Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 174: Industrial Park

Maggie returned two days after Ashes left.

She arrived in pigeon form on the castle parapet, changed back, and stood there with the particular expression of someone who had made a decision and was slightly embarrassed by how quickly they’d made it. Lightning brought her to breakfast. By afternoon she was a formal member of the Witch Union, and Roland had arranged a barbecue in the castle’s back garden to mark the occasion.

The long iron shelf held enough meat for twice their number. Roland had prepared a sauce from mushrooms and chicken and salt and sugar and flour, which was not quite what he would have made if certain things had been available to him but was genuinely good anyway, and Maggie ate until she looked anatomically improbable. The evening was warm. The Concealing Forest was dark on the horizon. Everyone talked.

He tested her ability the next morning, with Nightingale observing.

Her power was mid-range by Nightingale’s assessment — not as raw as some, not as precise as others. She could transform into any bird she had previously seen, maintaining her chosen form with very little magical expenditure but requiring a significant outlay each time she transformed. Four, perhaps five changes per day, then diminishing returns. The God’s Stone suppressed her completely, which confirmed her as a standard-category witch rather than an extraordinary.

In every form, she ran approximately one size class large. As a sparrow she was pigeon-sized. As a pigeon she was nearly sea-eagle sized. Roland had spent ten minutes asking about phoenixes and griffins and large mythological birds before accepting that her ability extended only to creatures she had physically encountered, and the mythological was not among them.

He wrote the letter to Tilly that afternoon. Not long — he was aware that the Fjords were far and Maggie could only carry so much — but specific. The Church’s four-kingdom plan, as he understood it from Margaret’s intelligence and Ashes’s account of the God’s Punishment Army. The nature of the alliance they were both, separately, waging. An olive branch: if Tilly had witches with agricultural or industrial abilities who had no immediate role in her Fjord settlement, he was willing to discuss arrangements. Technology for people. Border Town had room.

Maggie would carry it next month, during her first scheduled return trip.

The factory had been completed while Ashes was still in Border Town. Roland had been saving the formal opening.

It stood on the western bank of the Redwater River, opposite the experimental field — across the pontoon bridge from the main town, close enough to supply, far enough to handle noise. Wooden construction, simple and large, roughly a thousand square meters of floor space with a smooth access road from the bridge. Inside: two steam-driven boring machines, two manual milling machines, a grinding machine, a lathe, and the tools to use them. Anna’s work, every piece of it — shaped with the specific quality that came from a witch who treated tolerances as a moral position.

Ten workers. Former town blacksmiths and their senior apprentices, each drawing fifty silver royals per month, each learning to operate machinery unlike anything they had encountered before. They had brought their forging tools with them. The brick house outside the factory wall would be their shop.

For the opening ceremony, Roland assembled the City Hall officials at the front gate. Echo amplified his voice. He cut the ribbon and said the necessary words and had Echo replicate the sound of a gun salute, which startled three pigeons from the roof.

Graycastle Industrial Company. Formally established.

He visited most days in the first week, demonstrating processes, watching results. The first parts were all wrong — tolerances off, finishes uneven, one boring attempt that produced a cylinder that would have made a good planter but nothing a steam engine could use. He didn’t care. Anna turned the scrapped metal into fresh stock and the workers tried again. The manual he’d made — each part labeled by name, number, and dimension, the assembly sequence drawn out step by step with Soraya’s help — was pinned to the wall above every workstation.

They would get there. They were already getting there.

The military workshop at the North Slope Mine ran separately. Lesya, the furnace specialist Karl had recommended, had arrived and installed new airbags that pushed the forge temperature high enough to independently calcine cement — which made the old calcination room obsolete and freed that facility for expanded production. Revolver rifles and cartridges still moved through Anna’s hands directly, but Roland was finishing the design for a stamping press that could produce cartridge cases without her involvement. It wouldn’t match her speed. But it would produce at scale, and scale was the problem he needed to solve.

He owed Anna a gift.

He’d been thinking about what it should be for some time. Not jewelry — not because she wouldn’t appreciate it, but because he had already given her things, and the things he’d given her she’d used to change what she could do and therefore what she was. Jewelry was finished. He wanted to give her something that opened a door she hadn’t known was there.

He had started with the canvas. He had it covered with linen in the castle courtyard before he brought her out.

“A gift?” Anna set down the component she’d been working on and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and the smile that came to her face was the one she kept for moments she hadn’t expected. “What kind?”

“Come outside and see.”

She followed him to the courtyard. He pulled the linen back.

The basket was rattan, large enough for two people, tied to a web of ropes that led upward to the gathered neck of a vast canvas bag — deflated now, lying in soft folds across half the courtyard, made from an outer layer of canvas and a middle layer of what had taken the intestines of twelve cattle to produce and an inner layer of light gauze. Three layers, because each one had a different job. The outer layer took damage. The middle layer held air. The inner layer let nothing seep through.

Anna circled it in silence.

“A hot air balloon,” Roland said. “Fill the bag with hot air and it lifts into the sky. You can see the whole territory from above.”

She stopped circling. Looked up at him.

“Can it really fly?”

“You’ll be the one heating it.” He smiled. “So yes.”

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