Rewrite That Witch
CH216 · Rewrite
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Chapter 216: Demonic Plague

For the next two days, Theo did not stop moving.

The route was the same each time: Margaret’s Chamber of Commerce, the refugee camp, the tavern, back. Margaret arranged the fleet—a line of vessels that would, on the appointed day, arrive at the canal pier looking like exactly what Theo was advertising. The First Army soldiers were in place outside the walls, waiting for the signal to arrive in their mercenary disguise and begin loading people.

The information work he left to Black Hammer. Street rats were made for exactly this kind of task—circulating through crowds, starting conversations, letting a rumor develop the way water develops a channel: always finding the path of least resistance, always spreading further than you’d planned. They couldn’t work the whole refugee camp in forty-eight hours, but they didn’t need to. One person told two, and two told four, and by the time the fleet appeared at the pier, the whole camp would know. He had seen it work before.

On the day the fleet arrived, nearly a thousand people gathered at the pier. More than Theo had expected. More than he had allowed himself to hope for.

He organized the boarding in the order Roland had specified: the sick and injured first, then children, then the families of children, then the remaining adults. He looked for the elderly and found almost none—those who had survived the Eastern Region’s collapse and then the walk to King’s City were, predominantly, young and relatively able. The journey itself had been a selection.

The first ten single-masted ships took five hundred people and moved west. The remaining refugees were told the fleet would return. They seemed to believe it. Some of them stood at the water’s edge watching the ships go, as if they could make them come back faster by watching.

This is going well, he thought, and then stopped thinking it immediately, because in his experience that particular thought was an invitation.

The second fleet had barely cleared sight of King’s City when the first body appeared.

A man, found in the Northern District, lying on the street. His skin was covered in black spots. His teeth had fallen out. In several places his skin had broken open, and the blood that had dried in those wounds was dark—not the red-brown of ordinary dried blood, but something closer to ink.

Theo heard about it through Black Hammer, which meant it had already been circulating for a day.

More bodies followed. Then: people walking around with the same spots appearing on their skin. The physicians tried everything they knew—herbs, cold compresses, bloodletting—and found that even the drawn blood had changed color, as if some process had already contaminated it entirely. Nothing worked. Nothing slowed it.

Fear does not travel slowly. Within days the churches were packed, people pushing against each other in the pews, praying with the specific urgency of those who have run out of other options. The High Priest appeared before the crowds and declared what people had already begun to suspect: the witches had done this. This was the Devil’s power made manifest—a corruption spreading through contact, unstoppable by any natural means. The Church, however, had not been idle. They had developed a Holy Elixir. It would drive the evil back.

The sick gathered on the church steps and waited.

Theo watched all of this with skepticism he kept to himself and stopped shipping refugees.

“Why stop?” Black Hammer demanded, genuinely baffled. “Now more than ever we should be getting those people out before the corruption spreads to them. You want to keep the Devil’s seeds here in the city?”

“Orders from above,” Theo said. “Those people came from the Eastern Region—if the West gets infected, the entire kingdom suffers. We wait.”

“The West doesn’t matter to—” Black Hammer began.

“I have one head,” Theo said. “So do you. Let’s both keep them.”

He left the tavern and went directly to the nearest shop bearing Margaret’s emblem. He showed his token to the attendant, said he needed the boss—now, today—and was taken to a back room within the hour.

“The disease has nothing to do with witches,” Margaret said, before he could frame the question. “If witches could release something like this into the air, God’s Stones of Retaliation would be worthless and Hermes would already be a graveyard.”

“I agree. But that’s not the issue right now.” He pulled a folded letter from his coat and set it on the table between them. “This needs to reach His Highness as quickly as possible. The two groups we already sent may have carried infected people—the disease may not show symptoms immediately. If any of them reach Border Town already sick, the town needs to know it’s coming.”

Margaret looked at the letter. Then at him.

“Information between merchant networks,” she said, “has always been the fastest route.” She took it.

Several days out from King’s City, Lucia wanted to be sick.

She had been in motion for a month—east to King’s City, then King’s City to west, driven first by disaster and then by rumor of something better. She was fourteen years old and had not slept properly in most of those thirty days, and now the river itself seemed to move in ways designed to punish her.

She lay flat at the lowest point of the deck with one arm submerged to the elbow in the current, filling a water bag, and let her stomach settle its argument however it needed to settle it. The bile came up regardless. She got it over the side, wiped her face with the back of her hand, and kept filling the bag.

Bell’s water. That was all that mattered.

Her sister was in the cabin. Lucia had been watching the color drain from Bell’s face for three days—the flush that should have been normal warmth was instead fever, and the dark spots had appeared first at the wrists and then moved up her arms and were now at the collar. Bell had stopped being conscious most of the time.

“You’re too close to her.” The voice came from the corner of the cabin where a middle-aged man had been lying since the second day. He looked like he was holding on by something thinner than will. “The spots are at her neck now. She won’t last much longer.” He coughed. “Think about yourself.”

Lucia forced the water past Bell’s clenched lips, drop by drop.

It had started on the second day of the voyage: a handful of people showing the first spots, then a geometric spread, then the crew quarantining one ship specifically for the sick. She had understood why they didn’t simply tip the sick into the river—some of the crew had spots of their own, and there was a kind of solidarity in shared danger, even when that solidarity meant nothing medically.

When Bell’s first spots appeared, Lucia had moved to the sick ship without being asked.

She had heard, before Valencia fell, about the Witch Cooperation Association. Fragments, rumors, the kind of information that traveled between cities in pieces and arrived missing its most important parts. She knew there were witches in Border Town. She didn’t know how to find them. She hadn’t known what she would say when she did.

But the ship was moving west, and west was all she had.

Just get there, she told herself. Bell’s forehead burned against her palm. Just get there and something will change.

She believed this without being able to justify it. She believed it the way you believe, in the worst part of the night, that the light will come back—not because you have proof, but because you have to.

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