Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 954: New Great Wheel

“She came ashore.” Roland’s interest was genuine. “I remember you said she’d stopped contact with people entirely — after she chose to live in the sea.”

“That’s largely thanks to Her Highness Tilly and Miss Camilla.” Margaret’s voice carried something careful in it, the particular tone of someone who has been worrying about a thing for a long time. “Without direct consciousness communication, she probably still wouldn’t have been able to adapt. And she has completely lost the ability to speak — Lord Thunder brought in several scholars to work with her, but the results were limited. She can manage a few words. She cannot sustain a conversation.”

Margaret paused. A decision being made about how much to continue.

“What is it?” Roland asked.

“Her long-term transformation has changed her in other ways.” She pressed her lips together briefly. “Her body — parts of it are no longer quite human. Witches shouldn’t look different from ordinary people as long as they aren’t using their power. But Joan can’t revert to her previous form. Her cheeks, neck, arms, and legs are covered in cyan scales. Like those of a Sea Ghost.”

Roland’s mind went briefly to Lorgar — the long ears, the tail, the way the Wildflame people had reacted to them with barely concealed fear. A woman covered in scales was a considerably larger obstacle. And the Sand Nation people were hardly the most superstitious society he’d encountered.

He set the thought aside. Focus.

“Has anyone harmed her?”

“We tried to prevent it.” A tired sigh. “We couldn’t stop rumors entirely.”

“There was no way to prevent it,” Thunder said, less delicately. “Teaching her to function among people again requires contact with people. Her appearance isn’t well received even in the Fjords — since we took her in, three maids and two scholars have left rather than continue. There are rumors I’m keeping a Sea Ghost.” A helpless gesture. “Perhaps the sea genuinely suits her better.”

“If Joan truly preferred life in the water, I wouldn’t try to change that.” Margaret’s voice was quieter now, and steadier. “But she doesn’t seem to dislike being on land. Even though she needs several hours in the sea each week, she still seeks out the maids who accept her. And she prefers cooked fish to raw. She remembers what she used to prefer.”

The problem was that this acceptance existed only within the controlled environment of Thunder’s household. Roland understood what Margaret was saying without saying it: bring her into the wider world, and the reception would be worse, not better. Changing people’s perceptions of something that frightened them required time — often, a great deal of it — and Joan’s situation was more extreme than any of the other witches he’d integrated into Neverwinter. Animalization, deformation, inhuman appearance: history had never been kind to these things.

“It will improve, eventually,” he said. He meant it, even knowing it was inadequate as comfort. “May I see her?”

If the problem was severe enough, concealment was at least a temporary solution — similar to the hat that let Lorgar pass unremarked.

“Of course.” Margaret turned and raised her hand. “Come here, Joan.”

Joan looked up from behind the maid, met Roland’s gaze for a second, and retreated.

“Your Majesty, I’m sorry.” Margaret bowed. “She isn’t accustomed to large gatherings yet.”

“You frightened her.” Nightingale’s voice was dry at his ear.

Roland directed a measured look at the empty air beside him, coughed once, and said, “It’s all right. She’ll be in Neverwinter for some time — she’ll grow more comfortable. For now, let’s go to the shipyard.”

Roland had cleared nearly a hundred acres southwest of Shallow Beach for the construction. Lotus had raised a wall around the perimeter; sentry towers stood at the four corners, and the First Army rotated guards through the checkpoints. Beyond the workers themselves, very few people in Neverwinter had seen what was inside.

They came through the wall and descended the zigzagging staircase into the shadow of the hull.

The sound that went through the group — a collective, involuntary intake of breath — was not exactly surprise. It was something closer to the sound people make when a scale they have been imagining in the abstract finally reveals itself to be real.

This was a different order of thing from the three-masted ships in the harbor. The hull rose sheer from the ground — no curved belly, no keel-swell at the waterline, just a flat-bottomed perpendicular wall of steel ascending into the grey sky. Standing at its foot, looking up, the sailors instinctively reduced themselves; the ship was not a vessel but a cliff face that happened to have been shaped.

“In the name of the Three Gods. Am I asleep?”

“Twenty thousand tonnes, at least. Has to be.”

“Even the biggest sailing ship wouldn’t survive a direct impact from this thing.”

“Sea monsters would turn around.”

“Lord Flyingbird — you didn’t mention we’d be sailing on a monster.”

The sailors scattered toward it without any order to do so. They pressed their palms against the steel, knocked their knuckles against it to hear the sound, circled the hull the way men circle something they cannot quite believe they’re allowed to touch. Every one of them was an experienced mariner who had never seen anything like this before, but experience was enough to tell them what it meant — not the details, but the category of significance.

Thunder stood still.

His reaction was quieter than the sailors’, and deeper. When Roland’s letter had described a ship built entirely of steel from keel to deck, Thunder had assumed it meant steel framing, steel reinforcement in the critical joints — the kind of thing a careful and resourceful shipwright might do with premium materials. He had said as much to his crew when he recruited them, pitching it as an ocean-going vessel with an unusually strong skeleton.

He understood now that he had been wrong.

What he was looking at was not what could be built with the best materials available in the Fjords given unlimited time. The volume of steel required was simply not gatherable. The Fjords had no production process that could have created it. Among commodities, iron ore was unexceptional — a palm-sized crude ingot fetched thirty to forty silver royals. Forge it into steel and the price multiplied tenfold. Knights passed steel armor down through generations specifically because a blacksmith could make perhaps seven or eight full sets in a lifetime. Gathering enough steel for what stood in front of him would have taken every blacksmith in the Fjords more than a decade.

The price Thunder had quoted to his Chamber of Commerce for a steam paddle steamer — three to four thousand gold royals — had made the trade seem balanced. Roland had said cost of production only; Thunder had privately thought the exploration data he’d provide in exchange was easily worth the ship’s full market value, and had planned to settle the difference after the Sealine expedition as a gesture of goodwill toward Lightning’s wellbeing.

He revised that estimate completely.

He could not help feeling a little sorry for his purse.

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