Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 180: Population Statistics

Roland was in a good mood.

He had been in a good mood for several days running, which he had noticed and which he had decided not to examine too carefully on the grounds that examining good moods was a reliable way to end them. When he was alone in the office he occasionally hummed something without being aware of starting. When he remembered the balloon — the way Anna had looked with the whole territory spread out below her, the way she had kissed him before he’d quite finished his sentence — he would find himself smiling at his desk in a manner that was completely undignified and that he had no intention of correcting.

She had kissed him before he finished.

He kept returning to that specific detail with the private pleasure of someone turning a coin over in their pocket. She had been the one to close the distance first. The blue of her eyes had been the same blue as the sky behind her and she had not looked away, not once, and then—

His lip was faintly tender on the left side. He was, in his private opinion, substantially responsible for this outcome. They had been up there for quite some time.

He reached into his desk drawer for something to chew — he’d put dried beef in yesterday — and found nothing. He looked back toward the window.

Nightingale was standing there with her hood pulled up, blowing a low whistle at the scenery with the studied innocence of someone who had not just eaten his dried beef. The fog around her feet was slightly thicker than the morning light required.

Roland looked at the empty drawer. Looked at the window. Let it go.

Footsteps in the corridor, then a knock. “Your Highness, Lord Barov requests to see you.”

“Let him in.”

Nightingale did not go invisible — she pulled up her hood and moved to the couch along the wall, which was a new development. She was making herself less invisible rather than more. Roland filed this away.

Barov entered, registered the hooded figure on the couch with a slight elevation of one eyebrow, and recovered his expression with the smoothness of a man who had learned not to comment on whatever he found in Roland’s office.

“Your Highness.” He presented the parchment. “This month’s demographic statistics. Completed.”

“Already?”

“The Citizen Registration File made it considerably easier.” Barov allowed himself a brief smile. “Your Highness’s earlier decision to implement the system was most prudent.”

Ah. Flattery. Roland took the parchment and spread it across the desk.

The document was organized by category — clean divisions, summary lines, remarks appended below each section. Compared to the cramped, paragraph-free reports Barov had been producing six months ago, this was a different artifact entirely. The man had been learning, apparently, from the documents Roland kept producing as examples.

The first section: serfs. 3,628 individuals in total, including family members. Of these, 1,500 were currently assigned to farming.

“Don’t you think the agricultural numbers are low?” Barov leaned forward and tapped the line. “Sirius Daly — from the Ministry of Agriculture — believes that to reach food self-sufficiency, we would need to double both the farmland and the manpower.”

Roland remembered Sirius: a former knight of the Wolf family, competent and systematic, prone to analyzing problems through the lens of what had worked historically. The 1,500 farmers were the first wave of serfs to arrive at Border Town; subsequent groups had gone to the mines or to Karl’s construction crews, with the same promise attached — work hard enough, earn your way to free status.

“Self-sufficiency this year isn’t the goal,” Roland said. “The castle warehouses have two to three months of grain in reserve, and this year’s harvest is going to look different.”

“Different how?”

“When the time comes, you’ll understand.” He smiled. Leaves’ modified wheat — the Golden Ones — produced at least three times the yield per plant of the original variety. When the harvest numbers landed, they would be striking enough to change the calculation entirely. The point of keeping agricultural headcount low was precisely this: with the crop quality transformed, a smaller workforce could feed a larger population, which freed the remaining bodies for construction and industry, where the bottleneck was labor rather than land.

He moved down the document.

Section two: construction. Over 1,100 individuals — masons, bricklayers, mud craftsmen, carpenters, laborers of various kinds, the majority of them serfs working as general hands. This number had enabled the recent acceleration of residential and factory construction: template designs, mass production of standard components, workflow sequencing that reduced the skilled-labor requirement for each unit. Not fast by any standard Roland had in his head from another life, but fast by Border Town’s, and Border Town’s was the standard they were working against.

Section three: mining. 1,600 workers at the North Slope mine, almost all of them outsiders — former mercenaries captured at Longsong Stronghold and serfs from subsequent transfers. The local headcount at the mine had dropped to 25, now functioning as equipment operators, ore registrars, and supervisors.

“There have been some brawls,” Barov said. “Primarily between the mercenaries and the serfs. Seventeen incidents this month, two requiring medical attention.” He set his hands on the desk. “The twenty-five managers cannot contain a situation if it escalates. I’d recommend assigning First Army troops to the mine as a guard presence.”

Roland thought about it. The mine population was large and mixed in a way that created friction: men who had come as conquerors sitting alongside men who had come as impressed labor, sharing space without shared history. Trouble was predictable. “Agreed. I’ll speak with Iron Axe — fifty rifles from the firearms team should be adequate for now.” He paused. “What we actually need is a police force. Dedicated internal security, separate from the military.” He saw Barov’s expression. “Think of it as organized patrollers with a fixed jurisdiction. But that requires manpower we don’t have right now.”

Barov absorbed this and filed it. “As you say, Your Highness.”

Section four: the First Army.

After Longsong, the name had spread through the territory with the particular velocity of a story people wanted to believe: three hundred men, minimal losses, the Duke’s fifteen hundred broken and scattered. The reputation had done more for recruitment than any incentive Roland could have designed. When the expansion order went out, the town square filled within a day.

He had kept his original criteria: local birth or long-term residency, physical condition, clean record. Three hundred new recruits added to the three hundred veterans, bringing the total to six hundred. He was already thinking about the next expansion, the timing of it, the training pipeline, the equipment constraints.

The rest of the document covered technical personnel.

Smelting and firing: approximately 400 workers, up from fewer than 20 at the start of the year. Lesya’s improved furnaces at the North Slope had unlocked a production capability that had restructured everything downstream — red brick, cement, glass, all coming from the same facility, with three new shaft furnaces now processing the ore backlog that had been accumulating in the yard.

Education, chemistry, industry, animal husbandry combined: fewer than 50. A thin cohort, but each person in it was a multiplier — the chemistry knowledge would diffuse outward, the educational infrastructure was already producing literate workers who could be trained faster than illiterate ones, the husbandry improvements would affect food supply within two seasons.

The remaining approximately 1,000 residents were still unassigned — waiting, in effect, for the literacy program to complete its first full cycle and render them trainable for factory work. The factories existed. The equipment was being produced. The bottleneck now was workers who could read a process manual, follow a tolerance specification, understand what a measurement meant.

When the first cohort finished basic education, Roland planned to move all of them into the factory. That was the moment Border Town would stop being a town with industrial equipment and start being a place where industry actually happened at scale.

He rolled the parchment back up and held it for a moment.

Half a year. He had been here just over half a year. The place he’d found — a half-abandoned border posting with a few hundred terrified residents, sitting on a frontier that functioned as a death sentence for everyone exiled to it — had become this: a population over eight thousand, a functioning industrial base, an army with a reputation, and a demographic document organized by category with remarks appended.

It was, he thought, a start. A real one.

“Good work,” he told Barov. “Both the data and the format.”

Barov straightened slightly. Even after all these months, the direct positive statement caught the man briefly off-guard, as if he was still recalibrating against an expectation of indifference. “Your Highness is too generous.”

“No,” Roland said. “I’m accurate. There’s a difference.” He set the parchment aside. “That’s all for now — unless there’s something else?”

“Nothing further, Your Highness.”

After Barov left, Roland sat quietly for a moment in the office’s morning light, listening to the faint sounds of the town outside: hammers, voices, the distant rhythmic beat of something at the construction site. Then he opened his desk drawer, found it still empty, and looked toward the window again.

Nightingale’s whistle had stopped. She appeared to be genuinely interested in the scenery now. The fog had thinned.

He decided to requisition more dried beef and say nothing about the matter at all.

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