Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 55: A Once-in-a-Thousand-Years Opportunity

The door closed behind Petrov, and Roland let the expression fall off his face.

He picked up the letter, unfolded it again, and read it a second time more carefully — not because he’d missed anything, but because there was a habit his previous life had left him of confirming that what he’d read was what had been written, and not what he’d wanted it to say.

It said the same thing the second time.

He dropped it on Barov’s desk on his way through the hall, didn’t break stride, and went to his office and sat down with his feet on the desk in a posture that would have horrified his staff if any of them had been watching, and permitted himself a moment of what he could only describe as profound satisfaction.

Barov arrived three minutes later, reading while walking, which told Roland the administrator had recognized immediately that this was not a social visit.

“Your Highness,” Barov said carefully, “the King’s death—”

“Is not what concerns me right now.” Roland took his feet off the desk and sat properly. “The trial is suspicious. The recall order is Timothy’s play. The question is what he expects people to do about it.”

Barov frowned at the letter. “Most will comply. Or attempt to delay.”

“Or attempt to run.” Roland spread his hands on the desk. “My sister Garcia will not comply. She has a fleet and a harbor and more intelligence than any of the rest of us, and she will have read Timothy’s motive before she finished the first paragraph of this letter. She’ll make her own move.”

“And if she does?”

“Then Timothy has a problem on two fronts instead of one, and his attention is divided.” He paused. “That is a structural advantage we should not waste.”

Barov waited, with the expression of a man who had learned that waiting was usually the right choice in this room.

“First: your family,” Roland said. “And Carter’s family. Write them letters today. I’ll have the guards take them when they escort the ambassador back — they’ll go to shelter in a town that isn’t on anyone’s list of interesting places. Not Border Town. Not yet. Just somewhere they’re not a leverageable asset.”

The assistant minister’s expression shifted — not quite surprise, but a recalibration. “My family, Your Highness?”

“Timothy took the throne by removing inconvenient people. If I stay in Border Town — which I intend to do — I become officially non-compliant. Duke Ryan will use that. He’ll use whatever pressure he can find.” Roland looked at him steadily. “I don’t want your loyalty tested by something I could have prevented.”

A silence of perhaps ten seconds, which in Barov’s register was the equivalent of an emotional speech.

“I understand,” the administrator said. “Thank you, Your Highness.”

“Second: the ore trade. We stop selling iron ore to Willow Town after the current contract. Rough stone only. I need the iron.”

“Our revenue—”

“Takes a cut, yes. The miners found gems last week — that partially offsets it. And winter is slow regardless; we’ll only run two or three trade missions between now and spring. It’s the right time to make the change quietly.”

Barov wrote it down without further argument, which meant he’d done the arithmetic himself and arrived at the same place. Good.

When the administrator left, Roland called Carter in.

“Expand the militia. Another recruitment round, same evaluation process. Find the strong ones and promote them to team captain. Use the same training program.”

Carter’s expression did the thing it did when he was about to professionally object to something. “Your Highness, with the standard training cycle, it’ll be months before they’re deployable—”

“Deployable against what?”

A pause. “Against whatever Your Highness has in mind.”

“Demonic beasts are mindless. They scale in mass and difficulty, not in tactics. What we need is enough people to cover the wall length and enough discipline to hold their positions.” Roland leaned forward slightly. “The enemy I’m concerned about isn’t a demonic beast. It’s a noble’s private army, trained to fight the way private armies have always fought — in the expectation that the other side fights the same way.” He held Carter’s gaze. “We don’t fight that way.”

Carter stood very still for a moment.

“Yes, Your Highness,” he said, and left.

Roland sat alone in the office and allowed himself to think through the full implication.

Border Town had two thousand inhabitants. This was enough to run a small workshop, a modest militia, and a sufficiently impressive dinner table. It was not enough to drive industrialization at any meaningful scale. The machines he was building required operators; the operators required training; the training required time; the time required that the operators not also be farming to survive. The math was unforgiving. More people was not optional. It was the prerequisite.

He’d considered the conventional solutions and found them each worse than the problem: slaves were expensive and arrived without applicable skills; imported talent cost more than slaves; artificially stimulating the birthrate would take twenty years to produce results he needed in three.

He had been, in the honest part of his mind, somewhat stalled on this particular problem.

And then the King had been murdered, and a recall order had arrived, and Duke Ryan of Longsong Stronghold had made the calculation that this was his opening.

Roland made his own calculation.

Longsong Stronghold had ten thousand inhabitants. It was the commercial center of the western border, had been for centuries, and its wealth was real wealth — not the performance of wealth that provincial nobles put on for visiting assessors, but actual accumulated capital, trade infrastructure, and more population per square mile than anywhere within three days’ journey.

Duke Ryan intended to use the recall order as legal cover. The new king commands it; I only enforce the command. He would move at the end of the Months of the Demons, when the roads were clear. He would come with the weight of royal authority behind him and the full force of his alliance behind that.

Roland intended to be ready.

The logic was not complicated. If someone was going to force the confrontation — if Duke Ryan had decided, under Timothy’s banner, to come for Border Town — then the outcome of that confrontation would either establish who controlled the west border or it wouldn’t. And if it did, and if the force that controlled the west border was Roland’s—

Ten thousand people. Three hundred years of accumulated trade wealth. A location that controlled river access through the mountains.

What’s easier than annexing a population? What’s faster than consolidating existing wealth?

He was already writing the deployment timeline before he realized he was humming.

He stopped humming, out of professional respect for the gravity of the situation.

But the timeline was good. The timeline was very good. He went over it twice and couldn’t find a flaw he couldn’t plan around, and by the end he had covered both sides of the paper and started on a third sheet, and the afternoon light had shifted while he wasn’t paying attention, and somewhere outside the window the first evening wind was moving through the grey streets of Border Town.

He capped his pen.

Timothy may believe he lit a fire under me, Roland thought. He did. Just not in the direction he expects.

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