Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 78: Accompany

Wendy opened her eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling.

Grey brick, wooden beams, cobwebs hanging in the corners around an unlit chandelier. She lay still and let the details resolve from blur into clarity. Not a stone cave roof, not a tent sloping to one side against wind. The mattress beneath her had several layers to it — soft cotton, yielding slightly when she pressed, the kind of surface that held the shape of a body. The blanket was silk-lined. Even stretching to her full length, her feet stayed covered.

Half a month, she thought. Cara and the others were somewhere in the Impassable Mountain range by now, moving toward whatever the Holy Book promised. Perhaps they had already found it. Perhaps they were already there.

She breathed in the warm air of the room and felt, as she had every morning here, a quiet guilt at how comfortable she was.

In all the years of wandering — the camp fires that needed starting before dawn, the food that had to be dried or rationed or coaxed from uncertain sources, the constant preparation for a departure that might come at any hour — sleep had never been more than a light thing, easily broken, never fully trusted. Here, in this room in the castle at Border Town, she had slept through the night and into the grey morning, and no one had disturbed her.

I can’t stay like this. She pressed her palms against her cheeks, a habit from the convent, useful for clearing a foggy head. The nuns had said laziness was a small door to larger failures. She had agreed with that at twelve. She was less certain now, but the habit remained.

She was pulling herself upright when someone knocked.

“Come in.”

Nightingale opened the door and was already holding a basket.

Wendy felt a small, warm surprise. The maids usually brought breakfast. “Is His Highness already awake? If not, you shouldn’t have time to visit me.”

“What are you — I’m not beside him all day.” Nightingale lifted the basket, a little flustered. “I brought you food.”

“Of course you did.” Wendy smiled and reached for a cheese sandwich. “What is it?”

Nightingale set the basket on the bedside table and sat on the edge of the mattress with the careful posture of someone carrying news she had been rehearsing. “Today is Nana’s day.”

Wendy stopped chewing.

The Demon’s Bite. Nana’s first — which would not be as severe as the day of adulthood, but the younger the witch, the less endurance she had, and the first occurrence was unpredictable in its timing. There were no certainties.

“Didn’t His Highness say that daily use reduces the suffering?” Wendy said, keeping her voice steady.

“It’s still only a hypothesis.”

“A reasonable one. Anna survived her adulthood bite without harm — the most severe kind — and she’d been training her flame every day. You were there.” Wendy reached out and set her hand on Nightingale’s shoulder. “Where is Nana now?”

“In the medical center.” Nightingale’s mouth turned briefly toward something that might have been a smile. “Her father bought a large quantity of hares from the hunters and had them sent over. She’s been practicing on them since yesterday.”

“Such a good father,” Wendy said, and felt the old hollow ache of someone who cannot compare. Her earliest memories began in the convent. Before that: nothing. No parents, no name for herself before the church gave her one, no childhood in any form she could access. She had sometimes thought of it the way she thought of a room she had never entered — the door was there, but she had no key, and had stopped standing in front of it some years ago.

“I suppose I’m slightly more fortunate in that regard,” Nightingale said, with a careful lightness.

“You are.” Wendy pulled her in, an arm around her shoulders. “Are you frightened?”

A silence. Then Nightingale nodded, once, small.

Wendy held her. She understood the fear — understood it at a level below language. Today was not only a test of one twelve-year-old girl’s endurance. It was the test of a theory that, if proved, changed everything. If Nana passed through unharmed, it would mean that Border Town had solved the problem the Church had used for centuries to control them. The Demon’s Bite was not fate. It was not divine punishment or the mark of a devil’s bargain. It was a mechanical problem with a mechanical solution.

Which would mean Border Town was what the Holy Mountain was supposed to be.

“There’s nothing to do but wait,” Wendy said. “So we’ll be lazy and keep her company. I believe the contract calls it paid leave.”

Nightingale looked at her sidelong. “You read the contract that carefully?”

“I read everything. You should try it sometime.”

They gathered in Nana’s room after dinner: Anna, Lightning, Nightingale, Wendy, Sir Pine who sat closest to his daughter and said almost nothing, and Roland who had come with a handful of small coins and an offer to demonstrate tricks. Nana watched his hands with enormous eyes, the anxiety in her face gradually displaced by the simpler question of where the coin had gone.

The tricks were elementary — sleight of hand at the level Wendy had seen from traveling performers a decade ago. Roland knew it, and performed them anyway with the straight face of someone delivering a serious report. That quality she had noticed in him before: the willingness to be undignified if it served a purpose.

He really is as Nightingale described, Wendy thought. Strange and precise and genuinely kind, though he would not name it as such.

Lightning took over from the tricks, launching into sailing stories — her father, his ship, the fjords between islands, whirlpools that could swallow a hull, a giant deep-water shark they had tracked for three days before it dove beyond any possible measurement. Some of it was embellished; no one said so. Roland listened with the expression of a man doing mathematics on the inside of something else.

Nana’s grip on her father’s hand was very tight.

They waited.

The fire burned low and Roland added wood. The room grew warm and close. Nightingale checked Nana’s temperature at intervals, watching the subtle shifts of magic within her with that quiet attending focus she brought to everything. The hours passed without announcement.

Roland went to refill his water glass and passed the window, and when he did he pulled the curtain aside on reflex — just a fraction, just to look.

The sky was pale. Not dark. Not night.

“Everyone look.” He pulled the curtain open fully.

They crowded the window, and they saw: the grey of early morning, the particular white-grey that arrived an hour before proper light, the snow still falling but the darkness broken. The new day had come while they were watching Nana’s face for signs, and the signs had not come, because there were no signs.

She had passed through without pain. Without incident. Without any mark at all.

Nana looked at her own hands like she was checking for damage, then looked at her father, then at Anna, who pressed a kiss to the top of her head and said nothing. Some things the body knew before the mind caught up to them.

Outside the window, the snow continued to fall on Border Town, grey and patient and indifferent, exactly as it had all winter.

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