Chapter 540: Different Concerns
“Is that all?”
Agatha exhaled.
A few living demons, not an assault on their encampment. The panic drained out of the room like water through cracked stone. Even a small number of Mad Demons, caught unaware, fell within the capabilities of a handful of Senior Witches. The numbers were survivable.
“Have you found a method to confine them?”
“The newly arrived witches.” Roland described Iffy’s cage and Softfeathers’ adhesive ability, then how the balloon could carry the load once a demon was contained. He mentioned the shackles he planned to commission. “What I need to understand is how long the Red Mist in a demon’s canisters will last once they’re separated from the source, and whether we can produce Sigils from their blood after death.”
“Now I understand what you’re after.” She had been assembling the plan as he spoke, and the whole shape of it became clear at once. “The Red Mist in a standard canister lasts roughly one day under normal conditions. The number of canisters a demon carries depends on mission length—surveillance and patrol units typically carry three to four, which is also the maximum their mounts can support.”
“Why that limit?”
“Once separated from the Blackstone Pagoda, the Mist begins losing effectiveness—slowly but irreversibly. If that weren’t true, the Quest Society would have been farming demons and manufacturing Sigils centuries ago.” She paused. “The Three Chiefs tried it—attacked demon outposts, attempted to seize the smaller field Pagodas. The demons always destroyed them before falling. What the Blessed Warriors recovered was a withered stone, rough and dark, fragmenting at the surface. Whatever the Pagodas are made of, they only function intact.”
“‘Withered,’” Roland repeated, the word catching his attention. “For stone.”
“The surface texture changed completely—rough, discolored, crumbling when touched. Nothing like what the warriors had first observed. We didn’t know what it was made of, only what happened to it.”
He turned that over for a moment. “If we capture a demon and keep it alive, can you produce Sigils from the magic stones?”
“Given an independent laboratory, twenty common people as assistants, and sufficient experimental materials—” she counted on her fingers “—I estimate an eighty percent probability of producing simple Sigils. Advanced ones require Magic Stones we don’t have, so that question is academic for now.”
“None of that is a problem. The problem I’m less certain about—” Roland’s voice dropped slightly “—is what happens if the capture draws a larger response. If more demons follow.”
Agatha couldn’t quite suppress the sound that escaped her. “You’ve been managing your territories with considerable self-assurance. I didn’t know this was something you worried about.”
“I prefer certainty where I can get it.”
She settled into the chair across the desk. “You don’t fully appreciate what you have here, Your Majesty.” She said it without apology; it was simply accurate. “The Union at its height—when its authority extended across the whole of the Fertile Plains—had just over one hundred Senior Witches. Fewer than forty of them were combat witches. Those forty were the load-bearing columns of the Blessed Army. What you have in this castle is a higher concentration of Senior Witches than most Union commanders ever worked with, and your weapons amplify their reach considerably. Even without special preparation, your Witch Union could handle a patrol group without difficulty. Even a Lord of Hell—Miss Anna can activate the Sigil of God’s Will twice.”
“Ah.” Roland sat with that for a moment. “I’d nearly forgotten that.”
“You should try to remember it.”
“Thank you for the suggestion. Genuinely.”
“You’re welcome. Defeating the demons is the purpose I have left. Please don’t waste this opportunity.” She stood, smoothed her coat, and turned toward the door.
“One more thing.”
She stopped.
“Earlier—when I mentioned the demons—you burst in ready to argue me out of attacking Devil’s Town directly. And you made a very coherent case against it.” He raised his eyebrows. “That’s a significant departure from when you first arrived here. At that time, you were the one pushing for an immediate offensive—capture the Chaos Beasts at any cost. What changed?”
The heat arrived in her face before she could prevent it. She was quite certain her cheeks were visibly red.
The truth was this: when she’d first arrived, she hadn’t believed him. She’d thought his confidence was performance, his military claims were exaggeration, and the correct approach was to push him toward action before he wasted what advantage he might have had. She’d said things out of pique that she’d meant less than half of. But the city had continued to grow. The army had taken King’s City. The industries had produced things the Union would never have imagined, and they’d done it with ordinary people who learned as fast as witches. She had changed her assessment, and the assessment had changed her.
She could not say any of this without sounding exactly as foolish as she had been.
“Did I say something like that? I don’t recall it.”
“You were quite emphatic at the time—”
“Your Majesty.” She forced a yawn with professional composure. “I find I’m suddenly very tired. Please excuse me.”
She left at a dignified pace and did not look back.
The corridor to the Witch House ran between open windows, and the breeze off the river reached her there—cool, unhurried, the kind of air that exists after the day’s heat has finished its work. She stopped for a moment and let it settle her.
Above, the stars were coming out in their thousands.
She thought of what Wendy had said—one day, he will become King of Graycastle and lead us to defeat everything that stands against us. This I believe—and the expression that had accompanied it: undefended, absolute, the faith of someone who has decided to trust and has not reconsidered.
When Agatha had first heard it she’d felt the twin weight of envy and pity. Envy for the simplicity of it. Pity because conviction alone had never been enough—the Union had believed in itself completely, and it had still fallen.
But standing here, breathing the river air, watching the stars multiply overhead, she found the envy remained and the pity had gone.
She was beginning to believe it too.
Iffy did not remember walking back to her room.
The afternoon had filled her head with sound—the crack and roll of hundreds of muskets firing in sequence, white smoke rising in sheets from the ranked rows of soldiers—and the sound had not left. She had tried to cage the bullets with her magic. Even sensing them crossing the field’s perimeter, she hadn’t had the speed to close the trap before they’d struck the targets. She’d felt them through her power like rain through open hands: too fast, too many.
He didn’t lie.
The modified rounds Maggie had used against her were nothing. The standard rounds punched through wooden targets at a hundred steps with force that left no margin for the kind of calculation combat witches built their confidence around. And the cannon—a weapon that required a telescoping sight to observe its own impacts, whose range made the distance between a witch and safety a theoretical abstraction—the artillery commander had called it old-fashioned field artillery. The Longsong Cannon was the real instrument.
Heidi Morgan lied to us.
She said it to the ceiling, without heat.
Softfeathers was sitting on the edge of the other bed, her knees pulled up, watching Iffy with an expression Iffy had only seen on her a handful of times—the expression that meant she had also arrived somewhere difficult and was sitting with it.
“Maybe Heidi doesn’t even know what’s possible,” Softfeathers said quietly. “What do we do now?”
Iffy was quiet for a long time.
The math was simple and brutal. Heidi had built the Bloodfang Association’s identity on the premise that combat witches were the indispensable core—the protectors, the symbols, the ones who determined whether survival was possible. But the army Iffy had watched today didn’t need the Bloodfang Association. It needed Lotus. It needed Honey, and Evelyn, and Candle, and Soraya, and Paper. It needed the ordinary people who operated the nitrogen equipment and maintained the artillery and turned raw iron into functional machines. The combat witches of the Bloodfang Association, with all their training and their pride and the ideology that had been hammered into them through years of whippings and competitions over shared meat—they were less useful here than a single assistant witch who understood chemistry.
Everything she had been proud of was a story told to produce a specific kind of soldier. The story was not untrue, exactly. But it was not complete. And the incompleteness had cost—
She could not finish the thought without arriving at Annie.
“I don’t want to go back to the Bloodfang Association.”
Softfeathers was still. Then, almost imperceptibly, she nodded. “Me neither.”
A beat of silence. Then: “Are you crying?”
Something salty reached the corner of Iffy’s mouth. She wiped her cheek and looked at her fingers.
“I don’t know.”
It had been a long time since tears. She had learned to treat weeping as something that happened to other people—the ones the Association called sheep, the ones without enough to protect.
Beasts don’t cry.
Or if they do, it’s not for themselves.
She closed her eyes. Salt ran warm down the bridge of her nose.
If we had found the Witch Union first, Annie—if we’d walked in the other direction at Graystone, if the church hadn’t cut us off—
She pressed her hand over her mouth.
Forgive me, Annie.