Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 693: The Ideal Place

Dinner arrived on a tray.

Before the servant lifted the covers, Annie had already smelled it — something warm and yeasty that moved through the room ahead of the tray itself. What appeared underneath was a pile of bread, baked to a deep even gold. She could tell by looking: fine wheat flour, properly kneaded, allowed to ferment. Not the hard flatbreads she had learned not to complain about. Beside the loaves sat a small wrapped pat of butter and a pot of broth, deep-colored and aromatic, with circles of oil shivering on the surface.

Enough for five.

“Spoons and plates are in the cupboard. Breakfast will also come in the morning — no need to save anything.” The servant’s voice was pleasant and unhurried. “Until you receive a Resident Identity Card, you’re not to leave the Foreign Affairs Building unaccompanied, and the basement is restricted. The rooftop is available for ability practice. I’m in the service room on the first floor — come and find me if you need anything. All of this is complimentary.”

He bowed and left them standing in a row, none of them quite sure when to blink.

“This is what great noble hospitality looks like,” Amy said finally. “Same as the plays. Except for a few lines.” She paused. “Usually it starts with ‘Your Honorable Excellency, it is my privilege—’”

“We’re not nobles,” said No. 76, with the mild patience of someone stating weather. “Eat. I’m famished.”

They all swallowed their agreement at the same moment.

Was this king simply feeding them? Amy watched No. 76 move carefully toward the table and felt the familiar suspicion she could never quite argue herself out of. The ruler of Graycastle had extended hospitality without demanding they name their abilities. Without interrogating their purposes. The Witch Union’s leader had welcomed them, asked them nothing, and left them with bread and butter and a promise. That inconsistency nagged. She had learned at some cost that generosity this comprehensive was usually a shape cut around a trap.

The safest course was still the one they’d always used: find a village near enough to a city to access it occasionally, keep their identities buried, live small. The Church had been broken here. That removed the immediate threat. What remained were the ordinary human dangers — discovery, rumor, the neighbor who suddenly made a connection.

But Hero’s legs were in a room down the hall.

She couldn’t take them away from the only healer they’d encountered in four countries who had looked at the situation and said possibly rather than no. Even that one word was more than anyone else had offered.

Eat first.

The bread, when she bit into it, stopped her thought entirely. It was soft in a way that bread wasn’t supposed to be — not doughy but genuinely, completely yielding, dissolving almost before she needed to chew. Fine-grained and faintly sweet, with butter melting into it faster than she’d expected. The gravel she had grown used to expecting in bread was simply not there.

She put down the first piece and immediately reached for another.

Nobody spoke for some time.

When only crumbs remained in the iron box, they all let out a long breath at roughly the same moment.

“Will we eat like this here?” Broken Sword licked her thumb and looked at the empty box with transparent reluctance.

“I doubt it.” Amy divided the broth into five bowls in even measures, tipping the pot carefully. The scallion fragments settled; the oil circles reformed on each surface. “Bread this fine is nobility food. My father ate coarse bread his entire life and thought himself fortunate for it.”

“Coarse bread is fine.” Hero accepted her bowl with both hands and blew across the surface, watching the steam disperse. “When we first arrived in the Kingdom of Dawn, there were days we ate nothing at all.” She took the first sip slowly. Warmth spread through her expression. “I’d forgotten what full felt like.”

“Lady Wendy said there are benefits for Union members—”

“Do the benefits include food like this?”

“She’s showing us around tomorrow. We can ask then.”

“I hope they do.”

Annie listened to them and let herself believe, just briefly, that the city outside the window might be real in the way that good things rarely were. Four pairs of voices. Five bowls of broth. The fire going. She felt, without quite articulating it, that whatever she decided tonight, it would matter for a long time.

They allocated the four bedrooms with the efficiency of people accustomed to close quarters. Annie took Hero’s room without discussion — as the strongest of them, and as the one who had been carrying responsibility for the rest since Wolfheart.

The bed received her without protest. Soft and dry, no damp in the mattress, no sourness of mold. The fireplace had been banked to low flames, and the shadows they threw against the white stone walls moved slowly, the way shadows do in rooms that are warm enough.

She settled Hero beneath the blankets. Blew out the candle. Pressed her hands warm through her ability and let the heat spread through the bedding.

Hero curled against her and was quiet for a moment before asking, softly, “It’s been almost a year since we left Wolfheart?”

“One year and two months,” Annie said. “If you count from when we crossed into the Kingdom of Dawn.”

“And from home?”

Annie was quiet.

She knew the village — remembered its position in the northwest quadrant of the kingdom, the particular color of light in early morning over the fields. She had forgotten the exact date. It had been the kind of leaving that erases its own calendar, because looking back at any of it for too long was a thing she hadn’t been able to afford. East and east and east, and eventually she’d found the suburbs of the king’s city, and eventually she’d found Broken Sword, and eventually Hero — all of them driven by the same current, ending up in the same place.

“Five years,” Hero said. Her voice had gone low, almost private. “I’ve been running for five years. I thought when we reached the king’s city I could stop. Then the Bloodfang people—” She didn’t finish. “And then I still had to run. Even after losing my legs.” A pause. “Even after that.”

Annie pulled her closer.

“Lady Wendy said this is the witches’ home.” Hero’s voice was the sound of something worn thin by handling. “Can we actually stay? I don’t want to run anymore.”

“We’ll stay.” Annie made her voice certain, because uncertainty was not useful here. “We’ll have our own rooms. Your legs will come back. When they do, you can go anywhere you want — not because you’re fleeing. Because you want to.”

“Really?”

The window’s cold pressed against the glass outside. The fire spoke to itself in low pops and hisses.

“If only I had been born here,” Hero said finally. Her voice was already softening at the edges, becoming something closer to sleep than wakefulness. “In Graycastle. If only I had been born here from the beginning…”

Annie opened her mouth. The reply she had almost assembled slipped away — because in the space where it would have gone, Hero’s breathing had gone even and slow, the breathing of someone who had finally, for one night at least, let herself stop thinking.

Annie held her and watched the fire.

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