Rewrite That Witch
CH240 · Rewrite
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Chapter 240: Award and Honor Ceremony

Roland was designing the medal.

He should have finished this hours ago—it was not a complicated task. But since the middle of the afternoon he had found his attention sliding off the work and returning, each time, to the same place.

Nightingale’s kiss.

There had been signs before—not exactly subtle ones. But she had never acted on them, and he had never raised the subject, and a thing that exists only in unspoken understanding can be maintained indefinitely without having to be dealt with. Now there was no longer any such ambiguity. What she felt was clear. What he intended to do about it was not.

The question forced another admission: he did not dislike Nightingale. He did not dislike her at all. She was beautiful and direct and possessed of a calm that could harden to steel when it needed to. They had been together from morning to night for more than a year—how could he possibly dislike her? The barrier between them was not feeling. It was the accumulated weight of twenty years of thinking about the world a particular way, about what relationships were supposed to look like and what honoring someone you cared for was supposed to mean. A framework inherited from somewhere else. Applied, now, to somewhere it had not been designed for.

And the real question, which was not about him at all: Anna’s opinion.

He could not act on his own preferences without knowing how she would feel. That was the center of it.

He was still sitting with an unfinished medal sketch when a knock came at the door.

“It’s unlocked.”

Anna came in carrying a tray. On it: two small plates of roasted mushrooms and an earthenware jar. The smell reached him immediately—warm, complex, sweet-edged.

“Food?”

“Yes.” She set the tray on the desk and removed the jar’s lid, revealing a pale, fragrant soup. “Honey roasted mushrooms. This plate is mine, and Nightingale made the other. The soup is seasoned with herbs from the kitchen garden.”

“It looks extraordinary.” He pulled his chair around. “Sit—eat with me.”

She settled across from him.

“Why didn’t Nightingale come?”

“She said she didn’t know what expression she should wear when she saw you.” Anna considered her own words. “I don’t quite understand why that would matter.”

He took a slow breath through the nose. That’s why. She had declared, boldly and without apparent embarrassment, that she had no regrets—had even said with something approaching cheek that it was not his fault, that she had simply done what she wanted to do. And then she had retreated behind a wall, literally, because she couldn’t work out what to do with her own face. Daring and paralyzed at once.

“In that case, let’s eat.”

The first bite of mushroom took thought out of him entirely.

The honey dissolved the moment it touched his tongue and spread its sweetness ahead of the mushroom’s own juice—rich, clean, something between salt and sweet that no single ingredient could have produced. Tender and faintly chewy at the same time. Without MSG, in a world where flavor had to be coaxed by craft and by the quality of the ingredient itself, this was exceptional.

“These aren’t ordinary mushrooms.”

“Bird Beak Mushrooms,” Anna said, smiling. “A specialty of the Concealing Forest. The townspeople know them. That’s why I wanted you to try them.”

The soup was equally good—deeper, richer, the same flavor concentrated into liquid that he could feel moving through him as he drank it. It tasted the way he imagined a skilled chef’s clear stock would taste before MSG made patience with ingredients optional. Before the seasoning shortcut that would become essential to half the world’s cooking. The Bird Beak Mushroom might be, he thought, the natural source of precisely the compounds that made MSG possible.

“How many of these grow in the forest?”

“Maggie only circled the edge and collected a full bag without difficulty,” Anna said. “I suppose there are quite a lot.”

“Good.” He had already finished Anna’s plate and stretched his chopsticks toward Nightingale’s. “I was beginning to worry the menu would never expand beyond honey meat or peppered meat. I was nearly—” He stopped.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” He chewed carefully and swallowed. The salt on this particular mushroom had been applied with the confidence of someone who had not yet learned restraint. He finished it without expression. The next piece showed a different problem: scorched on one side, raw on the other. The piece after that: fine. The pattern of someone learning in real time and improving toward the end of the batch.

He cleaned both plates and drank the last of the soup. His stomach protested mildly. He put down the chopsticks.

“Thank you. Both of you.”

Anna laughed—it turned her face luminous—and then reached across the table and pinched his nose. He made a startled sound. She kissed his cheek, light and unhesitating, and stood.

“Go to bed at a reasonable hour,” she said. “I’ll go wash the dishes.”

After she left he sat for a while in the quiet of the office.

He didn’t want to ignore Anna’s feelings. He didn’t know how to speak about any of this without doing damage he couldn’t predict. He suspected this was also connected, in ways he had not fully worked out, to the fact that he had spent most of his previous life in the kind of focused professional solitude that didn’t allow much practice with the sort of conversation he now needed to have. A large organization, a reasonable salary, a demanding project—and still, somehow, no one who had come close enough to make these questions necessary.

The Church would not fall tomorrow. There was time to work this out slowly, carefully, without haste and without avoidance.

For now: the medal.

He picked up his pen.

In the morning, Roland stood on a wooden platform erected in the town square, and the square was full.

Full was the wrong word—it overflowed, pressed outward against the surrounding streets, refugees from the western camp and serfs from across the Redwater all gathered in among the townspeople who had watched Border Town go from impoverished outpost to something that barely resembled what it had been. The sparse old houses were gone. In their place: construction sites and finished brick buildings arranged according to a district plan—neat, coherent, occupying only a third of the old footprint but housing the full original population with room to spare. When the three- and four-story buildings were complete and the adjacent districts opened, the density would increase further. No one called it a town anymore, not really—you couldn’t call twenty thousand people and six hundred professional soldiers a town.

He would make it official next spring.

Echo carried his voice across the square without distortion—every person at the back of the crowd heard him as clearly as the front row.

“Today is Border Town’s award and honor ceremony. More than half a year has passed since I arrived. In that time we have defeated the demonic beasts, repelled the Duke, and built what you see around you. To do that, many people sacrificed greatly. Among them are several who stand out—not nobles, not wealthy merchants. Before they served this town, they were ordinary people. Just like you.”

The square was quiet.

“And today, they will receive what they have earned. Including a medal made by my own hand, one hundred gold royals, and five acres of land.”

The crowd broke open. The cheers were not polite—they were genuine, surprised, the sound of people who had not expected to hear a number that large spoken aloud as though it were a real thing that could happen.

“This is not a one-time ceremony. We will hold it every year from this day forward. It does not matter what you were born to, or how much you own. Merit is merit. Extraordinary contribution will always find its reward here.”

The last syllable left his mouth. Echo’s imitation gun salute rang out—a series of sharp cracks that rolled across the square like a drumroll, like applause, like something new beginning—and the crowd surged.

Iron Axe, Kyle Sichi, and Nana Pine emerged from the far side of the square, escorted by the First Army, and walked toward the platform.

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