Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 185: The Star of the Theater (Part One)

The Swan followed the Redwater River westward, and May stood at the bow because she couldn’t make herself go below.

She wasn’t watching the scenery. She was watching for the pier.

“How much longer?” she asked.

“Soon, Miss May.” Ghent’s voice came from behind her, carrying the particular patience of a man who had said the same thing several times and intended to keep saying it. She turned, and he was smiling — the practiced, pleasant smile of someone who had learned to deploy pleasantness as a shield. “The sun is bright today. It might be more comfortable in the cabin.”

“You’ve been telling me ‘soon’ since we passed the tributary,” May said. “Have you actually been to Border Town before?”

He scratched his head. “The last time was ten years ago.”

“Ten years is enough time to change a Lord’s entire territory. One year was enough to change who rules Longsong Stronghold.” She let that sit for a moment. “In ten years, you might as well have been to a different town entirely.”

The smile diminished marginally. She found, in this small victory, some fraction of the comfort she had been unable to find in her own reasons for making this trip, which she had not been able to explain adequately to herself since the moment she’d booked passage.

The theater in Longsong Stronghold was performing in two days. She had a role in it. The theater owner did not know she was on a boat to the western border.

May had received Irene’s letter the same week she returned from King’s City, where she had played a supporting role in The Prince Seeking for Love at the Tower Theater and received, afterward, a comment from Kadin Faso himself — the master of drama, the name against which all names in the profession were measured — that her performance had been extraordinary. She had come home flush with the particular satisfaction of being recognized by someone whose recognition actually counted.

She had come home to discover that Duke Ryan was defeated, the Western Territory had new governance, and Ferlin Eltek, First Knight of the Western Territory, had been captured.

Irene had already left.

That detail had not sat quietly. May had grown up in the same theater as Irene, had been the senior woman, the established name, the one whose performances drew queues that extended into the street. Irene had been the newcomer — talented, genuinely talented, she’d never denied it — but still the flower of tomorrow rather than today, still the actress who had yet to find the role that would make the theater’s audience forget everyone else. She’d also been the one who attracted Ferlin Eltek’s attention, and kept it, and received his proposal, which he had made despite the cost to his family inheritance.

May had not attended the wedding. Theater commitments.

Now Irene was in Border Town with her husband, and May was on a boat headed in the same direction, for reasons she had told Rosia were about seeing how an old colleague was faring.

She had not told herself why she was actually going. She preferred not to examine it.

“Farmland!” someone called from amidships.

She looked left. Along the bank: rows of wheat, knee-high, rippling in the wind, the green of it vivid against the dark river water. Farmers in straw hats moved between the rows, their figures small against the scale of the fields. The planting went back from the bank further than she could see clearly.

“What beautiful scenery,” said Rosia, materializing at her elbow.

“It’s not as large as the fields around King’s City,” May said, which was true but also, she recognized, not the point Rosia was making.

“I’ve never been to King’s City.”

“Then you have something to look forward to.” She paused. “The fields around King’s City run between cities. Along the road it’s nothing but wheat in every direction. It stops being beautiful and starts being repetitive.”

Rosia smiled politely, which was Rosia’s response to most things. She was one of Irene’s friends — plain-faced, poor memory for lines, had been with the theater for years without ever performing on stage. She was the kind of person theaters kept because they were useful in other ways and because turning them out would have felt unkind.

The riverbank grew denser as they continued west. Tents, then wooden houses, then the smell of cookfires and porridge drifting over the water. Children were at the river’s edge, the braver ones shucking their clothes and jumping in while their companions cheered. The mountains in the distance were closer now, the Impassable Mountain Ridge forming the grey wall that ended all maps going west.

Then the pier.

The Swan maneuvered in and made fast. Ghent and Sam, to their credit, took charge of the luggage without being asked. May let them.

On the dock: a woman in a white dress, arm raised, waving. Beside her: a tall man with a straight-backed posture that did not require a uniform to communicate exactly what it was.

Ferlin Eltek.

Morning Light.

May had seen him at performances, at the functions the theater attended, at the wedding she had not attended. She had held, in some private archive, a rendering of him in memory — younger, perhaps, or simply unencumbered by whatever this last year had done. The figure on the dock was older at the temples and something about his bearing had changed, not weakened but deepened, as if weight had been added to something that was already structurally sound and had only become more so.

She had had several plans for this trip. All of them rearranged themselves in the moment she saw him.

May put her traveling expression on — composed, slightly above the situation, the one that read as confidence rather than effort — and walked down the gangplank.

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