Chapter 704: A Cross-Era Talk
The tavern had a private room at the back, small and smelling of spilled ale and old timber, with noise from the main floor a muffled constant through the wall. No. 76 closed the door and returned to sit across from Agatha.
“I expected somewhere quieter,” Agatha said, looking around.
“Taverns have always been good places for contact and information exchange, my Lady.” No. 76 poured ale into both mugs without being asked. “I apologize for the setting. I’ve only been in Neverwinter two days.”
The reasoning was what it had always been: people felt safer in rooms with walls full of other people than in empty streets. Neither of them feared the cold, but Agatha would not have accepted an invitation to follow a stranger somewhere deserted — and No. 76 wouldn’t have either, in Agatha’s position. The tavern removed that particular reason for refusal.
Beyond that: concealment no longer served. She had found a better path than the one she’d arrived with, which made the original plan unnecessary. The whole architecture of careful blending and hidden observation had been built around the assumption that she would be working against the Witch Union’s notice. That assumption had just collapsed.
Common people and witches both faced the same approaching end. The danger did not wait for stratagems.
“How did you find me in two days?” Agatha asked.
“I had the Wolfheart witches ask Wendy about your work location and shift hours.” No. 76 kept it brief. “The route was the residents — a few questions along the street gave me the timing. Once I confirmed you were in the Witch Union, I decided to make direct contact.” She paused. “I hadn’t expected to see anyone from Taquila. The contact I would have made to Wendy would have been considerably more complicated.”
Agatha looked at her for a long moment. “Are there other surviving Taquila witches?”
“Some.” No. 76 set the mug down. “But we’re no longer witches, not in the original sense. There’s no method that preserves a body for four centuries. We found another way.” She met Agatha’s gaze without decoration. “The body you’re looking at now belongs to a God’s Punishment Warrior of the Church.”
A pause. Agatha absorbed this. “You can control the body fully. And activate the God’s Stone domain.”
“Yes. The domain is a property of the body, not of the soul it carries. This was also the ultimate purpose Lady Alice was working toward — a warrior that combined a witch’s soul with a body capable of fighting demons. Even losing most of the body’s blood wouldn’t kill the witch, as long as the transfer held. A perfect Transcendent warrior.” No. 76 kept her voice even. “She believed it was the only answer.”
“I knew her plan had more depth than what was visible.” Agatha was quiet for a moment before finishing her ale. “But your tone suggests the other survivors didn’t all share her view.” She refilled her own mug. “And that raises the question of why you’re here.”
“Before I answer that,” No. 76 said, lowering her voice slightly, “I need to ask you something.”
Agatha nodded.
“Have you told the Witch Union about the demons? The Battle of Divine Will? The Union’s history?”
“Yes.”
The word was a single syllable, but No. 76 felt it open something. She leaned slightly forward. “And their response? Did they accept the information?”
“They accepted it.” Agatha’s expression was careful, measuring. “More than that — they’ve already acted on it. Not long ago, the Witch Union engaged the demons directly. They killed a Magic Slayer and two Fearsome Demons.”
No. 76’s fist closed on the table.
Natural allies. The word she’d been reaching for, the arrangement she’d been hoping to build toward through months of patient groundwork — Agatha had already created it. No deception required. No slow disclosure, no managed revelations, no years of maneuvering. The Witch Union knew and had chosen to fight.
She told Agatha everything then: the disagreement between Natalia and Alice, the plan of the Chosen One, the instrument of Divine retribution and what it required, what the instrument could do if the right witch stood at its activation point. And at the end: “I’ve found her. She’s in the Castle District. I need to identify her formally, and I need access to do that.”
Agatha was quiet. Something in her expression had shifted from analytical assessment to something slightly harder to name.
“You’re certain someone here meets the criteria.”
“Lady Pasha gave me the threshold. The ring confirms it.” No. 76 removed the ring and placed it on the table between them. “It detects the complexity of a witch’s Key. I’ve measured every witch I’ve encountered today. One of them was close — Anna, or the invisible witch in the castle, I’m not yet sure which. But there’s a third reading, from last night, that exceeds both of them entirely. The width of the beam filled the stone’s entire field. I couldn’t find the edge.”
Agatha picked up the ring, examined it, set it down.
“I think,” she said, “you should speak to the Lord of Neverwinter.”
No. 76 blinked. “I planned to speak to Wendy. She manages the Union’s—”
“Roland.” Agatha’s voice was patient. “Roland Wimbledon. The local lord. A common person.”
“I don’t… understand what you mean.”
“I was where you are when I first arrived.” Agatha leaned back. The slight smile that appeared on her face was private and unperformed — the smile of someone recalling something specific and being surprised, again, by what they recall. “I assumed the same structure you’re assuming. That Wendy leads the Union and the lord manages the city and the two are separate. They’re not separate.” She paused. “Without Roland, the Witch Union doesn’t exist. Neverwinter doesn’t look like this. Graycastle doesn’t defeat the Church. Every piece of it — the cooperation, the machines, the legal protections for witches, all of it — comes from him. He is the actual core.” She pushed the ring back across the table. “If you want to reach the Chosen One and begin the cooperation Taquila needs, Roland is who you speak to.”
No. 76 frowned. “A common person.”
“Yes.”
“You’re telling me — a Taquila witch, who understands what Taquila was and what the witches of the Union built and how that civilization ran — that a common person is the center of all of this.”
“I’m telling you exactly that.”
No. 76 said nothing.
“Do you know what he said to me,” Agatha continued, “when I came out of the Frozen Coffin? I had just learned that the Union was gone. That Taquila was rubble. That everything I had known was four centuries dead. I was not in a state that could be described as composed.” A pause. “He told me that common people could defeat demons.”
“He said—”
“I know what you’re about to say. I said it too.” The smile remained. “It sounds like the statement of someone who has never seen a Fearsome Demon. Who has no framework for the scale of what the third Battle of Divine Will will require.” She set down her mug. “But I’ve watched him work since then. And the hope I saw in him was real — real enough that the witches of Neverwinter believe it completely. Not because he tells them to. Because he earns it.” She met No. 76’s eyes. “If Taquila wants the Union as an ally against the demons, that alliance runs through Roland. Not Wendy. Not me.”
No. 76 held her mug without drinking from it.
A wild witch who had grown up in this era, who had no memory of the Union’s authority, who had only ever known the long collapse into powerlessness and hiding — her trust in a common person would be unremarkable. Expected. The product of circumstances that had never offered anything better.
But Agatha was Taquila. Agatha had stood in the halls of the Quest Society and been judged by the Three Chiefs and received the scepter with her own hands. She had lived the world in which the distinction between witch and common person was not merely social but structural and real.
And she was sitting across a tavern table in a border city saying Roland Wimbledon is the core of all of it with the expression of someone reporting a fact rather than conceding an argument.
“Please allow me some time to think,” No. 76 said at last.
She stood. The Union’s formal salute: elbows level, overlapping fingers, the deep bow. Old habit, correct form, automatic.
Then she left the tavern and walked out into the cold of Neverwinter’s streets, and thought.