Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 190: Victory and Defeat

“The prince is quite handsome,” Margaret said, in a tone of balanced assessment. “His facial expressions are very stiff.”

“That’s Ferlin Eltek,” Roland said. “Morning Light. The First Knight of the Western Territory. He’s a schoolteacher here.”

Margaret turned to look at him. “He’s not an actor?”

“We had limited casting options.” Roland glanced toward the stage, where Ferlin was managing his movements with the concentration of a man who understood the assignment and found it physically difficult. “And if one of the prop handlers had played the prince, it would have been harder for the audience to believe in the love at first sight.”

”…You make a valid point.”

May was dancing with Ferlin.

Irene, changing behind the partition for the ball scene, watched through the gap between two boards. May’s hand was on Ferlin’s shoulder, guiding him through the movements with the ease of someone who had been dancing since childhood — and under her guidance, the knight who had been wooden through every rehearsal was following her lead naturally enough to look, from the audience’s perspective, like he was choosing to move that way.

It was improvised. None of this had been in the rehearsal. Irene knew, because she had scripted every beat of the rehearsal, that May had inserted herself into a scene that didn’t require her presence in order to stand beside Ferlin for as long as possible before Irene crossed the stage.

She recognized what was happening.

She also recognized that May’s dancing was genuinely extraordinary, and that the sight of May at her best — effortless and exact and entirely in possession of the stage — was producing in the crowd the specific quality of silence that meant hundreds of people were holding their breath without knowing they were doing it.

The distance between stars and flowers, she thought. The phrase had come to her on the floor after May’s push and had been sitting in her head ever since.

Then Ferlin looked at her.

Not a staged look. Not the planned moment in the script where the prince’s attention shifts. He turned his head toward the partition gap where she was watching, as if he knew precisely where she was, and his expression was the expression she recognized from the field by the river, from the evenings they’d spent there when the wheat was ripe and the light was long: helplessness and encouragement and love, all at once, all together.

No, said something underneath the thought. You still want to act. This is the chance. Don’t waste it.

She finished changing. Walked on.

The script called for Cinderella to cross the stage, for the prince’s gaze to follow her, for the elder sister to be displaced by simple presence. In rehearsal, Irene had found this scene technically difficult — how do you make presence compelling when you’re competing with May? — and had done it correctly but not memorably.

What she did now was not from the script and not from technique. She stopped thinking about the stage and thought about the field, and about the man in it, and about the specific thing she could always do in front of him that she couldn’t do anywhere else: be exactly herself, without performance, without the gap between what she was feeling and what she was showing.

She didn’t act. She simply arrived.

The moment she reached Ferlin’s side and met May’s eyes, May’s hand released his shoulder before the script called for it.

“May I have this dance?”

“Of course you can, my lady.”

His dancing improved under her hands. Not because she was a better dancer than May — she wasn’t — but because they knew each other’s weight and tempo and the particular way each of them adjusted when the other stumbled. The crowd felt the difference, even without being able to name it. The applause that started wasn’t for technical excellence. It was for recognition.

She kissed his cheek. Pushed him away. Ran.

The bells rang. The midnight came.

The search scene was the last one.

May came back on in her sister costume, beautiful and imperious and, if anything, more herself than she had been in any moment before. She wore the crystal shoe. She stood beside Ferlin’s prince with the composed certainty of a woman who has always won the comparison and cannot conceive of losing it.

Your Highness, why do you hesitate? I am the one you’re looking for.

The prince looked at her. Then looked at Irene.

No. She is not.

And Irene, who had been standing at the edge of the stage in the gray dress with the broom, walked forward.

She did not rush. She did not look away. She walked to the center of the stage and looked back at May with what she found when she stopped performing — not defiance exactly, but steadiness, the particular quality of someone who has decided they are not going to be made small in this moment regardless of the cost.

The crowd began to clap before the witch appeared.

Then Rosia came on and tore the gray robe away, and the ball dress was underneath, and the wild hair smoothed under one sweep of a hand — and the square erupted in the way Roland had hoped for but not counted on, which was not politely, not with the practiced appreciation of trained theater audiences, but from the gut, the whole thousand people on their feet at once.

Echo’s gun salute came from outside the square at precisely the right moment, layered into the crowd’s noise like punctuation.

Roland watched the actors bow and exit and found that he was applauding.

“I thought she’d be overwhelmed,” Margaret said, still clapping. “May is extraordinary — I’ve seen her perform twice and she’s extraordinary both times. But somehow at the end it was the younger one who held the stage.” She shook her head. “Was that always the plan?”

“Honestly, no.” He watched the stage where Ferlin and Irene were still visible at the edge, Ferlin saying something to her, her laughing. “She found something she didn’t have at the start of the play. I don’t know that you can plan for that.”

Behind the partition, May closed her eyes for a moment.

She had spent a week in this town. She had arranged for Ferlin to play the prince — which had required one conversation with Irene, who had taken the suggestion without visible suspicion, because Irene trusted her. She had gone through rehearsals with people she would not normally have spent professional time with. She had put her position at the Longsong theater at risk by disappearing without notice into a border posting to perform an open-air production for farmers.

She had done all of this in order to stand beside Ferlin on a stage and be what she was best at, and she had done all of this better than she had ever done it in her life, and she had still lost.

Not to Irene’s technique. Irene’s technique was good, better than it had been at the start of rehearsals, better than May would have admitted two weeks ago. But that wasn’t the thing that had displaced her hand from Ferlin’s shoulder.

She had lost to something she couldn’t compete with, which was the specific way Irene and Ferlin looked at each other when neither of them was trying to perform anything.

She changed her clothes in the quiet after the performance. Put on her traveling dress. Picked up her bag.

At the foot of the ladder she was greeted by a man she did not know — tall, silver-armored, handsome in a way that announced itself. The kind of face that had learned to use its own coldness as a quality rather than a disadvantage. Raised brow, long eyes, a bearing that suggested he expected things to go a certain way and was rarely wrong.

She had spent enough time around knights to read them. This one was not Morning Light. But he was, unmistakably, someone.

“Hello, Miss May,” he said, and the coldness dissolved so completely when he spoke that she revised her assessment on the spot. “Carter Landes, Chief Knight to His Highness. Your performance was remarkable.” A slight pause, with the precision of someone choosing their words and their timing. “Would you be willing to have a drink?”

May looked at him for a moment.

“I would,” she said.

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