Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 3: The Witch Named Anna (Part II)

Roland swallowed the last of his fried egg, wiped his mouth, and set the napkin down. “So your concern is that the Association will hear she survived and come to retrieve her.”

“Precisely.” Barov stood, his composure reassembling itself now that they were back on terrain he controlled. “If she had already been executed—bad enough, but finished. But she is still alive. These women steal infants on the chance they might awaken someday. A confirmed witch, alive, in a prince’s dungeon?” He pressed his fingers to the table. “They would burn down the border town to get her back.”

Roland frowned at his empty plate. Something in the picture was wrong, and had been wrong since yesterday—a structural fault he’d been circling without being able to name it.

Why is she still here?

That was the question. Not for Barov’s reasons—Roland had understood those the moment he saw her. The question was simpler: the woman should have escaped. If witches were as dangerous as Barov described—if an adult witch with her power fully expressed could defy an army—then why had this one been standing in a noose?

“How did they catch her?” Roland asked. “Precisely.”

“During the mine collapse.” Barov glanced at him as if uncertain whether this was relevant. “She exposed herself—used her ability—to escape. The crowd saw it and took her.”

“And before that?”

“Before that, no one knew.”

“So she’d been living in the town.”

“Yes. Her father was a miner. She herself—” Barov checked his expression, then continued— “attended Master van Bate’s school, I’m told.”

Roland sat with that. A girl who lived in a mining town, attended school, helped her neighbors, and concealed what she was for years—not because she was strategically sophisticated, but because she was afraid. And then the mine collapsed, and she had a choice between hiding her ability and watching someone die, and she chose wrong. Or chose right. The question of which depended on who was doing the choosing.

“What exactly happened in the mine?” he asked. “Step by step.”

“I…” Barov paused, a faint color rising in his neck. “The investigation focused on resuming operations rather than—”

“You didn’t investigate.”

“The iron mine accounts for half the territory’s production, Your Highness. The priority was—”

“What do you know?”

The assistant minister composed himself. “The guards’ reports said someone at the scene was killed by witchcraft. The body was found…” He paused, measuring the words. “The head, and much of the upper body. As if melted. Like a burned-down candle.”

Roland was quiet for a moment. He thought of acids—sulfuric, hydrochloric—the kind of chemistry that could destroy human tissue in that fashion. But acids required preparation, containers, the right conditions; you couldn’t produce them from nothing in a collapsed mine tunnel. He thought of extreme heat. Highly localized. Applied directly.

“I want to see her,” he said.

Barov went very still. “Your Highness.”

“That’s an order, not a request.”

“Sir, she may still have her abilities—the God’s Locket of Retribution may not fully suppress—”

“Then we’ll find out. Summon Carter.”

The Knight Commander made his objections at every landing of the dungeon stairs. Roland listened to the first two and then stopped listening, though Carter’s voice continued—a low, emphatic counterpoint to the sound of their footsteps on stone and the trickle of water that worsened with each level they descended.

The dungeon was four levels deep, cut into the earth like an inverted cone, narrowing as it went down. It had been built for a border territory—small, functional, not designed with anyone’s comfort in mind. The drainage was nonexistent. By the third level the walls glistened and the floor was a slow movement of cold muddy water toward the stairs. The smell accumulated with the depth: mildew, old straw, and something chemical beneath it that Roland couldn’t name.

“—and even supposing the restraint holds,” Carter was saying, “there is the question of the Association. If they have agents in the town already—”

“You just told me you were afraid of a witch raid,” Roland said without turning, “and now you’re afraid to look at a little girl. My Knight Commander, what a formidable reputation you’re building.”

The knight’s jaw tightened. He was a good soldier and a poor debater—he knew when he’d lost ground—and the group reached the bottom level in relative silence.

Two cells. The dungeon warden lit the torches on the walls and the darkness peeled back in stages, and Roland saw her.

She was hunched in the far corner, arms wrapped around herself. It was late autumn; the air at the bottom of the dungeon was cold enough that the torchlight caught the fog of their breath. She wore rough linen—coarse, insufficient, leaving her arms and feet bare and blue with cold. Roland, in his fur coat, felt the temperature only as an abstraction. She was living in it.

The sudden torchlight made her flinch—she turned her face away, eyes squeezed shut. But within a few breaths she had turned back.

They were pale blue. The color of a lake just before the light changes—calm, with something moving below the surface. There was no fear in her expression. No anger either, no particular resentment of the five people who had just descended into her cell with torches. What Roland saw instead was a quality he had no exact word for: the kind of stillness that comes not from peace but from having already made a decision.

She had made her decision. She was waiting for it to be carried out. And she was not going to perform suffering for their benefit while she waited.

She tried to stand, pressing her back against the wall for support. Her legs shook with the effort—she hadn’t eaten properly in days, he guessed—but she found her footing, and she came out of the corner into the torchlight. Behind Roland, someone sucked in a sharp breath. Carter shifted into the space in front of him.

She didn’t acknowledge any of it.

“What is your name?” Roland asked.

“Anna,” she said.

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