Rewrite That Witch
CH043 · Rewrite
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Chapter 43: Be Strong

Anna hadn’t come yet.

Nana heard footsteps on the stairs and went to the door with her heart already lifted, composing her face into the expression that meant I was just checking, I wasn’t waiting — and then Roland appeared at the top and she let the expression drop.

“She’ll come by later,” he said. “She’s still at the workshop.”

“I know.” Nana went back to the table. “The grey powder again.”

“Among other things.”

Nana propped her chin in her hand and looked at the window. She had work too. She had very important work. She was here to heal soldiers who were hurt defending the town, which was vital and necessary and would presumably require soldiers, who were not here yet.

She did not feel bored. She felt ready.

Roland pulled a chair to the fireplace, sat down heavily — the way a man sat who’d been on his feet since before dawn — and was asleep in approximately four minutes. Nana watched him for a moment. He’d been building walls, training the militia, managing the mine, preparing for the beasts. She’d seen the candles burning in his study at hours when nobody ought to have candles burning.

He’d come to her with his hat in his hands and asked if she would do this.

You’ll encounter things that make you want to keep living, he’d said, even when living is hard.

She hadn’t understood it then. She understood it better now — not the words, exactly, but the shape of what he meant. It was the same shape as Anna: blue eyes, that particular stillness of someone who had decided to hold her ground. That was why Nana had said yes.

She wanted to be as strong as her sister.

The fire crackled. Roland snored once, softly.

An invisible hand closed around her arm before she reached the door.

“Just a moment,” Nightingale said, from somewhere near the window. “There’s more than one person.”

Nana pressed her free hand to her chest. “You always do that.”

“I know.”

Brian’s voice came up the stairs ahead of him. “Miss Pine. Burn victim.”

The patient arrived unconscious, carried by two guards and a short man whose face was stripped raw by grief. Nils — Nana would learn his name later. He stood by while Brian bound Titus’s wrists and ankles to the bed, a precaution Nana had been told about and not yet needed. Brian drew the curtains and led the small man out, speaking quietly.

Sir Pine appeared from somewhere, as he tended to. He stood beside Nana and watched her look at the curtain.

“Nana,” her father said.

She made herself look.

The face that should have been a face had been remade by steam into something else — skin the color of overdone candle wax, the dead white of tissue where no blood remained. Blisters at the neck and jaw, some burst, a fluid she had no word for mixing with blood into the pillow. She could see, distantly, the person who had been there before. Couldn’t quite connect it to someone living.

She took two steps back. Closed her eyes.

Treat the injured the same as you treat the little animals. Roland had told her that. They’re just bodies trying to heal. You help them along.

She thought of the sparrow with the broken wing she’d mended last spring, sitting in her palm while the bone knit under her fingers. She thought of Anna.

She stepped forward and put her hands out.

The power came the way it always did — up from her chest, down through her arms, pooling green and luminous in her palms. She could see it clearly; apparently no one else could. She let it fall across the ruined face and watched the skin shift: dead tissue sloughing away, new skin rising underneath like something being uncovered rather than built. The blisters flattened. The color returned, slowly, then all at once.

She did not faint.

The man’s breathing eased into sleep. His bound hands uncurled.

Nana exhaled.

“My God.” Sir Pine’s hands came down on her shoulders and she could feel him trembling, though she didn’t think he knew it. “That’s — good girl. You’re remarkable.”

“It was Miss Pine who healed me when I was injured,” Brian said from the doorway, with the reverence of a man who had made up his mind about something permanently. “I owe her my life.”

He still doesn’t know it was Nightingale who got him out, Nana thought, and felt a complicated fondness for him.

Roland came through the curtain rubbing sleep from one eye. “How is he?”

“Healed,” Brian said. “Completely, Your Highness. As if —”

“Yes.” Roland crouched beside the bed so his face was level with the waking man’s. “Titus. Can you hear me?”

The man opened eyes that were unambiguously working. He blinked at the ceiling. Then at Roland. Then at Nana. “I — what happened to me?”

“You were burned. You’ve been healed.” Roland stood. “The young woman who treated you is a witch. Healing is her ability.”

Nana’s heart did something abrupt.

Titus looked at her. The gratitude on his face shifted — she’d seen that shift before, knew what came after it. “A witch? But aren’t they —”

“Don’t.” Sir Pine’s voice came out low and hard, nothing like his usual register. “My daughter just healed you. You were dying. She brought you back.” He waited a beat. “Does the devil do that?”

Titus’s mouth closed.

“Thank you,” he said, finally. “Miss Pine. I’m sorry.”

She nodded. She wanted to be somewhere else, but the voice in her head said: hold your ground.

Afterward, when Titus had been clothed and sent out, Sir Pine turned to Roland with his worry plain on his face. “Once word spreads —”

“Word will spread. That’s the point.” Roland glanced at Nana, and there was something in his expression she couldn’t read fully — looking at something past the room, past this winter. “If Nana is known for what she does rather than feared for what she is, we have something to work with. Otherwise she spends the rest of her life hiding, and eventually someone finds her anyway.”

Sir Pine said nothing.

“Real freedom is what I’m working toward. For all of them.” Roland picked up his coat from the chair. “It’s not close. But it’s reachable.”

Nana turned the phrase over. She already felt free — freer than before, when she’d kept herself in the house and kept her hands to herself and kept everything carefully small.

But Roland had said Anna would be free too, eventually. Free enough to walk to Karl’s school under open sky, the same as anyone.

Nana decided that was worth being strong for.

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