Rewrite That Witch
CH099 · Rewrite
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Chapter 99: Night Talk

The rooms were warm and the beds were wide and there was no one standing outside the door. This was the problem.

The new witches could not sleep. After months in the mountains counting who woke up each morning, they could not simply lie down in separate rooms and stop being afraid. Wendy had anticipated this. She and Nightingale gathered them all into one room, and they sat on the floor in a circle the way they used to in the Association’s camp — close enough to count each other by breathing — and let the evening run down.

This is what a leader looks like, Leaves thought, watching Wendy arrange herself easily between two of the newer witches and begin talking with the relaxed authority of someone who had done this a hundred times. Cara would never have noticed we needed this. Or if she had noticed, she wouldn’t have understood why it mattered.

“Sister Wendy —” Hummingbird’s voice was barely above a whisper. “What exactly will His Highness need from us? Our abilities are so much weaker than yours and Sister Nightingale’s.”

Nods, quick and small, from around the circle.

“Practice them,” Wendy said.

“Practice.” Soraya turned the word over. “Does he want me to draw his portrait every day?”

“Probably.” Wendy reached over and touched the top of Mystery Moon’s head, lightly. “You too. Especially you. Even if Cara banned you from using your ability in the camp, His Highness doesn’t. He’ll encourage you to use it and figure out what it can do.”

“But I cause problems when I do.” Mystery Moon’s voice was so low Leaves could barely hear it from across the circle. “For our sisters.”

“Even so,” Wendy said, not unkindly. “You need to practice. Every day.”

“What does daily practice have to do with anything like life and death —”

“Because practicing daily is how we survive.” Nightingale’s voice cut in, precise. “The Day of Awakening. His Highness worked it out. If you use your power every day — spend it down, keep moving it — the Demon’s Bite loses its hold. Nana went through her first Awakening this year. No pain at all.”

Nobody spoke.

“You’re talking about what happened to Anna,” Scroll said finally. Her voice was careful, the way it was when she was rebuilding something from insufficient data. “Last time you didn’t tell us how.”

“It was still theory then. Now it isn’t.” Nightingale looked at each face in turn. “Magic accumulates when it isn’t used. The body can’t bear the pressure. But use it regularly and the body adapts — the reserves grow, the pressure doesn’t build the same way. Come to your Awakening with your reserves empty, and there’s nothing for the Bite to work with.”

“So the torment of the Awakening —”

“Is not inevitable.” Nightingale paused. “Has never been inevitable.”

The fire in the corner grate was the only sound for a moment.

“I knew it,” Leaves said, almost to herself. She had noticed it in the wildlands — the Bite, when it found her, had been milder than it had ever been before. She had been using her power constantly just to survive, which meant she’d been emptying her reserves every day without intending to. She had thought it was coincidence, or that the cold had something to do with it. “While we were hiding from the Church, never using our abilities — that was what killed our sisters in the winters. Not the Bite itself. Our own fear of ourselves.”

“Yes.” Wendy’s voice was quiet. “We had the key the whole time.”

Leaves sat with that for a moment. She thought about Cara, about the ancient book from the eastern ruins, about the absolute certainty that the Holy Mountain was a place you could reach with enough walking. About forty-two women crossing the mountains for nothing.

“Then the Holy Mountain isn’t a location,” she said.

“No.” Wendy looked at her steadily. “It never was. We are our own Holy Mountain. As long as we accept what we are — stop hiding our abilities, stop telling ourselves we are the devil’s servants — we carry it with us.”

Silence again. Nightingale glanced at Wendy, something moving briefly in her expression. “We’d already asked His Highness if Wendy could go to the Association’s camp after the Months of Demons ended. To bring the news. To tell whoever was still there that they could live in the mountains and be safe.” She paused. “You came to us first.”

“It is what it is,” Wendy said simply. “The point is: whatever His Highness needs from you or doesn’t need, practice your abilities every day. For your own sake.”

“Can other witches know?” Scroll asked. “There are societies in the Kingdom of Dawn, in Wolfheart. We sent them letters once, before the march. Never heard back.” She was quiet for a moment. “If someone had known earlier. If the information existed somewhere that we could have found it.”

Leaves breathed out. She had thought the same thing. If Cara had found that answer instead of that book —

“His Highness is already planning to spread it,” Nightingale said. “Carefully, through rumor. So other witches in hiding can hear it without it looking like a trap.”

“But why?” Echo’s voice came from the back of the circle, measured and deliberate, with the accent of the deep south still in every syllable. “Why does His Highness help witches at all? What’s his reason?”

The question fell into a particular kind of quiet.

Echo’s story was not a secret in the circle. She had been sold twice — once by her own people to a merchant, once by that merchant to the capital’s market — and she had spent years learning to read men’s intentions from their smallest gestures, because being wrong had costs she couldn’t afford. She was not asking rhetorically.

“The same reason those men bought you,” said Lily, from across the circle. Her voice was flat. “Men are —”

“That’s enough.” Nightingale’s tone didn’t rise, but it stopped the sentence. She looked at Lily steadily. “You’re talking about something you don’t have information about. His Highness is not those men. Some of us have been here long enough to know.”

Lily said nothing more.

“We should sleep,” Wendy said, before the silence could curdle into something else. She was still smiling the way she smiled when she was managing something — gently, without making you feel managed. “All of you. Whatever His Highness asks for tomorrow, the first thing he’ll ask is that you sign a contract. And then he’ll ask you to practice your abilities. Start thinking about what that means for you specifically.” She looked around the circle. “It’s enough for tonight.”

Leaves walked back to the room she and Scroll had been assigned.

She had been given a bed in a room with a real door and a real window and candles left in the holders. Before His Highness had known anything about her ability, he had already arranged it. Temporary, he had said, until the construction is finished. She could have her own room once the new quarters were complete. The bed was wide enough for two people with room left over; she had slept in worse conditions with five.

She took off her coat. She got under the quilt.

The feeling that went through her when the weight of it settled over her was something she had no adequate word for. She pressed her face into the pillow and made a small, undignified, happy sound into the linen.

After a while: “Scroll.”

“Yes.”

“Do you blame Cara? For what happened to us.”

A long pause. The candle on the nightstand had burned down to half. Outside the window, Border Town was quiet.

“No,” Scroll said finally. Her voice was even and considered, the way her voice always was when she was being precise about something that mattered. “What she became at the end was not what she was at the beginning. Whatever she did after — and she did things I cannot excuse — at the start, she truly wanted to find us a home. A place where we could exist without fear.” Another pause. “It doesn’t change what happened. But no. I don’t blame her for that part.”

Leaves lay still. She thought about the ruins at the eastern border where Cara had found the old text, and all the walking that had come from it. She thought about Scroll’s voice just now, giving the dead woman exactly as much as she was owed and no more.

“Sleep now, child,” Scroll said softly.

The candle guttered. The room went dark.

“Good night,” Leaves said.

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