Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 509: To Become a King

The stone steps carried a memory Roland had not asked for.

He recognized the feeling as he descended—not dread exactly, but the echo of it, old and physical, the kind of fear that lives in the body long after the mind has moved on. He searched the prince’s memory for the source and found it quickly.

He had been twelve years old. Timothy had invited Gerald and Garcia and little Roland to explore the palace basement together—a rare invitation, the younger prince eager to be included in something that felt like an inner circle. Timothy had stolen the keys from the guards. At the bottom of the stairs, he had locked Roland in a cell and left with the older two, laughing.

Little Roland had been alone in the dark for the full night. A guard had once told him that the wails he heard echoing up through the stone came from ghosts in the world beneath the palace. He had believed this. He had been too frightened to cry out—afraid the noise would draw the ghosts—and had eventually pressed himself into a corner, arms around his knees, face buried, sobbing until his face ran.

He had not come back to the basement after that.

He understood now that the wails came from prisoners being questioned in the cells below. The palace jail was small and not heavily used—hence the sounds were intermittent, occasional enough that a child might not connect them to anything human. The building was full of things like that: history worn smooth by time until it no longer looked like what it was.

Timothy was in a small cell at the bottom floor. Compared to the city jails, it was almost comfortable—dry, clean, no vermin, no smell. It was also, Roland noticed, the specific cell where little Roland had spent that night. The symmetry was not lost on him.

Timothy sat against the wall in the way men sit when they have run out of plans. He looked up when Roland entered—and he looked, in many ways, the same. The Wimbledon coloring: gray eyes, gray hair. Their father’s nose and jaw, the same short curly hair. The long, narrow eyes that made the face a degree more cold than it might have been otherwise, especially in torchlight.

The previous Roland had been afraid of those eyes. He had never met them directly. He met them now.

They watched each other for a while. The torches burned. Neither spoke. Then something in Timothy’s expression shifted—the effort of projecting authority into a situation that no longer contained any—and he let it go.

“Who the hell are you?”

His voice was dry. The emotion underneath it was fear—Roland could hear it the way you hear water under thin ice. Timothy had known Prince Roland well enough to recognize that something was wrong, that the person looking at him from the other side of the cell bars was not the person he had locked in this room twenty years ago.

Roland crouched until his eyes were level with his brother’s. “I’m Roland Wimbledon. You don’t remember me?”

“No.” Timothy’s voice was unsteady. “He could never look at me like this. He couldn’t meet my eyes.” He pressed himself back against the wall. “I know what you are. You’re the real demon—not lured by them, not allied with them. You are one. You’ve stolen my kingdom.”

Roland did not bother explaining. There was nothing useful in the explanation and no one left to care about it. “So what if I have?” he said. “You think you’re better than a demon? You killed our father. You framed Gerald and had him executed without trial to keep a throne you stole. You allied with the Church—the institution our father despised above all others. You sent men drugged into madness to slaughter their way through Garcia’s territory. In a single year, you drove half the kingdom into chaos and left ordinary people with nothing. Even demons wouldn’t do all that.”

“I didn’t kill our father!” The protest came out with more force than Timothy likely intended. “He killed himself. He drove a dagger into his own heart—while smiling. Just like you—he was controlled by demons at the end!”

Roland frowned. “Suicide?”

“He was in his bed, the same as any night, and then he just—drove it in. While smiling.” Timothy’s voice cracked at the edge of the word. “There wasn’t any warning. I couldn’t stop it.”

“Not a witch?”

“He wore a God’s Stone of Retaliation! I checked. There was nothing—” His voice broke to a rasp. “It just happened.”

Roland looked back at Nightingale. She gave a small, precise nod.

An attaching magic witch—one whose power functions without contact, or functions through the Stone’s interference. The Church’s pure witches were different from the untrained women who developed abilities in the common population; their methods were not catalogued in the same way, their limits not understood. A witch who could reach into a man’s mind through a God’s Stone, find the moment when his resolve was lowest, and make him act on an impulse he might never have acted on alone—it was not impossible. The refugee incident had shown that Church witches could pass as civilians, enter protected spaces, and act without being detected until the moment they chose.

If the Church had killed King Wimbledon III—if the Royal Decree on Crown Prince Selection had been their instrument, designed to provoke exactly the civil war that followed—then the purpose was not to support any particular heir but to destabilize the kingdom, to create the conditions for Church expansion into the resulting power vacuum. He would need someone to confirm it. The High Priest of King’s City’s church would know something.

“But that doesn’t justify framing Gerald,” Roland said, keeping his voice level. “Or expanding the war into the South. Or feeding civilians Berserk Pills.”

“Even without the Pills, who could guarantee Garcia wouldn’t use them?” Timothy crawled forward and gripped the cell bars. His knuckles were white. “If anyone had recognized me as the legitimate king from the beginning, none of it would have been necessary. What does any of this have to do with a demon like you? What do you want from me?”

“To expose your crimes, judge you, and send you to the guillotine—like Gerald, except you’ll be tried and proven guilty of things for which death is still insufficient justice.”

“You can’t kill me!” The composure broke entirely now. “Demons like you can’t stand in the light—the deities will destroy you. If you want the Kingdom of Graycastle, you need me alive. You have to rely on me.”

“Deities,” Roland said. “You mean the Church.”

“You don’t know them! Their hidden strength is beyond what you’ve seen. Our father’s notes—there were things he wrote down that kept him from moving against them his entire reign. The Pills were only one of their instruments.” Timothy’s voice had gone hoarse. “If they discover what you are, there will be no escape. Not for you.”

“I know more about the Church than you think I do,” Roland said, “and I have a clearer view of the road ahead than you imagine. It’s a hard road. You don’t have the capacity to walk it—you never did.” He straightened. “Your life ends here, for what you’ve done. But relax: you won’t be the only one going to hell.”

He left the cell without turning back. Behind him, Timothy’s voice rose in the dark, but the stone walls absorbed it, and by the time Roland reached the stairs, it was only sound.

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