Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 23: New Source of Power

“Join these two pieces together.”

Anna pressed her fingertip to the seam where the iron plates met at a right angle. A tongue of flame ran along the joint, and the metal at the interface went liquid and then solid again — the whole process unhurried, precise, visible as a heartbeat.

“Lower the heat and do the reverse side.”

She nodded and did it. The two plates locked together at ninety degrees, bonded with a clean line of fused iron.

Roland crouched and examined the weld. It was exactly what he had imagined: no gaps, no pitting, the surface as true as anything a modern shop could produce. A little polishing and the fluid traces would disappear. He stood.

“Excellent. Now these two.”

“What is it?” Anna looked at the growing assembly. “An iron bucket?”

“A cylinder.” He pointed to the component parts still waiting to be joined. “The piston goes inside. Air — or steam — enters through the port here, pushes the piston, and that motion turns the wheel.”

She looked at him with an expression that suggested she understood approximately none of this but was committed to understanding it.

The steam engine had been the central diagram in every mechanical engineering textbook he’d ever used — not the Newcomen engine, not even Watt’s, but the improved high-pressure dual-rod design that he’d known since his second year of university. The principle was simple enough to explain to a child: boil water, capture the steam, let the pressure push a piston, connect the piston to a wheel. Thermal energy into mechanical energy. The first industrial revolution, compressed into a back garden.

The difficulty was not the principle. It was the manufacturing. A proper cylinder required tight tolerances between the piston and the cylinder wall, required reliable sealing, required pipework that could handle pressure without leaking at the joints. Without precision machining, without a mill or a lathe, the traditional answer to these problems was either genius-level craftsmanship or accepting that the thing would barely work.

He had Anna instead of machining.

The design he had worked out divided every component into flat plates that the smithy could cut and grind. Anna welded the plates into shape: cylinder from four plates, perfectly square, the interior surface continuous. Pipework bent and sealed at the seams. All the large parts subdivided into workable pieces and joined. What would have taken a modern workshop months of tolerancing and testing took three days in a back garden, because the welds were structurally indistinguishable from the base metal.

Carter had forged the iron plates under Roland’s supervision, working without complaint on something he clearly regarded as inexplicable.

On the third day Roland poured water into the steam room and told Anna to light the wood.

Ten minutes. The water came to a full rolling boil. From inside the cylinder came a low creaking — the thermal expansion of the iron, the piston pressing outward as the walls expanded slightly less.

“That’s a water boiler,” Carter muttered, with the tone of a man who had been promised more.

The cylinder filled with steam. The piston rod began to move — extending, reaching its limit, triggering the slide valve that redirected the steam and drew it back. The great wheel connected to the rod began to turn. Slowly first, then faster, the rhythm of extension and retraction finding its pace, until the wheel was spinning at a steady speed that made the garden air tremble slightly near the rim.

White vapor hissed from the exhaust. The sound was a deep mechanical hum, repetitive and dense, the sound of something working.

“Is this what you called the hidden forces in nature?” Anna said. She was staring at the wheel.

Carter was also staring. His face had gone through surprise and arrived at something else — a harder expression, more considered. He had helped install the wheel himself, felt its weight, knew what it cost to move. Now it turned as though it weighed nothing, driven by water and heat.

He thought: training a knight takes fifteen years. Manufacturing this takes three days.

He thought: it doesn’t need food. It doesn’t fear cold or hunger. It doesn’t flinch from an arrow.

He thought: if you mounted a ram on it—

He said nothing. But Roland caught his expression and recognized it.

That evening Nightingale was in his room again.

No hood this time. She was sitting at the table, smiling, with a sheaf of parchment in front of her — his parchment, from his desk. His steam engine diagrams.

“The rumors about the fourth prince are thoroughly incorrect,” she said pleasantly, not looking up from the pages. “Ignorant, bad character, no learning or skills — this doesn’t match. These drawings are more sophisticated than anything I’ve seen from the court’s master engineers.”

“Those are private documents.” He kept his voice level. The privacy had been violated approximately an hour ago; anger about it now would accomplish nothing. “The plans don’t work without Anna.”

“What can it do?”

“Ore transport. Drainage. Metalwork. Forging. Anywhere physical power is needed at sustained levels.”

“Then I’ll take it.” She folded the pages and tucked them into her robe.

“Hey—”

“Before you protest, look at this.” She set something on the table: a small roll of paper, tight as a scroll.

He unrolled it. Dense handwriting, coded shorthand, the kind that intelligence services taught people who expected their correspondence to be intercepted. He read it twice.

“This is a pigeon letter,” Nightingale said. She sounded almost cheerful. “The intended recipient was your maid, Tyre. She was about to burn it.”

Tyre. He searched his inherited memories. The former Roland had kept a personal maid since childhood — she had followed him from Graycastle, taken the room adjacent to his when they arrived in Border Town. He had paid her little attention. He had assumed she was simply staff.

The letter wasn’t signed, but the content was legible in its implications. A previous operation had failed. The author was displeased. The plans for a second action in Longsong Stronghold were not to fail again.

“I didn’t forge this,” Nightingale said, reading his face. “And if I wanted to kill you I wouldn’t need to invent elaborate pretexts.”

Both things were true. He rerolled the paper. “Can you find out who sent it? The name behind it.”

“I can ask Tyre that question. My methods are efficient.” A pause, delicate. “Consider it the price for the drawings.”

He thought about it. He did not have the means to do this himself. He was not going to pretend otherwise.

“Then I’ll have to trouble you,” he said.

Nightingale rose and curtseyed. “As you wish, Your Highness.” She was already moving toward the door, the gesture as formal and as mocking as the first time. “I’ll be in touch.”

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