Rewrite That Witch
CH217 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 217: The Cause of the Disease

Lunch had just ended when Carter arrived at a run.

Roland was still at the table, debating the merits of an afternoon nap, when the doors opened with more force than Carter usually applied to anything. The sweat on the man’s face was not from the summer heat. His brows were drawn in.

“Your Royal Highness—the ships transporting the Eastern Region refugees have arrived at the pier.”

“That was fast.” Theo’s been efficient. Roland started to feel pleased. Then he read Carter’s face more carefully. “What’s wrong?”

“A strange disease. It came aboard during the voyage.” Carter described it quickly—black spots on the skin, blood that had turned dark, rapid spread through contact. “It started with a handful of people, but it’s on two or three ships now. Some of the First Army soldiers have been infected.”

Black spots. Dark blood. Contact transmission. Roland sat still for a moment, running it through.

It sounded like plague. The skin discoloration, the obvious suffering—it had the shape of it. But the bubonic plague bacillus didn’t blacken blood. It didn’t break open skin. If this were Black Death, the symptom profile was wrong in ways that mattered. Something else, then. And the question of what that something was would have to wait, because whatever it was, people were dying on ships anchored at his pier.

Lily, he thought. And then immediately: Carefully. Her new ability—the mothers she had developed—had not been tested against any infectious disease. If her range was sufficient to treat patients without contact, the isolation problem might be solvable. If not, sending her in blind was a way to lose her.

Her ability was a summoning type. Five-meter range, consistent with most witches. She could work through distance.

He was already moving. “Get the First Army to the pier—establish a quarantine perimeter, no one in or out. Tell them Nana and I are on the way.” He looked at Nightingale. “Gather the Witch Union. No naps today.”

On the walk to the pier, Roland worked out the box.

A divided room: Lily on one side, patients on the other, a window in the barrier for observation, two symmetrical holes cut in the lower section so she could extend her hands into the contaminated air without actually crossing the barrier. Soraya’s painted coating would seal around her wrists when she reached through—flexible, airtight, better than any glove. As long as she washed her hands with alcohol afterward, the infection risk was as close to zero as he could make it.

He brought two carpenters. With Anna’s help, the box was assembled at the pier in far less time than it had any right to take.

The First Army soldiers were still on the ships, still maintaining order—not because they weren’t frightened, but because they had decided that if Nana Pine had ever failed to fix someone she was given access to, no one present could name the occasion.

The first test case: a soldier who could still walk, spots visible on his forearms, brought to Lily’s side of the barrier and told to stand still. She extended her hands through Soraya’s seal and worked.

The magic was silent in the way all magic was silent—visible only in its effects. When Lily nodded, Roland leaned close to the window.

“How do you feel?”

The soldier startled at the voice. “Your Highness?” His hand came up in a salute. Then he looked at his own arm—and stopped. The spots were fading. Not slowly. Quickly. “I feel—my strength is coming back. Your Highness, I feel much better.”

Roland watched the discoloration recede and made a mental note. Not plague. If it were bubonic plague, killing the bacteria would not make the spots vanish—those came from tissue death and complicated sepsis, physical damage that persisted long after the infection was cleared. These spots were fading while he watched, which meant they were caused by the pathogen directly, and the pathogen was gone.

“Once you’ve fully recovered, bring the next ten in. Symptomatic or not—everyone comes through.”

“Yes, Your Highness.” The soldier paused. Then he turned toward the window. “Thank you, Miss Nana.”

“It wasn’t Miss Nana—Miss Lily is the one who helped you this time,” Roland said, keeping the amusement out of his voice. “Miss Nana handles the cases where skin has already broken open.”

The soldier nodded, processed this, touched the back of his head. “Thank you, Miss Lily.”

When he left, Lily was quiet for a moment. Then she said, without looking at Roland: “I didn’t mind him thinking it was Nana. I don’t need to be thanked.”

Roland looked at her. Her two ponytails had swung forward when she turned. He reached through the window frame and rubbed the top of her head—she allowed it, which surprised him, emitting only a brief muffled sound of protest that didn’t quite amount to one.

Strange illness. Cured by Lily’s ability. Not plague. So what was it?

He stepped out of the box. Nightingale materialized at his elbow, which she had a way of doing when she had been quiet for long enough to have an observation worth delivering.

“The blood from their wounds,” she said. “It carries signs of magic.”

He stopped. “Magic?”

“Very small.” She was trying to describe something that had no good vocabulary yet. “In the fog—like seeing stars at night, but much smaller. I’ve never seen anything that faint.”

A disease with a magical signature. Not a natural pathogen. Which meant the Church was likely involved—not because witches were guilty, as the High Priest was apparently claiming in King’s City, but because the Church was the institution with both the motive and the means to deploy something like this.

“I need to look at the blood directly,” he said.

Nightingale’s hand found his arm. “You could get infected.”

“Lily’s ability suppresses it. She’ll treat me afterward if anything shows.” He met her eyes until she let go.

He took blood from a coma patient, prepared a glass slide, placed it under the microscope, and adjusted the focus.

What he saw made him sit back from the eyepiece and look at the ceiling for a moment.

They were bugs. Not bacteria—not anything a bacteriologist would have recognized. Larger. Fat-bodied, tentacled, moving slowly through the blood sample with the unhurried progress of things that had no predators. From their posterior ends they extruded something thin and filamentous—mucus, he supposed, though it trailed behind them like fine hair. Their size was closer to single-celled algae than to any bacterium, but their bodies were opaque in the way Lily’s mothers were opaque, which meant they were not transparent single-celled organisms.

They glowed with the specific faint light that Nightingale’s ability detected as magic.

And when Lily extended her ability into the sample—when one of her mothers was introduced alongside the parasites—the mother attacked. Directly. Prioritized. Converted the parasites into copies of itself the way it converted anything that had magic in it.

The disease was magical in origin, treatable by Lily’s magic, and it was not plague. Whether the Church had created it deliberately or something else had introduced it into the eastern population—that was a question for later.

The treatment ran from noon until evening. Five hundred and some people from ten ships, each passing through the box, each emerging on the other side with skin clearing and color returning. Nana handled the worst cases—where wounds had already opened, where the body needed more than Lily’s purging could do alone.

When the last person was through, the sound from the pier was something Roland had not heard before in this particular configuration: five hundred people who had each, separately, believed they were dying, and who now weren’t.

They found him in the crowd. They knelt. They called his name repeatedly, the sound layering and overlapping until it lost the shape of words and became something else—louder and more sustained.

“You don’t look happy.” Nightingale had come to stand beside him.

“The credit belongs to Lily and Nana,” he said. “They cured the disease. I stood next to a microscope and told people what to do.”

He knew it wasn’t wise to explain this to people who were not yet ready to hear it. He knew that saying the witches healed you to a crowd trained to fear witches would complicate everything. He knew why he stayed quiet. He didn’t have to like it.

Nightingale’s hand landed on his shoulder—brief, brisk, the gesture of a person who respects you enough not to say the obvious. “You’ve done enough. And the other day will come.” A pause. “Speaking of which—I almost forgot. There may be a new member joining the Witch Union soon.”

“From the ships?”

She smiled.

Discussion

Suggest a change