Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 2: The Witch Named Anna (Part I)

For three days Roland did not leave his room.

Servants brought meals on trays and left them outside the door. He ate alone, working through the old prince’s memories the way an engineer combs a failed system—methodically, looking for load-bearing facts, discarding noise. What he found was thin. The fourth prince had spent his years in Valencia moving through gambling halls and drawing rooms, trailing after other nobles’ sons, and had left no record in his own head of anything that mattered. No understanding of the kingdom’s political structure. No sense of which families held what and why. Not even basic common sense: city names, the years of significant events—all of it diverged from the European history Roland knew.

He knew, at least, his siblings.

Gerald, the First Prince—a soldier who had made military competence into an identity and defended it accordingly. Timothy, the Second: patient, calculating, the kind of man who smiled most when arranging something unpleasant for someone else. Garcia, the Third Princess—the old Roland’s impression of her was purely a feeling, a wariness without content, as if something in her had activated some animal caution and never explained itself. And the youngest, a girl the old memories flagged only as brilliant, which in a royal family was a word that cut two ways.

That was everything. The full weight of a prince’s knowledge of his own family. Roland folded the napkin beside his breakfast tray and thought: at least I can’t do worse than he did.

Barov was already in the drawing room when Roland appeared, and he rose as if held down by a spring.

“Your Highness. Why did you not give the order yesterday?”

Roland clapped once—the signal to bring breakfast—and settled into the chair across from him. “One day earlier or one day later. What changes?”

“Everything changes.” The assistant minister placed both hands flat on the table, his version of restraint. “This is not one of your previous escapades. Not at this moment—”

“Sit down, Barov.”

The man sat. Roland had expected the confrontation. The old prince’s memories were useless as intelligence, but useful as character study: Barov favored private consultation over open conflict, choosing his moments with the patience of a man who had navigated twenty years of court politics. That patience had carried him to where he stood now—assistant minister of a frontier territory managed by a prince no one expected to amount to anything. He was loyal to the king. Not yet to Roland.

Something to work on.

The breakfast arrived: toast, fried eggs, a carafe of milk. Roland served a second plate and pushed it across the table.

“You’ve been here since dawn. You haven’t eaten.”

Barov regarded the food with faint bewilderment, then regarded Roland with something closer to suspicion.

“Eat,” Roland said, “and tell me about the witch. Not what the Church says about witches. What you know.”

Barov took the cup of milk but did not drink. After a moment he reached into his coat pocket and placed an object on the table between them.

It was not a coin—not metal at all, Roland realized when he picked it up. Ceramic, fired coarsely, lighter than it looked. And warm. Not room-warm; the object held a heat well above the ambient temperature of the drawing room, something closer to forty degrees, like water at the edge of a bath. Whatever had made it retain that warmth, it had nothing to do with Barov’s pocket.

He turned it over. The face bore a carved pattern: three triangles nested like a mountain, and in the center triangle, a single stylized eye. The linework was rough—polished by hand, not cast.

“The guards found this in the abandoned camp,” Barov said. “West of the forest. The women left in a hurry and didn’t clean up after themselves. The emblem there—” he pointed— “is called the Devil’s Eye of the Sacred Mountain. The insignia of the Witch Cooperation Association.”

Roland set the coin flat. “Tell me about them.”

The assistant minister exhaled, the way a man does when he has been trying to say something for hours and has finally found his opening.

“In the past, Your Highness, witches ran from the Inquisition and lived in hiding. Isolated, frightened. Manageable. The Association changed that. They recruit. They seek one another out, draw in newly awakened witches who don’t yet understand what they are, and they do it deliberately.” He paused. “There were rumors last year in Clearwater Port. Missing infants. The Association was blamed.”

“You believe that.”

“What I believe is that a living witch is something they would come for. A dead one—they mourn, move on, find another. A living one in a prince’s dungeon?” He spread his hands. “Your Highness, we already found their camp within a day’s walk of the town. If they hear she survived—”

“What do they want? The Association.”

Barov settled back slightly, shifting from urgency to explanation. “The Sacred Mountain. The ancient texts describe it as a place where witches can live without pain—where their power has no side effects. No Bite.” He said the last word as if tasting it and finding it bitter. “They believe the mountain exists. They are looking for it. And they will drag every witch they find along in the search, regardless of what that witch might prefer.”

Roland gnawed his toast and listened. Barov’s next sentences arrived in a current he had prepared in advance—the full account of witches as the Church understood them: power that arrived in adolescence and grew with use, the Demon’s Bite that came with it, the way the power and the suffering escalated together, the witches who had lost control and done damage before being stopped. He did not tell it with cruelty. He told it the way a man recites a danger assessment when he has been living with the danger long enough to have memorized the facts.

Roland heard him out. The details were genuinely useful—more useful than anything in the old prince’s memories—and he let Barov talk until the breakfast was mostly gone.

When the man finally finished, Roland refilled his own cup and said, “How was she caught?”

Barov blinked. He had not expected this to be the next question.

“I’m told the mine collapse,” he said carefully. “She exposed herself rescuing someone. The townspeople took her.”

“Mm,” said Roland. And then, after a moment: “What, exactly, did they see her do?”

The assistant minister opened his mouth. Closed it.

“I,” he said, “am not entirely certain of the details.”

Roland set down his cup. “Then let’s go find out.”

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