Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 97: New Witches, New Abilities (Part 1)

Roland walked into his office and found Wendy standing at the window.

“Nightingale’s not here?” He poured himself a cup of warm water and held it.

“She went to meet our sisters.”

He had the cup halfway to his mouth. He set it down. “Your sisters. As in — the Witch Cooperation Association?”

“They came to Border Town,” Wendy said. “They arrived this morning.”

“I thought they were still —” He stopped. The last news had been the Association entering the forbidden lands. Looking for the Holy Mountain. “Cara. Is she with them?”

“No.” Wendy’s voice changed, just slightly. “They didn’t find the Holy Mountain. When they entered the wildlands, something attacked them. Terrible creatures. In the end, seven survived.” She told him what Leaves had reported — the march in, the devils, the retreat, the dead left in ground too frozen to dig properly. She bowed when she was finished. “You were still sleeping. Forgive us — we sent Nightingale and Lightning to bring them in without asking you.”

“Don’t apologize for that.” He waved the formality away. Seven out of forty-two. He held that number for a moment before setting it aside. “Their abilities — do we know what they are?”

“Leaves said they’re not fighters. Maybe —” Wendy hesitated. “They may not be what you need.”

Non-combat witches. He thought for approximately two seconds about what that actually meant, and then stopped being diplomatic about the excitement.

Combat witches were useful in specific circumstances, all of which were constrained by God’s Stones of Retaliation and the small-area problem. Production witches had no such ceiling. A witch who could manipulate electricity could light the whole town indefinitely. A witch who could shape raw materials could compress years of manufacturing development into months. A witch who could modify plant genetics —

He realized he had been silent for a while.

“Your Highness, if you don’t have use for them —”

“I don’t care how many arrive,” he said, before she could finish the thought. “Every one of them has a place here. Every single one.”

Around sunset, Nightingale returned with the survivors.

Roland had the Grand Hall set for dinner — a proper one, not a working meal: roasted meat, fresh bread, the castle’s better wine. If they’d been in the mountains for months, if they’d buried their sisters in the snow and walked back on frostbitten feet, the least he could offer was a table worth sitting at.

They were hungry; they were also terrified of the room. First time in a castle for most of them, first time in the presence of a lord, and this lord was also, incidentally, a prince. They sat with the stiff careful posture of people trying very hard not to touch anything, watching how everyone else handled the cutlery before they picked it up.

Fortunately there was Lightning, who sat next to the newest arrival and talked with the uncomplicated confidence of someone who had decided newcomers were interesting rather than threatening. And Anna, whose quiet manner communicated safety in a register that didn’t require translation. And Nana, who was too absorbed in eating to maintain any kind of formal presentation and whose obvious comfort in the room gave the others something to calibrate against.

By the end of the main course, actual conversations had started.

Roland ate bread and watched them. They were all young; the oldest was perhaps forty, which for a witch in this world was improbable and implied something he’d ask about later. Most had green or silver or other modified hair. All of them were, in the way of witches who used their power regularly, striking to look at in ways that were hard to fully account for. He recognized this pattern now and no longer found it surprising, only worth noting.

Karl hadn’t finished the dedicated witches’ quarters yet, so he would need to reconfigure four rooms on the second floor to double occupancy. The beds could manage it.

After dessert, he asked for the ability interviews.

Nightingale organized them — she had a talent for making orderly things look effortless — and brought them through his office one at a time while Roland worked from a prepared list of questions. Ability, onset age, scope, limits, physical cost, whether it had evolved past the base function on the day of adulthood. He tested each ability against a God’s Stone of Retaliation to confirm it suppressed correctly.

The last interview finished near midnight. He stretched, rolled his neck, looked at the stack of files.

They’re all remarkable. He began sorting through the notes.

He pulled the first file back to the top.

Leaves.

She was the one who had come alone to the castle gate that morning, green hair under a hood, walking openly because she’d already made her peace with whatever came next. He had noted that detail when Wendy told him the story. It said something about her that he found worth remembering.

Before adulthood: she could accelerate the growth of plants, promote fruiting, intensify the properties of herbs. After adulthood: she could also control them. Animate them, direct them, in a radius of roughly five meters through any physical material including earth. She could grow green leaves on a dead branch. She could send a network of vines wrapping around an enemy’s legs before they realized the ground was moving. She could merge herself into a tree — not hide behind it, but become part of its structure.

The bigger the plant, the more power it cost. She preferred weeds in combat, faster response, lower expenditure. Precise and economical. He wrote druid in the margin and underlined it.

Industrialization required food. Specifically, it required enough food that the majority of the labor force didn’t need to be farming — that you could shift workers into manufacturing and maintain the population. The limitation in this era was yield per acre, which was constrained by soil, seed quality, and growing season. Leaves could address all three. If she improved wheat or barley strains by even a moderate percentage, the downstream effects on Border Town’s carrying capacity would be significant. And if Lightning’s accounts of Fjord crops were accurate — if what she’d described were actually potatoes and some variety of high-yield grain — introducing those plants and having Leaves work with them became one of his highest immediate priorities.

He was already writing out a practice curriculum in his head. He set the file down carefully.

The second file. Scroll.

He’d noticed her the moment she entered the office: approximately forty years old, which was anomalous enough that he’d filed it as a question before she said a word. The oldest of the surviving seven by a significant margin. In a world where magic, if not exercised, accumulated in the body and eventually killed its bearer in the Demon’s Bite, surviving to forty as a witch required either unusual luck or an ability that invited constant use.

She told him her primary ability: perfect retention. Not enhanced memory in the ordinary sense — complete, permanent recall of anything she had experienced. She had not, in forty years, forgotten anything she chose to remember. The ability was almost self-directing, activating continuously without deliberate effort, which meant she was using her power all the time and the accumulation had nothing to work with.

Her evolved ability on the day of adulthood: she called it creating an illusion of a book. She could produce a temporary visible copy of any text she’d read, tangible enough to be handled and read by others, maintained for roughly one to two hours depending on her reserves. The limitation was physical cost — it depleted her quickly, more than the memory retention did.

Roland sat with this for a long moment.

She had walked into a world that underused her completely and had become the most knowledgeable person in the Association by reading everything she could find and simply not forgetting any of it. She had survived by exercising the one ability that kept her alive and spent forty years accumulating knowledge in a system that had no use for her.

Natural-born teacher. He wrote it clearly under her name.

When the time was right — when there was a schoolhouse and students who needed something to put in their heads — Scroll would be the one to do it. Primary mathematics. Literacy. Basic physics. He would write the materials; she would retain them instantly and teach them with perfect fidelity. He had no idea what the standard of education in Border Town currently was, but he had a reasonable guess, and the gap between that and what he needed for an industrial workforce was something he’d have to close eventually.

He put her file aside. Patience, he noted in the margin. Her time will come.

He reached for the third file.

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