Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 341: Transport Route

After Vader left, Carter leaned close. “Your Highness — do you have any idea who sent them?”

“If we rule out the Church, it would be Timothy.” Roland watched the last of the refugees shuffle back through the checkpoint. “Garcia has already put distance between herself and Greycastle — it’s unlikely she still cares about me. Timothy is more cautious about moving a real army away from the capital, but that doesn’t mean he won’t retaliate. A handful of men carrying berserker pills is a different calculation.”

He was lucky they had carried pills and not powder. A man detonating in the middle of that crowd would have erased two months of work in a heartbeat.

Not that he had been particularly worried for himself. On days Nightingale was out, he traveled with no fewer than ten bodyguards and wore a God’s Stone of Retaliation. Ten revolving firearms presented a wall that even a witch extraordinaire would struggle to breach, let alone a few men on berserker pills.

What surprised him, thinking it over now, was how calm he had remained throughout. Less than a year in this role, and his instincts had already changed. When he had first arrived in Border Town, a scene like this morning’s would have buckled his knees. Now the anxiety had come and gone like weather — felt, managed, set aside. The guards were there to protect him. The crowd needed to see someone who would not fall apart. These were simply the constraints, and you worked within them. That he was already thinking that way, automatically, without having to remind himself — that was new, and strange to notice.

He turned to Barov. “Round up everyone from the missionary group and get the specifics of how those men were recruited. I need to know where they boarded.”

Barov’s expression had the tight, inward look of a man swallowing something that disagreed with him. He had been proud of those subordinates. He would not have liked watching them fail in front of the prince.

“You shouldn’t be too hard on them,” Roland added. “Get the full picture first, then decide.”

By the time all the refugees were processed, the dock had returned to its usual grey quiet. Roland walked back to his office in the castle and opened the missionary group’s full report.

The numbers were a pleasant surprise. On the southern border — the zones around Eagle City and Clearwater Port — war had turned the fields fallow and the towns hollow. Grain prices had been climbing for months, the cold arriving sharper than usual across the whole of Greycastle. Slaves were selling for half what they fetched last year. The people who remained were desperate for somewhere to go.

And they had heard about Border Town.

That was the real finding buried in the report: a portion of the migrants hadn’t needed to be recruited at all. They had heard from someone who heard from someone, and they had simply started walking west.

The bottleneck was not persuasion. It was transport.

During the Months of Demons, snow shut down the roads. The Redwater River was the only artery that still moved, and the only vessel capable of running it without a witch aboard was Little Town — a single boat, utterly inadequate for the scale of the problem. To keep the river in continuous use, he would need at minimum twenty inland sailboats capable of the passage.

The numbers made the difficulty plain. The missionary group had burned through most of its gold royals not on recruitment but on chartering private boats and housing the staging personnel. Less than four hundred refugees had made it to Border Town; three thousand or more were still waiting in Willow Town, Silver City, and Fallen Dragon Ridge with no way in. The captains who knew how bad the western region’s winters could be had priced accordingly — insanely so. Moving the remaining three thousand would cost as much as the large-scale rescue operation from the capital.

He drafted a letter to Margaret’s Chamber of Commerce. The tone was courteous and slightly pointed — he hoped her affection for Lightning might move her to something less than extortionate rates.

But the letter was a stopgap. The real answer was to build his own ships.

The quality of reinforced steel and cement had improved enough in recent months to support larger, sturdier hulls than anything currently running the Redwater. Add a steam engine for propulsion and you had the foundation of a real transportation industry — not chartered and contingent on a captain’s goodwill, but owned, scheduled, reliable. He made a note to begin sketching the design after dinner.

Barov knocked after dark, opened the door without waiting, and said, “Your Highness. I have the situation mostly sorted out.”

“Speak.”

“One of my apprentices — Salem, assigned to recruit in the northern territories — ran short of boats mid-journey. He reached out to contacts he had made in the capital, looking to hire merchant ships willing to run the western route.” A long pause. “The information leaked from there. He had arranged accommodations for his refugees in Silver City, less than half a day from the capital. If Timothy wanted to insert men into that group, it would not have been difficult.”

“How many people are still being held in Silver City?”

“Roughly eight hundred.” Barov’s voice dropped to something close to a confession. “The merchant ships take about half a month for a round trip. We still won’t have a clear picture by the time the next batch arrives. Perhaps we should — recall the First Army personnel in the area immediately, and leave those refugees behind.”

“No.” The word came out quietly, but without hesitation. “We get rid of whatever plants Timothy put in the group — however many there are. As long as the inspection checkpoint is properly managed, we can run each person through individually.” Roland shook his head. “Think about what it would mean if we abandoned those eight hundred. They would go back north and tell everyone what happened to them. We would never recruit from the Northern Lands again.”

Under Sylvie’s eye and Nightingale’s ear, no spy or assassin could hide indefinitely. There was no reason to punish the innocent majority for the contamination Timothy had attempted. So long as no one was hurt in the processing, it was a solvable problem.

“Yes, Your Highness.” Barov coughed once, cleared his throat, and added, “As for Salem’s punishment — what is your instruction?”

“What do you think?”

He hesitated. “Given that the incident arose from carelessness rather than intent, and that no serious damage was done, I would suggest stripping him of his city hall post and a two-month salary fine. Sending him to the northern mines would be excessive for what amounts to a first mistake.”

Roland did not bother suppressing the laugh. Barov’s heartache was written across every line of his face. He had lobbied for the lighter sentence before Roland could even speak — this man who normally opened negotiations at the harshest available position. Salem had been at Barov’s side in the capital and had come to Border Town in the first wave. The relationship was something more than official.

“He’s in his twenties, isn’t he?” Roland said. “Young enough that this lesson sticks. Two months’ pay is sufficient. Implement it as you said.”

“Understood.” Barov bowed with obvious relief. “As you instruct.”

“You’re dismissed.”

He stretched after Barov left, worked the tension from his shoulders, and pulled several sheets of white paper from the drawer. He had just set the pencil to the first outline of the steam-powered cement boat when the door flew open.

Leaves stood in the frame, out of breath, vibrating with some barely contained news.

“Your Highness! The Hawk Eye is back!”

He set down the pencil. Stood. “Lead the way.”

They went quickly to the back garden, where a massive shadow was already falling across the courtyard — the hot air balloon descending in slow, stately spirals, its envelope blocking out the last grey light of the afternoon. The basket touched the stone with a soft thud.

Anna jumped out.

She turned toward him. Her smile was light — small, quiet, certain, the smile of someone who had left and come back and found everything exactly as they had expected to find it.

He walked toward her. She walked toward him.

“I have returned.”

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