Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 41: The First Demonic Beasts

Snow had covered Border Town in a single night, which should not have been possible.

Cheng Yan had learned not to argue with things that should not have been possible.

He walked beside Carter toward the western wall through streets that had gone entirely quiet, breath clouding in the cold, boots crunching through a white glaze that showed no sign of stopping. The sky was the same grey it had been yesterday and the day before — a uniform, sourceless grey that seemed less like weather and more like a decision. A few flakes still drifted down, unhurried, as if the sky had nowhere else to be.

Several months of this, he thought. Not a cloud with a sun behind it. Just grey, the whole time.

“The town is deserted,” Carter said. He had the habit of stating things Roland had already noticed, which Roland had come to understand was Carter’s way of opening a conversation rather than filling silence. “A number of people followed the nobles who withdrew.”

“Let them go.” The fog of his breath trailed behind him in ribbons. “Barov is conducting a census this winter.”

“A — what?”

“Door to door. Name, occupation, which house. He counts everyone who stayed.” Roland watched a shutter bang loose on a house whose owners had clearly left in a hurry — a strip of cloth caught in the frame, snapping in the wind. “When the fighting starts, we know exactly what we have to work with. After it, we distribute pensions without guessing.”

Carter was quiet for a moment. “I wouldn’t have thought of that.”

“Most people don’t, until they need to and can’t.”

Another pause. Carter had more he wanted to say; Roland had learned to recognize that silence.

“Your Highness.” Carter’s voice had shifted register — less the Knight Commander, more the man underneath it. “When you first said things I couldn’t understand, I thought it was what princes do. Say strange things so people assume depth behind them. Make themselves difficult on purpose.”

Roland said nothing.

“But the drills work. The workshop works. The people who stayed behind are less afraid than they should be.” Carter paused again. “My grandfather used to say that extraordinary people are extraordinary because they see possibilities ordinary people overlook. I’m beginning to think you might actually become king.”

The warmth came without warning — the particular warmth of being seen doing work you know is real. In his previous life, Roland had felt it maybe twice: once when his supervisor signed off on a design he’d fought three months to protect, once when a prototype ran clean on the first test. He let himself have it for a moment.

“We’ll see,” he said. The grey sky felt, briefly, lighter.

The militia had cleared the wall before dawn. They lined up and bowed when Roland arrived at the parapet, which he was still getting used to.

Iron Axe stood at the western section, crossbow across one shoulder, eyes already on the treeline. He had come from the Sandpeople and had a habit of watching things at a distance rather than up close — as if proximity was a disadvantage he’d long since stopped accepting. “No traces last night, Your Highness. The first snowfall usually gives us a window — animals still outnumber the beasts, and the ones that do come are recently turned. Weak.”

“How long?”

“A week. Maybe two.” He said it the way he said most things: flat, no interest in qualifying further.

Roland walked the length of the parapet. The stone was cold through his gloves, the wind coming off the white fields steady and without mercy. Two hours per shift, three rotations — no man on the wall long enough to lose focus or feeling in his hands. He’d designed it after asking Brian about Longsong Stronghold’s method, which turned out to be: assign the new recruits, keep them there all day, and hang twenty or thirty each winter for desertion. That was considered normal.

Roland had other opinions about normal.

He paced back, slower. The roadblocks below were working exactly as intended — logs and stones arranged to channel attackers toward the defended sections. They were also nearly buried. A month of snowfall had reduced them to suggestions. Two more months would make them invisible entirely, and the demonic beasts would distribute themselves across the full six hundred yards of wall, not just the sections his militia could hold.

He didn’t have enough men for six hundred yards.

The solution was straightforward: Anna, at night, outside the walls with Nightingale running cover the same way she’d moved Nana in and out of the Pine family’s house. Melt the roadblocks clear, return before dawn. He filed it for later.

“Look ahead!”

The shout came from the observer on the left section. Roland and Carter both turned.

At the treeline, shapes appeared — a dozen, perhaps more, low to the ground, moving in the uncertain gait of things that had not been what they were for very long. They crossed the white expanse slowly, strung out rather than grouped, veering and correcting like boats without a keel.

The hunter commanding this section looked to Roland.

“Handle it according to the drills,” Roland said. “You know the wall better than I do.”

The hunter uncocked his crossbow and moved down the parapet to watch. Roland noted that as a good sign.

The shapes resolved as they crossed fifty yards: fox-built, grey-black fur, eyes that took the flat winter light and returned it red. They reached the base of the wall and stopped, panting, heads lifting to scan upward with an aggression that was more reflex than intelligence.

“Recently turned,” Iron Axe said, already drawing. “They don’t know what they want yet.”

He loosed. The arrow covered the distance between heartbeats and took the lead fox at the throat, pinning it to the frozen ground. The others flinched and scattered — a problem dissolving into several smaller ones.

Black blood spread into the snow below.

Roland studied it.

The same erosion that turned animals into demonic beasts was the same erosion that attended a witch’s awakening — that much was established. Witches came through it with their minds. The beasts came through it like this: unminding, running on whatever nerve the infection left behind. Same mechanism. Two outcomes.

Why?

Was it the host’s capacity for thought? The dose? The timing? Behind the Mountain of Despair, past every boundary he’d been told was absolute, the Gates of Hell were said to open each winter and breathe this infection outward. Nobody had ever traveled there. Everything known about it came from books that were copying books, all the way back to oral traditions from before anyone alive could remember. He had no way to verify any of it.

He would go there, eventually. Not now.

The remaining foxes milled at the wall’s base, confused, dying by degrees. The militia moved through their drills with a steadiness that would have seemed impossible a month ago.

Roland watched, said nothing, and stored the question with all the others.

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