Rewrite That Witch
CH004 · Rewrite
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Chapter 4: Flame

“Tell me what happened in the mine,” Roland said. “From the beginning.”

Anna nodded and began.

He had expected silence, or the particular refusal of someone who had learned that speech was dangerous. Instead she said, “ask what you want,” and told it plainly, without decoration or appeal. It wasn’t a complicated story. Her father was a miner, working the day the North Mine collapsed. She heard the news and went, like every other family on the street—the kind of response that doesn’t involve a decision, that just happens, the body already moving before the mind catches up.

The North Mine ran in all directions at once, unmapped, unreliable. The rescuers arrived and immediately scattered through different tunnels, no one coordinating, everyone looking for their own person. Anna found her father with two neighbors—Susan and Ansgar—and the three of them together found him pinned beneath an ore cart, leg crushed, unable to move.

There was another man with him. A miner, searching her father’s pockets.

When the looter saw them, he picked up a mining pick and rushed Ansgar. He knocked Ansgar down and turned toward Anna.

She stopped him.

Then the three of them got her father out.

That was the whole story. Or nearly. She told the last part without particular emphasis: the neighbors vowed silence. Before dawn the following day, her father went out on his crutches and reported his daughter to the guards.

Barov, quietly, said: “Twenty-five gold royals. The reward for identifying a witch. For a man with a crippled leg, that is half a lifetime’s wages from the mine.”

A silence settled in the dungeon. Roland was aware of it—the warden, the guards, Carter—all of them somewhere between discomfort and an uncertain sympathy they wouldn’t know what to do with.

“Your opponent was a grown man,” Roland said. “How did you stop him?”

Anna looked at him. Something in her expression shifted—not toward humor exactly, but not away from it either—and the torches on the wall flickered, a single shudder, like the surface of a lake when something passes beneath it.

“The same way you’re imagining,” she said. “The devil’s power.”

“Shut your mouth!” the warden shouted, and his voice cracked on the last word.

Roland stepped around Carter, who moved automatically to intercept him, and walked to the cell bars. Anna was an arm’s length away. He could see the bruise along her jaw, the state of her hands, the prison grime that thorough cleaning hadn’t reached because she hadn’t had any cleaning at all. She was younger than he’d thought from the doorway. Her face still had the soft uncompleted look of adolescence, but nothing adolescent in her expression.

It was a face he’d seen before, on screens, in photographs, in the long legacy of human suffering that made it to print. The orphaned face, the displaced face. Except those children bent. They looked at the ground. They made themselves small.

Anna had not made herself small. She stood straight—not with defiance, not with pride, just with a refusal to collapse that seemed as fundamental as breathing—and she looked at him directly.

“Is this the first witch you’ve seen?” she asked. “Your curiosity might get you killed.”

“If you had the power everyone in this room believes you have,” Roland said, “the question of danger would be running in the other direction.”

The torches went dark.

Not all at once—they dimmed, rapidly, as if someone had sealed off the oxygen. What remained were tight clusters of orange at the wick, almost nothing, and the dungeon became what it had been before the torches: a close stone darkness with cold water on the floor. Behind Roland he heard two people stumble, the soft panic of someone’s prayer murmured at speed, a body going down.

His heart was doing something he noted with clinical detachment. Accelerating. Yes. He was standing at the boundary between the world that followed the rules he knew and a world that did not, and the boundary was a prison cell with iron bars.

He looked at the locket around her neck. A red chain, cheap iron, and a pendant that caught what little light remained—translucent, sparkling. The God’s Locket of Retribution. It hung on a chain that a child could have snapped. Her hands were manacled behind her back, which was the only reason she hadn’t snapped it herself.

Roland moved quickly. He reached through the bars, found the pendant, and pulled.

The chain gave on the first tug. He held the locket in his hand for a moment—it was lighter than expected, almost nothing—and the dungeon was very quiet.

“Go ahead,” he said quietly.

He thought: if this is alchemy—bottles, acids, chemical preparation—I’ll be disappointed. He thought: if this is real, I’ll have to revise several things I’ve been fairly certain about since university.

He heard the crackle first. The thermal expansion of water vapor—steam rising off the floor as temperature spiked. Then the fire came, rising from the ground at her feet, not cast outward but appearing, answering something inside her that had been held back. The torches on the wall responded as if they’d been waiting: they burst simultaneously, pure and brilliant, filling the dungeon with a light like noon.

Anna walked forward, and the fire moved with her.

When she reached the bars, the iron caught. Dozens of them, the full wall of the cell, and they did not glow dully—they ran the color spectrum in seconds, orange to yellow to a searing, sourceless white that Roland had to look away from. The heat hit him like a physical impact—not the ambient warmth of a summer day but a directed, brutal intensity that baked one side of his face while the other felt the cold at his back.

He retreated. He had no choice. The air between him and the bars was no longer survivable; the heat alone, without contact, was enough to blister. He pressed himself against the far wall of the corridor and thought, with the corner of his mind that didn’t stop working: fifteen hundred degrees. That’s what yellow iron means. That’s yellow iron.

He did not know how long it lasted. Long enough for the bars to melt—not to bow or deform but to melt, running in slow drops down to the stone, leaving gaps that widened as they went. Long enough for the dungeon floor to hiss and steam and then go dry. Long enough for the warden to soil himself, which Roland registered only peripherally.

Then the fire went out.

The torches burned quietly on the wall. The air was still harsh and dry and hot but survivable. Three of the five people who had come down with Roland had found the floor; Carter remained standing, barely, beside the stairs.

Anna stood in the corridor outside what had been her cell. The manacles were gone—the metal too soft now to hold anything. Her prisoner’s clothes were ash. She stood with her hands at her sides, not covering herself, and looked at Roland with the same lake-still quality she’d had when they first lit the torches.

“I’ve satisfied your curiosity,” she said. “Will you kill me now?”

Roland crossed the dungeon. He shrugged off his coat and wrapped it around her shoulders, and the stone floor between them was still warm beneath his boots.

“No,” he said. “Miss Anna—I want to hire you.”

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