Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 16: Future Route

The fireplace in the study held a full bloom of flame, pushing back the cold that crept through every gap in the stone. Above the mantel hung a stag’s skull, its long horns casting shapes on the rear wall that shifted with the fire — claws one moment, teeth the next, something that could not quite be named.

Roland had moved his official work into this room and found he preferred it. The long dark-red table with its stacks of parchment, the window at the far end that showed the town below and the mountains beyond — the mountains that walled Graycastle off from the wild lands, that made the northern slope the one passable break in an otherwise impassable line. And below the window, the wood-fenced garden where Anna trained, the brick pool long since replaced with a table for afternoon tea, the custom rocking chair he’d had built for himself. It was small. It was his.

In another life, he thought, you’d pay admission to sit in a castle garden. Here he had the whole town.

“Your Highness.” Barov set a parchment on the table. His posture carried the particular carefulness of a man about to say something unwelcome. “The treasury is running low. At the current rate of expenditure on the wall construction — artisans, materials, equipment — we will not make it to spring.”

Roland took the ledger. He read it. The numbers were not surprising.

Border Town’s finances had always been simple to the point of bleakness. Income: ore from the North Slope Mine, traded to Longsong Stronghold for food at fixed rates that hadn’t been renegotiated in years. Taxes on the blacksmith’s shop, the tavern, the textile stalls — a modest drizzle. Expenditure: whatever the appointed lord chose to spend, which historically had been as little as possible. The appointed lord had usually lived in the stronghold and administered Border Town from a comfortable distance, never intending to stay.

That was the core of it. The North Slope Mine was, functionally, a joint investment of the stronghold’s nobility. The local lords were custodians of someone else’s asset. They had no incentive to develop what they didn’t own and every reason to extract what they could before their rotation ended.

Border Town had existed for less than thirty years. Duke Ryan — the Duke of Longsong, from whom the region took its informal name — had founded it as an early-warning outpost against the demon beast migration routes. He hadn’t anticipated that the pioneers who found ore in the northern slope would simply settle and build. The municipality had grown around the accident of the mine, which meant its economy had been captured from the beginning.

Roland turned the ledger pages. The annual ore output was worth more than a thousand gold royals at market prices. Border Town received food in exchange, at rates the stronghold set. The arithmetic was not complicated. The difference between what the ore was worth and what Border Town received for it was the subsidy the six invested noble families lived on.

He would need to end that arrangement. He knew it. The families would not give up the income voluntarily; there were too many of them, the returns were too comfortable, and the precedent of letting a minor prince renegotiate the terms of an established trade relationship was one no one in the stronghold had any incentive to set. He couldn’t take it by force — not yet, not with the position he was in. But the Chishui River didn’t end at Longsong. It ran through Willow Town, Dragon Mountain, Red City. He had other options, and the shipping Petrov had already seen implied he was using them.

He needed to recover control of the ore trade. He would offer fair terms first. If fair terms were rejected, he would work around them.

He closed the ledger and set it aside.

Barov remained standing, his eyes on the prince’s face. He had been watching Roland for three months, or more precisely for the last month of those three — the period during which everything had changed in a way Barov could not quite account for.

He was a careful man. He had spent his career reading people because reading people was how an assistant minister survived. And what he was reading in Roland these days did not match anything in the file he had assembled on the fourth prince over years of secondhand observation in Graycastle.

The fourth prince’s reputation was specific: self-indulgent, erratic, given to petty quarrels with minor nobles and worse quarrels with his own dignity. No great crimes; just a long, consistent record of small ones. His Majesty had sent him to Border Town as a punishment assignment, and Barov had accepted the posting on the promise of a finance ministry appointment after the succession was settled. He had arrived expecting to manage a slow decline.

Instead he was watching something that felt, uncomfortably, like the early stages of a plan.

He had considered the obvious explanations. A witch’s control? The prince had handled the God’s Punishment Stone without effect — no demon’s influence could survive contact with that relic. Poison? Manipulation? The behaviors were too consistent, too purposeful. You couldn’t fake this kind of sustained attention.

No: the prince had simply changed. The style was the same — the refusal to follow convention, the willingness to offend people who expected deference. But the purpose had changed. In Graycastle, Roland had run against convention because he was bored or because he couldn’t be bothered. Here, he ran against it because he had decided something, and the decision was load-bearing.

That was the part Barov couldn’t explain. The fourth prince had decided that Border Town would survive the Months of Demons, that it would survive by means of a wall built from an alchemical material no one had heard of, and he had committed to this without apparent doubt. He was wrong about so many of the normal things that princes were supposed to know. He was right, or seemed right, about this.

Barov found himself curious about what would happen next.

He retrieved the ledger when the prince dismissed him, tucked it under his arm, and walked out of the warm room into the cold corridor. Outside the window, snow was beginning to settle on the northern slope.

To what extent did Roland’s plan go? he thought. And in the end, how much of it do I actually know?

He found himself, against all his professional instincts, interested in the answer.

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