Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 50: The Wall of Fire

“Better?”

Anna kept her hand on Nana’s back until the worst of it was over. Nana straightened, pressed her sleeve to her mouth, and nodded — the particular nod of someone who had decided to be better regardless of the answer.

The man on the bed was still breathing. His intestines were back where they belonged, the wound closing under Nana’s hands in that slow green light that only Nana could see. He’d been conscious when they’d brought him in, repeating help me in a small cracked voice while his eyes asked a question nobody wanted to answer.

Nana had looked at the wound, looked away, and vomited.

Then she had looked back at the wound and gotten to work.

Anna thought that was about the bravest thing she had ever seen.

The second horn shook the walls of the hospital.

Brian was off the bed he’d been sitting on before the last note faded, pacing the length of the room in three steps and turning and pacing it again. Sir Pine watched him from the chair without moving, one hand still on the sword he was cleaning.

“Young man.”

Brian stopped. “Sir.”

“A knight doesn’t enter a battle already undone.” Sir Pine set the sword across his knees. “His Highness put you here for a reason. Your duty isn’t to the wall — it’s to this room. To her.” A slight tilt of his chin toward Anna.

Brian looked at the floor. “I know. I just—”

“I know what you just.” Sir Pine’s voice was not unkind. “Sit down.”

Brian sat.

The horn sounded again — shorter this time, more urgent, the kind of sound that didn’t wait for you to finish what you were doing.

Anna was already standing.

“Anna,” Nana said.

“Stay with your father.” Anna picked up her coat from the peg by the door. Her voice was perfectly level, which was how you could tell she’d already decided.

Brian stood up again. “His Highness said—”

“His Highness said to protect me.” Anna looked at him, not unkindly, with the blue eyes that tended to end arguments. “If you’re protecting me, you’re following his orders. That’s not a contradiction.”

Brian opened his mouth, closed it, and looked at Sir Pine.

The old knight had the expression of a man watching something work exactly as designed. He nodded once.

“Yes sir,” Brian said, and the blood came back into his voice.

Nana watched them go, then looked at her father.

“My battle is here,” Sir Pine said, already anticipating the question. He picked up his sword and resumed cleaning it. “At your side. Whatever comes.”

Nana sat down beside him and didn’t say anything else.

The wall had a hole in it the size of a house.

Anna saw it from fifty yards away and kept running. Behind her, Brian was keeping pace and not asking questions, which she appreciated. Ahead: the breach, stone rubble scattered inward, dust still hanging in the cold air. Roland’s guards were pushing back against something she couldn’t see from this angle, their line ragged and giving ground.

The bear-demonic beast came through the gap moving like a flood.

It hit the front rank of the militia and they scattered — not breaking, not running, but scattered, knocked sideways like pins. A thing that big didn’t need to be fast to be unstoppable; it simply was, and the men in its path were in its path.

Brian went for it.

He dropped low, swung his sword in a two-handed arc at the beast’s leading foreleg, and connected — and the sword spun out of his grip from the impact while the beast’s legs folded under it, cut and broken. It went down screaming, thrashing in a way that kept everyone at a distance, big enough that even disabled it was dangerous.

Anna walked up to it.

She put both hands flat on the frozen ground beside it. She felt the fire come the way it always came — from somewhere in her chest, answering a question she hadn’t spoken aloud. She let it out.

The beast became fire, and then became coal, and stopped moving.

Anna stood up.

Forty yards away, Roland was staring at her with an expression she’d never seen on him before. Something between alarm and calculation, the face of a man watching a plan revise itself in real time.

I know, she thought at him. I know this wasn’t the arrangement.

He turned and said something to Nightingale — too fast for Anna to hear — and then pointed at the breach.

She was already moving toward it.

The guards stepped aside as she came through. She’d half-expected them not to. She walked to the edge of the breach and spread her arms and sent the fire out along the stone, up the fractured walls on each side, across the gap — a curtain of flame that climbed and steadied and held, orange and gold against the grey sky, filling the hole as completely as the stone had.

The snow within twenty feet melted instantly. Steam rose in white sheets. The men nearest her had to fall back from the heat, and the demonic beasts outside did the same — pressing back toward the treeline, circling the edges, finding no passage.

The line held.

Roland’s voice from somewhere behind her: “Get back on the walls! Hunter squad, fire at will!” And then the guns started again, and the men were moving with the purpose of people who had something to fight behind.

She heard them cheering something — his name, she thought, and Border Town, and something that sounded like it belonged on a battlefield rather than a provincial wall at the edge of the world.

She didn’t turn around. She kept the fire.

The sky was dark by the time the last of the beasts were down.

Anna let the fire go slowly, the way you let go of something you’d been holding hard — carefully, making sure before you opened your hands. The flames receded into the stone and then into her and then were gone. The breach was still open. The cold came back immediately.

She was aware of being very tired in a way that started in her bones.

Behind her, someone moved. Then more than one someone.

She turned.

Roland’s personal guards had their fists pressed to their chests. They were bowing — to her, toward her, the way they bowed to him. One by one, and then not one by one but all together. The militia further back saw it, and the gesture moved through them the way the cheering had moved through them, spontaneous and unstoppable.

No one said anything.

No one cursed at her or stepped away. They just stood in the silence of the smoke and the cooling stone and looked at her, and then they bowed.

Anna didn’t know what to do with her hands.

Roland appeared at her elbow. He looked at her the way he had looked at the milling machine when it ran correctly the first time — the expression of a man who was not going to say everything he was thinking.

“Are you all right?” he said.

She smiled, which took more effort than it should have.

Then the ground tilted in a way that had nothing to do with the ground, and she fell into his arms, and let him hold her up.

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