Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 57: Cara the Snake Witch

Wendy was not as easy to convince as Nightingale had hoped.

She sat quietly and listened to everything — the whole telling, from the moment Nightingale had slipped into Border Town to the green fire and the soldiers’ bow and Roland’s finger in the flame — and at the end of it, she did not look convinced. She looked careful, which was a different thing.

“Did he really say that?” she asked. “In those words?”

“I can tell when people are lying,” Nightingale said. And then, because Wendy already knew this: “He wasn’t.”

“I know you can.” Wendy looked at her with the steady attention she gave to everything — not skepticism, but the particular quality of a person who had been given beautiful things before and had learned the cost of believing in them. “I also know you believe what you’re saying. That doesn’t mean he meant what he said the way you took it.”

Nightingale stopped herself from answering. Wendy wasn’t wrong. A noble could believe what he said in the moment he said it, could genuinely want to build the thing he described, and still find a thousand reasons why it couldn’t be done when the Church pressed him, or when his rivals moved against him, or when the first witch in his care did something that frightened someone important. Belief wasn’t the same as commitment, and commitment wasn’t the same as capacity. She knew that.

She had also stood on the wall at Border Town in the dark and watched him not flinch.

If you do not step out, you will never know the answer.

She told Wendy that. Wendy was quiet for a moment.

“That’s not a lie,” Nightingale confirmed, before she could ask.

“No,” said Wendy slowly. “I don’t suppose it is.”

The camp gathered that evening.

They came in from outside in ones and twos, the witches who’d spent the daylight hours ranging out for food and wood and water, and when they saw that Nightingale was back they came toward her with the warmth of people who have very few people they can afford to lose. There were thirty-two of them now. The white mourning bands on a dozen arms marked where there had been more.

Nightingale told it all again, longer this time, with more detail, because some of these women had not been inside a working town in years and she wanted them to understand what the wall looked like and what the steam engine sounded like and how many people had been in the square the day Anna held the fire. She took out the copy of the construction blueprints Roland had given her, and passed it around, and watched their faces while they looked at it.

When she got to Anna’s day of adulthood, something changed in the air.

It was a specific kind of silence — not the silence of disbelief, but the silence of people who have wanted something so badly for so long that they have learned to be afraid of wanting it. She watched them look at each other. She watched a woman near the back of the group press her knuckles to her mouth.

No pain, Nightingale had said. She went through it and felt no pain.

A path opened in the crowd.

The woman who walked through it was perhaps forty years old, though she had looked forty for as long as Nightingale had known her — age seemed to find her uninteresting. Her hair was green, not by any natural process, and her arms from wrist to shoulder were covered in snake tattoos that moved when she moved, in the way that very detailed ink sometimes seemed to. She was not large. She was not loud. She walked through the crowd the way the crowd was there to witness her walking, which in Nightingale’s experience was the most efficient way to command a room.

Nightingale bowed.

“Respected Mentor.”

Cara looked at her without expression. “I heard your story.” Her voice was always like this — hoarse and hollow, as though it came from somewhere deep rather than from the throat. “Tell me. Do you want to say that everything we have built here is wrong?”

“No, mentor, I’m saying it’s an opportunity—”

“Enough.” She raised a hand, and Nightingale stopped. “I don’t know what this prince did to your thinking when you went to his town. But I know what a witch hears when she listens long enough to the right kind of noble. She hears what she wants to hear. And she begins to believe it.” Cara turned from her to the assembled women, sweeping her gaze across them with the calm certainty of a woman who has never doubted her right to speak to a crowd. “Have you forgotten? Have any of you forgotten what they did to you?”

She didn’t wait for an answer.

“They called it God’s judgment. They made it into law. They built the machinery and the prisons and the pyres, and they used them on us — on our mothers, our sisters, our children — not because we were evil, not because we had done evil, but because they were afraid.” Her voice had found its register now, the one that filled a cave without effort. “And now you hear that one of them — one noble, in one border town, with reasons of his own that we are not privileged enough to know — has decided that we are useful to him. And you want to call that salvation.”

Nightingale said: “I’m not calling it salvation. I’m calling it—”

“Our power does not come from the devil,” Cara said, and her voice cut across Nightingale’s without any apparent effort. “We have always known this. The Church knows this too, and hates it — because if our power is not from the devil, then their authority to hunt us is not from God. And if their authority is not from God, then we are not the children of darkness. We are—” she paused, long enough to be intentional — “the children of God. And the Holy Mountain is not a legend.”

The cave was very still.

“We have found a clue,” Cara said. “In twenty days, when the blood moon rises above the Great Shimen, we will find the gate. We will cross to the other side. We will have what we were always meant to have — not shelter under the hand of one noble, but our own place, our own rule, our freedom that we will not have to earn from anyone.” She looked at Nightingale one more time, and something moved in her expression that was not quite compassion and was not quite contempt, but occupied the space between them. “The suffering during the day of adulthood is a test. The ones who survive it are the ones who were meant to. The ones who did not—” a slight pause — “were not strong enough.”

In the silence, Nightingale heard the mourning bands on thirty arms.

“Come back,” Cara said, more quietly. “Forget what you saw. You were deceived — it happens, you’re young. Come with your sisters to the Holy Mountain, and I will forgive what you said tonight.”

Nightingale looked at Wendy. Wendy’s face was composed and still.

She looked at the women around the room — some of them watching Cara, some watching her, some looking at the ground. At the white bands. At the hands folded in their laps.

She shook her head.

“Anyone who wants to leave with me is welcome,” she said. “Anyone who stays — I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

She had taken two steps toward the entrance when she felt it: a small, precise sting at her ankle, low enough that she’d looked down at the ground rather than around it. The snake was blue and black striped, barely the width of her finger, and already gone. The venom moved upward through her leg in a wave that her mind had time to catalog — paralytic, fast, Cara’s ability, she was ready for this, she had it waiting — before the cave tilted sideways and the ground came up and everything became dark.

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