Rewrite That Witch
CH569 · Rewrite
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Chapter 569: Power Threatened

Spring ended without fanfare, and the city began to change.

The first wave arrived in dozens. Then the dozens became hundreds, and the hundreds — as the envoy teams found their rhythm from the previous year’s experience — became something approaching a tide. Every day, boats from Redwater City and Willow Town unloaded at the Border Area pier, each one carrying refugees from the eastern and southern regions who had heard, through the circuitry of rumor and desperate hope, that Neverwinter was stable and plentiful and would take them in.

The pier ran on ninety percent of the city’s constabulary. Medical inspection lines stretched from the barrier to the river. The residential officers worked a triage system: riverbank boardrooms for the first arrivals, cave dwellings in the west city for the overflow, formal residences for those who cleared processing quickly enough. City Hall commissioned temporary barracks at the gathering points in Redwater City and Willow Town — porridge, water, medical triage — to keep people alive and orderly until the boats could reach them.

City Hall itself had become a different kind of place.

Voices carried from every corridor. Documents moved from desk to desk without settling. The outer office sounded like a trading floor at market open:

“Three ships from Redwater City, 126 aboard, blue flag on the mast — Bob’s in charge—”

“How many batches today?”

“Four, maybe five. Stop asking and go meet them—”

“Who covers Bob’s route to Redwater City when he’s here?”

“Bring soap when you go. You can’t find any there—”

Barov sat in his office with the door closed and the sound filtering in regardless, and felt something that was not the usual productive pleasure of a busy ministry. He felt distress. Not because of the work — he had always found more work brought more satisfaction, not less. The distress had a specific cause, and the cause had green hair.

Edith Kant had been in his office for two weeks.

“Director.” An assistant appeared in the doorway. “The Ministry of Justice is asking for more personnel again. Chief Knight Carter says without a hundred additional constables, he can’t hold the city’s order together. He said if His Majesty asks who’s responsible—”

Carter. Who is now Chief Knight, and therefore speaks directly to His Majesty. “Put it on my desk. I’ll handle it later.”

“Yes, sir.”

The assistant left.

Edith’s voice arrived immediately afterward, the way it always did — quiet, unhurried, and entirely unbothered by the fiction that this was someone else’s domain. “Is this the recruitment order? Since you’re occupied, allow me to draft it.”

Here we are. Barov set down his pen. He could find no argument against the offer that did not make him look petty. That was the particular quality of her encroachments — they were always framed as assistance, always technically appropriate, always leaving him with no graceful refusal available. He said what he had to say: “That’s fine.”

Several minutes of rustling. Then the paper appeared on his desk, completed.

He read it.

“Based on the recent recruitment drafts,” Edith said, from the opposite desk, “the standard posting calls for reliable candidates with clean records — but there are very few such candidates left who haven’t already been approached. Rather than posting bulletins and waiting, it would be more efficient to pull the residential archive files and identify a hundred unemployed locals directly. The Ministry of Justice offers better salary and welfare than most positions available. No one who qualifies will decline. This saves approximately a week over standard procedure and reduces the Chief Knight’s complaints by the time of the next meeting with His Majesty.”

She did not state this as a proposal. She stated it as the conclusion of an analysis that had already been performed and resolved.

Barov looked at the draft. He could not find an improvement. “Do it your way,” he said.

He watched her turn back to her desk, and behind his neutral expression, he examined the feeling.

This is what it means to have grown up in a duke’s household, educated by people who were doing serious work. The administrative intuitions that took a man of his background years to develop — she had arrived with them. She had no knowledge of Neverwinter’s specific systems, none of the local texture that he had built his authority on — but she learned it in hours, not weeks, and she had arrived already knowing how to think.

And His Majesty is not yet married. And she is the daughter of a duke.

He let that thought sit for a moment, then deliberately removed it from the center of his attention. Panicking about the future was a luxury. The present needed management.

What he needed was a problem she could not solve. Not to embarrass her — that would be counterproductive, and Roland Wimbledon was not a man who missed the difference between genuine incompetence and manufactured difficulty. What he needed was a demonstration that governing Neverwinter required a specific depth of local knowledge that could not be improvised.

He retrieved the grain statistics from his secondary drawer and placed them on her desk.

“We have a problem,” he said, keeping his voice measured, just serious enough. “Our grain reserves may not last until the wheat harvest.”

Edith picked up the form. Her eyes moved down it, unhurried.

“The current consumption rate—” she began.

“Yes. With the refugee intake continuing at this volume, we run short before July. And we cannot stop the intake.”

“His Majesty’s population target?”

“Deeper than that.” Barov shook his head. “If we turn away people at the gathering points, Redwater City and Willow Town face disorder. We destroy the reputation we have built for reliable welcome. Future recruitment becomes significantly harder. His Majesty’s development plan requires numbers well beyond one hundred thousand — he has told me this directly. The City Hall does not disrupt his plan over a grain problem. This is my responsibility as minister.” He paused, letting that settle. “Do you have a solution?”

Edith looked at the statistics form for a moment longer.

Her eyebrows had risen fractionally. That meant she was working the problem — the particular upward tilt that appeared, Barov had noticed, when something resisted the first approach.

He touched his beard and waited.

No one who has been here only two weeks knows about Leaf. No one who grew up in the Northern Region knows the specific character of this city’s extraordinary tools. You can be exceptional, Miss Kant, and still find yourself standing at a wall you do not have the keys for.

He waited with the patience of a man who knows what the answer to a question is, and has arranged to ask it anyway.

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