Chapter 691: The Path into the City
The question caught No. 76 slightly off-balance.
Four hundred years of conditioning had taught her to master that — the small internal lurch that preceded any genuine surprise. She did not let it reach her face. Her consciousness separated cleanly from her body’s stress responses, as it always did when the stakes required it, and she composed her expression into something appropriately flustered while her mind worked the problem behind it.
Two witches. One detecting lies. One with inner sight of some kind — Clairvoyance, perhaps, or something near enough. She revised her assessment of the Witch Union upward in the same instant she began her performance.
She hesitated. Reached slowly into her robe. Drew out the ring and held it in her palm as though reluctant to part with it, which was true enough in its own way.
“It was… stolen,” she said. “From Black Money.”
The green-haired witch — long hair, unhurried bearing, the kind of person who stored observations quietly — took the ring and turned it over in her fingers. Her expression shifted into the particular alertness of someone who recognizes something without quite having a name for it.
“This looks like a Magic Stone,” she said, “but it isn’t quite right.”
They know the term. No. 76 kept her frown internal. Not ideal. The stone worked on a different principle from the common kind, but given enough time and the right minds, the distinction wouldn’t hide itself forever. She needed to redirect.
“Black Money was the exhibition where I worked,” she said. “Underground auctions. Ancient relics, mostly — things from ruins. The owner always said the stranger the origin, the higher the bid. And sometimes they auctioned…” She let her voice falter. “Auction of…”
“What?” asked the witch Wendy.
“Witches,” No. 76 said quietly.
The effect was immediate and gratifying. All four faces hardened — not with theatrical outrage but with the real kind, the kind rooted in something personal. The ring ceased to matter. The concern evaporated from the green-haired witch’s eyes and became something colder.
“I was nearly sold to a noble family myself,” Amy added from the corner. “Before the ambassador found us.”
“They will be punished for it,” said the blonde witch. Her voice was flat and certain. The voice of someone who intended to be the instrument of that punishment.
No. 76 pretended anxiety. “The ring—”
“Miss Agatha will certainly find it interesting,” the green-haired witch said, with the light shrug of someone declining a minor administrative problem. “But that can wait until you’ve settled in.” She pressed it back into No. 76’s palm. “Keep it for now.”
Agatha. The name snagged somewhere in her memory, caught on something old and not yet surfaced. She filed it.
Wendy’s voice had warmed again by the time she spoke. “No one will harm you here. His Majesty King Roland believes the age when witches and mortals live side by side is coming — not only in the Western Region but across Graycastle. That is what we are building.”
“Will there really be such a day?” Broken Sword said. The disbelief in her voice was genuine, unpolished, the kind that comes from having been disappointed too many times to believe in forward motion.
“That is why we built the Witch Union.” Wendy’s smile was the kind that had been tested and had held. “Now — let me take you somewhere to rest.”
The sailors carried No. 76 out on a stretcher, and the city opened up before her.
Snow was falling in dense curtains across the pier, but the workers hadn’t stopped — dozens of them moving in lines, sweeping the white off the flagstones with the methodical patience of people who had made peace with weather. Beyond them, the freighters Wendy had mentioned sat low in the dark water. No masts. No sails. The river moved around them without apology.
“Those boats — they have no paddles either?”
“Are they made of stone?”
The other witches murmured to each other. No. 76 watched Wendy’s face instead. The pride there was quiet and warm and genuine, a kind she hadn’t seen directed at a city in a very long time.
Neverwinter revealed itself as they moved deeper into it.
She had seen the Holy City of the Union. She had seen the cities that common people built in the centuries between. She had expected one or the other. What she found was neither.
The streets were wide and straight, their surfaces black and solid beneath the snow. On either side, the cleared white was heaped in orderly mounds — not the chaotic drifts she had walked through in other cities but something deliberate, managed. The trees were bare this time of year, their trunks wrapped in ribbons of yellow and red; she imagined them in summer, branches arching overhead, and the street becoming a tunnel of green.
The houses were brick, square, uniform. Not monotonous — just precise, the way a well-designed thing is precise. No lean-tos. No collapsed thatch. No gradations of poverty announcing themselves through architectural desperation.
People moved through the snow without urgency. Several of them paused when Wendy passed, nodding to her with the easy warmth of people greeting someone they genuinely respected. Not ceremony. Not performance. The small social reflex of a community that had grown comfortable with itself.
That was what No. 76 was watching.
Witches and common people. Not separated. Not co-tolerating. Something she hadn’t witnessed in practice, only read about in texts describing the first Divine Will campaign, eight or nine centuries ago — and even then the accounts were cautious about how deep the cooperation had run.
His Majesty King Roland believes the era when witches and mortals live together will soon come.
She had thought Wendy was speaking aspirationally. In the way that people announced the future they couldn’t quite bring themselves to reach for, to soften the distance.
Looking at the street, she revised that judgment. Neverwinter was not the threshold of that future. It was already inside it.
She thought of what she had learned during the month-long voyage. Roland Wimbledon: formerly the inconsequential fourth prince of Graycastle, lord of a forgotten border town that stood between the kingdom and nothing. Somehow: the King of Neverwinter. Somehow: the man who had faced the God’s Punishment Army and was still standing. The Church’s field capacity was not a secret to her. She knew what that army cost and what defeating it required.
She had assumed it was brute force. Military innovation. The kind of problem that could be solved with sufficient ruthlessness applied to the right points.
The street outside her stretcher suggested the explanation was more complicated than that.
If she had not needed the pretense of injury maintained, she would have sat up.
Pasha had been right about one thing: any path forward against the Demons ran through the common people. There was no other arithmetic. They had to work with Roland, or near enough to it, and that meant trusting him with portions of the truth while the rest stayed sealed — the ruins, the maze, the things that could not yet be explained without undoing everything they were trying to build. Lady Alice and Lady Natalyae had agreed. The Union’s continuation required some concealment of the Union’s history.
But she had expected concealment to be the cost of a difficult alliance, not the thing that became unnecessary once she saw what the man had actually built.
She filed that too. It would want more thought.
The Foreign Affairs building was warm and smelled of pine resin and something baking. The sailors carried her and Hero to beds and withdrew, and the others gathered around the fire almost immediately, speaking in low excited voices about everything they’d seen since the pier. The impressions came tumbling out of them, overlapping — the ships, the streets, the houses, the people greeting Wendy as though she belonged to the city and the city to her.
No. 76 let them talk. She had her own cataloguing to do.
When Wendy returned, she brought a child with her. Small. Dark-haired. Perhaps twelve.
“This is Nana. She can heal wounds — new ones, old ones alike.”
Amy was at Hero’s bedside before Wendy finished the sentence, pulling back the blanket. “Even broken legs? Legs that were — can she fix those?”
Nana leaned in to look. She placed her hands carefully and was quiet for a moment. Then she shook her head. “Not if they’re already lost. I can mend what’s still there, and I can join things that have been separated recently. But I cannot grow what isn’t present.”
“Then we would need to… find her new legs?”
“Yes.” Nana considered this with complete practicality. “Freshly cut is best.”
The room fell silent.
The child’s voice had been earnest. Childlike in pitch. Perfectly serious in content. It moved through the witches assembled by the fire like a cold draft from beneath a door, and for a moment no one spoke at all.