Chapter 944: The New Witch Group, Part I
The news came through, and Roland felt the tightness in his chest release.
The rescue mission had succeeded. The Kingdom of Dawn hadn’t been taken by conquest — the original plan had fractured somewhere along the way — but the outcome was acceptable: the Moya family deposed, the Quinn family installed, stability more or less preserved. Before the Quinns consolidated their hold, they’d remain Graycastle’s most dependable ally. And with Andrea in Neverwinter, that alliance could hold through the next generation, perhaps beyond.
The third Battle of Divine Will would not take a century. He was confident of that much.
Andrea and the God’s Punishment Witches were estimated to return to the Western Region within a month. Roland intended to use the interval well. With the destruction of Timothy’s remnants, the internal opposition had gone quiet, and the kingdom was unified in name at least. The City Hall networks in the secondary cities would take time to function with real authority, but he could begin laying groundwork now. When the machinery caught, Graycastle would be operating on a different level entirely from its neighbors.
The key was the witches.
Everything Neverwinter had built rested on their abilities. He knew this and had stopped being self-conscious about it.
Within the first two weeks after Anna’s return, the castle had been reorganized almost without ceremony. His desk was now twice its former size. Arrayed across it were more than ten wind-up telephones — connecting to the Witch Building office, the City Hall, the barracks, the Third Border City, Longsong Stronghold. No more runners sprinting across the castle grounds in an emergency. The first public telephone in the central square linked the city to Misty Forest, extending its reach as the railways did, allowing workers months away from home to speak with their families. The fare was time-based, access scheduled in advance, and for those who found it expensive there were always carrier pigeons or written letters — which, thanks to the spread of basic education, were increasingly common.
A new department had been formed to operate all of it: the Ministry of Communications. Its mandate covered every step of the process, from carrier pigeon care to home delivery, and it had grown enormous almost immediately. Nearly a thousand positions. Almost every recent graduate from Neverwinter’s schools had been absorbed.
Roland could see, in its shape, the faint outline of something much larger.
And that was purely from Anna’s contribution.
The problem now in front of him was the witches from Sleeping Island.
The second batch of migrants had brought the Sleeping Spell total to ninety-six. Testing their abilities had nearly broken Wendy and Scroll — not every witch was cooperative, and the first pass at data collection had been rough going. Tilly’s authority and Wendy’s patience had carried the registration through, but only barely.
The black notebook on Roland’s desk was the result: ninety-six witches, preliminary examinations, abilities catalogued.
He had read it over many times in the past few days. Most of the abilities he’d parsed for their practical applications. In the process, he’d decided that the old classification system — intensifying, summoning, attaching — was too crude. It said nothing about what a witch could actually do. He was reclassifying them by work assignment: manufacturing, cultivating, undetermined. That way the City Hall could see at a glance how many witches were available for production work.
This batch had also given him a clearer sense of just how wide the range of abilities truly was. Some witches could coax flowers out of cracked stone. Others could construct Magic Servants large enough to move structural beams. It was no wonder the Union had struggled to sustain losses — replace a combat witch with her particular gift, and you might wait a decade for a match.
The most reliable place for most witches was the factory floor. This was simply logistics.
Among the ninety-six, four had pulled his attention.
No. 26, Darkcloud. No. 43, Azima. No. 44, Doris. No. 89, Slimwrist.
Darkcloud’s ability was dyeing. She could change the color of any material she touched to whatever she wanted, without altering the material’s underlying properties. Technically this was attaching magic, and it was subject to the usual constraints: time limit, consumption scaling with target size, no effect against God’s Stones of Retaliation. But Darkcloud’s version was unusual. Her effective duration was extraordinarily long — probably because changing color required minimal interference with an object’s fundamental nature, and therefore minimal ongoing expenditure. Extended past her magic reserves, a dye she applied could last a century.
The size constraint remained. She couldn’t saturate the sea blue on a single breath, the way Hummingbird could compress an instant’s work into a burst. Objects beyond her magic capacity simply wouldn’t take. Wendy had measured her effective area at roughly one and a half square meters — the span of two outstretched arms in each direction.
That was enough. An object could be divided. A divided object could be dyed in sections and reassembled.
What Darkcloud offered Neverwinter was something it had not had: reliable dyes.
Current methods pulled color from natural sources — plants, minerals, animal derivatives. The results were uniformly poor. Too many impurities. Colors faded within seasons. Oxidation resistance was negligible. The variety was narrow enough that only nobles could afford genuinely saturated cloth, and even noble fashion ran mostly on gold and silver threadwork to compensate. Dyes mattered far beyond textiles: in education, printing, chemistry, biology. In almost every direction Roland looked, the ability to apply precise, stable color on demand opened doors. Darkcloud could also reduce the demand on Soraya, who had been stretching to fill too many roles at once.
Witches 43 and 44 were a different problem.
Azima and Doris had made their feelings clear in the first meeting: they disliked Tilly, they wanted to leave Neverwinter as soon as possible. Scroll had temporarily convinced them to stay, but the fracture was real. Whether either of them would agree to work remained an open question.
This was unfortunate, because their abilities were unlike anything else in the notebook.
Azima’s power was Source Tracing — find the whole through a fragment, locate a concentration through a trace element. Hold a drop of river water, and she could sense the nearest lake or creek. Examine seeds from animal droppings, and she could estimate the host tree’s location, its size, its health. On Sleeping Island this had kept people fed and supplied. Here, it was the most powerful natural resource survey tool Roland could imagine.
Sylvie’s Eye of Magic had real limits underground. The deeper she looked, the heavier the magic expenditure, and her precision fell off sharply. She could mark known ore beds in the North Slope Mine area without difficulty, but perceiving deeply buried veins — or distinguishing what a vein contained — was beyond her. She could detect presence, not identity. Azima could do both. More: she could estimate the scale of a reserve, not merely confirm it existed.
Combine that with Lucia’s ability to purify elements, and Roland could envision a completed resource map of the entire kingdom — not a rough survey, but something close to a periodic table overlaid on geography.
Even if Azima refused to cooperate, that loss was survivable. The ore wasn’t going anywhere.
Doris was a different calculation entirely. Her ability — what Wendy had recorded as enchantment — was not replaceable. It was not even comparable to anything else in the notebook.
Wendy’s description: enchantment attaches magic power to a dead object, enabling it to slowly absorb ambient magic and recycle, dramatically slowing the rate of depletion and making the object function as if alive.
Roland had his reservations about the framing — “dead objects cannot contain magic power” was witch convention, and like most convention, it was approximate. The joint experiments by Isabella and Agatha on God’s Stones of Retaliation had already disturbed the premise: even these stones, when observed under Isabella’s ability, showed faint traces of magic residue on their surfaces. No third party had injected it. The residue had to belong to the stone itself.
Which meant the principle that magic could not inhabit inert matter was at minimum incomplete.
Agatha’s working theory: the God’s Stone of Retaliation maintained a constant circulation — slowly losing magic power, constantly absorbing new power from ambient sources, the way desert sand absorbs solar heat through the day and releases it through the night. This would explain why Isabella could alter a God’s Stone’s nature without disrupting its structure: she was killing the cycle, not the stone. The stone became an ordinary rock. Dead, in Agatha’s framing.
Roland set aside the theoretical scaffolding. The practical point was this: enchantment was effectively a form of conversion to God’s Stone. An object so treated could sustain itself through ambient absorption.
Dawn I, fully charged, generated electricity for five consecutive days. When Mystery Moon held Broken Sword during that time, Dawn I’s runtime extended by ten days — but the magic was still depleting, the reservoir still draining. Mystery Moon’s sustained maintenance was all that kept it working. Even if her magic capacity grew to match Anna’s — a fantastic hypothetical — she could maintain only a handful of Dawn I units simultaneously. That would barely cover the factories, let alone the rest of the city.
A Dawn I enchanted by Doris could draw from the ambient field to compensate for its own consumption. The circulation wasn’t perfectly balanced — losses still exceeded gains — but the margin was astonishing. It meant Mystery Moon could stop being a maintenance worker and become a generator. It meant stable electricity could reach beyond the factory walls. It meant every witch with a minor enchantment ability, previously assigned to low-value tasks, might have new purpose. And it meant Agatha and Isabella would have a supply of test targets analogous to God’s Stones, which would accelerate their research considerably.
The complications — slow activation time, limited efficiency, vulnerability to God’s Stone interference — were real but small against the ability itself.
Roland needed Doris. That was the conclusion. The question was the method.
He had been thinking about it, and the only approach he could see working was the sugarcoated bullet. In the art of convincing people of things they didn’t want to be convinced of, he had found no instrument more reliable than himself.
The last witch worth noting was No. 89, Slimwrist — named, apparently, for the obvious.
She was a jeweler’s daughter, raised in craft. Before her awakening, she had possessed the natural dexterity of someone trained from childhood; after it, her hands had become something closer to precision instruments. She could carve faster than any unAwakened artisan, and she could work any material. Anna could do similar things with her Blackfire, but Anna was a Senior Witch who had passed two evolutionary thresholds, an anomaly in a population of anomalies. Slimwrist was not Anna. But she could take real work off Anna’s hands, and in precision manufacturing there was no such thing as too much capacity. On Sleeping Island she had been a craftsperson for noble clients. In Neverwinter, she could help build the future.