Rewrite That Witch
CH293 · Rewrite
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Chapter 293: The Night Before

Roland called Barov, Carter, and Iron Axe to the castle the morning before departure and told them he would be gone for two days.

The opposition was immediate and unanimous. Carter wanted to ride at the Prince’s side — his duty, not a request. Iron Axe proposed a hundred-man escort, minimum. Barov produced three documents requiring immediate signature, held them in the air with the manner of a man who had come prepared, and explained at some length that the Prince’s departure during a period of regulatory activity would create administrative complications that only the Prince’s presence could resolve.

Roland waited until each of them had finished, then told them he would be leaving regardless and that they were to follow standing orders during his absence.

“Your Highness.” Barov lowered the documents. “In the end — what is so important that you must go yourself?”

“Something that touches the life or death of the Western Territory. Possibly the Kingdom.” Roland paused. “And the judgment required is mine.”

“You cannot—” Barov stopped. Tried again. “You cannot tell us the particulars?”

“Not yet. You’ll understand eventually.” He looked at all three of them. “This is a secret operation. No one outside this room is to know I’ve left.”

He didn’t say what he knew, what Lightning had seen — a red mist sitting two hundred kilometers west of the Concealing Forest like a tide waiting to come in, and below it the ruins of whatever the Devils called civilization. He’d absorbed enough disaster films in his previous life to hold the fact without shaking. He wasn’t sure the same could be said for Barov or Carter or the subjects of the Western Territory, and he had no interest in discovering it. A panicked population would empty the town faster than any army.

The truth would keep. For now, it was his to carry alone.

The hot air balloon lifted from the castle’s front yard in the early afternoon, Soraya’s sky-grey coating swallowing the shape of it against the overcast. Roland watched Border Town diminish below them, the river bending away to the east, and then turned his eyes north and west toward the pale mass of mountains that had been sitting at the edge of every calculation for the past week.

“Your Highness.” Sylvie’s voice was careful. “If the Church truly was the one fighting the Devils four hundred years ago — does that make them good?”

“It makes them still bad,” Nightingale said, before Roland could open his mouth. “Has a good person ever hunted witches without cause? If we were the Devils’ allies, we would know. There is no connection between witches and the Devils — the demonic bite is a lie they invented.”

Sylvie looked at Roland all the same.

He thought for a moment. “First — we don’t know that it was the Church who fought them. If they’d made those sacrifices, concealing the fact would be irrational. That story would be the most powerful recruitment tool they possessed. So either the Church was not the army that fought in Taqila, or something about that history doesn’t match what they’d want people to believe.” He let that sit. “And good and evil depend on where you’re standing. But I think what you’re actually asking is whether I would ally with the Church against the Devils.”

Sylvie looked down. “Yes.”

“The Church and I are incompatible,” Roland said. “That was true before I had all of you. It’s more true now.”

“I want to add something,” Nightingale said, with the satisfaction of someone who has been waiting to deliver a particular point. “Even if the Church fought the Devils once — they lost. Or at least they didn’t win cleanly, or they wouldn’t have spent four hundred years hiding the evidence. His Highness has said before: if you don’t know who’s winning, why stake everything on the side that’s already been beaten?”

Sylvie nodded slowly. Something in her face loosened, not entirely but enough.

Dusk came while they were still in the air, and the snow-capped mountain appeared first as a density in the clouds, then as a form, then as something too large to be taken in all at once. Roland had seen mountains before — the ranges south of King’s City, the ridges that divided the northern territories — but this was different. It rose alone: no foothills, no rising approach, the earth simply continuing flat and then, without apology, not. The mountain wall occupied more than half the horizon and climbed into the cloud layer and kept climbing. If they’d tried to go around it by land, he estimated months. By sea, weeks at least.

The camping site Soraya had identified was a ridge above the shoreline — high enough to see in every direction, far enough from the Concealing Forest that no land beast could approach silently. The balloon descended in the last grey light.

They’d brought one large tent. Roland announced, with what he considered appropriate gravity, that the witches would have it and that he would sleep in the basket. Wendy and Soraya objected and offered to take the basket themselves. He refused them, though in truth the refusal cost him a moment’s internal negotiation — the basket floor was uneven iron strapping and the night was cold.

Still too thin-skinned. He acknowledged this privately and said nothing.

Maggie settled into a tree and closed her eyes, having converted to a bird for the night. Sylvie watched Roland with an intensity that had become a fixture of the expedition — as though she were running a continuous calculation that hadn’t yet resolved.

After the watch rotation was arranged and the tent flap had been still for twenty minutes, Roland sat on a flat rock at the edge of the ridge and looked at the sea.

The moon was up. Its reflection broke and re-formed on the surface below, patient, indifferent. Back when he’d attended school — the other life, the one he’d carried across whatever it was that separated here from there — he’d gone on school trips and always nursed a quiet expectation that something would happen. That the proximity of evening and unfamiliar places and people removed from their usual contexts would produce something unexpected. It rarely did. But the expectation had never quite died.

He heard footsteps on the rock behind him.

Anna sat down without asking, which was the exact right thing to do. Her face in the moonlight was very still — not the stillness of someone being careful, but the natural stillness of someone who has nothing to prove by moving. Her eyes, always very blue, looked darker out here.

“Can’t sleep?” he said, because he had to say something.

“I can sleep,” she said. “I wanted to be with you.”

He coughed. “Well. Thank you.”

“It should be me thanking you.” She wasn’t looking at him; she was looking at the sea. “What you said to Sylvie. She didn’t say thank you. But I could see it helped her.”

“Does that make you happy for her?”

“No.” A small pause. “I’m happy about my own choice.”

He looked at her. “What choice?”

She turned, and kissed him once on the cheek — a light, precise pressure, unhurried — then pulled back. In the moonlight her expression was the same: steady, certain, at rest.

“Good night, Your Highness,” she said, and went back to the tent.

Roland held very still for a moment. Something in him that had been tightly organized had come slightly apart, in a way that felt like relief rather than damage.

That counts, he thought. That definitely counts.

He was still looking at the tent when two invisible hands took hold of either side of his face, gentle and firm. The air in front of him was empty. Then, on the other cheek, a second kiss — softer, quicker.

“I thank you as well,” Nightingale said, from somewhere to his left. “For everything you’ve done for us.”

He did not hear her leave. Only the sound of the sea remained, and the moon breaking and re-forming on the water.

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