Rewrite That Witch
CH095 · Rewrite
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Chapter 95: Meeting

Pathetic prince. Wilderness exile with pretensions.

Cornelius held the thought carefully, the way you hold something that would make a mess if dropped, and walked. The two guards behind him had their hands resting — not gripping, just resting — near their sword hilts, and he said nothing aloud until the castle gate was well behind him.

When he was clear of them, he pulled out his handkerchief — already damp — and wiped his forehead. Then he spat on the ground. Thoroughly. He stamped on the result twice, which helped somewhat.

You think stopping a few demonic beasts makes you Longsong Stronghold’s equal? Enjoy it while it lasts.

The reason he’d come back to Border Town this early was information he had from a reliable source. Sir Reynolds — financial director, City Hall, a man Cornelius had been cultivating for five years with two high-quality furs per year and the occasional familial gesture — had passed word that Duke Ryan was ready to move. And the authority behind that movement was Timothy Wimbledon himself, new king of Graycastle. The precise language, as Reynolds had reported it: Roland Wimbledon is no longer the Lord of Border Town. If he wishes to be reassigned, he must present himself at the king’s court.

Cornelius was not a sophisticated political analyst. But he knew what had happened to the first prince — the eldest son, the obvious heir — once Timothy secured the capital. A sentence like present yourself at court from a new king who had already sent his elder brother to the block was not an invitation. It was punctuation.

The west of Graycastle was Duke Ryan’s domain by every practical measure. The only real question was whether Ryan would wait for Timothy’s formal sanction before moving, or act and receive it after. Either way, the outcome for Roland Wimbledon was the same: eviction, arrest, or worse.

This was why Cornelius had rushed back early. The civilians in Border Town hadn’t fled to Longsong Stronghold this year — which meant their inventories hadn’t been depleted, which meant the early-season trade opportunity was real, and he’d intended to take advantage of it. He’d also planned to sell the house. No point keeping property in a territory that was about to change hands, especially if Ryan’s mercenaries were the ones doing the transfer.

He hadn’t expected the house to already be a pile of rubble.

Thirty gold royals, minimum. The figure of one hundred fifty he’d given Roland was somewhat aspirational, but thirty was honest — the materials alone. And the Prince had authorized twenty, paid them to some militiaman named Blair, and then had the gall to threaten him with a desertion charge when he objected to it.

Cornelius’ jaw tightened. He had bent his back to accept twenty. Had swallowed his pride in front of two armed guards, in the Prince’s own parlor, and agreed the house wasn’t his. And in return he’d gotten nothing — not the money, not even the satisfaction of having argued effectively — and been escorted out like a petitioner who’d overstayed his appointment.

He was still reconstructing the sequence of the conversation, somewhere between the castle gate and the harbor road, when something snagged in his memory and made him slow down.

The 4th Prince’s reputation was specific and consistent: impulsive, dissolute, incompetent. Within a week of arriving in Border Town, the man had apparently accosted Baron Simon’s wife in a way that had become a joke at every dinner table in Longsong Stronghold for months afterward. That was the Roland Wimbledon that Cornelius had been briefed on. That was what he’d expected to be dealing with.

What he had actually been dealing with was a man who had sat at the head of his own table with his hands folded and his voice level and had dismantled Cornelius’ position in four sentences without once raising his voice. Who had offered a choice between two options and made both of them sound entirely reasonable, as if the hangman’s option were simply an administrative formality he was obligated to mention. Who had never, in the entire interview, looked anything other than mildly inconvenienced by the interruption.

If I’d held my ground, Cornelius thought, if I’d insisted the house was mine —

He stopped walking. The sweat on his forehead had gone cold.

He had been, in that room, genuinely afraid. Not of anything the Prince had done — nothing dramatic had happened, no one had drawn a weapon — but of something in the quality of the man’s attention. Something that made him feel, while it was happening, as if he were talking to Duke Ryan.

He shook his head. He was giving the man too much credit. Ryan had fifty years of hard governance behind him and an army that could field three thousand cavalry. Roland Wimbledon had a wall and some peasants with pikes. Whatever the Prince’s demeanor in a parlor, it meant nothing against those numbers.

A few more days of pride, Cornelius thought, resuming his walk. That’s all he has left. And when Ryan moves, I’ll have my laugh. The twenty gold royals were a loss, but Ryan would settle the account eventually. He had received some excellent furs; he no longer needed to sell the house since it no longer existed; he could sail back to Longsong Stronghold today with a clear conscience and deliver the Prince’s message to the assembled nobility there, which would at least be entertaining to perform.

He was still composing the performance in his mind when the wind moved a hood.

The woman was walking in the opposite direction, toward the castle. Ordinary enough. Border Town had its traffic, even now. But the gust caught the edge of her hood, just for a moment, and Cornelius saw the green hair beneath it — deep green, the genuine article, not a dye — and a portion of a face that made him stop in the middle of the road.

He had attended three royal court celebrations. He had seen the daughters of dukes and the decorative wives of marquises who had been selected from three kingdoms’ worth of candidates for precisely their appearance. None of it had prepared him for this.

She was already past him, walking toward the castle gate with the purposeful quiet of someone who knew exactly where she was going. Cornelius turned, calculated, and gave it up. Whatever the Prince had or hadn’t done, the man had access to someone like that in a town at the edge of the wilderness. There was no rational explanation for it, and pursuing the matter would require walking back through that gate.

He continued to the harbor.

His clipper was at the pier. The boatmen had the sail up within minutes, and Border Town fell back as the river caught them and the current did its work.

He was sitting in the sun, feeling better by degrees, when he saw them in the fields.

Perhaps five miles out from the town — he estimated from the shoreline — a column of soldiers crossed the snow. Brown leather armor. Long pikes slung across their backs. Moving in formation through drifts that came up past their knees, the line stretching back into the trees so that he couldn’t count the end of it, though he guessed at least a hundred.

The snow was deep. Walking in it at all, at any speed, was difficult; Cornelius had managed perhaps fifty meters of it earlier in the day and considered that sufficient. These men were marching in it. In formation. They were moving slowly, but they were moving, the line keeping its shape despite the uneven surface.

He had meant to laugh. He had found, somewhere in the process of drawing breath to do it, that he couldn’t.

The knights under Duke Ryan’s command, he found himself thinking, watching the column until the bend of the river took it from view. Would they do this?

He didn’t answer the question aloud. He didn’t want to.

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