Rewrite That Witch
CH086 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 86: The Choice of the Witches

Leaves did not know how long she had been moving.

Half a month from the wildlands to the Impassable Mountain Range, perhaps a little more. She had lost the precise count somewhere in the middle of it — somewhere between the third sleepless night and the morning she’d woken inside a hollowed trunk to find the wood soaked with blood and had to strip off her clothes and move before the smell drew something down on her.

The pace was brutally slow. She had to stop before crossing each stretch of open ground, listening for the sound of demonic beasts before her next move, coaxing seeds in the soil to give her warning if something large was nearby. Ten miles on a good day. Less on the bad ones. The Witch Cooperation Association’s badge had gone dark — the heat spell drained — so she’d replaced it with bark wrapped tight around her core, and leaves she had coaxed from bare branches and sewed into a layer using a twig as needle and leaf-veins as thread. It was not enough, in the end. By the time she crossed back into the mountain range the frostbite had already taken her toes, two on each foot, and she had no feeling below her ankles.

The Demon’s Bite had found her in the wildlands, as it always found witches at their lowest — or perhaps there is no lowest, and it simply arrives when it arrives. It had woken her in the hollow trunk with a sensation of her chest being torn open, pain spreading outward through every nerve at once, and she had fought it by biting through her own tongue and tasting blood, and she had held on because she knew that more than twenty sisters might be waiting in the camp, injured, without a healer, waiting for her specifically.

She had held on.

When she finally reached the camp and saw a familiar shape moving between the tents, she fell.

She woke two days later.

The gangrene had progressed too far by then. Even her own herbs could not stop it. Two toes from the left foot, two from the right — the sisters handled it quickly and told her afterward, because telling her before would have meant she tried to prevent it. She had not wept about the toes. Compared to what she had left behind in the wildlands, it was a small accounting.

But when she saw that all her surviving sisters had their arms wrapped in white bandages, she wept about that.

Forty-two had left the camp. Six had returned.

She listened to the accounts when she was well enough to hear them. The witches with no combat ability had fled immediately when the devils attacked, made it back to the mountain pass, were struck by demonic beasts within the first night — a boar-type, then wolves the morning after — and by the time they reached the camp there were eight. Two of those had been struck by the Demon’s Bite in the days that followed; the darkness of the wildlands and the deaths they had witnessed had taken their will to fight, and they had not survived the bite. The remaining six had waited, expecting no one, until Leaves had dropped at the camp’s edge.

When things had settled, one of the sisters asked: “Scarlett, Windseeker — and our Mentor Cara. Did any of them survive?”

“Only me,” Leaves said.

The silence that followed was the particular silence of a weight being placed.

Scroll — the eldest among the survivors, the one who had been with the Association since its first months — waited a day before raising the subject. “Leaves,” she said, with the careful tone of someone who has already discussed this without the person being addressed. “If Cara doesn’t return, we hope you’ll take the position of Mentor.”

Leaves closed her eyes.

She thought about Cara. About the certainty that had driven forty-two women through the Impassable Mountain Range in winter, the absolute conviction in the Holy Book’s promises, the hunger for the mountain that had turned into a destination and then into a mirage and then into a killing ground. The certainty had been the strength that held them together. It had also been the reason they could not stop.

If the cautious and patient Wendy had led them — Leaves did not finish the thought. There was no point in finishing it.

“We will go looking for Nightingale,” she said.

The camp erupted. Voices over voices: Why? Border Town? What if she lied? What if Wendy is already dead?

Scroll clapped once, sharp, and the noise collapsed. “If Nightingale lied,” she said to Leaves, “what then?”

“Then you wait outside the town at a safe distance,” Leaves said. “And I go in alone to find out. If I don’t come back, you go wherever you decide to go. If I come back—” She stopped. Reconsidered. “If what Nightingale told us is true, then there is no reason for the Witch Cooperation Association to continue as it was.”

“Why?”

“Because that would mean Border Town is the Holy Mountain.” She let it sit for a moment. “And we spent the winter walking the wrong direction.”

Another silence.

Scroll said, after a long pause: “If something happens to you in the town—”

“Then you take command.” Leaves looked at her directly. “I know your ability isn’t suited for fighting. It doesn’t matter. A leader doesn’t have to be the strongest — she has to be the wisest, and the most careful, and the least likely to mistake her own certainty for truth.” She thought of Cara’s face when the city appeared in the clouds, all that brightness. “You were there at the beginning. You walked the whole kingdom to reach this mountain. I trust your judgment more than my own.”

Scroll looked at her hands for a moment. Then she nodded.

“Get some rest,” she said. “We’ll start preparing to move when you can walk.”

Leaves lay back on her blanket and looked at the canvas ceiling of the tent. The camp was quiet. Outside, the Impassable Mountain Range stood in its winter silence, indifferent to all of it.

Nightingale, she thought. I hope you told the truth.

Discussion

Suggest a change