Rewrite That Witch
CH230 · Rewrite
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Chapter 230: Assassination (Part 1)

Before the last light went out of the sky, Faceless slipped into the canal and swam.

Her real name was Aphra, a name she loved. It meant dust, and Archbishop Heater had given it to her in the New Holy City. Dust settled and became indistinguishable; one particle of it was exactly like any other. That was how she had lived, most of her life — so thoroughly unremarkable that she could stand in a room and watch it empty around her without anyone remembering to say goodbye.

Only for Heater did she show her actual face.

As a member of the arbitration tribunal, she had spent years handling what the Church delicately called fallen ones — witches who had attempted to revolt, corrupt secular officials, believers who had decided that their own needs outweighed their obligations. She’d been sent to King’s City for one essential purpose: to convert a loyal Presiding Judge into the King of Graycastle. The assignment with the fallen witches at the dock was, by comparison, a minor errand.

She had her preferences about the work. When the Church sentenced witches to be tortured, she would sometimes take their form afterward — wear their appearance from beginning to end, experience the punishment they had received, feel in her own body what the fallen had felt. She told herself it was atonement. A way of sharing in the cost of what she’d accomplished. A way to understand more deeply what she’d done.

The camp had been positioned well. The slope above the canal, open ground on all sides, elevation enough to see anyone approaching from below. The witch in the air had made closer observation impossible; Aphra had spent most of the day in a farm warehouse, still as stored grain, waiting for dark.

Night came and revealed that something had changed.

The mercenaries had pulled entirely off the pier, consolidating back into the camp. And the Dreamland men — those useless, torch-carrying fools — had assembled themselves on the near bank in full view, lighting up their own position. Anyone at the top of that hill could see them with a glance. If the mercenaries had any sense at all, they would not wait to be encircled; they would be moving east through the dark, splitting into small groups, losing themselves in the farmland before Dreamland had finished rowing across.

If they run, I’ve lost them. The witches would scatter with the soldiers, impossible to track.

Aphra pushed off from the bank and moved toward the camp at speed, trying to close the distance before a retreat could begin.

What she found instead was a camp in perfect order.

Men still moving between patrol points. Bonfire burning steadily. Sentries rotating at regular intervals, passing each other with the kind of easy acknowledgment that meant they recognized one another. She crouched in the shadow of the wheat stalks at the camp’s edge and watched for a long time.

They’re not leaving.

She felt something unclench. Whatever the mercenaries’ reasons — stubbornness, confidence, a calculation she hadn’t made — they had chosen to hold their position. Which meant she still had time.

She watched the sentries’ rhythm until she understood it. Found the gap. Picked her angle — low and from the blind side, the approach that made her nothing but shadow until the final two steps.

The guard turned to scan elsewhere. She was already moving.

One hand sealed his mouth from behind. The other pressed the blade to the junction of neck and shoulder, angled to reach what needed to reach. He went down without a sound.

She kept one hand on his body and placed the other on her own sternum. The transformation came from there — always from the chest, always a sensation like water reversing direction inside her. The duration varied by the complexity of the target. When she had replaced a King, it had taken nearly half an hour to achieve something that would last. Here, no patience required: within a breath, her face had changed. Within two, her height. Her hands, when she looked at them, were a man’s hands.

She moved quickly. Got his clothes on before the other patrol returned. Dragged the body into the wheat field, pulling it back between the rows until the stalks closed over it.

She looked at the weapon she’d inherited. A length of iron shaped like a barrel, fitted to a wooden handle, the barrel capped not with a blade but with a hole — a dark, perfect circle. She turned it in her hands. It was not a spear. It was not a crossbow. She had handled every weapon the Church maintained in its armories and could not place this one.

Strange thing. She shouldered it with the appearance of someone who knew how to carry it and stepped back into the patrol’s circuit.

The other guard passed her without hesitation.

She wasn’t ready to enter the camp directly. Her imitation gave her a face but not a history; the moment she crossed paths with someone who knew this particular soldier well — a bunkmate, a friend, someone who would ask a specific question she couldn’t answer — she’d be exposed. Better to wait. Find the moment when attention pulled outward, when the camp’s order became briefly insufficient for its own demands.

It came when the moon was high.

Dreamland had finally crossed the canal. She heard it — the shouts, the banging of weapons against shields — a mob announcing its arrival with the subtlety of a market. Then the other sentries were calling to each other, relaying back to the camp, and the patrol dissolved as men pulled inward, retreating toward the perimeter line.

She went with them.

Inside the camp: more than a hundred men. Far more than the rat’s intelligence had suggested. They were deployed in a wide ring across the slope’s crest, some crouching, most standing, all of them pointing the strange barrel-topped weapons outward toward the approaching sound. The formation was dense and deliberate. These were not men who were afraid.

Then the outside exploded.

A sound she had no reference for — not thunder, not a siege weapon, not anything she had heard before. Concentrated, percussive, continuous in a way that suggested mechanism rather than accident. She flinched backward against the nearest tent before she had decided to. The noise went on and on, and then stopped, and then started again.

She waited in the tent’s shadow and controlled her breathing.

The camp’s noise reorganized. Footsteps, shouted adjustments, officers moving people to cover gaps — all of it purposeful, none of it panicked. Whatever was happening outside, the mercenaries knew how to answer it. Minute by minute she listened to the battle’s sound, trying to hear signs of collapse, signs that the Dreamland mob was through the line.

She heard nothing like that.

The explosions thinned. The mob sounds diminished. By the time she could no longer hear the Dreamland men at all, she had accepted what the silence meant: they had been broken. A thousand street rats, attacking uphill against men with these strange weapons. The rats were gone.

Think. Faceless in a camp of several hundred men, no mob to cover her movement, a roll call or assembly coming as soon as the perimeter reported clear. She needed to move now — find the witches, finish the assignment, get out before anyone looked for a man who wasn’t there.

She left the tent. Moved low, between canvas walls, angling toward the camp’s center. Paused at the corner of the last tent and looked around the edge.

Four women sitting around a bonfire. Relaxed, talking, unaware of her, their faces warm in the fire’s light.

The intelligence had said two witches. That was wrong. But four was only a counting problem — it didn’t change the method. Whatever these women were, suspected or confirmed, the order stood: no fallen ones left alive. If they weren’t corrupted, the Church’s position was that the sacrifice was still necessary. Aphra had been taught that rationale. She had believed it for years.

She studied the escape routes, noted the angles, committed the positions to memory. Then she stood up and walked into the open space between the tents, moving as though she belonged, one more soldier heading toward the fire’s warmth.

She had made it halfway across the clearing when something cold and hard pressed into the center of her back.

“Don’t move.” A woman’s voice, close behind her. Quiet and very steady. “Who are you?”

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