Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 850: A Lone Wolf

“One, two, three, four…”

Lorgar tipped the gold royals from her bag onto the table and counted them twice, her brows pressed together.

Twenty-one.

In less than half a month she had burned through three-quarters of her savings. At this rate she would be crawling home in disgrace, every aspiration she’d arrived with buried in quicksand.

The prices in a big city are outrageous. Especially Evelyn’s Complex Wine House.

Open robbery. That’s what it is.

“No—” She made a small sound of self-reproach and lowered her head, ears drooping with it. The wine shop had not robbed her. She had taken out the gold royals herself, freely, every time, and the owner had actually expressed concern on more than one occasion, pointing out that once she joined the Witch Union she would receive one free bottle per month. None of that had registered. The words had arrived in her head and found nothing to stick to.

I was defeated by my own desire.

Or by my curiosity.

But.

Those Chaos Drinks are not my fault. Not entirely. Even the morning dew of Arturo Oasis doesn’t taste like that. Each one is different — color, flavor, everything. The Complex Wine House earns its reputation.

If every bottle tasted the same, she was certain she could control herself. She knew the warrior’s rule: measured drinking sharpened the edge, excess dulled it. She had applied that rule without difficulty before. But Chaos Drinks refused to be measured. Every new flask was something she had never tasted, and something she could not resist trying. The gold royals had simply run out between one drink and the next.

Lorgar pressed her forehead against the cold table and held it there, rubbing side to side.

Stop.

The wine house had other uses, she reminded herself. It was a reliable place to broaden her knowledge. She had found that by sitting anywhere inside and keeping her ears open, she could collect more useful information than she would gather from a week of asking questions — merchants from every northern kingdom passed through, wealthy enough to have opinions worth hearing, informed enough to know things the traveling traders of the Southernmost Region had never considered. Some of the Witch Union members also came by, and from them she had managed to learn things about the Union’s internal workings that no one would have told her directly.

But twenty-one gold royals would not carry that plan much further.

She needed to act.

The clearest solution was also the simplest: get out of the city. Remove herself from the proximity of the Complex Wine House entirely. Fighting was an effective cure — during battle, she forgot everything else, and the temptation could not follow her into a wilderness. She would find an opponent worth testing herself against, and the city would have time to stop pulling at her.

When she closed her eyes, the sand road appeared. The particular red dust of it, the heat of the horizon.

Yes. This is the challenge the Three Gods have set.

She patted her own cheeks, put the twenty-one royals back into the bag, and began to pack.

The half-month had not been entirely wasted. Ashes had introduced her to the healer Nana Pine, and through Nana she had learned that three witches in Neverwinter possessed curing abilities — Nana herself, Lily, and Leaf. They did not work exclusively for the great chief: all three operated a hospital in the city where any resident could receive treatment, at prices that were, compared to the Chaos Drinks, almost charitable.

This was better than she had imagined. She would not need to join the Witch Union simply to access medical care.

Among the three, Nana’s healing was the most powerful, but it required the patient’s direct presence. Lily and Leaf could produce portable medicines — which suited Lorgar better. The gray powder in her hand now was Leaf’s work: a compound she called “special medicine for metal-infected wounds,” capable of stopping blood loss quickly. The small bottle of liquid beside it — “Cleansing Water,” Lily’s — looked like well water and acted nothing like it. Any warrior with experience knew that an infected wound killed more reliably than the blade that made it; resistance to infection was worth more than it appeared. Lorgar had recognized the value the moment she tested it on a cut. If it kept longer, she would have bought every bottle she could carry.

Both medicines were available at the hospital. At what they could do, their prices were not high at all.

The rest of her plan had not gone as smoothly. Every trick she had prepared to gather intelligence on the northern kingdoms proved useless — Neverwinter had no Rats Association, contrary to what the traveling traders had told her. The residents she questioned about demons knew nothing; she had asked several dozen people without result, and the asking had eventually attracted men in black who began following her at a discreet distance. From what she had been able to gather through other channels — Ashes’s descriptions, and a conversation overheard in the Wine House — demons had appeared once in an abandoned city in the wilderness north of Neverwinter.

Ordinarily, she would not have targeted an enemy she knew so little about. But the Chaos Drinks were a more immediate threat, and she was eager to prove herself to the great chief, and this journey was supposed to be a challenge. Challenges were supposed to be filled with obstacles.

She was prepared for that.

Outside the city walls she found a dense stretch of forest without people in it.

She stripped and shifted into the great wolf, the pack gripped between her teeth, and ran north.

She did not know where the abandoned city lay, or how long before she encountered a demon. She had patience. A Desert Wolf with sharp hearing and sharper smell could live comfortably in a wilderness that would kill an ordinary person inside a week, and she had proven that ability dozens of times in the Southernmost Region, finding and killing hidden enemies that her prey never knew she had detected.

She would find what she was looking for.

The ground was soft under her paws — dirt mixed with snow-melt, yielding, quiet. She felt the Three Gods somewhere ahead of her, arranging the path.

She had not covered much distance before the sound reached her.

A high whistle in the air — something moving fast, slicing downward. The particular quality of it — the crack and split of displaced air — registered before she finished recognizing it.

She had heard this sound before. On the Burning Stage, during the holy duel, the Four-winged Eagle had come at her this way. She had been unable to dodge it then. She knew how to answer it now.

An excellent Mojin warrior did not permit herself to be hit twice by the same attack.

Lorgar dropped onto one hind leg, turned her body to the side, and faced the direction of the sound. She pressed her haunches into the ground, felt the muscles lock, opened her claws, and held the position — ready to answer whatever arrived.

The creature landed where she had been an instant before. The impact sent snow-water spraying in every direction. Its wingspan was greater even than the Four-winged Eagle’s. The ground shuddered with the landing’s weight.

And then a sound — surprised, almost indignant.

“Coo?”

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