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Chapter 583: Anna’s Secret

When Anna opened her eyes, the world was red.

Scorching air struck her face. Smoke billowed from below — thick, choking — and through it she could make out the walls of the shed, the ceiling, the mound of hay she slept on, all of it lit from within like a lantern. Wood cracked. Sparks fell.

There were cries from the back room. She could not be certain they were real.

She got off the haystack and moved toward the sound, but the heat drove her back. She went out through the doorway instead, into the night, and stood watching as the house collapsed into its own fire. Her neighbors came. Some tried to help. The nearest water source was the Redwater River, outside the town, and the few pots they managed to fill had no more effect on the flames than spitting would.

Anna went back and forth several times before she saw her father.

He had come from the mines. His coat was still filthy, his face grey with dust. He stood beside the burning frame of the house and stared at it with a blank, uncomprehending expression — and something in that stillness broke her open. She ran to him and clutched him and began to cry, the fear pouring out.

He grabbed her by the shoulders hard enough to make her yelp.

“Where’s your mother?” His voice was very flat. “And your brother.”

She shook her head.

The slap knocked her sideways.

“Did you escape alone? Why didn’t you rescue them?”

“How can you only care about yourself?”

Anna sat bolt upright in her bed.

Her breath came hard. The scolding voice rang in her ears and refused to leave.

This dream again.

She reached for the cup on the bedside table and drank the cold water in two swallows. It took a long time before her chest unclenched. She turned to the calendar on her desk. The last day of the first week of summer: payday for the Witch Union. She rose, washed simply, dressed, and walked out of the castle toward the Witch Building in the backyard.

“Sister Anna!” Ring brightened at the sight of her. “You’re so early!”

“Good morning.” Wendy’s smile was quieter, warmer. “The weather looks promising today. Will you be going to the North Slope Mountain later?”

Her two former classmates — now living in the same building, part of the same world they had never imagined sharing — hurried to bow.

“Just Anna,” she told them, waving it away. “Like old times.” She took a seat at the long table and considered. “I have something to do first. I’ll go up in the afternoon.”

“Oh?” Wendy’s expression sharpened with interest. “That’s unusual. Could it be that you and His Majesty Roland are—”

“Are they going shopping!” Ring shouted, overjoyed.

Pearl and Grayrabbit, listening from the side, laughed until they had to cover their mouths.

Anna shook her head but said nothing further.

Wendy did not press. She took an envelope from a drawer and placed it in Anna’s hands. “This month’s salary. Two gold royals.”

“Thank you.”

Most witches could not quite see the point of the salary. They had no rent, no food costs, no transport to pay for; the convenience market provided prototypes of its luxury goods freely, and special requests were rarely denied. His Majesty insisted, but the reasoning eluded them. Anna understood it. And this particular ritual, which he had built into their lives without explanation, had inadvertently done her a service.

She walked back toward the castle hall with the envelope in her hands. Carter was already there, standing.

“Miss Anna.” He rose and nodded. “Shall we proceed as usual?”

“Yes.” She took a gold royal from the envelope and held it out to him. “Let’s go.”

During the reconstruction of Border Town, every native had been given new lodgings. Anna’s father was no exception.

After he sold her for twenty-five gold royals to the church, she had cut off all contact. From that moment, she stopped considering him her father. The word no longer fit.

But there were things she could not simply walk away from.

Like the gold royal she had Carter deliver to him every month as living expenses.

Most poor people who suddenly come into a windfall do not keep it long. Her father had been no different. Within half a year, the sale money was gone — gambling, fraud, theft, the usual ways a man unmoors himself. Anna had not yet become well known at that point, but her ability had been spotted when she sealed gaps in the city walls with fire, and her father had tried sending a neighbor to reach her. The neighbor was turned away each time. When Carter — then organizing the militia — learned of it, he told Anna.

From then on, she had known she needed to do something. Not for him. For Roland.

She walked with Carter through a quiet neighborhood in the city’s eastern quarter, climbed to the second floor of a building, and stopped in the corridor.

“Wait here, Miss Anna.”

“Sorry to trouble you.”

“Not at all.” He knocked on the door. Hard.

A pause. The door creaked open. “Ah — it’s you, Knight Sir, I—”

“Why did you take so long? Are you deaf!” Carter’s voice cracked like a whip. “Move aside. Don’t stand in the doorway.”

“Yes, yes—”

Anna leaned against the wall in the corridor and listened. Perhaps this is how it has to be.

She exhaled.

She felt nothing warm about it, and never had. The man behind that door had handed her over, and no gold royal would change the shape of what that was. But she was not naive enough to think that simply cutting him off would make him disappear. He was conceited, bitter, and capable of causing trouble in ways that would come back to Roland — and the moment he sensed any softness from her, the deterrent would dissolve. A direct visit would let him believe their statuses were comparable. Carter arriving in the role of Chief Knight, which among the commoners of the Border Area carried the weight of a great noble, with a few words of hard warning and a single coin — that was the correct instrument for the correct purpose.

She had not understood these kinds of relationships before. After her capture, the world had gone dead gray, and she had watched it with the detachment of someone who expected very little from it. Roland had brought the color back. Living in the castle had taught her, slowly and against her preferences, how people moved around each other, what made them afraid, what made them quiet.

She still hated these convoluted arrangements.

She could only truly relax with Roland. Or with a book — specifically the kind that looked impenetrable from the outside but revealed, once you had spent enough time inside it, that the relationships between things were simple and direct and did not shift because someone’s interests changed. She had often wondered why the real world could not work the same way.

Carter returned to the corridor. “Miss Anna. It’s done.”

“Good.” The tension in her shoulders loosened. “Don’t tell His Majesty.”

“Of course. I understand.”

She nodded and turned toward the stairs.

The terrible feelings would not go away — they were structural, part of whatever she was now. But with Roland, the good things kept accumulating. She could feel it, the slow weight of them on the other side of the scale. She wanted to get up to the North Slope Mountain, to the work that was actually hers.

That was a place she was fond of.

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