Rewrite That Witch
CH534 · Rewrite
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Chapter 534: The Value of Witches

“What are you doing?”

“Let her go!”

Iffy twitched her lips and raised her hand. The cage dissolved and Maggie fell.

A gold streak crossed the grass—Lightning, moving fast, fist already raised. The cage snapped shut around her before she closed the last meter. She hung suspended, knuckles centimeters from Iffy’s face.

“Stay out of this. It’s none of your business.”

Iffy flung the cage sideways. It tumbled through the grass, Lightning bouncing inside until it rolled beyond the range of her power and dissolved. Lightning scrambled to her feet, dirt on her cheek, and was already angling back when she saw Roland walking forward.

The slap landed clean.

Silence.

Iffy didn’t cover her cheek. She stood with her hand at her side, staring at him in genuine disbelief. Then, slowly, she went to one knee. “Pardon me, Your Majesty.”

Roland surprised himself. He had not decided to do it. He had seen Maggie fall, had felt something ignite, and his body had moved before anything else. Like watching a child he loved being hurt by someone who saw that child as furniture.

“Why?” He kept his voice level, though it cost him. “Why did you do that?”

“Her potential responds to physical extremity. I wanted accurate results.” Iffy’s tone was even—clinical, almost. “It appears that even an evolved non-combat witch cannot rival a combat witch in raw power.”

Roland had no answer for a moment. He turned to where Wendy stood with Maggie in her arms, the small white-haired girl’s face buried against Wendy’s shoulder.

“How is she?”

“She’ll be fine. Some welts and bruising.” Wendy had rolled up Maggie’s sleeve; red marks tracked across the pale skin where the cage had pressed. Her expression said everything her voice carefully did not.

“Coo,” Maggie said, muffled, into Wendy’s arm.

“I’m aware of my own precision,” Iffy said behind him. “The marks will fade in two days—”

“Apologize to her.”

Iffy blinked. For a moment she looked genuinely thrown. “I apologize, Your Majesty.”

“Not to me. To Maggie.”

She pressed her lips together. She did not speak.

Roland looked at her—arms at her sides, jaw tight, burning—and felt the anger in him cool into something colder and more useful. He had been naive. He’d assumed the Bloodfang Association’s hierarchy stayed within its shores. If she behaved this way on someone else’s territory, in front of her host lord, she behaved far worse at home.

The situation was impossible in a direct way. He couldn’t punish her back into gentleness; that only produced witches who performed contrition while feeling none. He couldn’t send her back to Sleeping Island without conceding the problem to Tilly—he’d promised Tilly she could always rely on him. And humiliation wouldn’t move someone whose entire identity was built on being unmovable.

The only path was the one that broke the premise itself.

“You think you’re more powerful than the non-combat witches,” Roland said, “so you can hold them in contempt. But you’re not as strong as you believe.”

Her chin came up at that. Her eyes were the kind of still that precedes motion.

“You think combat witches are the protectors of the others because strength determines value.” His voice stayed flat. “That logic breaks down the moment you stop being the strongest thing in the room.”

“Your Majesty,” Iffy said, a tight edge in it, “are you saying a non-combat witch could defeat me?”

“I’m saying most witches in the Witch Union could.” He glanced at Lightning, who had been watching with an expression of sharp, dawning comprehension. She gave him a small nod. “Witches you would call assistant witches. Witches who have never thrown a punch in their lives.”

“That’s—”

“Tomorrow,” Roland said. “You and Maggie. A duel.”

Iffy went very still.

“You and the—” She stopped. Breathed. “The pigeon?”

“Tomorrow,” he repeated. “Then you’ll see whether what you believe is actually true.”

The bedroom held bread, mushroom soup, a roasted joint, stewed greens—enough to constitute a real meal.

Softfeathers eyed the table. “We get meat? I thought they’d give us cold water.”

“Conditioning me before the duel.” Iffy pulled off a piece of bread and bit in. “He has too much confidence in that bird.”

“Maybe there’s something in the food.” Softfeathers considered the soup. “Laxatives. Something like that.”

“Then don’t eat it.” Iffy reached for the joint. “No one’s making you.”

“I’m not the one dueling.” Softfeathers climbed onto a stool and pulled the mushrooms toward her. After a moment: “Did you have to do that? Lady Heidi told us to read the situation here. She didn’t say antagonize the lord.”

“Interesting opportunity.”

Softfeathers tilted her head. “That’s why you did it? You found it interesting?”

Iffy didn’t answer. She watched Softfeathers until the younger witch looked away and muttered, “Fine, forget I asked.”

The trouble had started when the witches who’d spent time in the Western Region had come back to Sleeping Island. The things they’d described—non-combat witches valued, commoners treated as capable people, witches and ordinary people working together and building something—had excited precisely the witches the Bloodfang Association considered dispensable. Lady Heidi had decided it was a story Tilly had constructed to consolidate her support. Any self-respecting lord, she’d maintained, would value the witches who could fight.

But today’s test had surprised Iffy.

He had treated every witch the same. He had praised Softfeathers. He had looked at Maggie the way a person looks at someone they care for.

None of this was what surprised her most.

What surprised her most was Maggie herself—clumsy in speech, embarrassingly enthusiastic about food, clearly taken for a pet on Sleeping Island. And yet every witch in that field had moved when she was hurt. Not from duty. Not from fear of the lord’s displeasure. They’d moved because they cared.

Iffy had never seen anyone react to her own injury that way. Not once.

She was still trying to understand what she’d felt when Maggie fell, and why she’d squeezed the cage when she could have simply held it.

It had looked like cruelty. She suspected, privately, that it was something else.

The duel was a ridiculous idea. A pigeon against a trained combat witch. She would demonstrate, clearly and without ambiguity, the difference between someone like herself and someone like Maggie.

She would demonstrate it, and everything would be resolved.

That was what she told herself, finishing the bread.

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