Rewrite That Witch
CH021 · Rewrite
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Chapter 21: What Do You Actually Desire

Anna was not asleep. She was sitting at the table in her room when Roland knocked, copying something in the careful hand of someone who has discovered recently that writing is possible and is not yet done marveling at it. She looked up, surprised, when she saw him in the doorway.

She followed him upstairs without asking why.

When she saw Nightingale, she went still in the doorway. Roland took her hand and made the introduction briefly, and the three of them sat down at the round table while the candle burned between them.

Nightingale told her everything she had told Roland, and some things she hadn’t. The Witch Cooperation Association — its purpose, its numbers, the camp in the mountains. The other witches. The companions who would know her, who shared what she carried. And the adulthood. She was plain about it: the magic in Anna was approaching stability, and the crossing would be dangerous, and she would be safer surrounded by women who had already made it through.

Roland watched Anna’s face through all of this. She listened the way she always listened — fully, without interruption, with that quality of stillness that sometimes read as cold and was in fact simply complete attention.

When Nightingale finished, Roland began: “Miss Anna, though we have an employment agreement, in circumstances with this degree of risk, your choice—”

“I won’t go.”

He stopped.

“I won’t go,” Anna said again, faster, as though speed would settle the matter before it could be reopened. “I want to stay here.”

Nightingale’s frown was slight and professional. “I’m not misleading you. I can feel your magic — it’s building toward the crossing. Two months into the Months of the Demons it will arrive. If you’re with us before then, your chances are significantly better.”

Anna turned to Roland. Not to Nightingale. To him.

“Your Highness — you once asked if I wanted to go back to Karl’s school. Learn with the other children.” She waited for him to nod. “I didn’t answer. And then you said — a normal life, freedom to go anywhere without fear. You said it was a promise.” She looked at the table for a moment. “I don’t care about any of that.”

He said nothing.

“I just want to stay at Your Highness’s side,” she said. “That’s all.”

He looked at her. He had thought he understood Anna by now — had spent weeks watching her, building a working model of who she was. What he saw now was that the model had been wrong, or at least incomplete. He searched her face for what he was used to finding there: the guarded self-containment, the surface of still water. It was still there. But under it, now, something blooming — not adoration, not dependence, nothing that performed itself. Just a fact, stated plainly, by a girl who had decided.

She had stood at the gallows unafraid. She had faced the kiln’s heat without complaint. She had survived her father’s betrayal without a word of self-pity. What she wanted, apparently, was this.

“The adulthood,” Nightingale said, quietly, “will not be manageable alone.”

“It won’t kill me.” Anna said it with certainty, not bravado — the certainty of someone who has measured a thing and found a number.

Nightingale looked at her for a long time. Then she exhaled. “Understood.”

“You’ll leave them?” Roland asked. “Just like that?”

“I have a comfortable situation here,” Nightingale said, pulling her hood back up. “The Association’s camp won’t move before the month is out.” She stood. “And someone who hasn’t been through adulthood cannot understand how close to the margin it runs. I’ve been at that margin. I’ve watched companions die at it.” She looked at Anna. “When the day comes, I may be able to help. And if I can’t—” a brief pause, something that might have been dark humor in her voice— “I have some experience with funerals.”

She went to the door and pulled the dagger from the frame without looking at it. She turned, curtseyed once — the formal bow again, precise, practiced — and then her body simply dissolved into the shadows between the door and the hall. No sound. No footstep. Gone as cleanly as mist off a river.

Roland stood looking at the empty doorway. Invisibility, he thought. Or something close enough to it that the difference doesn’t matter. He thought of the week she’d spent watching him, following him through Border Town while his guards noticed nothing. The knife throw, the control of it. The Association was not simply a refuge. It was an organization with training and discipline. He would need to understand it better.

He reached over and patted Anna’s head. She turned and brushed his hand away without a word, and walked out.

He heard her footsteps on the stairs. Then nothing.

In the corridor outside her room, Anna stopped.

She set her back against the door. In the dark the only light was a thin line under the door behind her, Roland’s candle still burning.

She raised her arms and pressed them over her face. Her breathing, which she had kept steady for the entire conversation — through the explanation of the adulthood, through Nightingale’s quiet description of what it felt like to watch someone die from it, through the announcement that she would stay and the particular expression on Roland’s face when she said it — her breathing changed.

She stood like that for a long time.

”…Fool,” she said, very quietly, to no one.

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