Rewrite That Witch
CH260 · Rewrite
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Chapter 260: Perfumed Soap and Wine

The sun found the western mountains and descended behind them, and the worst of the day’s heat finally relented. In the castle, the cicadas quieted. The air did not become cool — Border Town in late summer was not a place that offered cool evenings — but it became bearable, which was its own kind of relief.

Evelyn climbed to the second floor with sweat still on her collar and pushed open the bedroom door.

Cold air.

The contrast was immediate, complete, almost physical — she stood in the doorway for a moment and simply breathed it.

“The test must have tired you out.” A woman with black hair and a face that projected competence without coldness looked up from the small writing table and smiled. “How did it go? Was it all right?”

Her name was Scroll — the eldest of the Witch Union, though she wore the fact without emphasis. They had known each other for barely a day, but Evelyn had already collected several instances of small kindnesses: a cup of water brought without asking, a corridor junction explained before she had to ask directions.

“I’m not sure,” Evelyn said, and the frustration she had been carrying since the afternoon came out in the words more than she intended. “Everyone else demonstrated their abilities. When it was my turn, His Highness only asked a few questions and let me go. Does that mean he thinks I’m useless?”

Scroll turned in her chair fully, giving the question proper attention. “There is no ability that lacks a function. There’s only the right context not yet discovered. His Highness says this often — you needn’t worry.”

“But—” Evelyn stopped.

“You’re afraid he’s already written you off.” Scroll’s voice was gentle and direct in equal measure. She did not dress up the fear or dismiss it. “That might have been true in the old Witch Cooperation Association. But since we arrived here, no witch has ever been judged by whether her ability seemed immediately useful. Hummingbird can confirm this.”

From the cabinet, half-hidden behind a hanging dress, Hummingbird’s voice drifted out. “That’s right. Me, Mystery Moon, Lily — even Nana recently, when her work was lighter — His Highness told us to play Gwent to pass the time.”

Evelyn blinked. “He told you to… play games?”

“When there’s work, you work hard. When there isn’t, you rest and enjoy yourself. That’s what he said.” A pause, and then a hint of something Evelyn couldn’t quite categorize — not quite complaint, not quite pride. “He is a little bit biased toward Anna, though. She and His Highness are obviously close.”

“She was the first witch he ever got to know,” Scroll said, with the patient tone of a woman who had answered this particular observation before. “Their bond is deeper for that reason.” She tapped the desk meaningfully. “Now — go get your clean clothes. The running water won’t last all evening.”

Evelyn looked from one to the other. “Where are we going?”

“To shower,” Scroll said, as if this were obvious. “In summer, there’s nothing better.”

When she stepped through the bathroom door, she stopped walking.

The room that should have been a bathroom was a grassland under an evening sky. Mountains in the distance. The setting sun striking the cloud-tops and leaving them gold. The light that came through the actual window of the actual room bent and scattered across Soraya’s coating on the walls, and the painted sky seemed to absorb it, and the painted clouds glowed with it, and for a moment Evelyn’s feet simply refused to take another step because the floor was covered in what her eyes were reporting as grass.

“Soraya’s work,” Scroll said, already unlacing her boots. “Take your shoes off.”

Evelyn removed her wooden sandals and placed them on the shelf beside the door and stepped barefoot onto the painting.

It felt like grass. Dense, slightly damp grass — the particular tactile sensation of a lawn after rain, the coolness of moisture not yet absorbed back into the air. The coating conveyed it perfectly through the soles of her feet, indistinguishable from the thing it depicted.

Scroll crossed to the wall, turned a fitting, and several streams of water erupted from a horizontal pipe overhead, drenching her completely. She turned her face up into it.

Hummingbird pressed something round and smooth into Evelyn’s palm. “This is a bath product His Highness developed. Use it in the shower — you’ll understand immediately.”

When Evelyn came back to the bedroom, her entire body felt as if it had been replaced with something lighter.

She had used the soap with Hummingbird’s guidance: working the lather across her skin, the bubbles multiplying and spreading, the thick sticky heat of the day dissolving as she rinsed. When the water carried the last of the foam away, her skin felt clean in a way she had not known to distinguish from ordinary cleanliness before — smooth, faintly cool even in the warm air, smelling of roses. Not perfume daubed from a bottle. The scent of something that had come off her own skin, as if the rose fragrance had decided to stay.

She stood in the center of the bedroom in her clean clothes and did not quite know what to do with herself.

This is their daily life.

She had grown up in her family’s tavern in King’s City’s outer city. The customers who drank there were farmers and craftsmen and the occasional merchant who preferred to avoid the inner city’s prices, and their favorite topic of conversation, reliably, across years and seasons, was the nobility. The stories ranged from the merely lavish to the frankly impossible: gilded bathtubs, baths drawn in wine, rose petals floating on pools of milk. Evelyn had served them their cups and listened and quietly concluded that some part of every noble’s life was probably as strange as advertised.

Nothing she had imagined was as good as stepping out of a shower and smelling like roses.

She stood in the doorway and thought: He is a real prince, and the castle reflects that. But the witches live this way too. The lavish part she had anticipated; the parity of it had not occurred to her as a possibility.

“Hungry?” Scroll dried her hair in efficient passes and began rebraiding it. “We should go down now.”

The dining room table was laden: six meat dishes, egg soup, vegetable soup, roasted mushrooms. Less spectacular than the welcome feast of the previous evening, but more than plentiful. Evelyn counted the place settings and was still working out the seating arrangement when everyone sat down together and began, without ceremony, to eat.

She noticed the chopsticks before long — not everyone used them, but several witches did, and Roland himself handled them with a facility that suggested he had been using them longer than anyone else at the table. The dishes were arranged differently from the tavern meals she had grown up serving: steak cut into pieces, wild boar leg already freed from the bone, everything sized for chopstick use as much as for knife and fork. A different standard of presentation than she was used to, and yet more practical in its way.

When the table was mostly cleared, Roland clapped his hands.

“I’ve developed two new products I’m thinking of putting into general circulation, but I want your opinions before I commit to production. You’ll try them first.”

“Is it food?” multiple voices asked at once, overlapping.

“Count me in!”

“Me too, goo!”

The Witch Union’s approval arrived in a wave. Evelyn looked at Scroll.

“He does this fairly often,” Scroll said quietly, half-smiling. “The perfumed soap you used this evening, the perfume itself, chopsticks, ice cream — he tests them on us before releasing them. We are, technically, his best customers.”

“Cough.” Roland cleared his throat. “First: a wine. The flavor and body are substantially richer than any ale or common wine you’ll have had. It is also considerably stronger. For that reason, the underage witches—”

“That is pure prejudice!” Lightning’s voice from the end of the table. “I can outdrink grown sailors!”

“—are not participating,” Roland finished, unmoved.

Lightning’s expression cycled through protest, indignation, and resigned sulking in rapid succession. She was still arranging the sulk when Roland nodded to the attendants, and three glasses appeared in front of each adult witch.

Evelyn looked at hers. A colorless liquid that resembled water. A milky white. And a clouded amber with small particles floating in suspension, catching the candlelight.

“White wine mixed with apple juice,” Roland said, indicating each in turn. “White wine mixed with milk. And the white wine itself, uncut. You can add ice according to taste, though more ice dilutes the flavor.” He looked at Evelyn directly. “You’ve spent time in a capital pub. You understand wine. I’d like your honest assessment.”

Her heart made an undignified small leap. She picked up the amber cup and took a careful sip.

The first impression: strong. A burning that arrived at the back of her throat before she had finished swallowing, followed by a bitterness at the front of her tongue that the apple juice was just barely managing to hold at bay. Then the last note — the wine’s own body, rich and layered in a way that ale never was, a depth that kept arriving in small successive waves long after the cup was down.

The milk-white was gentler. The bitterness almost entirely smoothed away, replaced by a sweetness that was probably honey, the milk taming the heat of the alcohol without erasing the character underneath it.

The clear cup last. She braced herself and sipped.

Pure. Nothing but the wine itself — burning, then bitter-sweet, then that same deep aromatic body without anything else to frame it. It was like removing every explanation from a sentence and leaving only the fact.

She set the cup down and took a slow breath.

“The flavors are all… memorable,” she said. “Some people won’t accept the strength — the heat when it reaches the throat. But anyone who genuinely loves wine will not be able to resist something with this much body. I don’t think I’ve ever tasted wine this rich.”

“That’s useful to hear.” He smiled. “And what you tasted wasn’t the strongest concentration. There’s room to push it further. I’d like you to evaluate that version when it’s ready.”

She was still absorbing the implication — he chose me as a taster, specifically, with intention — when she answered, “Yes, Your Highness.”

The dishes were cleared. Roland’s attendants brought several boxes and set them on the long table.

“My second creation,” Roland said, and paused in the way of someone building toward something with mild theatrical awareness. “Also a gift.”

He waited a beat.

“It’s a type of clothing.”

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