Rewrite That Witch
CH306 · Rewrite
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Chapter 306: Inside the Garden

Scroll stood behind His Highness as he wrote, watching the light.

Autumn sun came through the office window at a low angle and fell across her back in a way that was almost embarrassing — warm and consistent, the kind of warmth that made it difficult to maintain any particular mental posture. She felt herself soften, and let it happen.

“Electronic gains and losses — what else — online resources, very urgent—” Roland muttered something half-intelligible and pressed his forehead into his palms, staring at the manuscript. She had stopped worrying about this particular behavior a long time ago. It was simply what happened when His Highness tried to recall knowledge that lived in some deeper stratum of memory — deeper than ordinary recollection, closer to the body than the mind. Today’s symptoms were more severe than usual. Whatever chapter of chemistry he was reconstructing, it was resisting him.

If only I could help. Scroll had thought this before and set it aside, but it surfaced again now, accompanied by the particular awareness that there was only one witch in the Witch Union who might offer that kind of assistance. Anna had memorized every word of the textbooks His Highness had written out — memorized them completely, held them without error, the way Scroll held her own past. But storing the knowledge and understanding it were different things, and the mathematics and natural philosophy were deep enough that even Scroll, reading through them, came away with her head full of fog. It was no wonder His Highness struggled.

“Let’s stop here for today,” Scroll said, because she couldn’t watch him suffer over it.

Roland surrendered his pen and leaned back. “I envy your memory. If I could remember the way you do, I’d never have needed to study for exams. I would have gotten into a famous school and—” He paused. “—made it to the top.”

She automatically discarded the second half as noise. “Did the palace actually require you to take examinations?”

“Yes. How else would they know which prince had more to offer?”

“In truth,” Scroll said, “perfect memory isn’t always a gift.” She found herself saying it without planning to — not as comfort but as fact. “Bad experiences. Times you were humiliated, or hurt. Moments when your life was still whole, and now it isn’t. All of it stays.”

When she had lived in the Seawind Region as a girl, poor and identifiable as such, she had been beaten many times. She could still name the location of every blow, reconstruct the faces of the people who’d delivered them, feel the specific quality of each kick against her ribs. The old captain with the broken leg had given her something like shelter eventually — but even before that, even in the slums where people picked each other’s pockets and sometimes did worse, she had carried every injury without being able to set it down. The nightmares had taken years to thin. When her branch ability, Magic Book, had awakened on the day of her adulthood, she had finally understood what she was: a witch, which meant the memory was structural, not circumstantial. Not something that would fade with time.

She had hated herself for it, once.

Roland’s expression shifted — not quite apology, but something adjacent, quieter. “You might be right.”

That was all. And it was, she found, enough.

There were very few people who attended to a witch’s thoughts as though the thoughts mattered. Fewer still who were members of the royal family. Scroll felt warmth move through her — not the sun’s warmth, something that originated differently, somewhere behind the sternum.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Those times have already passed, Your Highness.”

She looked at him and tried, as she sometimes did, to compare him to other nobles she had known. The comparison collapsed immediately. He had knowledge, an enormous amount of it, but spent his days trying to give it away rather than use it as leverage. His rank was high enough to dismiss anyone in this room without consequence, but she had never seen him do it. He loved to be acknowledged — she’d watched him bask in crowd approval at public demonstrations — but he also noticed when someone around him was in pain, and changed course. Border Town had been a failing outpost one year ago. It was now the most functional settlement in the Western Territory, perhaps in all of Graycastle.

She had not thought, when she first arrived, that she would come to feel what she felt now. She had not approved of his stated intention to take a witch as his wife — had found it naive, even manipulative. But looking at the shape of what he actually built, she found that whoever stood beside this man in the end, the kingdom would be better for having him in it. He would not govern for the benefit of corrupt nobility. He would govern for the people in his city, and for witches, and for the people who were not yet in his city but might be someday.

A force, she thought, and couldn’t quite finish the thought. Stronger than any I’ve seen.

“All right,” Roland said, rubbing his eyes. “This is the last page.” He took a fresh sheet and wrote quickly — a title, a few sentences of notation. “Give it to Kyle as it is. Together with the physics materials, it should keep him occupied for a while.” He slid the sheet toward her. “It’s supposedly a copy of an ancient text, after all. Missing sections are expected.”

Scroll read the title: Intermediate Chemistry (Remnant).

She memorized the full manuscript in the time it took her to walk to the door.

Outside, the back garden had been transformed.

The castle wall expansion had given the courtyard the square footage of Border Town’s town square, and in the week since completion, Leaves had filled it entirely. Olive trees formed parallel rows along the main path, creating a colonnade of grey-green shade. Beyond them: sugar cane, dense and whispering; fruit trees with round late-season fruit; low beds of improved crops that Leaves was still testing for absorption rates. Bird’s nests clustered in the upper branches — Honey’s messengers roosted there, small and still, visible only if you looked for them.

Scroll followed the olive-tree path to its end and found Leaves sitting at the edge of a pond.

She had let her hair down — the green braids she usually wore wound at her neck were loose today, trailing over one shoulder. Her feet were bare in the water, pale skin catching the light from below the surface. She held wheat grains in her cupped hands, throwing them a few at a time toward the fish, and laughed — quietly, involuntarily — each time one of them brushed against her toes.

“Are your feet fully healed?” Scroll sat beside her.

Leaves looked up. “Oh — Teacher Scroll.” A beat of mild surprise, then a happy nod. “Yes. Miss Nana restored them completely. I won’t have to manage the pain in winter anymore.”

“All these plants — they’re your improved variants?”

“The vine shed, the fruit trees, the crop beds — yes.” She pointed to each in turn, the gesture proprietary and warm. “I asked His Highness to bring me compost for testing. And there are dozens of bird’s nests in the fruit trees, see? Honey’s messengers sleep there during the day.”

Scroll smoothed the girl’s hair with one hand. “I thought you’d be the first of us to evolve. When we were in the Impassable Mountain Range, your ability was already as strong as Cara’s.”

Leaves shook her head slowly. “His Highness says that evolving comes from understanding, not just from power. I used to feel that plant cells were unfathomable — too deep to comprehend fully. But now I think they’re all built on the same principle. A bundle of grass pressed together becomes a flexible vine. If they were truly different kinds of thing, that could never happen.”

“Your ability already gives His Highness so much,” Scroll offered.

“It isn’t far,” Leaves said, and there was something in her voice — not certainty exactly, but proximity, the sense of a door whose outline she could now trace. Her eyes held light in a way that had nothing to do with the afternoon sun. “Animals live. Plants live. Even the parts of them together — live. Birds need trees for nests. Their droppings feed the trees. A forest provides everything a living thing needs, and the living things extend the forest through their moisture and breath.” She paused, looking at the pond, the fish catching the light, the nests in the branches above. “I look at this garden — what I’ve made of it in one week — and I think I already know the next step.”

Scroll did not reply immediately. She watched Leaves watch the fish.

The afternoon light was thinning. Somewhere in the fruit trees, one of Honey’s birds shifted in its sleep.

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