Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 440: The Court Trial

Roland was reviewing the power grid layout for the first residential district when Carter’s report arrived. He set down his pen when it was finished.

He had known something like this would happen. A ban strict enough to matter was a ban strict enough to be worth breaking, and the incentive structure of a grain surplus distributed through individual quotas had a predictable failure mode. Knowing it would happen did not make it less grim when it did. This was the first case of its kind, which meant the sentence had to be heavy enough to function as deterrent—not for Gold alone, but for everyone who received the bulletin afterward.

He also made a note to finalize the legal code and hire specialized officers to conduct interrogations and hear cases. When the city reached its full population, criminal cases would multiply faster than he could personally adjudicate them. He could not play judge indefinitely.

The trial convened in the castle hall.

Roland took his seat on the throne. Barov sat beside him. The two suspects knelt on the stone floor, faces drained of color, eyes unfocused—men who had never been inside the castle in their lives and were discovering, now, exactly what that meant.

Roland cleared his throat. “Tell me everything you did. If you hold anything back or lie, your guilt doubles.”

They seemed to surface from some private paralysis. Both spoke at once; Roland let them go. The serf—Gold—was loudest. “Your Highness! Lord! I know what I did was wrong, but I wouldn’t have done it if I’d had a choice! The officials wouldn’t buy my grain at the posted price—I had no other way to live!”

The case, as it emerged, was simpler than Roland had assumed and more complicated than it appeared.

The City Hall had set individual grain quotas slightly above actual consumption—a deliberate buffer to reassure the citizenry. This meant a modest surplus every month, and Parker, a resident of the Sixth Residential Area, had recognized the opportunity early. He ground the excess into flour, mixed in a few self-grown herbs, and sold savory pancakes from a stall in the Convenience Market. Staples were restricted; finished goods cooked from those staples, it turned out, were not. The business had run for months and produced a steady trickle of silver.

The problem: the surplus was finite, and Parker had wanted to expand. He had begun buying from Gold—a serf who, for reasons that would become clear, had grain to sell.

And then the serf’s last words: the officials wouldn’t buy at the right price.

Roland looked at Barov. “Did the Ministry of Agriculture deviate from the purchasing rules?”

Barov held his gaze steadily. “The minister is Sirius Daly. He’s unlikely to have authorized a deliberate deviation, but you can question him.”

Sirius arrived within the hour, still wearing the measured deference of the Wolf Family’s knightly tradition. He listened to the question and answered without pause: “Your Highness, here is what happened. We continued purchasing through the bumper harvest as instructed. But grain quality degrades over winter—especially for serfs who were relocated from shacks to the temporary housing areas and had no proper storage. By winter, we were receiving wet, discolored, moldy product. Standard practice: we reduced the purchase price in proportion to quality. For this particular serf, the quality was so poor that we offered one-fifth the harvest price. The grain was barely salvageable.”

“Your Highness, that’s the same as refusing to buy!” Gold’s voice came up from the floor. “I worked all year on that farm. One-fifth is less than Black Street offers. You said the prices wouldn’t change!”

“The price for good grain doesn’t change,” Barov said sharply. “You knew why you were hoarding it. If there’d been a supply crisis in town, you’d have sold at three times the price. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

The shape of the case became clear, and it was not the shape Roland had expected.

He had come in thinking: food smuggling, straightforward prohibition violation, heavy deterrent sentence required. What he had found instead was a serf who had held grain too long in poor conditions, watched it deteriorate to the point of near-worthlessness, and then desperately traded it to someone willing to take it at a fraction of value. And Parker, who knew what he was buying—wet, partially moldy grain—and had been making pancakes from it and selling them to citizens in the Convenience Market.

The serf’s crime was deliberate and knowing. Sentence accordingly.

Parker was more difficult. Roland turned the question over. He had read Scroll’s accounts of what poverty meant in practical terms: bark, grass, anything with bulk, taken without regard for whether it was food. In those conditions, the category of “edible” expanded considerably. Parker had lived in poverty before Border Town. He may genuinely not have understood that selling adulterated food to the public was a crime of a different kind from selling grain without authorization.

Roland stood. The hall quieted.

“I pronounce both men guilty.” He looked at the serf first. “You knowingly violated the ban on private grain sales. The violation was deliberate and self-interested. Ten years of labor in the mines. Good behavior may reduce the term.”

He turned to Parker. “You violated the same ban, and additionally used degraded grain of substantially low quality to produce food you sold to other citizens—two separate offenses. Ten years of labor, and a fine of three times your total earnings from the pancake sales.” He let it settle. “Both sentences take effect immediately.”

The two men seemed to deflate where they knelt. Guards moved to them. The sound of feet dragging on stone faded down the corridor.

Roland turned to Sirius. “Write up the full sequence of events—every detail, start to finish. Hand the draft to Barov for review. Once it clears, I want it published. All citizens should understand what happened, and why the judgment came out as it did.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

He called Carter to the office afterward.

“I heard the arrest was Vader again.”

“Yes.” Carter nodded. “Though they went outside protocol this time—removed their uniforms, and one of them got into a physical altercation with a civilian during the surveillance operation. I was planning to issue a warning.”

“Don’t.” Roland leaned back in his chair. “Commend him instead.”

Carter blinked. “Your Highness?”

“A plainclothes operation that reads the situation, adapts the approach, and still lands the arrest with both the suspect and the goods intact—that’s not a protocol violation, that’s judgment. Vader grew up in Valencia’s street culture. He understands how Black Street operates from the inside.” Roland tapped his fingers on the desk. “When the time is right, I want to move him to the Security Bureau.”

Nightingale needs competent people around her. He kept that last part to himself.

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