Chapter 407: Tilly’s Questioning
“You mean she didn’t follow you to Sleeping Island.”
It wasn’t a question. The prince had already understood.
“Exactly.” Tilly shook her head. “Her name is Spear Passi, and her ability is magic power channeling — she can connect several witches and allow one end of the channel to draw from the others’ reserves. She’s the one you need.” A pause. “She lives in Fallen Dragon Ridge.”
“You’ve contacted her, then,” Roland said. “What’s kept her there? The Church is a danger to her.”
A moment of silence, careful and deliberate. “Because she’s a Marquess. Lord of Fallen Dragon Ridge.”
“Lord?” He sat with that. “A witch?”
“Her father — Marquis Passi, the last Lord — gave the title and the territory to her rather than to his second or third son. Her rank gives her effective cover. She can conceal her identity better than almost any witch in an ordinary position, and she leads a considerably better life than most.” Tilly continued evenly, “She contacted me first. She was the one who made it possible to gather witches from the towns in the southern and middle parts of the Kingdom during the migrations. Without her, that work would have taken much longer.”
“She contacted you first,” Roland repeated, turning the phrasing over. “She wasn’t trying to give those witches shelter herself.”
“No. She wanted them to leave her territory as quickly as possible. She was helping them escape, not protecting them in place. Spear Passi values her title.”
The arithmetic was clear enough. Fallen Dragon Ridge had established churches and a large faithful population — nothing like the thin Church presence in the Western Region. Any lord caught harboring witches there would face consequences that a title alone could not shield against. Roland could understand the calculation without approving of it. “If a witch in her territory were seized—”
“I asked her the same thing,” Tilly said, with a sadness she didn’t try to conceal. “She told me plainly: if a witch was caught by the townspeople, she would try to substitute a death-row prisoner in the jail and smuggle the witch out of the territory. But if a witch was caught by the Verdict Army or judged by the Church — she would do nothing.”
The room settled into quiet.
That was why Tilly had chosen the Fjords. The risk of crossing the channel, the unfamiliarity of a new island, the distance from everything established — all of it preferable to settling somewhere her witches could be abandoned without warning. Even from a Marquess who called herself an ally.
“If I invite her to Border Town,” Roland said, “do you think she’d come?”
“I wouldn’t count on it. But you could try.” Tilly spread her hands. “I’m telling you where to find her. I’m not promising what she’ll do.”
“I’ll send someone to speak with her first.”
The right choice was Nightingale. She could slip into any fortification unseen and detect lies without the target knowing they were being assessed. As long as she approached without visible hostility, Spear Passi would likely not overreact — a witch encountering a fellow witch was a different encounter entirely from any other. He would pair her with Maggie and Lightning: the fastest team in the Witch Union, armed now, capable of reconnaissance as well as evacuation.
He worked it through. Fallen Dragon Ridge was five or six days by boat from Border Town, but Maggie could cover the distance in half a day. Even without Spear Passi’s cooperation, the trip had value — Fallen Dragon Ridge sat astride an important passage to the Southernmost Region, and he needed a clear picture of its fortifications, sentries, and garrison before his spring attack planning could be finalized.
“I heard there’s a newly evolved witch in the castle?” Tilly shifted the subject with the ease of someone who had finished saying what she needed to say.
“Mystery Moon. Yes — she cohered her magic power.” Roland described the process. “But using the ancient witches’ method means the growth in her underlying power is limited. To become what Anna has become, there’s no substitute for genuine understanding of the knowledge. Evolution by sudden insight is faster, but it’s also shallower.”
“Still — it’s a method,” Tilly said. She looked at him with a particular quality of attention. “And there’s something you said just now that interests me. What did you mean when you said fire and the others were not natural phenomena but concrete forms of magic power?”
“Personal speculation,” Roland said, and reached for his tea. “Anna’s Heart Fire and her Blackfire don’t exist anywhere in nature, so it isn’t difficult to see them as forms her magic takes when she comprehends ‘heat.’ But what about the ordinary fires she produced before her evolution? Those were also magic-generated. My theory is that they reflect Anna’s understanding of heat at the time — as her understanding deepened, the form her power took changed with it. This would explain what Agatha described: many witches have similar abilities before evolution because they’ve observed the same natural phenomena. After High Awakening, their abilities diverge because their individual understandings of those phenomena are different.”
“Quite reasonable,” Tilly said, in a tone that neither agreed nor disagreed. “But your speculation implies that witches who reach the same understanding of a phenomenon would evolve nearly identical abilities.”
“Yes — assuming identical capacity for understanding.”
He didn’t mention the further thought, the one he kept to himself: if magic power formed the foundation of all abilities, and was universal in nature, then a witch who understood everything might theoretically be able to manifest everything. That particular question he wasn’t ready to examine aloud.
“Are you from a world without magic power?”
The tea nearly left his mouth.
He set the cup down carefully. “I’m sorry?”
“I’ve read all your books this past month.” Tilly was looking at him directly, without flinching. “Something has always felt wrong. I’ve been trying to locate what it was. After what you just said, I think I can name it.” She paused. “You separate magic power from nature. But neither Natural Science Theoretical Foundation nor Elementary Physics mentions magic power at all — as if it doesn’t exist. And just now you said explicitly that Anna’s abilities are not natural phenomena. But in this world, magic power is part of nature. It’s not outside it. Any book genuinely attempting to describe everything in this world would have to account for it.”
Roland sat very still.
He had made the mistake years ago, the day he arrived in the body of the Fourth Prince, and had been making it ever since without noticing. His ministers were afraid to challenge him. The witches were too grateful. Everyone else was too far outside the knowledge to see the gap.
Tilly was not.
She was Roland’s sister, yes. But she was also an Extraordinary, capable of reading and internalizing a book’s contents in the time it took most people to find the right page. She had noticed the absence. She had worked backwards from it to a question he had no prepared answer for, and she had used his own words to make the argument, which left no room to deflect.
Any forced explanation now would only compound the suspicion. And a lie stacked on silence was harder to sustain than either alone.
The silence stretched.
“You don’t need to answer me now.” Tilly’s voice was quiet, without hostility. “It’s late. I should get back to the Witch House. You should rest.”
“Yes. Alright.” Roland watched her face and couldn’t read it.
She paused at his office door. Turned back.
“I can trust you, right?”
He had said of course to that question a hundred times without thinking. Now the words stalled. He managed a nod. A slow one.
The door closed.
“How can she just walk away like that?” Nightingale stepped out of the air, sounding genuinely aggrieved. “She was so close to—”
“To what? Breaking us both?” Roland exhaled. “She left because she doesn’t want to fracture an alliance she needs. The Sleeping Island depends on Border Town. If she pushed hard and I couldn’t give her a satisfying answer, we’d both lose something neither of us can afford.” He leaned back. The chill in the chair reached him through his coat. “She’s not walking away. She’s giving me time to respond.”
The difference was everything.
He shook his head to clear it, and turned to Nightingale. “You heard everything. Now — about the trip to Fallen Dragon Ridge. You’ll check the situation before confronting Spear Passi. If she refuses, she refuses. Don’t threaten her. She’s a fellow witch and she’ll sense immediately whether your approach is hostile.”
“Is that all?” She sounded faintly disappointed.
“That’s all regarding the witch. Additionally—” he leveled a look at her— “you need to help Lightning map the surrounding area: layout, fortifications, sentries, troop positions. Then return quickly.”
Nightingale murmured her assent.
“And finally,” Roland said, and stopped to get the words right. “Be safe. That is the most important thing.”