Rewrite That Witch
CH570 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 570: Edith’s Reasons

In a sense, there was no solution.

The total grain was fixed. After the Months of Demons, the kingdom’s circulating supply would enter its annual shortage — prices rising, shelves emptying, the market locking up until the new wheat came in. Autumn was the season of trade; after that, the demons, and the cycle would repeat. The people who felt it most were always the same people: the refugees, the Rats, the penniless, who managed the winter on whatever they had when the cold arrived, which was never enough.

As for the merchants — they were waiting. Barov knew this instinctively, from years of reading the grain market. They were sitting on their reserves until the ears matured, watching prices climb. What they held might stretch to feed a few thousand additional people. Not tens of thousands.

So, Barov thought, completing his preparation. She will suggest reducing the ration. Changing from bread to oatmeal. Suspending new refugee intake. These are the obvious moves, and they are all wrong — they break His Majesty’s promises, they undermine the city’s reputation, and they risk the food panic that makes a shortage into a catastrophe. I will explain why each suggestion fails. She will find herself at a wall. And then she will ask me how I would handle it, and I will tell her about Leaf — because the answer was always mine to give.

He watched her read the form. The eyebrows settled. She put the list down.

“Actually,” Edith said, “it’s not a significant problem.”

Barov blinked. “What?”

“Before Deepvalley Town was developed, most land in the Northern Region was unsuitable for wheat cultivation. Every spring brought genuine shortage there. The local lords had two options: buy from the Eastern Region or the Kingdom of Dawn — or take.”

“You mean—”

“Since they couldn’t grow enough and couldn’t afford to buy, they raided.” Her tone was the tone of someone recounting geography. “Is His Majesty’s army not currently moving on Fallen Dragon Ridge? I understand Countess Spear’s brother has rallied a number of local nobles against her. That means resistance. That means targets.” She set the form aside. “We have both cause and means. His Majesty’s forces move through — and we assess what is in the basements. Those nobles have been sitting on the kingdom’s grain output for years. They use it to control their freemen and farmers, and to sell at premium in lean years.” A slight pause. “Fallen Dragon Ridge alone should cover ten thousand people’s food. If not, the Southeast Region has several cities that have not yet come under His Majesty’s laws. The timeline for the campaign means grain captured in the next several weeks will arrive in time to refill the granary.”

The room was quiet.

“But they are nobles—” Barov started, and stopped himself.

“After His Majesty takes the territory, they are not nobles anymore,” Edith said simply. “They are subjects who resisted. And Fallen Dragon Ridge is already the crucial pass on the road south — it will have to be administered regardless. The City Hall will send people to establish a local government, implement the city’s laws, initiate urban planning, begin the education system. The grain is incidental to a process that was already necessary.” She looked at him with an expression he was still learning to read. “The question was always about speed.”

Barov sat with it. She found a different wall. Not the witch wall he had planned for — a different wall entirely, one he had built the question around, only to discover she had not entered the labyrinth at the same point he expected.

He thought about Leaf. He thought about the grain witch who could bring a field of wheat to harvest in a day, whom he had intended to reveal as the answer no outsider could know. He thought about the fact that Edith’s solution required no witches, no local knowledge that was not available in the documents she had read in her first two weeks — only a clear reading of the military situation and the political logic underneath it.

What confuses me, he admitted privately, is how she adopted His Majesty’s manner of thinking so quickly. Even I, after years of service — even I needed time to understand that the old rules no longer applied. That the nobles were not a fixed class but a category of convenience. That the kingdom’s grain was not the nobles’ grain but the kingdom’s grain.

She had been here two weeks.

He touched his beard and said, carefully: “You accept His Majesty’s approach to the nobility without reservation?”

Edith’s expression shifted — not to discomfort, but to something close to amusement. “I find it more interesting than the alternative,” she said.

The Foreign Affairs Building was quiet when Edith returned. Cole was at the desk with a thin book open, bent over it with the focused stillness of a young man who has discovered something genuinely engaging.

“What’s that?”

He looked up. “I bought it at the Convenience Market. It looks like a picture book but it has stories. Very interesting.” He studied her for a moment. “You look pleased.”

“Do I?”

“In City of Evernight, you never looked like this,” Cole said. His tone was not critical — just observant, the way younger siblings observe the moods of the person they have always watched for signals. “We’re not going back, are we?”

“Temporarily.” She sat across from him and took the book from his hands, glancing at the cover. The Witch Diaries. “When Father replies, His Majesty will likely allow you to return to the Northern Region.”

“But not you.”

“No.”

“Why?” He leaned forward. “Is the City Hall really that fascinating?”

“Not the City Hall.” She set the book on the desk, face up. “Roland Wimbledon’s City Hall.” She let the distinction sit for a moment. “Do you know how I got things done in City of Evernight?”

“You told Father, and it was done.”

“More or less. I gave an order, and people carried it out — not because of me, but because of who I was. They knew Father would follow my suggestions. They acted on my behalf because my identity made it rational for them to do so.” Her voice was neither bitter nor proud about this — simply factual. “That worked inside the Kant Family’s domain. Nowhere else.”

Cole waited.

“Here, my identity is not an asset. It is closer to a liability.” She touched the cover of the book. “There are almost no nobles in the City Hall. No one cares whether I am the Duke of the Northern Region’s daughter. Everyone is operating on what they can actually do. When people accept your judgment, it is because your judgment proved to be correct — not because your father would be displeased with them if they refused.” She looked at Cole. “Do you understand what that means?”

“Not really.”

“Feudalism gives nobles what looks like great power. But it also sets a ceiling on that power. The ceiling is the size of your domain.” She straightened. “His Majesty intends to expand his domain to the entire continent. If that succeeds — and I think it may — the City Hall becomes an institution that governs everywhere. If you are recognized within that institution, your judgment carries weight in every corner of Graycastle. Possibly further.” She glanced out the window at the smoke rising from the industrial slopes. “Why would I limit myself to one manor in the North, when I could have that instead?”

Cole was quiet for a long moment.

“You are going to be very difficult to live up to,” he said finally.

Edith smiled — the same rare, genuine expression he had mentioned earlier, the one she apparently wore without noticing. “Go to bed, Cole.”

She picked up the book and opened it, and did not look up again.

Discussion

Suggest a change