Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 7: Training (Part II)

The fire rose from beneath her feet and vanished.

Her twenty-third attempt. Failed.

Sweat had gathered on her forehead in a thin film despite the autumn cold. She wiped it with the back of her hand and started again before Roland could say anything—the crackling sound of thermal expansion, the brief shimmer in the air around her feet, and then nothing.

She had folded her witch uniform neatly beside the fence. This was her insistence: if she was going to burn through robes while she worked, she would not burn through the one garment that could not be easily replaced. Roland had instructed Tyre to bring a full bucket of spare robes, and they had, and the bucket was sitting at the cottage wall for exactly this purpose.

Twenty-fourth attempt. The flame appeared—not at her feet this time, but in her hand. She moved her arm slowly, trying to guide it toward her fingertips, and the flame shuddered, climbed her wrist, ran up her sleeve. The robe caught. Anna dismissed the fire with a kind of interior contraction that Roland could not observe directly, only infer from the result, and she walked to the bucket without expression and pulled out another robe.

Roland looked at the fence.

He had developed the practice of directing his attention elsewhere when this happened—not because it embarrassed him to look, exactly, but because he’d decided it was more professional not to, and because the work required concentration that staring would not improve. He looked at the fence until the sound of Anna putting on a new robe resolved itself into the sound of the robe being on.

The goal he’d set was specific: produce the flame from the palm or fingers, with sufficient heat to melt the iron ingots stacked near the fence, without destroying the clothing in the process. It was a reasonable target. It was also proving difficult to the point where Roland had begun to seriously reconsider what he understood about how anyone learned anything.

After the thirtieth attempt—failed, the sleeve catching again—Roland said, “Stop.”

She looked at him with faint surprise, the pen paused mid-dip.

“You’re tired.”

“I can keep going.”

“I know you can. Stop anyway.” He walked over and took her by the hand—she went still, briefly uncertain—and guided her toward the chair he’d placed outside the cottage door. “Sit down. We’re having afternoon tea.”

She sat. She was not, he thought, accustomed to being told to rest rather than to continue.

The Kingdom of Graycastle did not have a tradition of afternoon tea. The border town’s nobles—such as they were—spent this hour in the taverns or at games. Roland had improvised: light food, something to drink that wasn’t water, served in the garden rather than inside. He’d done the cooking himself, which had produced results of varying quality but consistent ambition. They had ale rather than tea, which he noted in his running mental list of things to change as soon as possible.

Anna looked at the dishes in front of her with an expression Roland could only describe as recalibrated astonishment. The cream cakes he’d managed—strawberries macerated in sugar, folded into whipped cream, with the pastry edges pressed into a border pattern he’d had to attempt three times to get right—were sitting in the afternoon light looking precisely like something no one in a mining town would have encountered before.

She ate very carefully. With the focused, attentive concentration of someone who understands that the experience won’t last and intends to inhabit it completely. The blue in her eyes caught the light, and the strawberries ran a slow red against the white of the cream.

Roland watched her and thought: don’t burn them next time.

He meant the cakes. He thought this was the kind of thing you didn’t say aloud.

The routine settled into shape over the following days: training in the morning, afternoon tea in the garden at the cottage, Roland reading or writing while Anna rested and ate and occasionally looked at him with the expression of someone who was still checking whether this was real. She practiced without being told to—before Roland arrived in the morning, he could see from the window that she was already at it—and he felt something he recognized as embarrassment, which was unusual. He had studied through his share of difficult exams. He had never studied with this quality of quiet ferocity.

Three days after he had requested the financial records, Barov delivered them.

He set the stack on the desk with the subdued triumph of a man who has done something he was not sure he would manage on time. Roland looked at the stack. He thought about reading it. He looked at Barov.

“Read it to me,” he said.

The assistant minister’s eyebrows rose. This was not, evidently, what previous princes had said to the financial records.

“From the beginning,” Roland said. “I want to hear it all.”

He listened with the window cracked slightly, the sound of Anna’s practice a quiet counterpoint below—the hiss and crackle of something trying to become something else. An hour in, he interrupted.

“Why are the winter revenues zero?” he asked. “Not lower. Zero.”

Barov paused over his paper. “Your Highness. The Months of the Demons.”

Roland filed through the old prince’s memories. He found the term—it had come up in the history tutor’s lessons, attached to the image of a gate in a mountain and creatures that moved through it. He had assumed, when he first recovered that memory, that it was this world’s version of the folk superstitions that accumulated around winter in any pre-industrial society. A story told to explain the cold and what moved in it.

But the witches were real.

“Explain it to me,” he said. “In detail.”

Barov set down the records.

“Every winter in this territory,” he said carefully, “when the first snow falls and the sun drops behind the northern mountain, the gates of hell open. The miasma corrupts living creatures—animals, in particular—and transforms them. They become violent, directed, far more dangerous than their natural forms. They attack the town.” He paused. “The town evacuates to Longsong Stronghold. Every year. The animals—the demon beasts—they follow as far as the stronghold’s walls before the cavalry can clear them. By spring, the town can be re-entered.”

“Every winter,” Roland said. “The entire population evacuates. Every year.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“So we lose three months of production. At minimum.”

“It has always been this way.”

Roland looked at the zero in the column. He looked at it for a long time.

“How long until the first snow?” he asked.

“Two months. Perhaps three. It depends on the sun.”

He nodded slowly. He did not say what he was thinking, which was: then I have two months to fix this. He filed it under the category of problems that were large, urgent, and structurally solvable if he could identify the right approach before time ran out.

He thought about the mountain and the narrow gap at its foot, and the river, and the six hundred yards between them.

Then he went back to listening to the financial records.

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