Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 40: Letter

The firewood was burning hard but Gerald Wimbledon could not feel it.

The tent was leather-stitched, sealed at every seam, the ground covered against drafts, but the cold came up through the earth anyway — a Hermes cold that was not like the cold of the capital or the cold of the coastal roads. It was the cold of elevation, thin air and permanent ice and wind that had been traveling across the mountain range for centuries with nothing to press against. His toes had gone to numbness past the first knuckle. He could make them move but could not feel them moving.

He grabbed the table with both hands and heaved it to the edge of the fire pit. Six feet of heavy construction wood, the kind of table that required two men in any sensible camp — Gerald moved it alone, his knuckles whitening with the effort, his arms going dark red to the elbow. He sat, pulled his boots off, and put his feet to the heat.

Better.

He spread the scroll flat and picked up the pen, which he held with the grip of a man who had spent thirty years teaching his hands to do something else entirely.

Dear lovely Olivia.

It has been a month since I came to Hermes, which the Church now insists on calling their new Holy City. If it weren’t for the Months of the Demons I would not have spent a single night here — I want to be back in our bed, with you, where it is warm for reasons that have nothing to do with fire pits.

The Church monitors our forces with their own soldiers instead of giving us support, which is as ironic as it sounds. But I have to admit: what they have built here is extraordinary. When I came for the first time, twenty years ago, there was nothing but mountains and a small chapel at the base. Now they have a road carved up the face of the peak, wide enough for carriages, and a fortress city at the top that makes Graycastle look like a market town.

You should see the Hall of Military Affairs. The theater in Graycastle — do you remember it? “The Revenge of the Prince,” and you told me afterward that the vaulted ceiling made you feel like you were standing inside a cloud. The Hall of Military Affairs would swallow five of it and not notice. But here is what I want you to understand: it has no pillars. The walls are held up by eight demon beast bones, each as large as a ship’s mast, curved like hands cupped upward, and between them smaller bones lashed with hemp rope, and the roof rests on all of this without touching the ground at any point in the middle. I don’t know how they designed it. I don’t know if anyone does.

Those bones — if they came from a single beast, the beast was more than a hundred feet. You may worry. Please don’t. They are the devil’s creatures and in the presence of God’s Eye of Retribution no evil escapes — not beast, not witch, not the devil himself. They turn to ash. This I have seen.

He put the pen down and worked his hands open and closed until the tingling cleared. He could hold a fifteen-pound two-handed sword from morning muster to evening drill without fatigue. A pen broke him in under a page. He had no explanation for this. He picked it up again.

When I think of demonic beasts I think of my fourth brother. He was assigned to Border Town, which I count as the worst post in the kingdom, and I assume by now he has done the sensible thing and retreated to Longsong Stronghold, where the walls are adequate and the beasts won’t reach him. I do not blame him for this — I would have done the same at Border Town. What I blame is Father, for the assignment itself. Our fourth brother has never done anything to earn Father’s contempt. His only offense is not being the fifth, and yet somehow that is enough.

I have spent the weeks since leaving Graycastle trying to understand what Father wants. Since Mother died it has been harder and harder to read him. The fifth’s intelligence is obvious, I grant that — but Father himself did not win the throne by being the cleverest man in the room. He won it the way things are always won. And now he seems to have forgotten this.

He hesitated. He held the pen over the ink and thought about what he was about to write. About whether he should write it. About Olivia reading it — her careful face, her habit of folding letters twice before she put them down, the way she held things that mattered to her close to her chest before speaking.

He wrote it.

Ansger was right. If I do nothing, I will have nothing. He read the stars and told me the Star of the Apocalypse burns for four months before it moves out of its place again. Four months is not long. I have been waiting long enough.

After today’s battle, I am going back to the capital. I will take my loyal men with me — not many, but enough. The fighting here has been useful; there is no shortage of brave soldiers at Hermes, men who have been standing at the edge of what the beasts can do and have not run. Some of them will follow me for coin, some for promises, some because they have made the same calculation I have made. I don’t want a revolt. I want to ask my father a question, in person, with enough men behind me that the question is taken seriously: why has he decided that I, his eldest son, do not have the right to inherit?

If things go well, I will already be in Graycastle before this letter reaches your hands. If things go badly — don’t come back to the capital. Stay in the Freezing Wind Mountain Range. The Rose family will keep you safe until things settle.

Love you, Gerald.

He folded the letter, sealed it, checked the seal twice, and knocked on the tent post. His personal guard entered.

“The Rose family, in the Freezing Wind Mountain Range. Go as an ordinary traveler — no horse, no livery, town to town on the wagons. Take your time. But deliver it by hand.” He held the envelope out. “No one else touches it.”

“Yes, Your Royal Highness.”

When the guard was gone Gerald sat back at the table edge with his feet over the fire pit and let the silence settle around him.

If it went wrong, there would be no second position to retreat to. He had understood this from the start. It was, he thought, the clearest thing he had understood in years — that clarity was sometimes only available at the place where the road ended.

He closed his eyes.

In the King’s Garden in Graycastle, when they were children, he had played hide and seek with his second brother and his third sister. Garcia was small then, young enough to fall and need pulling up, and he and Timothy had taken turns being the one who pulled her up because neither of them could bear to see her on the ground for more than a moment. He could not pinpoint the year when the three of them had stopped being people who pulled each other up from the ground. It had not been an event. It had been a slow becoming of strangers, so gradual that by the time he noticed it was complete it had been complete for years.

He shook his head. Sentiment was a luxury he could not afford tonight.

The horn sounded.

One long note, then six short ones in rapid sequence — the battle call, unmistakable, reverberating off the stone walls and the mountain faces until it seemed to come from every direction at once. He was on his feet before the echo died. His sword was at his belt in one motion. He pulled his boots on and strode out of the tent into the organized chaos of the camp — soldiers running, flags moving, formations assembling in the torchlight with the mechanical urgency of men who had drilled this exact sequence enough times that their bodies remembered it when their minds were still waking up.

Above the mountain pass, against the black sky, shapes were moving.

He mounted and pulled his horse’s head around toward the wall. In the distance the shapes were resolving from black spots into forms — dozens of them, then more than dozens, descending from the heights in the way that made experienced defenders stop and make very specific calculations about the next few minutes of their lives.

Gerald Wimbledon clenched his sword and rode toward the wall.

The Months of the Demons had found him the same as every other year: still here, still fighting, still waiting for the thing that would change everything.

Tonight, he decided, he would fight particularly well.

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