Chapter 330: Farewell
The next morning, Roland said goodbye to Lotus and Honey in the castle’s rear garden.
Neither of them wanted to go—he could see it in the way they kept looking at the castle’s rear wall rather than at him, the way their sentences ran short. But the Charming Beauty and its crew were still waiting at the shore, and he had no good reason to delay them further. To insist would be to ask Tilly to accept an inconvenience she’d already conceded she couldn’t afford.
He thought it through from her position: she still had to complete the large-scale construction on Sleeping Island before spring, and she was nonetheless sending him five witches—two of whom were staying—as a sincere gesture. The least he could do was not make her feel guilty about retrieving the other two.
Anna and Wendy would see them off using the Cloud Gazer; with that, the journey to the beach would take thirty minutes instead of half a day through the snow.
“Thank you for these past months,” the two witches said, bowing in front of him.
“Thank you,” Roland said, laughing. “You’ve both made genuine contributions to Border Town’s construction—which is why I have gifts.”
Lotus’s cheeks went a shade pinker than the cold accounted for. “G-gift?”
Honey pressed her hand to her chest and looked over at Lotus, then back at him, eyes bright. “For us too?”
Roland accepted two bags from Nightingale and handed them over. Honey immediately opened hers and pulled out a length of white cloth, holding it up in some confusion. “What is this? It’s not a corset.”
“It’s a scarf.” He stepped forward, took it from her, and wrapped it twice around her neck with the practiced ease of someone who has tied a great many scarves. “Wind and snow can’t get to your neck with this on. Pull it higher and you can cover your ears as well.”
Honey tilted her head experimentally. The contentment on her face was complete and immediate. “Warm,” she announced, to the world in general.
Whether it was the cold or something else, Lotus’s face had gone a shade brighter.
“There’s more.” Honey reached back into the bag and produced a small wooden box. “Your Highness—is this also a gift?”
“Open it.”
She lifted the lid. “Oh—! Lotus, come look—you can see yourself, it’s so clear—” She lifted the box and turned it so that the small mirror inside caught the light, and the reflection was sharp and bright in a way that silver mirrors never quite managed.
The mirror was embedded in a carved wooden frame and had been available in the convenience market since Soraya’s coating method had been applied to it: reflective enough to show a person’s face in detail, compact enough to carry. In Roland’s experience, there was no woman alive who could pass one of these without stopping.
Honey’s exclamation drew the others. Within moments, the Sleeping Island witches had clustered around the box—each taking a turn, each making the same involuntary expression of someone seeing their own face clearly for the first time. Even Andrea allowed herself a moment, though she recovered her composure quickly enough to maintain deniability.
Once the gifts were distributed and the hot air balloon fully inflated, they loaded into the basket and lifted off. From below, Roland watched them wave—Lotus, Honey, and the two who would guide them down to the shore—until the balloon cleared the castle wall and the figures became small against the grey sky.
“I have to admit, this is a good place.” Tilly appeared at his shoulder, keeping her voice low, as if she were confiding rather than evaluating. “A water supply, comfortable rooms, all of this—it’s difficult to believe you built it from nothing in a single year.”
“Do you regret sending them?”
She laughed—a clean sound, without any of the things laughter sometimes hides. “How could I? As long as they live better lives, how would I regret it? Don’t forget—I’m also a witch.”
The garden was white and still. Tilly’s smile was easy in her face, uncomplicated by the wariness she’d arrived with. Roland looked at her and thought—briefly, with the kind of thought that visits without being invited—that in his previous life he would have been proud to introduce a younger sister like this, would have enjoyed the way rooms changed when she entered. But he knew better than to think of their relationship in those terms. She was not simply family. She was a partner and a natural ally, someone who had already shown she would take on personal risk without being asked. Yesterday’s decision about the ruins had confirmed it.
“Do you really intend to go to a place that dangerous?” he asked. “Your ability—it isn’t suited for direct combat.”
“Don’t worry.” Tilly raised her hands and showed him what she wore: on the ring finger of her left hand, a blue crystal ring; on her right hand, a white silk glove with a red gem set into the back. It was an asymmetrical combination—the kind of arrangement that a person from Roland’s previous century would have called maximalist art-student—and he had been curious about it since the day before but had kept from asking.
“Magic stones,” she said. “We found them in the ancient ruins. After you channel your ability into them, they produce effects of their own.” She nodded at the ring. “This one lets me fly, the way Lightning flies.”
And she lifted off.
Not dramatically—just rose from the snow-covered ground as if the air beneath her had simply become supportive, her whole body weightless without effort, without strain. Roland stared.
He understood the implications almost immediately. If abilities could be stored in a medium and reproduced, the practical applications were staggering. Lotus’s earth-shaping, replicated across several stones—entire blocks of temporary housing completed in a single day. Anna’s fire, available to someone who couldn’t produce fire of their own. The arithmetic of capability changed entirely.
Tilly settled back onto the ground and turned her right hand toward a clear patch of snow. Light flared at her fingertips—she had pushed magic into the glove-stone—and when it struck the ground it left an ankle-deep bowl-shaped crater, earth exposed at its center.
“Can you use both at once?” Roland asked.
“No.” She shook her head. “Within a certain range, each stone enables one ability at a time. Pushing magic into two simultaneously produces nothing.” She smiled, slightly rueful. “Originally I wasn’t planning to show you this so soon. But after last night—what you told me about the ruins, about the woman sealed in the tower, about what you’re choosing to do—I think I may have misjudged you. Being honest with me about those things was a gift. I wanted to give something back.”
“No harm done. I understand where you were coming from.”
“Oh—one more thing.” Her expression shifted into something that suggested she had been saving this. “What is a corset? The one Honey mentioned earlier?”
Roland almost choked on the cold air. “I—keke—I genuinely don’t know. You might ask Sylvie or Evelyn.”
Tilly raised an eyebrow. “It seems you still have some reservations toward me.”
He had no answer to this that would improve his position.
She let him suffer for a moment, then relented. “Let’s leave that for now. Since last night I’ve been turning over a different problem.” She looked at the garden wall, or perhaps through it, toward something further away. “If those ruins really did belong to the Church—why would they leave the magic stones behind? According to what happened to Ashes, the Church is cultivating their own witches. These stones would be invaluable to them. Even if they were forced to flee from the Devils, even if they deliberately buried their history to erase evidence of their defeat—why not take the stones? They could still use them wherever they went. It doesn’t make sense.”
Roland turned it over. “Unless they simply couldn’t mass-produce them. If they could, the Witch Cooperation Association would never have escaped. You can’t outrun enemies who fly.”
“Yes, that’s what I concluded too.” She nodded. “But there’s still the other thing. I went through the palace library when I was young—every text I could find about the Church and their god. And there’s a strange gap in it. Their historical records stop at approximately four hundred years ago. Even the god’s origins are vague—no name, no founding epic, just the declaration of omnipotence and nothing beneath it. No details. Compared to the Three Ancient Gods—who come with lineage and legend and contradiction—the Church’s god reads like a figure someone inserted without bothering to fill in the past.” She looked at him. “Put the two things together: records that stop four hundred years ago, and ruins that are also four hundred years old—”
“You’re suggesting—”
“It feels,” Tilly said, “as if the Church simply appeared from nowhere.”
Roland’s heart caught on something it couldn’t name.
He stood in the white garden, the snow still falling softly around them, and understood that the winter was going to be considerably more complicated than he had planned for.