Rewrite That Witch
CH578 · Rewrite
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Chapter 578: A Life-or-death Report

Yorko’s life had become remarkably comfortable.

The King of Dawn still recuperated behind closed doors. Prince Roland seemed to have forgotten he existed. And the Kingdom of Dawn’s nobility had not forgotten him at all — they remembered the title Wimbledon’s Royal Ambassador with the precision that distinguished men who lived by status hierarchies from men who merely inhabited them. Three or four banquets a week. Private clubs Denise brought him to that did not appear on any civic register, whose address you only learned from a member. Food and drink calibrated to a refinement that Neverwinter, for all its ambitions, had not yet reached.

He found he missed very little about home.

His title made all of it possible. Nominally equivalent to an earl, but an earldom commanded respect within its own borders and deference outside them — always with a slight diminishment the further you traveled from the fief. An ambassador of a reigning king carried privilege wherever he was received, at full strength, portable as a letter of credit. Yorko had navigated status hierarchies his entire adult life. This was the cleanest position he had ever occupied.

Hill Fawkes ran the intelligence work in the background. Whenever Yorko made a new contact, Hill spent the following three nights learning everything knowable about that person: rank, interests, routines, the things they never said aloud. Each morning he delivered a quiet accounting — inventory, Yorko always thought, the tone of a man reading a warehouse ledger. With Hill’s findings in hand, Yorko entered every social situation with the particular ease of someone who has already read the ending.

Hill had also quietly managed the slave purchasing scheme.

After one especially easy evening with Denise — she had the gift of conducting negotiations in a way that felt like nothing more than interesting conversation in a warm room — Yorko had laid out the proposal: her caravan network, a purchasing route for refugees from existing traffickers, transport to Graycastle, identity papers for each arrival as a free citizen. Denise agreed immediately. Her condition was that Yorko absorb all transportation costs. He worked through the math over breakfast the next morning — manpower, food, vehicle fees, incidentals — and set the resale price at ten silver royals per person.

Hill arranged the details. Yorko returned to his schedule.

The report that the first batch of twenty-five had been secured arrived on a Tuesday. One hundred twenty-five silver royals from His Majesty, for work accomplished primarily in comfortable rooms with pleasant company.

Is there any position in the world where you earn money this way?

He was still deciding how to spend the afternoon when a servant appeared. “Your Excellency. The eldest son of the Luoxi Family requests an audience. Lord Otto.”

The Luoxis were one of the three families — second only to the Moyas. Denise had advised him to be careful there. He had been careful. He could not imagine why one of their sons was at his door.

“Bring him in.”

The young man who entered was not the version of a noble family’s eldest son that Yorko expected. He checked the room before he sat, then closed the windows himself without explanation. Dark circles under the eyes; hands not entirely still; the look of someone who had not slept, and had spent the sleepless hours deciding something he still wasn’t certain of.

Yorko waited. The silence lengthened.

“You have a way to reach His Majesty Roland Wimbledon.” Not quite a question.

“I do. What brings you here, Lord Otto?”

A folded letter on the desk between them. On top of it, ten gold royals — bright against the dark wood of the desk, small and declarative.

“Make certain this reaches your king. What’s written here concerns the survival of the Kingdom of Graycastle.”

Yorko studied the young man’s eyes for exaggeration and did not find it.

“I understand,” he said. “It will reach him.”

After Otto left — moving with that taut, held-back urgency, like a man keeping himself from running — Yorko pocketed the gold royals and left the letter precisely where it lay. Hill would know the correct approach. Yorko, for his part, had learned early in life that not all information was improved by being known.

Hill arrived after dark, as usual — no announcement, the familiar knock-and-enter. Yorko walked him through the afternoon’s visit.

Hill listened to the complete account, then took out a small knife and opened the letter in a clean, practiced motion.

“What are you doing!” Yorko came half out of his chair. “That’s correspondence intended for His Majesty—”

“Quiet.” Hill spread the paper flat on the desk in the circle of candlelight. “A conventional messenger from here to Neverwinter takes a month. Roads fail. Couriers can be intercepted.” His voice was entirely level, the voice of a man describing weather. “I keep gray falcons.”

“I thought those were hunting birds.”

“They’re couriers. Faster than any pigeon, and considerably smarter — relay-style from bird to bird, they can cover the distance in under a week. But they can’t carry a full envelope. I need to condense this to oilpaper.” Hill was already reading. The candle threw steady light across his face, and in that light something shifted in his expression — not fear, but the sober recalibration of a man adjusting his estimate of a situation upward. “I’ll rewrite the essentials and send it tonight.”

Yorko’s eyes moved toward the letter.

“Don’t,” Hill said, without looking up.

“I haven’t done anything.”

“You were about to look.” A pause. “Some information is easier not to carry. You sleep better without it.” He kept reading. “Cancel your palace banquets for the next week — postpone, don’t refuse, don’t explain. And don’t mention that Otto Luoxi came here.”

Outside the window, the City of Glow’s evening sounds continued without particular concern: wheels on stone, a vendor’s call three streets over, the smell of cookfires from the servants’ quarter drifting up through the casement. Everything outside the room was ordinary. The room itself had become slightly less so.

“A wise choice,” Hill said quietly — reading Yorko’s silence, which was the one thing Yorko had never quite learned to hide.

He bent to write the falcon message, and Yorko sat alone in the candlelight with his comfortable life arranged around him, finding it had become, in some way he could not quite locate, slightly less comfortable than it had been an hour ago.

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