Rewrite That Witch
CH300 · Rewrite
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Chapter 300: Witch House

“Ahool! Ahool!”

Maggie fiddled with her new wings in the castle backyard, tail swinging, turning in a slow circle under the witches’ collective gaze as if she understood the value of a good entrance.

Roland had heard the descriptions. He hadn’t quite believed them.

Ten meters from crown to tail-tip. Wingspan somewhere around fifteen, the fleshy membranes stretched between the bones like a bat’s wing held up to strong light—translucent enough to show the webbing of vessels inside, fine as thread, branching and re-branching in a pattern that would have taken a painter several careful hours. Four limbs, each as thick as a grown man’s arm, angled to support the body when grounded. And the head: three eyes arranged in a triangle on either side, the rest of it an enormous hinged jaw that opened into something too wide to comfortably look at, lined with teeth that curved inward and a tongue that moved with its own evident opinion about the situation.

When Maggie opened her mouth to speak, three of the witches took a half-step back. Then she said “Ahool!” and they collected themselves.

“That’s the Devils’ flying mount,” Leaves said. “The one from the wilderness stories.” She looked at it for a long moment. “If we’d met something like this before we reached Border Town, we would never have gotten away.”

“Without her, I wouldn’t have gotten away two days ago.” Nightingale stroked the smooth arc of the creature’s neck with the familiarity of long affection. “I’m going to bring you a pocket of grilled fish every day.”

“Ahool—!”

“With honey drizzled on.”

The tail swept a wider arc.

Those are my fish, Roland thought, with a silent resignation appropriate to a man who had already accepted that his kitchen operated under a parallel set of agreements. Nightingale was distributing his resources with the confidence of someone who had never found this to be a problem.

“Alright,” he said. “Let’s test the new form properly.”

By late morning he had a complete picture.

The enlarged form outscaled the Devils’ mounts—not by much, but the margin was there. Maggie could carry two adult riders at altitude. Loaded, she held about eighty kilometers per hour for sustained flight; faster was possible but cost more of everything. Compared with Lightning, she was considerably slower, but that comparison missed the point: Lightning exhausted herself over distance; Maggie, once fully transformed, burned almost nothing on the magic side regardless of altitude or load. The constraint was physical—the effort of the body rather than the capacity of the core.

Her total magic capacity had grown as well. From the lowest ranks of the Witch Alliance, she had climbed to somewhere in the middle—seven or eight transformations per day now, where before she could manage three.

The underlying principle, Roland was increasingly certain, was the same for all of them.

A witch’s evolution followed understanding, not time. Maggie had not evolved by accumulating years; she had evolved because something in that desperate flight—the need to take on a form she had only glimpsed, to trust that the body would follow the image—had forced a recognition of her own ability that ordinary practice didn’t produce. The shape of her core had changed because her understanding of what she was had changed. It didn’t matter whether that understanding arrived slowly or in a single irreversible instant.

Which meant natural evolution was possible. Long life made it more likely, but it was the understanding that caused the change, not the years. Some witches, given enough time and circumstance, would evolve without anyone’s help. A few would change so profoundly that the ability they’d been born with would be almost unrecognizable in what it became.

Something rotten could, given sufficient time and the right catalyst, become something extraordinary.

He considered what the Church was doing, burning witches before they could reach that possibility, and the question answered itself.

After lunch, the castle received a milestone.

Four months of construction. Three floors. Fewer than fifty apartments. Standing beside it, Roland looked at the building with the mix of pride and perspective that he’d come to expect from himself: pride because in this world it was genuinely extraordinary, perspective because he knew what the future would eventually produce and this was not quite it.

But the material was real.

Karl had supervised the first pour of the reinforced-concrete columns himself, and had come to Roland afterward with an expression of someone who had just changed their mind about something they’d held for decades. “Cement can be used like this? Shaped into any form, mixed with aggregate, set into anything you need it to be—Your Highness, the stonemason guild is not going to survive this century.”

The floors were precast concrete slabs—the kind with voids cut through them to reduce weight, a technique that had felt dated even in his childhood, replaced by cast-in-place methods before he was ten. Antiquated enough that he’d recognized them with a specific nostalgia: a building material that had been obsolete in his world for decades, now representing the highest structural technology available on this continent. The backward technique, reborn.

The Witch House occupied the left wing of the castle, forming an L with the main building. The expanded garden between them had grown to three or four times its former size—enough for Leaves to run her various improvement experiments without crowding into the courtyard. Two buildings and still open ground remaining.

Evelyn checked into her room and tried to feel something besides inadequacy.

More than a month in Border Town. And what had she done with it? Served wine. Received a gold royal at the end of the month as if the coin itself were an accusation. Scored five points on the examination—five, when Honey, who spent her days talking to birds, had scored seven. Scroll had never announced the rankings publicly, but the truth had a way of circulating through quiet conversation, and Evelyn had circulated it to herself until the number had the weight of a verdict.

Lotus was rebuilding the outer wall. Honey was training messenger birds. Sylvie had gone with His Highness to look at the Devils and come back changed by it in ways Evelyn couldn’t read. And she had served wine and been paid for it and continued not to know why she was here.

“There’s a kitchen,” Candle said, appearing in the doorway, her voice bright with the enthusiasm of someone who liked kitchens. “A dedicated one, just off the living room. And a small white room they’ve painted—come look.”

“Mm.” Evelyn didn’t look up.

“Are you sick?” Candle crouched in front of her and pressed the back of a hand to her forehead. “You don’t feel hot.” A pause. Then, with the gentleness of someone delivering an obvious truth: “Are you missing the group room? Sleeping six to a bed?”

Evelyn was quiet for a moment. “We’ve been here a month.”

“More or less.”

“Lotus has the wall. Honey has the birds. Sylvie went to investigate the Devils.” She heard the thing she was actually saying—the list of other people’s purposes, lined up against the absence of her own. “I have nothing. I wasn’t given a training plan. My exam scores are the worst among all of us. I don’t understand why His Highness asked Lady Tilly for me to come.”

Candle sat with this for a moment. “Why don’t you ask him?”

”…What?”

“His Highness Roland is Lady Tilly’s brother. You’ve seen how he treats us—not as tools, not as an investment. Even Sylvie, who used to say ‘keep your distance from the Prince, be careful of what he wants’—even she came back from that reconnaissance saying things she wouldn’t have said a week ago.” Candle shrugged. “Ask him with someone else in the room if you’d feel safer. He’s not going to take your head off for the question.”

Evelyn turned the idea over. It had the uncomfortable quality of advice that was obviously correct.

She had been torturing herself with a question she hadn’t asked. His Highness Roland was apparently the sort of man who answered questions honestly, who threw himself in front of spears for witches, who paid wages whether or not they were deserved.

She decided she would go and ask.

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