal of her father had made her completely lose her hope. She didn’t have a family to return to before, at least now she had a friend.

“Nana will always come back, in fact, I’m going to have her come here every second day to let her practice her own ability.”

Hearing this, she blinked her eyes and nodded quickly.

“Do you want to go back to Karl’s college and learn together with the other children?”

Anna did not answer, but he felt that he could understand her inner thoughts.

“These kinds of circumstance are unlikely to last long… As long as I am here, you will one day be able to live like normal people, anywhere you go there would be no one to arrest you, much less send you to the gallows. One day this will be reality, “said Roland stressing every single word ” I promise.”

Since Karl took over the city wall project, fourth prince Roland suddenly settled down.

He spent every afternoon in the castle garden, accompanied by Anna and Nana. Now they had no further need to prepare extra clothes for Anna’s training, even if there were leaping flames on each of her fingers, she could still operate them skillfully. Now it was unlikely to be like before when a mishap occurred, igniting her own witch’s uniform.

Nana also changed her clothes into the same witch uniform Anna wore, at first she felt a little reluctant about the practice, but the afternoon tea session appeased her. Seeing the two witches come and wander around in his backyard greatly alleviated the bitterness in Roland’s heart.

Occasionally, he went to the north slope at the foot of the mountain to check the progress on the city wall. After more than two weeks of construction, the wall had already reached a hundred yards in length. In this era where a theodolite to measure the distance didn’t exist, every day, at the same time, Karl would have the craftsmen determine the distance and evenness by using the shadows formed by the sun with the help of a wooden pole. They built a watchtower every ten columns to stabilize the city wall.

Such a large-scale building project was naturally also noticed by the town’s nobility, but in addition to finding Barov and asking him about this project, they took no further actions as if this had nothing to do with them. Roland did not complain, since their possessions were at Stronghold Longsong, they would definitely not stay here and help him guard the Border Town. He could

even imagine these people getting together and ridiculing Roland, saying he had overestimated his capabilities.

Not only had the nobility noticed the change, but the merchants as well. In the previous years, the traveling merchants would purchase animal fur, but now it appeared that there was no possibility to purchase it. One after the other, they began to set out and return to the stronghold. Naturally, the anger about their empty-handed return was vented to Roland. The news regarding the fourth prince Roland Wimbledon’s building project to repel the demonic beasts in the Months of the Demons had already spread along the Chishui River, many calling it just stupid and ignorant.

At this point, no one thought that he could hold Border Town; even the majority of locals did not believe it. After all, the impression everyone got from the fourth prince did not include the courage to fight. Regardless what he did, in the end, he would take refuge in the stronghold.

In this manner, while everyone was discussing him, Roland welcomed his first winter after crossing over.