Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 947: Return of the Eastern Front Army

With the payment problem resolved — or at least well enough framed that he could let it rest — Roland turned to the next item on his list.

Standard units.

Neverwinter’s universal education had already introduced millimeter, centimeter, meter, kilometer into its textbooks, quietly retiring the older system of inches, feet, and yards. The transition had gone more smoothly than he’d expected. Measuring instruments built to the new specifications had been adopted without complaint by the construction and production departments, where their accuracy was simply too visible to argue with. The reference prototype — a bar of iron exactly as wide as Roland’s thumbnail — sat in the study of the castle, waiting to be replicated.

What remained was broader integration: standardizing weight, volume, and time across the whole kingdom, not just Neverwinter.

The delay had been deliberate. Early-stage production and basic education didn’t urgently require unified units, and the tooling to propagate them reliably hadn’t existed. Making a standard useless to declare it and distribute it in a form people couldn’t reproduce or verify. Now both problems had solutions.

Volume: a vessel holding one cubic decimeter was one liter. Weight: a cubic decimeter of water was one kilogram. Time: a one-meter pendulum swinging through one arc in one second. Hummingbird could produce perfectly consistent liter-vessels to serve as master references; the pendulums would do the same for seconds; from those masters, Neverwinter’s factories could replicate instruments in quantity.

This meant Anna didn’t have to build every measuring device by hand. It meant the standard could propagate without a bottleneck.

He wasn’t troubled by the imprecision. The prototypes used by any civilization in history had always been approximate, and they’d been improved over time as the tools for improvement became available. The point wasn’t perfection — it was consistency. Once the standard was set and the instruments were made, everything that came after could be calibrated against them, and from calibration came reliable exchange, reliable manufacture, reliable science.

He added it to the development plan and moved on.

Three days later, Iron Axe brought the Eastern Front Army home.

Echo came with him — she’d spent nearly half a year in the Port of Clearwater, and this was the first time Roland had seen either of them since before the Eastern campaigns closed.

They stood in front of his desk together — two Mojins, a commander-in-chief and a clan chief — and Roland found himself looking at them in the way you look at people who have changed and then checking whether you’d noticed before you started looking.

He had known them both as exiles. Iron Axe — identity hidden, hunting for a living in Border Town. Echo — sold into slavery, life balanced on a blade’s edge from one week to the next. And here they stood now: indispensable, composed, carrying responsibility the way people do when it’s been on their shoulders long enough that they’ve stopped thinking about whether it fits.

Experience changes people. He’d believed this abstractly for years. Watching it happen was something else.

Echo’s report was concise. The Wildflame Clan had kept their agreement. The first migrants were settled at the Port of Clearwater. Her acceptance by that clan had drawn interest from smaller clans in Iron Sand City — several had approached her to express willingness to serve under her leadership. By the end of the year, the Port of Clearwater’s emigrant population was expected to approach thirty thousand, comparable to the old king’s city in scale.

She also carried a letter from Spear, the ruler of Fallen Dragon Ridge. Roland didn’t open it. He could reconstruct the contents from memory of every previous letter: more labor needed, more food needed, the situation is difficult, please send help.

“Spear said that as someone who only managed a small manor before, she wasn’t prepared for this many people,” Echo said, and she’d caught something of Spear’s delivery in it. “The City Hall personnel are competent, but she needs two to three hundred more clerks before the settlement work can stabilize. She says that if Your Majesty doesn’t take better care of her, she may simply hand everything to someone else and come to Neverwinter to be an ordinary witch.”

Roland laughed. “An ordinary witch is anything but idle. Soraya and Leaf will see to that.” He thought for a moment. “I’ll include her in the next allocation after the new batch of officials completes approval. You’ve done well — take a few days.”

Echo bowed. Then, with a directness she’d clearly been carrying for some time: “Your Majesty — have you been composing recently?”

“Have you finished all the others?”

“Yes.” The hope in her face was small but clear. “All of them. They’ve been useful — especially for rallying people when things were hard. When I was uncertain, I’d sing. If not for those songs, I might not have stayed steady.”

So it hadn’t been as smooth as she’d reported. She’d carried the gaps and setbacks herself, without making them into a report.

“I’ll have the new ones written down and sent to your room tonight,” he said.

Echo bowed more deeply than protocol required. “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

After she left, the room settled back to quiet. Roland looked at Iron Axe.

“It’s been a hard few months.”

“On the contrary,” Iron Axe said, with the clipped certainty that was simply the man’s idiom. “It’s an honor to fight for you. I don’t find it difficult. I enjoy it.”

Roland studied him briefly — the set of his jaw, the total absence of performance. He believed it.

“The nobles who fled to Seawindshire,” Roland said. “You didn’t catch them.”

“They moved faster than anticipated.” Iron Axe’s expression didn’t change, but something compressed in it. “By the time the First Army cleared Valencia and arrived at Seawindshire, the suburb had been stripped. The granaries in the downtown area were on fire. They’d burned what they couldn’t carry rather than let us have it.”

“The last spite of Timothy’s remnants.” Roland turned it over in his mind. “If you hadn’t prepositioned supplies — the cement carriers, the steady transport chain — the Army would have stopped at that point. A hungry city tears itself apart, and suppressing it with force puts you on the wrong side of every story that follows.”

“We didn’t have to. The preparations held.”

“Where did the nobles go?”

“Some to the Fjords. Others to the other three kingdoms.” Iron Axe’s regret was plain, briefly. “Without ships, we couldn’t pursue them into the sea.”

“They’ll use their family names eventually. When they do, we’ll know where to find them.” The batch that had fled toward Dawn had likely walked into a net — Timothy’s most committed loyalists, now trying to survive in a kingdom that had just changed hands against them. Roland didn’t lose sleep over them. He wanted them gone from the board, not out of malice but because they were a permanent irritant as long as they existed. “The ones who ran will run again when it suits them. That’s not our emergency.”

He ran through the rehabilitation situation in the Eastern Region — the census work, the supply lines, the preliminary restoration of administrative function. Iron Axe answered each question without hesitation.

Then Roland remembered something that had been sitting in the back of his thinking since the first reports arrived from the East.

“The nobles,” he said. “Luring them to a prison and then burning it. That was your decision?”

Iron Axe’s expression went very still.

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