Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 539: The Melting Ice

Agatha came back late. The sky had gone fully dark by the time she pushed through the castle door, and Wendy was sitting in the living room, waiting for her.

“You worked this late again.” Not an accusation—there was no edge in it, only the slight furrow of concern. “Come back earlier next time. At least so we can have dinner together.”

“I lost track.” Agatha shrugged out of her coat and hung it by the door. “The final batch of nitrogen—I got caught up in the process. And the Lord puts lights in the chemical plant that make it bright as noon. Difficult to notice the sky.”

Wendy sighed in the way she sighed when she had already accepted something. “Your dinner is on the table. It’s still hot. Go eat.”

“Thank you,” Agatha said—and meant it more than she had expected to.

Wendy was the most respected witch in the Cooperation Association. Roland trusted her without reservation. In Taquila she would have held an executive position under the Three Chiefs—the kind of rank that came with distance, protocol, a careful formality in all dealings. It was entirely impossible that a person of that standing would have carried dinner to a colleague’s room and waited for her to come home. And yet.

“You’re welcome.” Wendy pressed her hand briefly to Agatha’s shoulder. “If you feel strained, ask Echo to sing the hot spring song for you. You’re part of the Witch Union too—remember that.”

The Witch Union.

Agatha was still for a moment after the door closed. Then she crossed to the table and lifted the lid of the metal insulated box.

Three dishes and soup: barbecue steak, fried mushrooms, sliced bread, egg soup. And in the corner of the box, tucked in like a secret—a small dish of honey.

She swallowed.

Even Wendy noticed.

During the barbecue feast, when everyone else had reached for pepper powder and salt, Agatha had worked her way through an entire jar of honey with what she had believed was discretion. During the decades of the Union’s war—Taquila under siege, supplies dwindling in ways that only became apparent after years of quiet subtraction—meals had meant grain and orchard fruit, and occasionally meat when the supply held. Spices were high-official luxuries. Honey was produced by witches who could keep bees, and those witches were all on the front lines because the Federation did not “waste” them on comfort foods.

She had missed honey.

She had not told anyone she missed honey. She had thought no one was paying attention.

Something shifted in her chest—small, unexpected, difficult to name. She was not cold in the way others were cold; she’d lost most of her sensitivity to temperature when she’d last been in a living body. But sitting alone in the room after Wendy’s visit, she noticed something that might have been coldness, or might have been its absence. The room was quiet and it was hers alone, and both of those things—which she had requested, arranged with Roland, preferred—felt slightly different than usual.

Perhaps sharing a space with others is not the worst thing.

She spread honey on the bread with careful evenness and ate it slowly, paying attention.

After dinner she opened Elementary Chemistry—not because it advanced her own understanding, but because the alchemists at the chemical plant had begun asking harder questions, and she preferred not to look lost in front of them.

A batch of strangers had arrived recently. Paper had identified them as the Alchemist Workshop’s relocated staff—students and masters from King’s City, including the workshop director Kyle Sichi and his student Chavez. Every day Agatha watched them cross between the laboratory and the plant with expressions of suspended disbelief, mouths falling open at the same intervals, as though reality kept producing facts they needed several seconds to accommodate. Several of them had identified Agatha as a senior alchemist of some kind and had attached themselves to her, their questions progressing from embarrassingly simple to genuinely interesting in the space of a week.

In order to maintain the dignity of the Quest Society—and, if she was honest, out of a certain competitive stubbornness—she was determined to hold her own.

But what she had confirmed, working alongside them, was something that still cost her something to acknowledge: the Union had been wrong.

Roland had proven that the wisdom of the nobility was not extraordinary. And the wisdom of these ordinary people—she had watched them master nitrogen equipment in days, discuss the composition of air, argue about element theory, and she had seen several white-haired old men consulting with Paper—who had been startled by the honor—without any apparent awareness that they were supposed to find this unusual. They absorbed and adapted with a speed that matched anything she had seen among witches.

The witches are neither the chosen nor the abandoned. At the core, the difference between them and the common people is a question of what they were born with—not of what they are. In the Battle of Divine Will to come, each part was necessary. The witches were not the whole.

Perhaps this was what the deities intended. With any part missing, the whole cannot hold.

A knock at the door.

“Come in. It isn’t locked.”

Nightingale entered—unhooded, tall, catching the light in the way she always did, as if the shadow that followed her was a choice rather than a condition.

“His Majesty wants to see you.”

“If he intends to lecture me about balanced work habits,” Agatha said, setting down the book, “I am already aware of the argument and will apply it in future. He doesn’t need to spend his time on it.”

“That’s only part of it.” Nightingale’s mouth curved slightly. “He also wants to discuss fighting the demons.”

Agatha stared.

“What?”

She was already standing. The book landed on the table without ceremony. “Take me to him now.”

She arrived at the office at a pace just below undignified.

“At the moment,” she said before Roland could open his mouth, “we have fewer than ten operational Longsong Cannons. You cannot attack Devil’s Town the way you’d attack a human fortification—they don’t rout at ten percent losses, they don’t abandon positions when the center breaks, and they’ve been building those defenses for longer than we’ve been a city. If you commit the army to an assault on their camp, you lose everything we’ve spent four years making.”

Roland looked at her with an expression of mild confusion.

“What are you referring to?” he said carefully.

“Aren’t you planning to fight the demons?”

He glanced at Nightingale. A short laugh escaped him. “Not their camp. I don’t want to destroy anything. I want to catch a few of them alive.”

Agatha stopped.

She stood there for a moment with the remaining momentum of her alarm going nowhere.

”…Oh,” she said.

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