Rewrite That Witch
CH024 · Rewrite
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Chapter 24: Development Plan

In the morning an older woman brought his breakfast. Not Tyre.

Carter was waiting outside the bedroom door. He fell into step beside Roland without preamble: “Your Highness. I have unfortunate news. Your maid Tyre died last night.”

Roland kept his face steady. He had known this was coming. It still landed somewhere uncomfortable — she had been young, and what had happened to her was his decision, and decisions like that left a residue that didn’t wash off quickly. “How?”

“She fell from the balcony of her room. No sign of a struggle. No witnesses. The guards saw nothing.” Carter paused. “It appears to have been an accident.”

He was watching Roland’s eyes as he said it. Roland understood why. In Graycastle the fourth prince’s interest in Tyre had been widely known — known and unremarkable, the sort of thing that happened between a noble and his household staff and was discussed with a shrug. Carter was checking whether the accident had been arranged by Roland for a different reason entirely.

“A tragedy,” Roland said. “Have the senior maid who attended me this morning take over her duties permanently.”

Carter nodded and withdrew.

Nightingale was already in the office. She was sitting on the desk — his desk — with her legs crossed and an expression of mild professional dissatisfaction.

“She killed herself.”

Roland walked around her and sat down. “You let her fall?”

“I had her tied. She’d hidden poison capsules in a back tooth — crushed them before I could reach her mouth.” Nightingale’s frustration was genuine; it had the quality of someone who expected competence from herself and was unhappy when circumstances prevented it. “I staged the fall to cover the scene.”

“So we have nothing.”

“I said we have nothing from her mouth. I didn’t say we have nothing.” She placed a folded letter on the desk. “Found in her room, behind the wall panel.”

He spread it open. On the surface: a personal letter, a maid writing to her sister, full of affectionate domestic detail. But the references to the sea ran through it like a thread — the beauty of the view from a certain beach, the pleasure of watching sunsets at the water’s edge, the question of when they might see each other again at the coast.

He thought through the map of Graycastle’s royal territories. His two brothers governed inland holdings. His three sisters were distributed differently. One of them overlooked the southern coast.

“Garcia,” he said.

“Almost certainly. Your brothers have no sea to write about. As for the other two sisters — Garcia is the most capable. The maid was too well-trained to have been placed casually. Two to three years of preparation, at minimum.” Nightingale folded her hands. “Before she was ever assigned to you.”

The succession contest. He had known it was real — had inherited a body that had already survived one assassination attempt, had read the intelligence in the letter Nightingale brought him last night. But knowing it abstractly and understanding that his older sister had placed an operative in his bedroom for years were different qualities of the same fact. He sat with it for a moment.

“Thank you,” he said, and meant it.

She blew a soft breath in his direction and vanished.

He held very still for two seconds, then reached toward the spot where she had been sitting and touched — nothing. Then something: the faintest resistance, warm and slightly amused. “Your Highness,” said Nightingale’s disembodied voice. “You should not do this. Anna would be upset.”

He withdrew his hand.

A knock at the door: “It’s Barov, Your Highness.”

He composed himself. “Come in.”

Barov arrived with an armload of files and the brisk manner of a man who had been awake since before dawn keeping Border Town’s administration running. They went through the weekly report together. The financial picture had improved: the ore sold to Willow Town had brought in nearly two hundred gold royals, and after food purchases and wages there were ninety left over. Barov, who had lived in anxiety about the treasury for weeks, allowed himself something close to satisfaction.

Roland let him have it for approximately one sentence before continuing.

“I want to form a militia. Recruit a hundred men — male, no criminal record, between eighteen and forty, physically capable. Carter will train them. They need leather armor, pikes, and two sets of winter clothes each.”

Barov’s expression returned to its professional level. “Your Highness, by convention, civilian militia are only called in as a last resort—”

“Untrained civilians are a liability in a defensive position. Sending them to the wall without any preparation would make things worse, not better. I intend to actually train them.” He watched Barov’s face. “Are you still uncertain whether I intend to stay in Border Town?”

Barov hesitated. “I merely ask because the expense—”

“Is necessary. Authorize it.”

After Barov left, Roland sat alone with the accounts for a while, thinking through the arithmetic. His personal treasury held a little over three hundred gold royals. The wall construction was drawing against it steadily. The first steam engine had cost twenty gold royals in materials; he would need at least two more. He’d intended the steam engine as his answer to the mine’s productivity problem — not as a commercial product, not yet, just as a means of pulling more ore from the northern slope without adding proportionally more labor. A top-down introduction of industrial capacity, modest in scale, constrained to the one use that would immediately pay for itself.

The industrial revolution, properly, required a society already straining against its productive limits. Border Town was nowhere near those limits. What he was building was an engine in the original sense: not a revolution, just a machine, placed where it could do the most specific good. The rest would follow, if he lived long enough to let it.

He made a note. Three steam engines. Northern slope. Spring.

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