Rewrite That Witch
CH507 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 507: The Wind-up

“Your Majesty—the road to the palace has been cleared. The city is yours.”

Iron Axe knelt. His voice carried the edge of something that wasn’t quite awe and wasn’t quite relief but lived in the narrow country between them.

The battle had begun the previous morning and ended in the small hours of this one. After entering the city, the First Army had needed four hours to seize the palace in the Inner City and the great church in the east. The remaining work—clearing out pockets of resistance, eliminating the last of Timothy’s organized defense—was underway and largely complete.

Roland looked around the pier. Everyone was exhilarated. The soldiers and the witches both had the quality of people who had held themselves tightly under pressure and were now releasing carefully, the way a spring unwinds. If he had made an announcement, they would have cheered. He hadn’t.

Timothy’s rule was finished. That made Roland King of the Kingdom of Graycastle, coronation ceremony or not—the title followed from the fact. He would hold a ceremony eventually, for the symbolic value, but the function preceded the form.

What he actually felt was calm. Quiet. Something close to relief, though not the triumphant kind.

This city—the political and economic center of the Kingdom of Graycastle, built over centuries, seat of the Wimbledon family’s power—did not resonate with him the way it presumably should have. It was an ordinary city. Less developed than Longsong Stronghold. The streets were wider, the buildings older, the walls more impressive; but the thing that made a city worth anything was what happened inside it, and King’s City had spent the last year happening wrong. What delighted Roland was not the city but the fact that the chaos of the Crown Prince Selection Decree was over, and he could concentrate on what he had actually been doing since the beginning: building.

Still, a victory was a victory—and a significant one. When the news spread, it would carry his name further and faster than any messenger he could send. New authority, new weight, new ability to recruit talent and implement change. The spring offensive was half complete. He looked south, toward Fallen Dragon Ridge and the territory beyond it.

Later. First this.

“We enter the city,” he said.

Iron Axe rose and turned to the guards. “Column of Twos—escort your new King.”

The weapons came up in unison. “Long live King Wimbledon! Long live His Majesty!”

Roland stepped off the warship and walked toward the palace.

The streets were nearly empty. The signs of fighting were heaviest near the palace—broken stone, scattered weapons, the dark stains that needed no explanation. In the Inner City the destruction was comprehensive: shattered property, traffic barriers reduced to splinters, blood on the cobbles in patterns that told stories Roland chose not to read too carefully.

His heart ached at it regardless.

The casualties were still being counted. More than twenty soldiers’ bodies had already been sent to the rear, despite Nana arriving quickly enough to save many who would otherwise have been added to that number. Without her, the count would have tripled. She was twelve years old and had spent the morning working on men who had been cut and shot and crushed by stone, and Roland had watched her face go blank in the particular way it did when she was focusing past what the work required her to see.

That debt has no accounting.

At the palace entrance, the guards knelt. Two columns of them lined the road to the castle, in formation, weapons at their sides, heads bowed. It was not a military salute—the First Army’s form was different, the raised hand, the straight back. This was something older. They were not greeting a commander. They were acknowledging a king.

Roland did not stop them.

He passed through the castle garden. Childhood memories arrived without warning—not his, but the prince’s, and therefore now his in the way all inherited memories were his: the three blue stone buildings arranged in a triangle around the aquatic garden, where the Wimbledons had lived for generations. The Hall of Sky Dome on the left, where banquets and ceremonies had been held—largely destroyed now, ten stone pillars still standing in the wreckage, the roof blown away by one of Lightning’s bombs. The City Hall and library on the right, both guarded and intact.

In the center: the Holy Temple of Double Towers.

It was an extraordinary structure. The oval three-story base alone was larger than the castle area in Border Town; the two lofty towers rose from it on either side, one shaped like a king’s crown, one a queen’s—the supreme symbol of the royal family’s authority. Between them, two crossed iron cables hung in the void: the Kamon, the crossed-guns emblem of the Wimbledon line. The entire composition was architectural argument made permanent in stone.

Roland climbed the spiral staircase and entered. He knew the chambers and hallways without needing to be shown. The prince’s memory was thorough here, where it counted.

Inside, along with the armed guards, stood a group of nobles doing their best to look composed and failing at it. When Roland entered, they knelt.

“Rise.”

He took the throne and looked down at them. He recognized most of the faces: Lauren Moore, Treasurer. Bullet Flynn, Minister for Diplomacy. Pilaw, Minister of Justice. Marshall, Director of Intelligence. Marquis Wyke, Prime Minister. Others whose family histories traced back to King Wimbledon III or beyond.

They had pledged allegiance to Timothy when Timothy took the throne. They would pledge allegiance to Roland now, following the same logic—the king changes, the ministers endure, the royal family’s administration continues. It was a sensible system, provided the incoming king needed what the outgoing king’s ministers offered.

Roland did not need them. Not as they were. Not with their histories unexamined.

This was not a reception. It was a trial.

“Timothy Wimbledon is suspected of the murder of Prince Gerald, treason, and collusion with the Church. He is in custody and will be publicly convicted. Does anyone wish to speak to these charges?”

Marquis Wyke found his footing first. “These are capital offenses. I personally tried to dissuade him, though I lacked the means to succeed. You have removed a plague from the Kingdom, Your Majesty.”

The other nobles chimed in agreement.

“Did you?” Roland said. “When he was committing these crimes, you watched with folded arms—or worse, you held the torch. Your ‘vain persuasions’ changed nothing. Tell me honestly: what did you actually do?”

“Your Majesty, the situation was more constrained than it appears.” The Marquis frowned. “Timothy replaced the old loyalists with his own people—Lanry, Scar, Marquis Morris. He controlled both the knights and the conscription army. We commanded nothing.”

“He didn’t even hold a trial before executing Gerald,” Pilaw said, coughing. “The executioner was a knight. We had no authority to stop it.”

“So none of what happened this past year had anything to do with you,” Roland said. He looked at them—the survivors of a court that had watched a king frame his brother and order soldiers fed Berserk Pills to attack civilian territory—and felt something beyond contempt, something closer to tiredness. These men had served the kingdom with great skill once, or their fathers had, and the institution had long since consumed whatever sharpness had made them useful. They were comfortable parasites now, and they knew it, and they were gambling that Roland needed them enough to overlook it.

He did not need them.

“Since you insist on your innocence, we’ll play a game,” Roland said.

The word game went through the room like a stone through water.

“A trial game. I ask questions; you answer. Ten questions total. You’re out of the game if you lie.” His eyes moved across them. “And you only get one chance at each answer.”

Discussion

Suggest a change