Rewrite That Witch
CH286 · Rewrite
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Chapter 286: Change

Genuine older brother.

The words moved through her like cold water.

King Wimbledon III had five children. Gerald, Timothy, and Garcia—older by enough years to form their own world, an inner circle that pulled together at birth and never opened its door. By the time Roland arrived, Garcia was already six. By the time Tilly arrived, there was a gap that no amount of proximity could close. The age math suggested she and Roland should have been natural companions. Instead what they had was something else entirely.

He had wanted desperately to belong to the elder circle. He’d tried and failed and tried again, and what the repeated failure did to his character—the way it twisted it, hardened it, gave it a brittle, dangerous edge—Tilly had felt the effects of that long before she understood the cause. He had never dared to direct his anger at Gerald or Timothy or Garcia. So it had come down on her.

He had once tried to persuade her to steal their father’s crown with him, some scheme half fantasy and half genuine, and when she refused, the humiliation curdled into rage. He said things. On particularly bad days they exchanged blows. Their father found out eventually and Roland received a ferocious lesson. After that he restrained the worst of it—but the smaller threats, the insinuations, the low-grade pressure he maintained over her had never fully stopped.

Looking back at it now from Sleeping Island’s garden, it struck her as both ridiculous and terribly childish. The entire performance of it. A boy who had been shut out, performing his pain on the nearest available target.

When she turned ten, she found earthworms—cut in half—packed into her favorite shoes. That was the last tolerance she had. She summoned Roland and waited. When he opened his mouth to threaten her again, she threw one of the worms into it.

He never provoked her after that. She never spoke to him again after that, either.

As adults, the distance became permanent. She heard about him—everyone heard about him. The stories were consistent: violent, arrogant, mean, empty of skills or learning, the worst image of nobility made flesh. Everything his identity promised and nothing that redeemed it. Tilly had agreed with the assessment. She’d also understood, in a way she rarely articulated, the mechanism under the surface: the cruelty was armor. He had been afraid his whole life, and afraid men became dangerous.

Can that person—that specific person—stand up for witches?

Give asylum to women the Church calls the Devil’s messengers. Become the enemy of an institution that has outlasted kingdoms. Without hesitation. Genuinely.

“Tilly.” Ashes shook her arm twice. “Tilly—come back.”

She blinked. “I’m all right. Everything is just—” She shook her head. “Hard to believe.”

She told Ashes what Sylvie had written: the Lord of Border Town was very probably the real Roland Wimbledon. No puppet, no controlling witch, no replacement wearing his face.

Ashes was quiet for a moment. Then: “That idiot who tried to grope me—I beg your pardon, that animal.” She coughed twice. “After one year he’s changed beyond recognition. He looks almost the same. But meeting him felt like meeting someone else completely.”

“Explain.”

Ashes crooked her head. For a long time she simply looked at the garden wall, working toward the right words with visible effort. “The biggest difference was that he seemed… cleaner.”

“Clean.”

“Not his person—his whole—” Ashes made a gesture that encompassed something invisible. “His style of dress. The impression he made. He wore no jewelry. No gold, no gems, nothing ornamental. His clothes were plain—no lace, no embroidery, no golden thread. If his hair weren’t so unusual, he could pass for a commoner. And yet he didn’t seem like a commoner either.”

“A nobleman, then?”

“No.” Ashes’s lip curled slightly. “Noblemen are unclean. Not like stagnant water—more like the silt beneath stagnant water. Something has settled and gone bad. He wasn’t like that. He was—” She paused. “I can’t find the precise word. He made people feel good. That’s as close as I can get.”

Tilly looked at her.

“I’m trying to answer your question seriously,” Ashes said. “That’s all.”

Tilly exhaled.

What caused the transformation? Was it something that had happened to him? Something he’d found? Or had something always existed underneath the performance, waiting for the performance to stop being necessary?

She thought of the first letter Roland had sent her—the one before Sylvie’s report, before any of this:

Therefore, I have to destroy the entire Church, and turn their declaration that witches are the Devil’s messengers into dust. Rescuing people from their ignorance and stupidity is a long, slow process. For this, I need your help.

As for what led to this decision—what changed me—those are matters that can wait until we have time to speak properly. A letter cannot hold it. I won’t try.

Perhaps only by meeting him in person, Tilly thought.

She turned back to the letter. The second half was Sylvie’s account of Border Town itself—what she’d seen and heard during her stay.

The North Slope Mine: originally scouted for natural mineral resources, it had turned out to contain an enormous vein of God’s Stones of Retaliation. The stones that suppressed witches’ powers grew from the earth like any other ore. Which meant the Church’s New Holy City at Hermes was sitting on a vein of its own—how else to explain the Church’s inexhaustible supply.

Further down, Sylvie had described Roland’s weapons. Iron tubes that fired iron balls and metal arrowheads, devastating range, a sound like thunder. Maggie and Ashes had mentioned them before, but Sylvie’s description was precise, with a hand-drawn diagram attached.

Ashes leaned over Tilly’s shoulder to look. “That thing that wounded me had the same shape.” She straightened. “Since we’re allies now, write and ask him to send a supply to Sleeping Island. We need weapons against the Church. If he refuses—” A small, deliberate pause. “—then perhaps this alliance isn’t as solid as you thought.”

“Being allies doesn’t mean no one guards against anyone,” Tilly said, with a dry smile. “Those weapons are the foundation of everything he’s built. He won’t hand them over on a first request—nor should he, and asking too soon would only damage the trust we’ve spent real effort building.” She folded the page. “I left Molly and Wind Reader off the list of our witches I gave him. He doesn’t know about them. Withholding is a universal language; he’ll understand the same caution from the other side.”

She paused. “Besides, we’re going to Border Town this winter anyway. Some things are better said face to face.”

“Fair enough.” Ashes spread her hands. “You decide.”

Tilly smiled and read on.

She reached the last section of the letter.

Her reading stopped.

Roland Wimbledon—Prince Roland Wimbledon, ruler of the Western Territory, protector of the Witch Union—had invented an undergarment for supporting a woman’s chest, and had presented one to every adult woman in the Witch Alliance.

Tilly sat very still.

This is simply—

And then she remembered: a story that had circulated through King’s City years ago. That Roland had presented skin-tight corsets to a gathering of young noblewomen. That some of them had thrown the gifts back into his face. That it had been a source of private amusement among the court for months afterward.

This is absolutely something he would do.

She sat with the letter in her hands and felt two things at once: a dim recognition that this sounded, finally, like the brother she had actually known—and a strong, immediate sense that visiting Border Town in winter might prove more complicated than she had planned.

Should I go? the 5th Princess asked herself.

The question sat there with no good answer.

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