Rewrite That Witch
CH006 · Rewrite
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Chapter 6: Training (Part I)

The rear garden of the castle held a cottage the size of a groundskeeper’s shed, ringed by a low wooden fence and built of clay brick on a loess floor—sand, silt, and clay tamped together, not the most elegant substrate but honest about what it was. A pond sat in front of it, roughly nine yards around, filled from the river, and the whole arrangement had a quality Roland could only describe as manufactured simplicity: someone had thought about this space. There were iron ingots stacked near the fence, brought over from the blacksmith on Carter’s order.

It was a poor laboratory. He’d had better in university apartments. But it was what there was, and what there was had the one thing a laboratory for Anna needed: it was unlikely to catch fire in a way that would spread.

He told Anna to join him in the garden and went out to wait, thinking about what they actually needed and what he could actually build. A proper workshop would require Barov’s cooperation, space, materials, and time. All of those were finite. He noted the problem and filed it.

When Anna appeared in the doorway of the cottage, he almost didn’t recognize her.

She had been cleaned—thoroughly, painstakingly, the way that required hot water and actual soap and people who understood the difference between cleaning and scrubbing. Her hair, the color of straw in late summer, fell past her shoulders and moved when she walked. The prison grime was gone; what remained was a girl with a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose, skin that showed some color in the cheeks despite the cold, a body still thin enough that a strong wind seemed like a genuine concern. She looked young. She was young. She also, Roland noted, looked entirely uncertain about why she was standing in a garden.

“Did you sleep?” he asked.

She blinked. “Yes.”

“Good.” He gestured at the clothing she was wearing—which he had arranged, and which was the result of considerable thought. Not iron workers’ protective gear, which was too thick and would impede movement. Not the dramatic mage robes that appeared in every story ever told about people with unusual abilities, which were nonsense for actual work. He’d taken one of Tyre’s maid dresses, altered it—shortened the skirt, shortened the sleeves, changed the collar to a fold with a small bow, added a knee-length cape and the particular hat he’d had made to order—and created something that felt, when he looked at it, like evidence that fiction and reality weren’t always as far apart as he’d assumed.

“Turn around,” he said.

She did, cautiously.

“Does it fit properly? Nothing too tight, nothing pulling?”

“No,” she said. “It’s—” She stopped. Started again. “I’ve never worn anything this comfortable.”

He nodded, pleased. “Good. You’ll need range of motion.”

She was looking at him with an expression he was coming to recognize: the look of someone who has revised their expectations of a situation several times in rapid succession and is waiting for the next revision. He had surprised her by coming to the dungeon. Surprised her by removing the locket. Surprised her again by the coat, the bath, the clothes, the room with the bed—and now here she was, standing in a garden in witch-appropriate attire while the fourth prince of Graycastle examined whether her collar was fitted correctly.

“Your Highness,” she said, “what do you need me for?”

“To learn to control your ability,” Roland said. “That’s the first thing. Send the fire out and call it back, at will, until you can do it the same way you’d open and close your hand.”

“You mean the devil’s—”

“No.” He bent to meet her eye line, a deliberate choice. “Your power. The one that lives in you. Most people in this world have made a decision about what witches’ abilities are and who they belong to, and they made that decision from outside the experience. You are inside it.” He paused. “You already know the Church is wrong about this. You’ve known it for years.”

She looked at him for a moment.

“I didn’t use it to hurt anyone,” she said quietly. “Before. Except the man in the mine.”

“That was defense, not offense. There’s a distinction.” He straightened. “And people fear what they don’t understand. They’ve been told witches are dangerous—and you are, potentially, with a power no one has taught you to use. Unknown strength frightens people. Controlled strength is a different thing.”

“You aren’t frightened,” she said.

“Because I understand what it is,” he said. And then, honestly: “Or I’m trying to.”

She had been studying him through the whole conversation with the same quality of attention she’d had in the cell—not passive, not calculating, just genuinely looking, the way someone does when they’re trying to decide whether to trust a piece of evidence. He didn’t try to perform trustworthiness. He’d found that people who were looking that carefully could generally tell the difference.

“All right,” she said. “What do I do?”

Later—after Barov had come and gone, after the old minister had read him the territory’s financial records aloud while Roland traced patterns in the numbers and noticed the ones that were wrong—Anna appeared in the doorway of the office.

She was holding something in her palm.

He had expected the conversation about the financial irregularities to extend well into the evening. He had not expected this.

“Sit down, Barov,” Roland said, for the third time that day.

Then he looked at Anna.

She was holding something very small—a contract, folded to the width of two fingers. She unfolded it on the desk in front of him, and Roland recognized Barov’s handwriting. The old minister had prepared it that morning at Roland’s direction: a formal contract of employment, the kind that could be shown to a magistrate if one was needed. One gold royal per month, in exchange for work to be defined by the prince. The signature line at the bottom.

Anna smoothed the paper with one hand. She looked at the number—one gold royal—and Roland watched her arrive at what he knew she must be calculating: that her father, working the North Mine every day of his working life, had earned perhaps one silver royal on a good day. One hundred silver royals in a gold royal. This was not a figure the fourth prince’s household budget would miss. It was a figure that meant something else entirely to someone who had grown up in a miner’s house.

“I read it,” she said. “All of it.”

“And?”

She picked up the pen he kept beside the inkwell, dipped it, and signed.

Roland watched her form the letters—carefully, with the precision of someone who had been taught and who took the teaching seriously—and he thought about the school. A border town school. She had learned to read and write there, retained everything she was taught, loved the history of religion even when it was used to justify her death. He thought that said something interesting about her.

“Good,” he said, when she set the pen down. “Now—let me explain what I actually need.”

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