Rewrite That Witch
CH035 · Rewrite
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Chapter 35: Home

Nightingale walked through the fog.

From inside it, the world outside was colorless — black and white, all edges softened to ambiguity, the line between a wall and the space beside it something you could find if you looked at it from the right angle. In the fog, up and down ceased to be fixed directions. Front and back exchanged themselves. The rules that governed the solid world applied only loosely, and only when she chose to let them.

She had entered the castle past the guards by walking through a wall, emerged through the floor of Anna’s room, and let the fog go. The world’s colors returned: the warm brown of the bedroom walls, the pale light from the window, and Anna herself.

Anna, in the fog, was something Nightingale had no adequate description for. The color of a witch’s magic was visible in the fog — it moved through them like light through water, orange or red for fire-wielders, varied and particular to each power. She had seen dozens of witches in the Association, had watched their magic under the fog’s stripping clarity, had developed a sense of what strong looked like and what weak looked like.

Anna’s magic was not what strong looked like. It was something past that measurement entirely — an aquamarine light so concentrated near its center that looking directly at it was uncomfortable, like looking at a forge at full heat. Every other fire-witch Nightingale had seen wore their power the way a candle wore its flame. Anna wore hers the way the sun wore its corona.

If this level of power encounters the adulthood trial—

She let the thought go. She had let it go many times. It returned the same way each time.

She stepped out of the fog into the ordinary colors of Anna’s room. “Good morning, Anna.”

Anna, practicing flame at her fingertips, nodded without looking up.

Nightingale sat on the bed and watched her work. She had been watching Anna practice since nearly the beginning — had been present, unseen in the fog, for the early sessions in the garden shed when the fire still went where Anna didn’t intend it, when Roland had stood beside her and worked through the basics of control the way someone works through something they barely understand but are committed to. She had watched the shed come down and the garden table go up in its place, and watched Anna move from the garden to her own room because the control was good enough now that the precautions weren’t necessary.

Anna still practiced. Every day, one to two hours, because Roland had asked her to and she had said yes.

“I brought fish cake.” Nightingale produced a cloth parcel from her robe and divided it. “Do you want some?”

Anna smelled it and nodded.

“Wash your hands first.”

Anna washed her hands in the bucket of well water and dried them with a small flame — a detail she had picked up from Roland’s relentless hygiene lectures, the ones Nightingale had initially found irritating and had later started following herself without quite deciding to. There was something contagious about a household that had decided on certain rules and applied them evenly to everyone. She had competed for a place in the handwashing queue more than once.

They ate in comfortable silence. Anna took small, careful bites.

“You really don’t want to come back with me?” Nightingale asked. She asked this occasionally, because it was still true and Anna was still here, and saying it aloud seemed like the only honest thing to do. “There are sisters there who would care for you. Strong witches who’ve already crossed adulthood. Your magic—” she stopped. “Your magic would make you welcome there.”

Anna chewed. She did not answer immediately.

“How was your childhood?” she asked instead. “Before the Association.”

Nightingale set down her piece of fish cake. “I grew up in a city in the eastern kingdom. Near the capital.” She looked at the wall. “Not a happy childhood, no.” A chain around her neck was a specific thing she didn’t describe. Work extracted under threat was another. When they had found out she was a witch, things had gotten worse in a direction she had not previously thought possible. “Why do you ask?”

“I lived in the old town districts,” Anna said. “My father sold me to the Church for twenty-five gold royals.” She looked at her hands. “Since His Highness let me out of the prison, I’ve been happy.”

“But you can’t leave the castle. And everyone outside still hates witches.”

“That doesn’t matter to me.” She looked up. “He said he would change it. Can he?”

“It would be hard. As long as the Church stands, they’ll keep naming us as devils.”

Anna went quiet. She was quiet long enough that Nightingale assumed the subject was settled. Then:

“Where were you better off? In the Association, or here?”

The question hit Nightingale sideways. She opened her mouth.

In the Association, obviously. Her companions were there. Her history was there. Border Town had been a mission — she had come because a witch was in danger and the Association monitored that kind of danger. She had never intended to stay. She had stayed because Anna had refused to leave, and then because staying felt like something she was choosing rather than something that was happening to her, which was a distinction she had not always had access to.

The answer was obvious. It was the Association. It was where everything that was hers was kept.

She could not say it.

Anna smiled. It was the kind of smile that did not perform itself — it simply arrived in her eyes, the way morning light arrives in a room, without effort. Nightingale had rarely seen her smile. She looked, for a moment, not like someone waiting for an execution she had accepted, but like someone who had found something and knew what it was.

“I think,” Anna said quietly, “that I’ve already found my Holy Mountain.”

Nightingale sat still. The castle walls around her, the warm room, the smell of fish cake and woodsmoke — she felt, suddenly and without any particular cause, entirely at ease. As though the fog were still active and the ordinary rules were suspended and nothing in this room was threatening her from any direction.

She was still sitting with that feeling when footsteps came fast down the corridor outside.

The door burst open. Nana Paien stood in the frame, face wet, mouth already moving before she had quite arrived.

She crossed the room in three steps and pressed herself into Anna’s arms. Anna wrapped an arm around her without hesitation, the way she did everything: quietly, completely, as though she had always known this would happen and had been ready.

“My father,” Nana managed. “He found out I’m a witch.”

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