Rewrite That Witch
CH204 · Rewrite
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Chapter 204: Tilly Wimbledon

On the table in front of Tilly lay a collection of stones that looked, at first glance, like jewelry that had been disassembled and not yet reassembled. Small crystals, mostly deep red, set in mountings of varying complexity. A white silk glove beside them, with a crystal ruby worked into the back of the hand.

“What are these?” Ashes asked.

“Come,” Tilly said, patting the space beside her. “I’ll show you something.”

She drew on the glove, adjusted it at the wrist, and then reached into the open air.

Lightning jumped from her fingertips — a real bolt, the cracking sound and the ozone smell and a black scorch mark on the floor where it landed, smoke still rising.

Ashes stared.

An extraordinary’s magic expressed itself inward: in Tilly’s case, as intelligence and comprehension so far beyond the ordinary that it functioned as a kind of second sight. It did not produce external phenomena. Could not. A witch had one ability. This was common knowledge, the kind of thing you did not question because the evidence was so consistent across every case anyone had ever catalogued.

“It’s not a new ability,” Tilly said, taking off the glove and handing it across. “It’s the stone.”

When Ashes touched the crystal on the back of the glove, she understood immediately. The stone was not decorative. Something lived in it — a latent potential, charged and waiting, that interfaced with the magic in her own body and rerouted it. Not amplification. Something more fundamental than that. The stone could take a witch’s existing power and express it in a form entirely different from its normal function. Tilly’s inward intelligence had become external lightning. What would Ashes’ fire-sword become?

“How many do we have?”

“One,” Tilly said. There was something in her voice that acknowledged this limitation without apology. “And it requires a specific kind of comprehension to use — you have to genuinely understand what magic is, not just wield it. Feel it as something real before you can fill the stone with it.” She watched Ashes try. “The extraordinary can sense magic more directly than other witches, so we have an advantage. But out of a hundred I’ve tested, only two or three managed it.”

Ashes set the glove down. “You’re calling me slow.”

“I’m saying you’re faster than ninety-seven percent.” Tilly’s mouth curved. “When I first used it, I only needed to —”

Ashes kissed her.

The rest of that sentence remained Tilly’s private knowledge.

When they separated, Tilly breathed in slowly. There was still a faint flush along her cheekbones. Ashes licked her lips and turned to the other stones.

“These are different?”

“Each produces a different effect,” Tilly confirmed, composing herself with the speed of a woman who had a great deal of practice composing herself in front of Ashes. “But only magic-users can activate them. They don’t grant ability to ordinary people — they only give witches a different expression of the power they already carry.”

“Where do they come from?”

“Unearthed from ruins, mostly. They’ve been passing through merchants’ hands for generations — people who didn’t know what they were, or knew and feared them, or kept them as curiosities.” Tilly looked at the collection on the table. “I’ve gathered what I could. There’s an old ruin in the eastern Seawind Region I want to investigate. There may be more there, along with records of what they were originally for.” She paused. “I don’t think these are natural formations. I think someone made them.”

“The Seawind Region isn’t safe,” Ashes said. “Garcia’s fleet has been deployed against Timothy’s holdings there. The whole coast will be in flames before long.”

“I know.” Tilly’s expression did not change, but something in it became attentive. “What else did you learn in the west?”

Ashes told her.

Everything she had seen and heard in Border Town — Roland’s town, Roland’s soldiers, Roland’s witches. The witch union, the technology, the weapons that had destroyed the Duke’s cavalry without the cavalry reaching the walls. The conversation with Roland himself, his assertion that they needed to unite, his standing invitation to the Fjords witches. And Ashes’ own conclusion: whatever was happening in Border Town, it had not been built by the Roland Wimbledon she had been briefed to expect.

Tilly was quiet through all of it.

Then, at the end: “That man is not Roland Wimbledon.”

Ashes turned.

“I grew up with him,” Tilly said. “Of all my brothers and Garcia, Roland was always the worst at concealment. He lied badly — every lie had a hundred gaps in it if you watched his face. And the Roland I knew had no extraordinary knowledge. Court mentors gave him history and letters and court etiquette. Nobody taught him about weapons that fire with smoke and noise, or about the things you’re describing as his students’ scientific practice.” She said the words carefully, as though the concepts themselves were new. “People are born without knowledge, Ashes. Where did he get it?”

“A witch controlling him?”

“Possible. Or the knowledge came with someone who replaced him.” Tilly turned her hands over in her lap. “Either way: the witches around him seem to be alive and treated well, and the threat from the Church is real and common to both of us. I need to make contact. Roland himself may have been replaced, but he is still my brother — harmless, in my experience, which is more than I can say for Timothy or Garcia. I hope the Witch Cooperation Association has not already buried him in a ditch somewhere.”

“I don’t think they have,” Ashes said. She thought of Wendy. Of the way the witches had moved around Roland in the space she’d watched. “I left Maggie there. She makes regular return trips.”

“Good.” Tilly unfolded herself from the floor and went to the window. Outside, the gardens had begun the transformation from dormitory camp to something with permanence. Flowers she had never expected to grow in the Fjords were climbing the stone walls.

She spread her arms, turning to face Ashes with the light behind her — gold through the grey of her hair, gold on the pale planes of her face, the expression of someone who has looked at a problem from every angle and decided which one she intends to solve first.

“Now that you’re back,” she said, “we can begin the cleansing. I want no trace of Church influence left in the Fjords. When it is done, they will be safe for us.”

I would give my life for that, Ashes thought, and did not say it. Some vows did not require announcement.

“Tell me where to start,” she said.

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