Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 410: Expectations

Water vapor had condensed in a thin white gauze across the window pane. Cold wind struck the glass in intermittent pops, and the contrast with the fireplace burning steadily in the corner made the room feel like two different seasons sharing one border.

Scroll sat at the long desk in the City Hall office, reading through a stack of documents that had nothing to do with education.

Statistics. Departmental reports. Numbers she had volunteered to memorize in the gaps between her actual work, because the Ministry of Education was quiet now — the second round of assessment had ended, and another would not begin before next summer. Her real usefulness to the territory, she had discovered, was as a living index.

Having worked for His Highness Roland for half a year, she had learned that he was unusual in his appetite for precise figures. He liked his subordinates to use numbers, not approximations — horizontal ratios, year-on-year comparisons, chain relative ratios. He named these things as naturally as others named colors. Over time, his staff had caught the habit from him the way one catches an accent, until the City Hall as a whole spoke a language of quantification that it had not known before his arrival.

As the population grew, the statistical work grew with it. His Highness had named her the territory’s “database” — his word, not one she recognized from anywhere she had studied. He described it, though, as something essential: a database, he said, allowed him to estimate next year’s development, make economic and military plans, and root all his decisions about the territory in actual data rather than impression. The nickname made her sound like a warehouse, but the role, she had decided, was worth carrying.

She read without stopping. The documents moved under her hands, their contents settling into memory without effort — the one faculty she had that no amount of training could have produced in anyone else.

The door opened.

A woman dressed as a City Hall apprentice bowed from the threshold. “Lady Scroll. My name is Freya. His Excellency Carter from the Department of Justice requests the information on refugees who completed resident verification in the past week.”

Per His Highness’s standing order, requests involving complex data required Barov’s approval. Individual records could be provided directly. Scroll checked the signature on the form, summoned the Book of Magic, and displayed the relevant contents on its open pages.

“There.” She offered it. “Give this to Mr. Carter.”

“Th — thank you.” Freya took the book with the exaggerated care that people always used on first contact with the Book of Magic — as though it might bite.

“It won’t harm you,” Scroll said. It was an old reassurance by now. “The book will vanish in four hours. Per the Constitution of Confidentiality, it cannot be passed to anyone other than Carter.”

“Yes, my Lady.”

Freya backed out and pulled the door shut. In the instant before it closed, Scroll heard the hall: dozens of voices, chairs, footsteps, the sound of a building working on a day it was supposed to be resting. A weekend — officially a rest day — and the City Hall was as busy as any morning of the week. The construction expansion had everyone buzzing with a restless energy, and with His Highness offering overtime pay, no one chose to stay home.

She didn’t always understand his decisions. To her eye, City Hall work — writing official documents, collecting data, making reports — was considerably less demanding than the labor of miners or furnace workers, who earned less. Raising the salary for the easier work struck her as illogical generosity; a lord had only to issue an order and the work would be done. The comparison to most nobilities she had encountered made His Highness seem almost impractically kind.

And yet.

She touched the edge of the document in front of her and thought about the numbers she had memorized. A year ago, only the miners had stable income in Border Town. Now: their wages had doubled, as had those of the furnace workers and common laborers who had once earned the least of anyone. Assemblers in the steam plant and operators in the acid plant had seen their wages rise eightfold, and the number of positions continued to grow. Anyone who had not been present a year ago would find these figures literally unbelievable.

It didn’t matter that His Highness didn’t seem like a real lord. What mattered was that he was the kind of person who produced these outcomes, and had produced them consistently, and showed no sign of stopping.

Scroll couldn’t imagine where the territory would be in another year. She was certain, though, that it would be somewhere none of them could currently picture.

“Lady Scroll.” Roland’s guard pushed open the door. “His Highness wants to see you.”

When she reached the castle’s third floor, Roland was organizing manuscript pages into a stack. He looked up when she entered.

“I’d like you to record these.” He pressed a hand to the back of his neck. “It took at least half my cognitive reserves to complete this draft. Even knowledge I used constantly in — at the time, I could only partially reconstruct from memory, and I had to rederive several formulas myself.”

She ignored the phrasing. She had long since stopped pausing at his unfamiliar turns of phrase. She picked up the manuscript.

The letters on the cover were in an orange unlike any shade she had seen used for a title. They spelled: Calculus.

She flipped through two pages. She could not begin to guess what the word meant. The notation inside was like nothing in the books she had previously memorized — not numbers but symbols, an entire system of marks that seemed to constitute a new written language. It had the quality of something that Anna and Tilly would immediately understand and she would need considerable time to unpack.

She began memorizing it without waiting for comprehension to arrive.

“What’s the average income of residents in Border Town?” Roland asked.

“The minimum is ten silver royals per month, the maximum forty,” she said, without pausing. “To calculate an accurate average I’d need the Book of Magic, and it’s already been used once today.”

“That’s fine. Give me the number the day after tomorrow.”

“If my other work doesn’t increase, I can have it tomorrow.”

Roland waved acknowledgment. “I need it to set the fee structure for the water and heating supply. The collective heating project begins in a week. When it’s finished, the city will stay warm through the entire winter — however long it lasts.”

She had heard him describe plans before and learned to believe them. This one, though, stopped her for a moment: a city where winter’s coldest weeks posed no threat. Another miracle that would have been called impossible before he arrived.

“Tomorrow, then — if there’s nothing extra.”

“Tomorrow would be excellent.” He shook his head with something like a rueful smile. “I wish you could turn the Book of Magic into a storybook. Or anything Anna hasn’t already read.”

“A storybook?” She almost missed it, then caught herself. “Tomorrow is Miss Anna’s—”

“Day of Awakening,” Roland said. He nodded. “Yes.”

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