Rewrite That Witch
CH186 · Rewrite
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Chapter 186: The Star of the Theater (Part Two)

When she reached the dock, May had already decided she was not taking the next boat back.

“May!” Irene grabbed both her hands before she’d fully stopped moving — which was always how Irene greeted people she was genuinely happy to see, with the entire forward momentum of her body. She turned immediately to Ferlin. “Darling, do you know who this is? She’s the most famous actress in all of Longsong Theater. When she performs, the queue starts at the lobby and runs into the street!”

The word darling produced a small involuntary contraction in May’s chest, which she had learned to route around without displaying on her face.

“Of course I know her name,” Ferlin said. He looked at May with the direct, unhurried attention of someone who had learned to read people before speaking to them. “Every noble in the West knows the star of the theater. Welcome.” Then, with a slight shift in tone: “I apologize for Irene — she leads with her enthusiasm. I’m Ferlin.”

He gave only his first name. He did not announce his title or his family. May looked at this and understood it: the Eltek name was no longer his to give, and he had arranged himself in relation to that fact so completely that it was simply not a wound anymore, just a condition.

The acting instinct that had sustained May through a decade of performances registered his composure and filed it in a place she would return to later.

“Everyone in the West knows the First Knight of the Western Territory,” May said. Her voice found the slightly warmer register she used for genuinely gracious situations. “Morning Light. I apologize that I was unable to attend your wedding — the theater had commitments. I’ve regretted it.”

“That’s long past,” he said, smiling. “I’m a schoolteacher now, and the Eltek family has nothing to do with it. There’s no need for formality.” He gestured toward the town. “Come — you’ll need to register for temporary residence before you settle in. We can talk properly once you’re through.”

A schoolteacher. May blinked at this without letting the blink show. The Fourth Prince of Graycastle had a knight of Ferlin Eltek’s reputation in his territory and had made him a schoolteacher. What did a prince need with a schoolteacher? What kind of court education were they providing at the border?

She followed. She had no better option and no competing theory.

The first thing wrong with Border Town was the road.

May had spent years performing in cities, had traveled between the major theaters of the western and central territories, and she knew what roads looked like in every tax bracket and administrative philosophy. Border Town’s road was not what a border town’s road should look like. It was wide — wide enough for two carriages to pass without negotiating — and surfaced with dark grey gravel that had been rolled flat. No mud. No ruts. The kind of surface you found in the inner districts of Redwater City, not at the edge of the kingdom’s map.

Sam said aloud what she was thinking: “What kind of road is this?”

“When I first arrived, it was mud,” Irene said, in the tone of someone who had personally witnessed a transformation she still hadn’t entirely finished processing. “The masons say this is only the foundation layer. The real road comes after.”

“The foundation,” Rosia said. “For a road. But roads are already on the ground. They can’t fall down.”

“I know. But what they do is mix a grey powder with crushed stone and then wet it and compress it with a stone roller until it’s hard. The mason said this is a technique from His Highness. He called it some kind of — water something layer.” Irene shook her plait over her shoulder as she walked. “Eventually they’ll pave it with slate. That’s the finished road.”

Slate. May had walked on slate paving in the inner city of King’s City. She had walked on it at the Tower Theater. She had not walked on it in Longsong Stronghold, which was the fourth-largest city in the Western Territory and the administrative seat of the entire region.

She said nothing. She observed.

The town’s interior, as they moved through it, produced further information that sat uneasily against her expectations. Old houses were being demolished on both sides of the road — clay-tile and timber construction, worn but serviceable — and replaced not with larger versions of themselves but with brick. Uniform brick. Row upon row, going up in an organized sequence that suggested a plan behind the work rather than individual owners doing what their budgets permitted.

“The Lord had them cleared?” she asked. “To widen the road?”

“No. The residents all moved to the new district voluntarily. Everyone who lived here was assigned a brick house instead.” Irene paused at an intersection to let a cart pass. “The same kind of house, the same size, the same materials. All the original families got one.”

May ran the arithmetic on this quietly and arrived at a number that didn’t make sense. Every original resident of a border town receiving a new brick house required either a patron with extraordinary resources or a patron who had fundamentally misunderstood what brick construction cost at scale.

She swallowed this without comment because Ferlin was three steps ahead of them and could probably hear everything she might say.

People stopped Irene and Ferlin on the street. This happened four times in two blocks. The people who stopped them were not nobility — they were townsfolk, the ordinary population, the kind of people who in Longsong Stronghold would have moved aside for anyone connected to a knight. Here they greeted both of them by name. They called Irene Teacher with the ease of a word that had settled into common use.

“Why do they call you teacher?” May asked. “I thought you came here to perform.”

“That’s my main work,” Irene said. “The performances are part-time. I teach children here during the week.” She had the expression of someone who had found something they had not expected to find and was still slightly surprised by how well it fit. “The pay is calculated the same as what the stronghold’s theater paid for a full lead role. His Highness said he wanted the educational system to attract people who were actually good.”

Open-air performances for civilians, May thought. For the people whose daily objective is to find enough to eat. She kept the thought behind her composed expression where it belonged.

The teachers’ building had two floors and a clean entry. Irene gave out keys, and when the key distribution reached May she said, before she had made the conscious decision to say it: “I’ll stay with you.”

Irene’s face lit. “Are you sure? The room is — it’s not large—”

“I came to see how my colleagues are living. I’d like to see it properly.” She produced the smile that read as warmth rather than calculation, because on this occasion it was not entirely a performance. “Unless you’d rather I didn’t.”

“Of course not!” Irene took her hand. “Come up. I want to show you something.”

The room was wrong.

May had constructed a mental image during the journey: a border posting, a defeated knight, a wife who had followed him out of love and was presumably making the best of it. She had been prepared to find something small and worn and maintained with the special dignity of people who have little and choose not to show it. She had been prepared to be gracious about this.

The room was clean. The curtains were new. Red and white cotton, recently bought and hung, with the precision of someone who had thought about where they should hang before they put them up. The floor showed the effort of regular sweeping. A linen carpet in the sitting room, unfrayed. And on the low table, catching the light from the window in a way that made May stop and look: a set of cups unlike anything she had encountered before.

She picked one up. It was lighter than wood. The surface was smooth in a way that wasn’t varnish, had color worked into it rather than painted on, and the color didn’t sit on top of the material but seemed to come from inside it. Two figures were depicted on it in a posture of easy affection.

She turned it in her hands, cataloguing the tactile information, arriving at no useful conclusion about what it was made of.

“Aren’t they charming?” Irene leaned over her shoulder. “They were five silver royals for the set. We spent our whole first salary on them. Ferlin insisted.” She said that fool in a tone that meant its opposite. “They sell them at the convenience market — that’s what His Highness calls the market he opened in the town square. Some of what he sells there is quite fine, though the prices aren’t low.”

May set the cup down with care and looked at the room around her — the particular, honest quality of a space that had been made into a home by two people who had agreed to make it one together — and felt, underneath her composure and her arithmetic and her professional catalog of others’ situations, something that she did not have a performance for.

She had come here to find a knight reduced by his circumstances. She had found something else.

She stood in Irene’s small curtained room with the unfamiliar cup still warm from her hands and considered her options, which had narrowed considerably since the dock, and tried to determine what she was actually going to do.

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