Rewrite That Witch
CH096 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 96: Leaves

She had not expected to walk back into a town.

Leaves crossed into Border Town’s boundary and found herself among one-story brick buildings, dusty and solid, with smoke coming from chimneys and people moving between them with purpose. Half a year in the mountains had not prepared her for this. Half a year might as well have been half a lifetime — the mountains measured time differently, in hunger and frostbite and the number of people left standing each morning.

She had crossed Silver City’s slums before. She knew what a town looked like after a hard winter and the Months of Demons. The hollowed faces, the slack way survivors moved, each step an argument against lying down. The bodies at the road’s edge that no one had found energy to bury yet.

Border Town’s people were drying fish at their doorways. Young men carried hoes and hammers toward the north of town, talking. Someone on a rooftop was replacing tiles. Leaves pulled her hood lower and kept walking.

The castle sat at the southwest corner on a hillside, visible from everywhere, isolated from the tree line by a broad open approach. There was no cover. She had considered growing something tall enough to hide in, but a single tree standing and walking in an empty field would not go unnoticed.

So she would walk in the front door.

This was the calculation: if Nightingale had told the truth, the guards would know the witches’ names and this would be easy. If Nightingale had lied about the broad picture but told the truth about the names, it might still be manageable. If Nightingale had been a Church informant all along — if everything she’d told the Association about Border Town was fabrication — then the guards would be summoning soldiers right now, and Leaves needed to assess her odds of reaching the tree line before the gate closed.

She was a fair judge of her own capabilities. Nightingale, though. If Nightingale was the threat, rather than the guards — Leaves did not finish the thought. She had already made her choice. If she didn’t come back, Scroll would take the others south. Maybe across the sea. Somewhere.

She walked up the hill. The two guards at the gate saw her at fifty meters and put their hands on their hilts; one called out: “This is the Prince’s residence. Move along. If you have business with the territory, the Town Hall is to the left —”

Leaves stopped. She removed her hood.

She watched them see her hair.

Green hair was unusual enough that it identified her before she said anything. Most people, on identification, went one of two ways: fear or disgust, usually disgust, the second a thin membrane over the first. These guards’ faces showed neither. One of them looked genuinely curious.

“I’m a witch,” she said.

“What’s your ability?” the curious one asked.

Her heart was doing something she couldn’t fully control. She kept her voice level. “I’d like to see Nightingale. Anna or Nana would also work.”

The guards exchanged a look. The one who’d spoken first nodded to the other — you stay, I’ll go — and disappeared through the gate at a trot.

Leaves waited.

She had thought she was prepared for either answer. Standing in the sun outside the gate with one guard watching her with interested rather than hostile eyes, she discovered that she was not prepared. She was afraid of disappointment in a way she had not been afraid of death when she’d crossed the border that morning. Death had an architecture she understood. Disappointment — the particular kind, the kind where the thing you chose to believe turned out to be wrong — had no architecture at all.

The footsteps came before the voice did. Running footsteps, from inside the gate.

Then the voice, which she knew, which she had heard a hundred times in the Association arguing with Cara about safety margins and food allocation and whether to trust the new arrivals:

“Leaves!”

And then Nightingale was through the gate and across the distance between them, and the hug was real and warm and forceful, and Leaves found she was shaking.

“Welcome home,” Nightingale said, against her shoulder.

“My spare uniform,” Nightingale said, rummaging through her wardrobe with focused urgency, pulling things out and stacking them on the bed. “Jacket — shoes — the nightgown is clean, I’m not sure about the towel, this one —”

“Slow down,” Wendy said. She was sitting near the window, smiling at the controlled frenzy. “His Highness won’t be up for another hour. There’s time.”

Leaves sat on the edge of the bed and watched Nightingale arrange clothing for her. The warmth behind her eyes was something she hadn’t felt in months. She breathed in through her nose, slow, and worked on not crying.

Nightingale had not lied. It was real. The prince was real. The rest of it — whatever it meant for the future — she would figure out later.

“Do you want a bath?” Nightingale said, setting the towel on the pile. “Tell me what happened. Did you find the Holy Mountain? How many of you made it back?”

The question landed like a stone in still water.

Leaves looked at her hands. She felt the crack open in her chest that she had been carefully not looking at since the canyon, since the days after the devils came, since counting heads in the cold and understanding that some of the names she was saying were already names of the dead. She put her arms around Nightingale and pressed her face to her shoulder and let it happen.

She cried for a long time. Nightingale held on and didn’t try to stop it or redirect it. When it finally wound down, Leaves sat back and wiped her face and felt emptied out in the useful way, the way that meant she could speak now.

She told them everything.

She told it in sequence, the way you tell something when precision is the only thing you can offer the dead: the march into the forbidden lands, Cara’s certainty, the cold that came before the devils did. The moment when the attack began and the chaos of trying to count who was still moving. The retreat and the frostbite and the decision to turn around. How many they had buried in ground too frozen to dig properly, so the graves were more like arrangements of stones. Scroll taking inventory of the survivors. Walking back.

When she reached the canyon where Scroll and the others were waiting — six survivors, herself the seventh — Nightingale’s hand found hers and squeezed once and stayed.

Wendy sat with her face still, the way she went still when she was absorbing something heavy. When Leaves finished, she said: “Forty-two went in. Seven came out.” She paused. “I didn’t think Cara would take it that far. I — if I had held my position more firmly that night, instead of stepping away from her —”

“It wouldn’t have changed what she decided to do,” Nightingale said. “She had already decided.” Her voice was quiet but without uncertainty. “The question now is what comes next.” She looked at Leaves. “The other six — they’re at the canyon entrance?”

“Waiting for my signal. We agreed: if I don’t come back, Scroll leads them south. Maybe across the sea. They don’t know where to go, just away.”

“Then we go get them,” Nightingale said, and was already standing. “I’ll leave now —”

“Not alone,” Wendy said. “If they don’t recognize you, they won’t trust you — Leaves has to go with you. And take Lightning. She should be on her training flight toward Longsong Stronghold, but you can intercept her.” Wendy was thinking through it the way she thought through things: methodically, already three steps ahead. “Take horses. Your sisters have been walking for weeks. Let them ride the last stretch.”

Leaves stood. “Does His Highness need to approve this? Should we wake him?”

Nightingale was already pulling on her jacket. She paused long enough to glance back with something that was not quite a smile but served the same purpose.

“If he knew about this,” she said, “he’d have already been waiting at the gate.”

Discussion

Suggest a change