Rewrite That Witch
CH195 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 195: Answer

Roland was not certain he had heard correctly.

He let a moment pass, then said: “I’m sorry — what?”

Scroll bit her lip and repeated it, word for word, her voice steady.

He had heard correctly. He turned the statement over in his mind the way he would turn over a faulty component — checking the manufacturing, checking the fit. Witches cannot bear children. Was this established fact, or the same category of error as the Holy Mountain? He said as much.

“I wish it were the same kind of mistake,” she said. “Unfortunately, we have many cases. Ordinary men who cared for witches. Witches who were forced. In every case, across every report the Association gathered — no pregnancy. None.”

Reproductive isolation, he thought. The phrase arrived from somewhere in his training and sat there, precise and impersonal. A new branch of the human species, speciated from the original stock. Or something caused by the magic itself, some physiological consequence of the power that gathered in their bodies. He did not know. The mechanism would need to wait.

What mattered now was the implication.

He thought first of Anna.

He could not pretend he would feel nothing at never having a child with her. He would. But the wish to have a child with her had always been downstream of the affection, not the other way around — a projection of what he felt forward into a future he was imagining, not a condition of the feeling itself. Removing the projection did not remove the feeling.

And from a modern perspective — from the perspective of anyone who thought about children as their own persons rather than as the continuation of a bloodline — the loss of biological heirs was a structural problem, not an emotional one. The structural problem had structural solutions. The precedents were not hard to find. Adoption, designated succession, a constitutional framework that did not require blood at all. He had always intended to build something that outlasted him anyway. The form of the succession was a design choice, not a tragedy.

He was still sorting through the implications when he noticed the larger one.

This is good news.

He and Nightingale had spent several nights in quiet conversation about the long problem: how witches and ordinary people could coexist without one eventually overrunning the other. Even with the God’s Stone of Retaliation as a check, a population of witches who could pass their abilities to children would compound across generations. The intelligence, the speed, the physical enhancements — eventually the gap would become a schism. He had no answer to that problem. He had been sitting with it unresolved.

But if witches did not bear children —

The gap could not compound. The two groups remained in equilibrium. Each witch who came to Border Town was a person, not a dynasty. They would live alongside ordinary people, build alongside them, grow old alongside them, and leave no inheritable exception behind. The conditions for peaceful coexistence became, for the first time, actually achievable over a long span.

He had been lost in this for too long. He felt Nightingale’s hand close around his arm.

He covered her hand with his and cleared his throat.

“The way I thought before,” he said, “is the way I still think. I am willing to marry a witch.”

Scroll stared at him.

The hand on his arm tightened like a caught breath.

He suppressed the laugh that tried to rise — it was exactly the reaction he had given her a minute ago, the same disbelief that what had been heard was what had been said. He coughed twice and continued, more gently: “I mean it. Nothing has changed.”

Scroll left with an expression he could not fully parse — something satisfied and something sad occupying the same face, not in conflict but in cohabitation. He watched her go and then turned to the only other person in the room.

Nightingale stood in a bar of afternoon sun, hood back. She was looking at him. Just looking — the way she sometimes did, a long steady attention that held something in reserve.

“Is she all right?” he asked.

She did not answer. She smiled instead — not the careful, controlled smile she wore in public, but the one that was just hers, open in a way that made the sunlight on her face seem like something that had been arranged on purpose.

Roland looked away first.

A voice from outside the door: “Your Highness. A knight has arrived from Longsong Stronghold. He says he carries urgent news.”

“Show him to the reception hall.”

The knight was on his knees before Roland had fully entered the room.

“Lord Petrov sent me to inform you: an envoy of Timothy Wimbledon arrived at Longsong Stronghold yesterday morning.”

“How many?”

“Fifty men, my lord. Lord Petrov ordered me to ride through the night.”

Fifty. A gesture, not a force. Roland considered it. Too small to threaten, too large for a private messenger. Timothy wanted the form of royal authority established on paper before committing resources to it. A recall order, probably. Come to King’s City or be declared in rebellion.

“Thank you,” he told the knight. “Rest today. There’s a gold royal for the ride.” He nodded to the guards.

After the man was escorted out, Roland called for Lightning and Maggie.

“I need you to fly the Redwater River road toward Longsong. The envoy left this morning — I want to know where they are and how they look.”

Lightning caught the word fly like a hand catching a thrown key and was already moving toward the window before he finished.

A double-hour later, they were back.

“Nothing,” Lightning reported, slightly breathless. “We flew the whole road. No knights. Not one. Not even a lone rider.”

“Doesn’t exist, goo!” Maggie agreed, perched on Nightingale’s shoulder in pigeon form.

Still at the stronghold, then. Which meant they’d taken a room, eaten a meal, slept. Petrov’s message had arrived first, as intended. Roland nodded. “Starting tomorrow, you two fly the road every morning until they appear.”

Lightning took her assignment with the gravity of an officer receiving orders, then spoiled it by immediately asking about the map.

“How much have you pieced together?”

“Enough to fill most of Soraya’s room. She had to move it to the backyard.”

“Show me.”

Leaves had turned the castle’s back courtyard into something between a botanical garden and a vertical farm. Wooden frames reached toward the sky, woven through with grape vines, apple branches, and sugar cane that had climbed half the castle wall. Whenever the witches had a free afternoon, they came here and picked things off the wall to eat. The crops required Leaves’ constant attention to maintain — they could not sustain themselves — but as demonstration gardens they were extraordinary.

The mosaic map covered five or six square meters of the courtyard’s center, assembled from hundreds of overlapping parchment squares. Lightning looped an arm around Roland’s waist and lifted them both into a slow hover, just high enough to see the whole.

“That brown square,” she said, pointing. “That’s us.”

He looked down at Border Town: a small brown square, wedged between the grey suggestion of the Impassable Mountain Range to the north and west. East and south, the map extended in pale blue — the sea, two ranges of mountains between here and there.

The scale was wrong in his head. He had thought of Graycastle as large because it was the only frame of reference he’d had for months. But from above — from even this slight conceptual altitude — the Western Territory was a pocket of settled land pressed against the mountains’ edge. And the mountains themselves, when he extended the map in his imagination to the east and traced the rough geography he had assembled from fragments and reports —

The Impassable Mountain Range was a wall.

And behind the wall was everything.

Graycastle — all the kingdoms, all the civil wars, all of Timothy and Garcia and the Church — were on one side of that wall. A confined coast, bounded by mountains to the north and sea to the south. Everything he had been thinking of as the world was a narrow strip between two barriers.

Beyond the wall, the Wild Lands. Unknown extent. Unknown contents. And somewhere beyond the Wild Lands, or in them, or beneath them — whatever was coming.

We are not large, he thought. We are very, very small.

Lightning floated him back to the ground, and he stood there for a moment longer than he needed to, looking at the brown square that was his town.

Discussion

Suggest a change