Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 91: Heart Prison

Moonlight fell through the corridor windows in pale strips, and only half of Anna’s face caught the light. Her eyes held the faint blue of it, two still points in the dark. She leaned against his door with most of her body in shadow, but her outline was clear — good nutrition had remade the girl he had first met, and what remained was a young woman, quietly certain of herself.

Roland stopped when he saw her. He kept his expression steady and walked forward until she had to look up to find his eyes.

“It was only an accident,” he began. “I didn’t know she would —”

“I know.”

“She’s still young. I didn’t encourage —”

“I know that too.”

She wasn’t angry. He had braced for anger, or at least its architecture — the cool distance, the redirected gaze — but there was none of it. Her lake-blue eyes were motionless. Not suppressed, not controlled: simply still. She had never required camouflage, and she didn’t need it now. She took the initiative herself.

“I can’t do what Lightning did,” she said. “Not in front of everyone. I wouldn’t dare.” The faintest color rose in her cheeks. “So I waited here instead.”

She did not look away. The blush did not soften the directness of her gaze — if anything it made it harder to bear, because she was not hiding even that small vulnerability. She was offering it.

Two beats passed before Roland understood that his heart had skipped them.

He could have said something. A dozen things formed and dissolved. None of them were right; none of them were as honest as what she had just done. She might be bothered by Lightning’s performance at the celebration — probably she was — but grief or complaint were not her way. She simply said the true thing.

He bent toward her. He felt her breath first, warm and faintly unsteady, the first sign she was nervous beneath all that steadiness. In the quiet of the corridor they could hear each other breathing. Then her lips touched his cheek — soft, brief, certain.

“Good night, Your Highness,” she whispered.

Wendy sat cross-legged on the bed with a book in her lap.

Leisure like this — genuine leisure, unhurried, unguarded — had been nearly unknown to her during her years in the Association. She had developed a ritual in the weeks since: before sleep, she cleaned herself, changed into the silk gown His Highness had provided, and settled against the wall with a pillow at her back and a borrowed book in her hands. The gown was untied at the waist and unbuttoned at the collar. She had decided she liked it that way.

Lightning had required considerable effort. The girl had talked the entire walk back — her father, something she’d seen in the clouds last week, a theory about why petrels flew lower before storms — and then hit the mattress and was asleep before Wendy had even said good night. Always performing at being older than she was, always tumbling straight into sleep the moment she stopped performing.

Wendy smiled at the memory, then returned to the book: The Origin and History of the Church.

She had grown up in a monastery. She had spent years governed by its rhythms, its prohibitions, its silences. And yet this was a subject she had never truly studied. The nuns taught obedience to God’s teaching. God’s name, though — that they never gave. Every other thing in the world had a name. As a child, the omission had puzzled her in the way that a missing stair puzzles the foot.

What the books said, all of them, was roughly consistent with what rumor said. Three major religions had contested the mainland at the beginning of recorded history, each declaring the others heretical. The conflict lasted nearly a century before the Church prevailed. They announced that the other gods had been destroyed. They forbade God’s name, or rather: forbade any name, since to name a thing is to admit there are other things it is not.

The pages that followed described glory: the Old Holy City, the New Holy City, the victory over witches. Wendy read with a particular species of unease.

She had also borrowed The History of the Kingdom of Graycastle and A Brief History of the Mainland. The first was meticulous to the point of obsessiveness — every king’s name, every marriage, the branching genealogies traced out like root systems. The second focused on the political evolution of the four kingdoms, the shifts of power, the internal and external struggles, but still foregrounded the ruling families.

The Church history named none of its Popes. It was done deliberately, she understood now — God has no name; therefore the one who speaks for God has no name; therefore there has always been only one, a single continuous presence. Hundreds of years. One Pope. It was not a record. It was a theology wearing a record’s clothes.

Nightingale stepped out of the shadow beside the wardrobe.

Wendy set down the book. “This late, and only now free to talk?”

Nightingale rubbed the back of her neck, came and sat on the edge of the bed. “I just finished walking Nana home. How did Lightning take the evening?”

“Talked about her father the whole way back. Was asleep three seconds after I stopped tucking her in.” Wendy shrugged. “She performs like a grown woman, then drops like a child.”

“In your eyes, everyone is still a child,” Nightingale said, and picked up the book. She turned it over in her hands. “His Highness said you shouldn’t read in bed. The light’s not good enough.”

“His Highness did say that.”

They talked. They talked the way they talked when there was no Association business and no emergency and no one who needed managing — loosely, associatively, doubling back. The years they’d spent traveling from Silver City to the Impassable Mountain Range. The message that had reached them about a witch scheduled to be burned. How they’d survived the Months of Demons their first year without Roland’s walls and guns. Nightingale had more to say than Wendy had expected; Wendy offered a word or two every so often to let her know she was still there.

The candles had burned most of the way down by the time Wendy asked, quietly: “Can’t sleep? Because of Lightning?”

“What are you —”

“Veronica.” Wendy’s voice was gentle. “We are witches. You know what that means.”

A long silence. Outside the window, nothing moved.

Wendy put the book aside entirely. She wished she could find a different path to this. She had tried before, when they were still in the mountains, and she had never found one. There was only the true thing.

“Roland Wimbledon is the fourth prince of Graycastle. Everything we do, we do in service of getting him to the throne, because a Roland on the throne is the best shelter we have against the Church. That hasn’t changed.” She paused. “But a king must marry. A duke’s daughter, or a princess from another kingdom — someone who can give him an heir. A son inherits. A daughter is married to another noble house. That is how it works. That is how it has always worked.”

She let that settle.

“Even in the best possible future — a world where the distinction between witch and common woman means nothing, where we walk any road freely, where the most exceptional among us are granted titles and canonized as nobility — even then.” She kept her voice steady. She owed Nightingale steadiness. “Witches cannot bear children. Without descendants, we cannot continue a family’s name. No noble house will enter such a contract, whatever else changes. We gain many things. But that particular thing is not among them.”

She whispered the last part. “This is our fate. I’m sorry I have to say it.”

“I see,” Nightingale said.

After a while, she left.

Wendy sat alone with the guttered candles and the silence. She felt the weight of what she’d said — not regret, exactly, but the particular heaviness of having done a necessary thing badly and well at once.

Nightingale would endure it. Wendy was certain of this. She had watched the woman cross distances that would have broken almost anyone. This threshold, too, she would cross.

Wendy believed this. She held it carefully, the way you hold a candle in a draft.

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