Rewrite That Witch
CH318 · Rewrite
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Chapter 318: Unknown

Roland’s wrist had begun to ache.

He set down the brush, flexed his fingers, and looked at what he’d produced: two pages dense with small characters, and a third still forming. Before he’d arrived in this world he had drawn everything on a screen—blueprints assembled by mouse and constraint, clean and effortless. He had not expected to miss that particular convenience as much as he did.

Three documents lay beside him, representing roughly three months of thought compressed into a morning.

The first detailed the scale-up of sulfuric acid production: new reaction vessels in iron with anti-corrosion coating rather than lead, each three times the volume of the trial units, to be built by Anna and Soraya over the coming weeks. The site would be placed at the southern end of the industrial park—far from the Redwater River, far from housing. Stone walls to contain any accident. A chimney tall enough to disperse the waste gas above the residential zone. The document was addressed to Kyle Sichi, with instructions to select a dedicated cohort of apprentices for acid work, and a note for Barov to recruit a hundred auxiliary workers to staff the facility properly.

The second document addressed public health—a subject Roland had no professional standing in whatsoever, which was perhaps why his common sense had a better chance of gaining traction. The central insight was tedious and non-negotiable: behavior changed through repetition. Boil your water. Cook your meat fully. The distinction between parasites and microbes. How disease traveled between bodies. None of these ideas were complex; all of them, if actually absorbed by a population of twenty thousand, would save lives at a scale that no amount of surgical skill could match. Slogans posted at field-edges. The same phrases repeated until they stopped sounding like instructions and started sounding like facts. It was an approach that felt undignified, and he suspected it would work.

That same document also addressed birth rates. A separate department for family planning seemed excessive given the City Hall’s staffing constraints, so Roland folded it in: subsidies for newborns, with girls drawing slightly more than boys to counter the customary pattern, installment payments to ensure the money reached the child rather than vanishing at birth, and penalties—fine or imprisonment—for abandonment. Nana’s ability had removed the worst of the risk from childbirth; survival rates were approaching something that would have seemed miraculous to anyone born in this century. The remaining obstacle was incentive, and incentive could be structured.

The last point in the second document named Viscount Tigu Pine as the administrator of what Roland was already thinking of as the hospital. The man had a daughter who was a witch; he understood, more viscerally than most nobles, what it meant to have something precious to protect. He would manage the clinic’s fees, its intake, its records—and keep the burden off Nana’s shoulders long enough for her to remain a child.

The third document was still being written when Roland stood and crossed to the window.

The sky was the color of wet slate. No sun since morning, no gap in the clouds—just that heavy grey pressure that promised rain or worse. The olive trees in the castle yard tossed. He stood there with the ache in his wrist fading slowly, watching the distant treeline, and then—

A black dot on the horizon. Moving fast, losing altitude, angling directly toward the window.

“That’s Lightning,” Nightingale said from somewhere behind him.

“She probably found a mushroom patch.” He smiled a little. Left to their own schedules, Lightning and Maggie spent their afternoons discovering new ways to forage; he’d long since stopped trying to picture what a mushroom-hunting expedition with a shapeshifting pigeon looked like. Bear Grylls, he thought. It always ends with Bear Grylls.

“Your Highness. Your smile is—strange.”

“I was going to tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a little girl who liked to gather mushrooms—”

The dot was not slowing down. It was not angling for the courtyard or the entrance. It was aimed at his window, dropping fast, and before he’d finished forming the thought he’d already stepped forward and pulled the latch. Lightning hit the sill at speed and came through without stopping, and she was shouting before her feet touched the floor.

“I found a witch!”

“A witch?” Roland steadied her by the shoulders. “Where?”

“The Stone Tower in the Concealing Forest!” She spun and pointed—Maggie had just arrived at the window, colliding gently with the frame before tumbling inside. “She can testify!”

“Googoo!”

Roland looked from one to the other. “The Stone Tower.” He said it slowly. “Tell me from the beginning. Everything.”

When Lightning finished, Roland let a moment pass before he spoke.

The girl in front of him was flushed and bright-eyed, her windbreak jacket still cold from the flight, and she had, apparently, taken a pigeon into an active ruin where Devils had been posted as guards—except the Devils had turned out to be dead, which had not been knowable in advance. He kept his expression neutral with effort.

Too bold. But also—

A witch. Sealed inside crystal. Four hundred years—

He made himself think about the logistics rather than the implications.

“That device you mentioned—the one that was playing the voice.”

“Here.” She reached into her jacket and produced a small square box, palm-sized, like a compact mirror. When she opened it he saw a red gem set into the interior, faceted, about the size of his thumbnail. A small lever protruded from the side. She pressed it.

“Save me…”

The voice was female. Distressed—but distressed in the controlled way of someone who had prepared for the possibility that no one would come—measured, precise, the same words each time with the same interval. In the dark of an underground chamber, in the middle of the night, after the Devils had been moving, it would have been—

He understood completely why Lightning had run the first time. He would have run.

“The gem is magical,” Nightingale said, materializing at his shoulder. She was studying the box, not touching it. “I can see a whirlpool inside it—faint, like what you find in a witch’s body.”

A recording device. Something that absorbed a spoken phrase and repeated it indefinitely—powered by a magic stone that had sustained itself for centuries. Which meant whoever had made it understood how to store and expend magical energy in a controlled way. Which meant the woman in the crystal was almost certainly not someone’s victim. She had planned to be found.

“Were there other stones in the chamber? Other devices?”

“I didn’t look closely—there was flooding, and I came straight back.” Lightning’s heels bounced slightly against the chair. The red marks from her windproof glasses had faded, but her eyes were still vivid with what she’d seen. “I thought you needed to know immediately.”

Roland put the box down. He reached over and pressed Lightning’s head down with one palm—not hard, just firmly enough to feel like a point being made.

“Don’t do that again,” he said. “If you want to go somewhere dangerous, you ask first.” He looked at Nightingale. “Call Iron Axe and the full Witch Alliance. We’re moving the Stone Tower expedition up.”

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