Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 71: Spy (Part 2)

Barov had lit the fireplace and set a mahogany candelabra on the table — one central stem branching into four, three outer candles ringing the tallest like courtiers around a throne. The pine oil in the wicks gave the room a smell of sweetened rot, drowsy and close, but he had long since stopped noticing. In Border Town, you did not ask for more than you had. You had a roof. You had a fire. You considered yourself fortunate.

His room was the old city hall, abandoned when the previous lord had taken his entire staff with him into exile, as though the furniture itself owed him loyalty. The castle’s remaining voices were faint tonight — the rustle of distant footsteps, the long complaint of wind at the windows. Two worlds, Barov thought sometimes, separated by glass.

The old wooden table was buried: books stacked at angles, scrolls open at their midpoints, the flanking side tables arranged into a shallow U so that his disciples could sit to either side and copy drafts or organize figures without crowding him. Tonight he was alone. He preferred it.

The candles had been changed three times. He had not paused his work for any of them.

Ten hours a day was his standard. He had never once felt tired by it — on the contrary, the work was the one place where all his training arrived at something useful. No distractions, no colleagues blundering through his conclusions. The apprentices did what was required, the accounts moved in orderly columns, and Barov himself handled everything else: administration, legal correspondence, the endless footnotes that kept a territory solvent. This is how it should be. This is what I was made for.

If only His Highness’ commands were a little more normal.

He bit the inside of his cheek — a habit he’d been trying to break for thirty years — and looked at the reply from Willow Town. Roland had written asking for additional administrative staff and, improbably, a brig. The reply had been polite and bewildered in equal measure: at the price offered, you cannot hire a captain, a helmsman, and sailors.

Obviously. So how was the boat supposed to arrive? Would they walk it up the river?

And why a boat at all? The ore trade with Willow Town ran smoothly. If Roland wanted to expand it after winter broke, a single notice would see more vessels dispatched within the week. Border Town’s pier was barely adequate for parking and unloading; without a crew to maintain a vessel she would rot at her mooring within two seasons. Barov had written three lines of objection and then stopped, because by that point he had already recognized it as one of His Highness’ moments — that quality of self-assured peculiarity the Prince wielded like a tool he had personally invented.

The staffing request, though — that, Barov understood.

The city hall had no one with free time. Barov himself had brought more than ten people across to manage the statistical reports, income and expenditure. He had divided their duties as cleanly as he could, but the division had left him responsible for administrative and legal work simultaneously, which was illogical and, more importantly, slow. If the Prince wanted separate departments with distinct responsibilities, the headcount would have to grow. Under ordinary circumstances an assistant minister guarded his portfolio of authority the way a miser guards coin — that sense of being the only one who could manage all of this, that quiet satisfaction, was not nothing. It was, if he was honest, most of what the job had offered him in better days. He had wanted to become what his teacher was: finance minister of Graycastle, sole steward of the kingdom’s accounts, the King’s right hand.

Ahem. Border Town is what matters now, he reminded himself.

Roland had promised to fight for the throne. A long road remained. But somewhere between the first month and now, Barov had stopped thinking of that ambition as theater and started thinking of it as arithmetic. The 4th Prince — that ignorant dandy who had never once interested anyone — had become, in Barov’s careful estimation, a genuine candidate. The only one who showed no sign of collapsing under his own weight.

It still astonished him, quietly, every time he thought about it. Border Town had survived the Months of the Demons on militia alone. Strange inventions, strange orders, strange alliances — and through all of it, the Prince had managed it. He seems more like the Devil who knows everything. The thought arrived unbidden, and Barov let it sit for a moment before dismissing it.

A knock — thunder-loud, the way Yarrow always knocked, as though a knock were something to be committed to.

“Come in.”

Yarrow opened the door. He was Barov’s sharpest disciple: quick with figures, quicker with inference, and constitutionally incapable of entering a room quietly.

“Respected teacher — we have caught another mouse.”

Barov set down his pen. “Already questioned?”

“He claims Timothy sent him. On his person: cement powder, some silver, and a letter.” Yarrow crossed to the table and placed a leather-wrapped envelope before him. “The rest of the interrogation is ongoing. Teacher, how shall we—”

“The same as the others. Write every answer into the record, then hang him.” Barov looked up. “Send me the book when it’s finished.”

“Yes.” A salute, precise. The door closed.

Barov did not return to his correspondence. He sat back and looked at the sealed parchment — the fourth, he thought — and reached for his letter opener.

Long before the Months of the Demons had begun, Roland had summoned him and explained the plan. The Prince had reasoned that once the cement, the new black powder, and the witches were openly deployed, every spy lurking in Border Town would feel compelled to report home. Which meant, he argued, that they would surface. That this was the optimal moment to find them.

Barov had accepted the first half of that argument and doubted the second. The town held more than two thousand residents. Proper surveillance required trained personnel and resources neither of them possessed. He had said so.

The Prince had smiled in that particular way of his and said: “Why do we need so many people? Every person in Border Town will be our eyes.”

Barov had not believed it. He had, privately, considered it one of the more naïve things Roland had said — and Roland said many things.

Then the census came, and with it Roland’s address to the long-term residents: Longsong Stronghold failed to burn our food, but they have not given up. Their people are still here — disguised as relatives, as merchants who stayed too late, watching for an opportunity. If you see something strange, report it to the city hall. Twenty-five silver royals if it’s verified.

The results had been remarkable.

Some false reports at first — neighbors settling grudges, mostly. But then the first real mouse, and another, and another. The townspeople had simply started watching, the way people watch when they’ve been told it matters, and that was enough.

Barov remembered the Prince delivering the census results with that slightly awkward satisfaction he had when something went exactly as he planned.

“Let the enemy sink into the bottomless sea of fighting against commoners.”

A strange sentence. Strange syntax, strange image. The assistant minister shook his head and broke the seal.

The spy — this one had used the name Groundhog — wrote at length about how Roland Wimbledon must have been replaced by the devil. The fear was legible between every line, threaded through the formal language like a stain. Barov read it carefully, twice.

He set the letter over the candle flame. It caught at the corner, curled, and became ash.

Since he doesn’t fear the God’s Stone of Retaliation, he thought, he can’t be controlled by the devil. Can he?

He sat with the question for a moment. Then he picked up his pen and returned to work.

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