Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 302: The Bugle Horn of the Decisive Battle

Flames roared in the palace fireplace, but the cold came through the walls anyway.

Garcia Wimbledon sat the throne of the Kingdom of Eternal Winter with a fox-fur coat draped over her shoulders, listening to the complaints of nobility. She hated this palace. The pillars, walls, and floors were all pale stone, each slab polished to a mirror sheen — cold even to look at, cold under her, cold pressed up through the two additional cushions she’d had placed on the seat. An iceberg dressed as a throne room.

The moment this stabilizes, she thought, I’m ripping out every floor in this place and laying dark granite.

“Your Majesty, I implore you for justice,” a noble said from the floor of the hall, his expression the particular mix of injury and calculation that Garcia had learned to read as a man who expected to get less than he asked for and was preparing his fallback.

He’d used many words to say something simple. When the Church had occupied the Kingdom of Eternal Winter, Archbishop Heather had presided over a public trial of nobles who had committed atrocities under its protection. Most had gone to the gallows. This man was among the survivors — his assets seized, his wealth distributed to his victims. Now he wanted it back.

“I understand your grievance,” Garcia said carefully. “Private property should not be plundered. But the specific figures are impossible to verify without records. If you can provide five years of financial statements, I can calculate an average and compensate accordingly.”

“The mob looted my house. The records are—”

“Then I can only compensate you by the standard for your title.” She let her gaze move around the room. “Look at the people around you. They are all nobles who suffered losses. If I give you more, some of them receive less.”

That last sentence had the right effect. The surrounding nobles turned their eyes on him with a collective frost that worked better than any edict.

“Knight Halon,” someone said. “You have it better than your associates. They can only appeal to God.”

The knight bowed very low. “In that case — the standard for my title. Thank you for your kindness, Your Majesty.”

“Excellent.” Garcia allowed a thin smile. “Next.”

A white-haired man stepped forward. He was old but upright, and he touched the silver heron crest on his chest with the reverence of a man who had worn it through worse days than this.

“Marquis Bodø. The Church’s men never reached your territory, as I recall.”

“They couldn’t,” he agreed. “Inundated Snow Ridge is difficult to approach from below. My knights turned back every attempt.” He paused. “But my son was not so fortunate. He was on duty at the palace on the day of the uprising — killed by believers while protecting the Queen, his body hung from the city gate until you arrived and freed him from that humiliation.”

“A tragic story.” Garcia’s expression softened by precisely the required degree. “What do you ask?”

“The man who killed my son is called the Butcher. He now leads the remnants of the rebel faction, somewhere in the Impassable Mountain Range to the north.” The Marquis’s voice was perfectly level. The calm of old grief, settled into decision. “I want revenge for my child.”

“My garrison is already stretched,” Garcia said. “Patrols, city walls, granaries — I can’t afford to dispatch men into mountain wilderness to hunt a hundred exiles. And when winter comes, the passes will close. Without supplies they’ll freeze before spring.” She shook her head. “There’s no need for impatience.”

“I don’t want your soldiers. The mountain caves have narrow entrances; knights could never force through stone-blocked passages anyway.” The Marquis reached the point he had been measuring toward all along. “I want the alchemical creation that destroyed the city gates. I’ll do the rest myself.”

Snow powder. Garcia’s eyes narrowed. That material was a trump card — the kind of advantage you held until the moment it became the only thing standing between you and annihilation. Letting it spread into private hands was the sort of mistake you made once.

She was about to refuse when he spoke again.

“If you grant this, I will return to court and serve you. The silver heron family will give its full support to your rule of the Kingdom of Eternal Winter.”

The words stopped in her throat.

She swallowed carefully. The Marquis of Bodø had prestige — real prestige, the kind accumulated through generations and demonstrated by surviving when others hadn’t. If he served as Prime Minister, the remaining nobles would fall into line. It would compensate for the administrative gaps left by the executions. It would change the entire posture of her court.

“The powder itself I won’t put directly in your hands,” she said finally. “But when you need it, I’ll send a specialist who will assist you in opening the passage.” She watched him calculate this — whether the condition was acceptable. “That is my offer.”

He bowed. “It is more than sufficient, Your Majesty.”

After the court session ended, Garcia retreated to the back room. Ryan was already there, warmed fruit wine in hand — he’d been at this long enough to know her preference.

“They all fell in line,” he said, satisfied. “Even without depending on the Wolf King, you’re slowly absorbing the entire kingdom.”

“Only because there’s no Church to complicate it.” She accepted the wine and sat.

This was true in a way that deserved to be understood precisely. The Church, in stripping the nobles of their inherited claims, had pushed them directly into Garcia’s hands. With their support — and with the Church’s former influence base crumbling under the systematic campaign her Black Sail Fleet had been running against Church strongholds across the kingdom’s cities — she had established her foothold in the capital with relative ease.

But controlling the kingdom was a different problem. The Church had sunk deepest into these northern people. Wherever her fleet moved, believers surfaced to resist. The coalition with the Wolfsheart Kingdom was not a preference — it was a strategic necessity, both to hold the Church in check and to use Wolfsheart’s people as a counterweight against Church-loyal sentiment in her own population.

The stubborn ones, she thought. They can simply be killed.

“A messenger from Wolfsheart arrived while you were in session,” Ryan said. He produced an envelope from his coat. “I didn’t want to interrupt you.”

Garcia read the letter once, then again slowly.

“Bad news?”

“The Church has sent troops by land,” she said. “Straight for Wolfsheart City. They’ve already broken through several defensive lines.”

Ryan’s eyes widened. “The Months of Demons will begin soon. Don’t tell me they’ve abandoned the New Holy City entirely?”

Garcia set the letter down and sat back.

She had known the Church would not let them breathe — but she hadn’t expected them to move so quickly. One more season of preparation and she would have been ready. Instead they had driven forward before she could consolidate, forcing a choice: watch the Wolfsheart Kingdom fall and then face the Church alone, or commit forces now.

But there was something else in the timing. Something that looked, if she let herself see it, like an opening.

If the Church ground its strength against the walls of Wolfsheart City — if she could force them to spend their God’s Punishment Army, their men, their logistics, against those ramparts — then whatever came through the Hermes pass in the Months of Demons would find them already bled. She had snow powder. Black river water. Demonic fire compound. And the walls of Wolfsheart City itself, which were not trivial.

Sometimes an enemy’s aggression was not a threat. Sometimes it was an invitation.

“Send word to the fleet,” Garcia said. “The Black Sail prepares for battle.” She rose. “We’ll winter inside Wolfsheart City.”

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