Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 308: Fear

In recent days Theo had kept daily contact with Prince Roland, and none of it had prepared him for this.

He had seen incredible things in the year he’d worked for His Royal Highness — things that rearranged the architecture of what he thought possible. But this new order felt different. Not incredible. Inconceivable was the word, and it sat in him with a particular kind of weight, the weight of a man holding instructions he suspects may embarrass him if read aloud.

Announce the attack on the imperial palace as Roland Wimbledon’s punishment on Timothy Wimbledon.

When the militia had returned from the Western Territory, he’d heard about the “warning” they’d carried back to King’s City. He had assumed it was a bluff. A feint — threaten east, strike west, draw Timothy’s defenses one direction while troops moved another. Garcia had done the same before winter set in, looting an enemy city and disappearing before anyone could organize a response. Theo had filed the warning under performance and gone on with his work.

The subsequent orders from Border Town had corrected that assumption with something close to embarrassment. His Highness truly meant to attack King’s City. He had asked Theo to prepare propaganda. And the most recent dispatch had made the timing explicit: the attack would come on the first day of autumn, at precisely the hour announced in the warning.

The attack on the imperial palace could be considered as punishment.

Theo had read that sentence several times. His Highness would forcefully enter the inner city. Which meant — but how? King’s City’s walls were wide enough for two houses set side by side. Even Roland’s artillery would find them difficult to breach. Behind those walls stood the kingdom’s finest knights, royal guards, an enlisted militia. You did not walk into King’s City without an army of ten thousand at your back.

Witches, then? But the imperial palace was thick with God’s Stones of Retaliation — embedded in every corridor, mounted in the grand hall, distributed across the outer courts like furniture. The moment a witch crossed a threshold, her power left her. It was the reason Timothy could hunt witches without fear of retaliation. Assassination of the royal family was not merely difficult. It was a structural impossibility.

And even if it were possible, it was dangerous in the wrong direction. A king killed by a witch’s hand would be the Church’s greatest gift. They would spend six months converting the event into evidence that the fourth prince was a puppet of Devil’s minions, and every noble in the kingdom would fall in line behind whoever opposed him. Theo believed His Royal Highness was intelligent enough to see that trap. He simply couldn’t see what other trap His Highness was walking into instead.

So, how.

“Sir.” Hill Fawkes pushed open the half-closed door and stepped into the sitting room. The former acrobat wore the careful neutrality of someone who’d learned to keep his expressions in check — usually. At present the neutrality was imperfect. “You sent for me?”

“We’re waiting for a new order,” Theo said, and spread his hands. “Sit down.”

”…Yes.”

Theo smiled despite himself at Hill’s expression. Ordinarily he gave his people precise instructions at precise times; ordinarily they did not need to know the shape of the larger plan. But this situation was different. He couldn’t brief Hill on the mission in advance — if the attack on the imperial palace failed, if it turned out to be the bluff Theo had originally assumed, then the revelation of these instructions would only destroy whatever credibility he’d built with these people. A man who promises heaven and delivers nothing loses the next promise too.

But if His Highness succeeded — if he actually struck the palace from a thousand miles away, just as the warning had stated he would — the effect on Hill and everyone like him would be unlike any propaganda Theo could manufacture. Watching a threat become fact, in real time, with your own eyes: there was no substitution for it. No pamphlet, no rumor, no cleverly worded speech. Confidence, once given that foundation, spread differently.

So Theo had chosen the middle path. He’d called Hill to the house. He’d said nothing. He was waiting.

“Have some tea,” he said. “And don’t wear your doubt quite so openly — an intelligence officer’s first obligation—”

“Is to wear another face. Yes, Sir.” Hill accepted the cup. “There are more patrols on the streets. The city wall garrison’s been doubled. That has something to do with His Highness’s orders, doesn’t it?”

“Indeed. Timothy—”

The thunder interrupted him.

Not thunder. It rolled from directly above the mansion — one enormous crack, the windows shivering in their frames, the floor beneath his feet shuddering with a distinct and momentary tremor. Hill’s teacup left his hands. It struck the floor and broke into three pieces, and for a moment neither of them moved.

“Sir,” Hill said. His voice had gone strange. “What was that?”

“Come with me.”

They ran into the garden.

The pillar of black smoke rose from the direction of the palace, still climbing, dense and dark against the autumn sky. Theo had heard artillery fire before, had felt the particular percussion of snow powder igniting at close range, and he recognized the family resemblance here — but only the family resemblance. This had been larger. Deeper. The ground tremor that had accompanied it was more like the explosive packages they’d used against the armored demonic beasts than anything a cannon’s barrel could produce.

Hill stood beside him with his mouth open, staring. The smoke column continued to rise.

“Could it be,” Hill said slowly, “that His Highness’s warning was real?”

“That’s right.” Theo waited for his heart to stop its racket before he turned to face the younger man, arranging his expression into something that passed for gravity. “This is the new order His Highness wants me to give you.”

Timothy was still looking at where the chandelier had been.

It lay now in a heap of plaster and gilt across the body of a silver-armored knight who had been delivering his morning report — refugee enlistment numbers, some figure he would never give now. The man’s neck was wrong. The chandelier had settled across it at an angle that made the wrongness obvious even from where Timothy stood, three paces back from where he’d been standing thirty seconds ago.

If I had taken one more step.

The dust was still falling. The Imperial Prime Minister was somewhere in it, coughing. Other voices competed in the wreckage of the hall — the Finance Minister, someone from the treasury, a guard — all of them suggesting competing courses of action with the specific urgency of men who wanted to believe this had been an earthquake.

“Is it safe here, Your Majesty—”

“We should move to the courtyard—”

“An open space, quickly—”

“Everyone shut up.”

The command came out hoarser than he’d intended. His throat had tightened in the moment of impact and hadn’t loosened. He sounded like a man speaking through clenched teeth, which was close to what he was doing.

“Sir Weimar. The basement. Now.”

“Your Majesty.” Weimar was calm by relative measure — not unaffected, but controlled, doing the work of lifting and guiding without the theatrical urgency of the others. They moved together down the stairs, and along the corridor, and Timothy watched the evidence accumulate on either side: shattered glass along the baseboards, the dome of the outer hall gone, the great roof-light now open to a sky still swimming with dust and smoke. Here and there a pillar stood where the surrounding architecture no longer did.

Earthquake. No. He knew the smell of snow powder. He knew what it meant when the ground shook from below rather than from a wave passing through it. This had not been the earth moving; this had been something buried, something placed, something he would now have to find and account for — and not just account for, but explain, because what had just happened meant that Roland had somehow put snow powder inside the palace, and if Roland had put snow powder inside the palace this time, then the next time—

“Your position is not as safe as you think.”

He’d read those words in the warning dispatch. He’d filed them alongside the threat to bomb the palace, in the same drawer marked performance, the same drawer Theo had opened and would now have to close.

“Sir Weimar.” He stopped in the basement corridor, the air cool and solid around him. His back was soaked. “Take knights with you. Search everything — the sewers, the gardens, the storerooms, anywhere snow powder could be hidden. Every attendant, every servant, every noble who has entered or left the palace in the last month — search them, stop them, arrest anyone suspicious.”

“At once, Your Majesty.”

Weimar left. Timothy sat down on the stone bench in the corner of the basement antechamber, in the cold and the quiet, and felt the fear come up through the soles of his feet.

Not anger. He’d passed through anger in the hall, in the moment he’d understood what had happened. What remained was not the hot thing but the cold one — the fear that moved slowly, methodically, like groundwater through stone, taking hold of each chamber of the heart in turn.

Roland had actually done it.

Whatever “it” was. However he’d managed to place that charge inside the most heavily guarded building in the kingdom, he had managed it. And if he could do it once, from a thousand miles away, without a single witch stepping foot inside a God’s Stone-warded hall —

The words of the warning were very clear, now. They had been performance. They had also been true. Both things at once, and Timothy had only prepared for one of them.

He sat in the basement and waited for the dust to settle, and felt his throne crumbling, one stone at a time.

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