Rewrite That Witch
CH194 · Rewrite
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Chapter 194: Lily

Not long after Roland returned to his office, Scroll followed him in.

“Your Highness, I apologize for Lily. She didn’t mean it as offense.”

“I know she didn’t,” he said. “She’s young.”

“She wasn’t always like this.” Scroll settled into the chair across from him, folding her hands on her knee. “Before she came to the Association — she was different. What made her this way happened before she met us.”

“Tell me.”

“I can sense magic,” Scroll said. “Not the way Nightingale sees it, but I feel its presence. When we entered a new town, I would go to the local shelters or orphanages, posing as a noble wife looking to adopt. Witches awakened at adulthood, so I looked among the older girls. I found Lily in a shelter in a remote village outside Redwater City. When I said I wanted to adopt her, the owner refused — said he only released the girls once they reached adulthood.”

Roland waited.

“We thought it strange. So Nightingale slipped inside to search for records. The shelter was far enough from town that we could stay for a while.” She paused. “Why didn’t we just take Lily? Nightingale could have. Except for one God’s Stone on the owner, the building was unprotected. But we’d made that mistake before.”

“What mistake?”

Scroll accepted the tea he poured and held the cup without drinking. “In the early days, we took witches by force whenever we found them. In the Seawind Region, a girl we brought in refused to believe anything we told her. She fought. Two of our sisters died because of what followed — killed by Cara’s snake when she tried to restrain the girl from attacking the others. After that, we observed. We learned the person before we made contact. When we were being hunted and couldn’t wait, we sometimes had to leave them behind.” Her expression did not change. “We left some of them behind.”

The room was quiet.

“So with Lily,” he said.

“We waited. Nightingale went through the owner’s books.” Scroll set the teacup on the desk. “It was not a shelter.”

She described what Nightingale had found without changing her voice. The shelter had been running for ten years. The owner traveled to Redwater City’s slums on a regular schedule, finding vagrant girls, telling them about a kind nobleman who had opened a charitable house in the countryside, a place visited by powerful people who adopted girls as daughters. Those selected would never want for anything again.

Not all of them were deceived. But enough were.

The books recorded over three hundred names. Most were no longer living. He buried those he had no use for in the woods behind the building. Girls of better appearance he dressed and sold. Three had awakened as witches in those ten years and been sold to the Church.

In twenty gold royals, he had earned less than a single year of average merchant income.

“When Cara interrogated him,” Scroll said, “he told her he had never cared about the gold. Selling the girls was only to sustain the shelter’s operation. The purpose was the power itself — to decide who lived, who was sold, who was buried. He said it made him feel like their king.”

Roland said nothing. He had heard worse from recorded history, from legal archives, from anthropological documents. None of that prepared a person for the specific geometry of it: twenty gold royals and three hundred names in a ledger and a man who considered the arithmetic unremarkable.

He felt a hand come to rest on his shoulder from behind. He had not heard Nightingale move.

“When Cara killed him,” Scroll continued, “most of the girls still in the shelter believed we had destroyed their chance of adoption. They had been told they were waiting to be selected. Some of them had been waiting for years. They looked at us as if we’d stolen something.”

“Lily too?”

“At first. Cara took her to the grove behind the building. There was a girl Lily had been close to — told she’d been adopted and removed from the shelter a month earlier. Her body was in the pit.”

He did not ask Scroll to describe the rest of it. The picture was complete.

“She fainted,” Scroll said. “When she woke, the look in her eyes was different. Wendy sat with her for weeks afterward. Wendy is the reason she came back to herself at all.” She paused, then added quietly: “I believe she will change, given time. You are also a noble, and she is beginning to watch you differently than she watches others.”

After Scroll left, Roland sat for a long time without moving.

He thought about the twenty gold royals. He thought about the ledger. He thought about the system that had made both things possible — the one that defined girls without families as something other than persons, that gave a sufficiently isolated man the authority of a king over those he had decided did not count.

That system still exists, he thought. I’m living inside it.

The Church’s witch-hunting, the inheritance laws, the way noble rank translated into impunity — it was all variations on the same structure. Different faces on the same thing.

He stayed there until the light shifted in the room, and then went back to work.

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