Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 62: Oath

Dinner was black pepper steak and fried eggs, without limit.

Roland had asked the chef for something the guests would find unconditional, which was his formulation for make a lot of it and keep bringing it out. Lightning went through two full plates and looked around for a third while Anna watched her with the expression of someone observing a natural phenomenon. Nana ate through the last serving of meat with the methodical, focused energy of a person who had spent a great deal of themselves that afternoon and was making a systematic effort to recover it. Lightning patted her belly and said something about density and efficiency. Anna told her that wasn’t how digestion worked. Lightning said it was a working theory and she was still testing it.

Nightingale’s and Wendy’s portions went to them on covered plates, to be eaten when they woke.

Roland arranged rooms: Lightning across the hall from Anna, Wendy’s room ready beside Nightingale’s. He watched Nana disappear into Anna’s room with the systematic thoroughness of a person who had already decided where she was sleeping and did not require further input, and went to his office with a cup of ale.

He drank it and thought about Cara.

He had drafted a model of the Witch Cooperation Association based on secondhand accounts: a community under pressure, keeping together by necessity, looking for something they called the Holy Mountain as a way of surviving the absence of anything better. The model wasn’t wrong. It was just not complete. There was Cara inside it — a woman who had watched her people die one by one for years and had built something out of the watching, something hard and organized and certain in itself, and what she had built looked a great deal like the structure she had retreated from. The same logic of purity. The same classification of the weak as the undeserving. The same tolerance for violence in service of the ideal.

The first thing a true believer does with power is eradicate the people who think like herself, he thought. It’s always the first thing.

He poured himself a second cup and moved on.

Lightning was useful — flight was obvious utility; her ability to carry weight aloft opened up reconnaissance options he hadn’t had before. Wendy controlled wind, which was less obviously applicable but which, combined with the firearms he was building, might matter on an open field in ways he hadn’t thought through yet. He added them to the mental inventory and kept moving.

He worked until the fire in the hearth had gone to coals, and sneezed, and decided that was the signal.

His bedroom door was open.

He had not left it open. He pushed it further and found the fire still going in the room’s own hearth, which he had not built, and Nightingale sitting on the edge of the bed in ordinary clothes rather than the disappearing-robe she usually wore. She looked better than she had any right to look after what she’d described, which was a thing he had noticed about witches — they recovered fast, not superhumanly, but fast, as though whatever the ability cost, the body charged it somewhere else and kept the surface operational.

She stood when she saw him. There was something in her expression he was trying to name — not urgency, not grief. Something that had settled.

“You should be resting,” he said.

She shook her head once, and the expression remained.

He waited.

She crossed the room, and he realized she was holding something — a dagger, hilt-out, in her right hand. She stopped in front of him, and then she went down on one knee, and held the dagger up in both hands, and bowed her head.

Roland had seen the knight allegiance ceremony twice before in the previous prince’s memories, both times at formal court events with witnesses and a herald. He recognized the posture, the gesture, the angle of the head. He did not recognize the feeling of standing in a small room at midnight and watching a woman who had walked through a mountain and nearly died and killed someone do this, quietly, without an audience.

“Your Highness Roland Wimbledon,” she said. Her voice was formal but not empty — there was something underneath it that the formality was containing rather than concealing. “I, Veronica, also known as Nightingale, swear. As long as you are good to the witches, I will serve. As your shield against whatever comes, or as your sword in the dark, without fear, without reservation, until the last day I have.”

He did not answer immediately.

He had drafted a refusal in the moment before she spoke — something about equals and shared purpose, about not wanting to build a hierarchy between them. It was the right instinct. He believed it. But Nightingale was kneeling in front of him with a dagger extended in her palms and the Witch Cooperation Association had just destroyed the future she had been building toward, and there was a difference between what was philosophically correct and what the person in front of you needed. Sometimes the right thing to do was to give people the form they were asking for, and trust that the relationship underneath the form would move the form over time.

He reached for his own sword, took the dagger from her hands, and touched the flat of the blade to her left shoulder, then her right, then her left again. The memories that weren’t quite his own guided the sequence.

“I accept your allegiance,” he said.

Her shoulders released something they’d been holding. He wasn’t sure how long they’d been holding it.

He extended his right hand.

She took his fingers, and pressed her lips briefly to the back of his hand, and the ritual was complete.

He pulled her up.

“Veronica,” he said. “Is that your name? Your real name?”

“Yes.” She let go of his hand. “I haven’t hidden anything from you since you asked me not to. I wanted you to have it.” A pause. “Five years ago I left the house of Gilen. Silver City, in the east — you’d know it for the mines.” She met his eyes, and he saw the thing he hadn’t been able to name before: she’d made a decision, and the decision was weight she’d set down rather than weight she’d taken on. “My father was a viscount. My mother was common-born, which wasn’t common, but they suited each other. I had a brother.” She stopped there, just for a moment, and then kept going. “I was Veronica Gilen. And then I wasn’t.”

“What happened?”

“My ability came in. My father—” she paused, choosing something carefully — “decided what his responsibility was.”

Roland said nothing.

“He wasn’t cruel,” she said. It had the sound of something she had worked out a long time ago. “He was afraid. He had his position to protect, his legitimate children, his house. I don’t think he hated me. I think he made a calculation.” She looked at the fire. “Wendy found me before the Church did. She was the first person who looked at me like I was a person, after.”

The fire moved. Somewhere in the castle a floor settled in the cold.

“I’m sorry,” Roland said.

She looked at him — not surprised, exactly, but like the word had landed somewhere she’d had to adjust for.

“I know,” she said.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, “you are a person. You have been since you arrived. That’s not going to change because your previous arrangement with the Witch Cooperation Association collapsed.” He picked up the dagger from where he’d set it and held it out to her, hilt first. “And you should keep this.”

She took it. Her hand was steady.

“Get some rest,” he said. “There’s a great deal to do in the morning.”

“There always is,” she said, and the smallest of things moved at the corner of her mouth, and she went.

He stood in the room for a while after she left, with the fire going low and the sound of the castle settling around him, and thought that he had not planned for this particular variable either.

He thought that he was glad it was here.

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