Rewrite That Witch
CH210 · Rewrite
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Chapter 210: Go or Stay

The room was exactly the way she had left it that morning, which meant Irene’s housekeeper had been through it: the curtains drawn back, the surfaces cleared, the small table near the window bare and waiting.

May arranged her purchases on it. Four bars of perfumed soap, wrapped in Carter’s handkerchief. The bottle of white liquor she had bought on an impulse she was still sorting through — clear as water, labeled in the cramped hand of someone who had very recently learned that labels needed to say what a thing was, so it said: White Liquor. High concentration. Not for large amounts.

She sat and looked at the two items on the table and the last orange light of the day falling across them.

Carter had mentioned the liquor in passing, while she was paying — the shelf beside the soaps, the brief description of its unusual properties, the advice that she should only try a small amount. She had listened to the advice in the way she listened to all advice about what she should do with her own evening, which was to evaluate it and then do what she wanted.

She wanted to get drunk.

This was not something she did. Her entire professional life had been built on control — control of the body, the voice, the expression, the distance between herself and everything that might cloud the precision she needed to do her work. Actors who drank lost their edge, then their roles, then the theater’s patience. She had watched it happen to three people she respected and two she didn’t, and the result was always the same. So she did not drink.

But she had heard other actors talk about it. The dissolving of the usual surface, the thing you kept maintained to face the audience and the other company and the nobles who came backstage and the managers who needed to believe you would always be exactly what they had paid for. The way that when all of that was set down for an evening, sometimes you could see what was left underneath — what you actually wanted when you stopped managing what you wanted.

She uncorked the bottle and poured a small amount.

The smell hit her before she lifted the cup — a sharp cloud of alcohol that made her lean back, followed immediately by something layered underneath it, complex and rich, that she would have smelled first if the first smell hadn’t been so aggressive.

She drank the whole cup.

The burning was architectural. She coughed it mostly back up and spent thirty seconds persuading her throat to forgive her.

Then she tried again. A sip this time, small enough to let the initial shock pass before the rest of it arrived.

The initial shock passed. The rest of it arrived.

There were, she decided, two separate drinks in this bottle. The first drink was the burning, which was aggressive and impersonal and made no promises. The second drink was the thing that came after — warm and deep and sweet in a way that sat underneath the tongue rather than on it. She held the second drink in her mouth for a moment before she swallowed, trying to map it.

She poured herself another cup, smaller this time, and set it aside to wait.

From her pocket she took the mirror.

It was a gift — left before she could refuse it, the classic technique of a man who understood that rejection required an object to be rejected and had removed that requirement by walking away. She had spent thirty seconds annoyed at the elegance of this and then put the mirror in her pocket and not taken it out again.

She opened it now and held it at arm’s length.

The surface was different from any mirror she had owned. The bronze mirrors she had used growing up showed her a version of herself that was slightly warmer and slightly softer than the truth, which she had eventually understood was a feature of the bronze rather than a mercy. The silver-backed glass in the theater at Longsong was truer but still not quite clear at the edges. This mirror — small, simple, with a plain iron frame — showed her exactly what was there.

Her flushed cheeks. The slight looseness around the eyes that the liquor was producing. The question she had been carrying around the edges of her expression for two weeks like an item she kept meaning to put down.

Outside, the sky had gone from orange to the particular shade of dark blue that arrives just before night but is not yet night. Down the street, someone was singing something simple and repetitive, the kind of song that worked for children or for people walking home, and the sound drifted up through the window without urgency.

On the table between the soaps and the liquor bottle was the letter from Petrov. She had been using it as a bookmark for three days. She opened it and read it again.

The stronghold theater misses its star. Your whereabouts were kept from the public. We await your return at your earliest convenience.

His Highness had not kept it from her. He had put it directly in her hands, along with the unspoken: this is yours to answer. She did not know many lords who would do that.

She thought about what she was going to lose if she stayed. The stronghold theater, which was the finest stage she had ever worked on. The audience that knew her name, that would wait three performances for her return, that measured its approval in terms she could count. A life whose edges she understood, whose demands were known, whose satisfactions were predictable.

She thought about what she would keep. Irene. The Diary of a Witch, which was better than anything she had performed in, and which was going to need her for at least two more months before it could stand without her. A town that was being built around a different set of assumptions than any town she had lived in, and which therefore produced, every few days, something she had not seen before. Carter Lannis, who talked too much and bought soap in sets of four and did not seem to consider any of this remarkable.

She poured the second cup and drank it more carefully than the first.

Her vision had gone pleasantly imprecise around the edges, the way candlelight goes soft when you’ve been staring at it too long. She found a piece of paper in the writing desk, spread it, and dipped the pen.

She wrote the letter quickly, before the part of her brain that managed things could reassemble itself and manage this.

She signed it and set the pen down.

The street outside was quiet now, the singer gone home. The mirror was still open on the table. In it, looking slightly more certain than she had expected, was her own face.

She closed the mirror.

Hello, Miss May, Carter had said, at the pub, at the beginning. May I have a drink with you?

She finished the cup and blew out the candle.

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