Page 11 of The Witch who Trades with Death

Chapter Eleven

The next day, Haz announced his desire to take her on a tour of the town. “Baba likes to send me to do his dirty work down the street,” he explained over an early lunch, during those odd hours between rushes. Although “rush” wasn’t the right word; it seemed the evening gush of customers watered down to a trickle in the morning.

“If I show you around, that means we get to send you out there to fetch his ingredients and argue with farmers over prices,” he cheered.

“I can’t imagine his leg makes it easy,” Khana said. “What happened?”

“Childhood accident. Apparently, he got cocky trying to climb the mountain when he was a few years younger than me and took a bad fall. It got infected, and the healer had to amputate. Good thing that break wasn’t any higher, or the world would’ve been deprived of my marvelous presence.”

Khana chuckled and sipped her tea. Haz had woken her that morning by tossing his old cloak at her head, and she wrapped it around herself now. It trailed at her heels, but it was thick wool, dyed almost black, and when she tucked herself in not even the wind could cut through it. She walked out of the inn beaming.

Haz pointed to various stone buildings and told her who lived there or what business it was. Most people dressed like him: plain wool or cotton clothes, maybe a cloak, hardly any shivering or bundling. These people were accustomed to the cold. Some women wore dresses or skirts, some men wore robes, but it seemed most people wore trousers, including the women, sometimes with a short decorative skirt over them. Khana wondered if that was warmer.

“What’s the Ghuran word for house?” Khana asked. Might as well pick up the language while she was here.

By the time they’d drifted to a statue in the town square, Haz had given Khana basic Ghuran vocabulary for house, street, left, right, man, woman, child, and a handful of other words. She studied the statue as they approached. It was a bearded man with a walking stick in one hand and a sword in the other. Haz pointed to it. “That’s Chief Pahileed. Before settling the mountains, our people used to be nomads.”

Khana remembered that bit of history from the palace library. “Really?”

“Traveled all around. Sometimes trading, but mostly we made money with mercenary work.” His buck-tooth grin went crooked. “It got to the point where if two kingdoms were at war and one of them hired us, the other would immediately surrender.”

“Did Divaajin beat you in a war?”

“No! Is that what they teach you over the mountains?” he laughed. “We would’ve been nomads forever, but kingdoms got bigger. More powerful. It got too dangerous to cross their borders, and too much of a pain to beat them in a fight. Lucky for us, we’d done a lot of work for Divaajin. They were our favorite client. So when Chief Pahileed decided it was time to lead his people to settle down, he asked the King for a spot.”

“And he sent you here ? That doesn’t seem very nice.”

“Khana, think about it. You’re king of a land that’s as flat as frozen piss on a plate. Most of your kingdom is near the ocean, with all your trade and farmland and everything else a country needs, and you’ve got a tundra and these big mountains in the north blocking most enemies from getting through. Except there are paths through the mountains that armies can get through and attack from behind. So, when a tribe of the fiercest, toughest warrior mercenaries pledges their allegiance to you and asks for a place to build, do you put them with the rest of your army, or put them where everyone else is too much of a pussy to spend more than a few summer months?”

“I’d give them the choice,” she said.

“Oh, he did. If we lived in the southern cities, we would’ve had to lick the boots of some fat lord or other who’d make us work his land until we died. Up here, we’re still the King’s subjects with all of the taxes and trade that comes with it, but we run things our way.”

“You have a kingdom’s protection, but also relative freedom,” Khana realized. The best of both worlds.

Haz nodded. “That’s worth a few blizzards, don’t you think?”

“I was born in a hot desert and raised in a jungle, so, no.”

“Ew. No wonder you left…”

“Haz!”

His open, happy face shuttered into complete neutrality when he saw the girl who called him coming around the statue. “Bhayana,” he growled.

Bhayana was a beautiful girl – well, woman, seeing as she was likely a year or so older than Khana herself. Porcupine quills stuck out of the shoulders of her cloak like wings, her eyes as dark as a raven’s beak. Despite being slimmer and shorter than Haz, she was still a Pahuudan giant. She stalked up to them and said something to Haz in Ghura.

He replied shortly, curtly. Khana frowned at the sudden change of tone and body language. The casual, friendly, joking demeanor was completely gone, replaced by something cold and distant.

Bhayana said something else, dark eyes piercing as she reached out with a finger to touch Haz’s cheek. He jerked back, just out of reach.

And Khana knew that look. She knew that look. Worn by countless concubines and her own self whenever Yamueto got too close.

She loudly cleared her throat, drawing both of their attention, and gripped Haz’s arm. “Weren’t you going to take me to the farmers? Your father will want us to finish that business as soon as possible, and I don’t want to upset him.”

She tugged him away. Bhayana glared at her, snapping something in Ghura.

Khana cheerfully cut her off, “I’m sorry! I don’t speak Ghura. But you have a splendid day, ma’am!”

She and Haz left Bhayana fuming at the foot of the statue. Khana had no idea where she was leading Haz, just as long as it was away from that woman.

When they had turned a few corners and were well out of sight and hearing, she cleared her throat. “Porcupine quills. An Old Family?”

“The Pinnsviris,” Haz confirmed, still tense. “Spoiled fuckers, every one of them. She and I… were lovers, for a time. It did not end well.”

Khana glanced nervously behind her, but all she saw was a throng of people walking the streets, haggling with each other and hollering after their children. “Are we going to get in trouble for that?”

“Probably not. There’s no law against being rude.” He gave a shadow of a smile. “And you, poor thing, are new. You don’t even speak Ghura. How can we possibly expect you to know our basic manners?”

“Woe is me, I’m so ignorant and helpless,” Khana deadpanned.

He snickered, knocking his fist against her shoulder. “Thank you. I would’ve been stammering like an idiot for much longer without your rescue.”

“Any time.”

Wandering the town became a near-daily habit. On particularly slow days when Heimili didn’t need her, and Sava wasn’t gambling with them – or at night when she was woken from nightmares and couldn’t get back to sleep – Khana would explore Pahuuda. Haz usually acted as a guide, teaching her the local language as they went, but not always. Heimili often needed him for more physically taxing or complicated tasks than Khana could handle, leaving her to her own devices. She had grown so used to traveling alone through war-torn kingdoms that one little town was nothing.

She still managed to get lost a week into her stay, however, finding herself on the edge of the empty tundra, the town and mountains at her back. There were a handful of farms and huts this far out, but the space was largely dominated by an open field of short, tough grass and stone. The tundra. The local military used it for drills, amid a handful of goats hunting for grass.

Khana watched archers fire shots, spearmen practice formations, and a couple of squads run laps in full gear. Surprisingly, while most of the spears and arrows were of bone, some were carved from wood. They must have been bought from the forests of Tlaphar over the mountains, or perhaps gifted by the Divaajinian king to better protect his mountains. She recognized Sava’s wolf cloak among the archers and considered going to him, striking up a conversation with the new Ghura she’d learned. But he was busy hollering drill orders. It was such a change from his calm attitude at the inn. Here, he was every inch the chief’s son, his back straight and his face stern. Khana stayed away, frightened, reminding herself that she didn’t really know this man.

She continued observing the small army. Heimili didn’t need her back right away, so she had time. It seemed the squads were largely divided by cultural origin. All the large, tall, native-born Ghura were separated from the shorter, slimmer Reguallian refugees and descendants, and then further subdivided into spearmen and archers. She noticed that the little wooden spears and arrows were exclusive to the Ghura while the Reguallian refugees had the cheaper, less valuable bone weapons. She couldn’t get an accurate count of their numbers, but there had to be a few hundred men out here at least. Men and women.

A group of runners sprinted past her, and she noticed at least a third of them were women. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that; not even the empire liked putting spears in the hands of their girls.

One of the closer Reguallian squads practiced throwing their spears at cloth targets. One spear went off-target, striking a stone instead. Even from a distance, Khana could hear the metal spearhead break. She winced.

The leader of the squad – a captain, perhaps? – berated the soldier, who looked properly abashed. She wondered if the unlucky soldier had some Ghuran blood; he was certainly tall enough, with the darker skin of a farmhand. The captain dismissed the soldier, and he picked up his broken spear and jogged away from the group, toward the town.

Maybe I can ask him directions, Khana thought. She did need to get back to the inn. And while the temperature was better than a few days before, the wind still nipped at her nose. She needed a hot cup of tea.

The soldier moved quickly, almost reaching the closest farm. Khana was just starting to follow when she noticed a couple of the Ghuran runners – whose group had stopped for a water break – peel away from the others to follow him, sharing dark looks with each other.

A bad feeling settled in her gut. She made sure the runners couldn’t see her, following at a distance.

The Reguallian soldier disappeared behind a barn. So did the two Ghura.

Khana broke into a run, slowing only when she neared the farm. She was being paranoid. Not everyone lived a life of danger and fear. They had crossed an open field and no one else had stopped them. She was making something of nothing, she was…

…hearing the sound of flesh beating flesh.

Holding her ragged breath, Khana pressed herself against the stone wall and peeked around the corner.

The three were locked in a fistfight, the Reguallian managing to hold his own before one of his attackers pulled a knife. Khana took a breath to scream, to shout a warning, but it froze in her chest. Don’t move. Don’t speak. Don’t speak don’t speak don’t –

The Ghuran runner stabbed the Reguallian in the back once. Twice. Three times. The Reguallian gasped, all the air leaving him in a rush so he couldn’t even shout. He fell to the ground. Khana clasped a hand over her mouth, stifling a scream that came too late.

The other runner yelled at his friend. The knife-wielder looked at his red blade, panicked. They both ran.

Khana waited as long as she dared, counting to ten before emerging from her hiding place. She knelt next to the Reguallian and put a hand on his back. Still alive, but blood and life force spilled out. This close, she could see the bean-shaped birthmark on his left cheek, see the fear in his wide brown eyes.

He coughed, tried to brush her off. She pushed him down. “Don’t move.”

He stilled. “Who…?”

“I’m Khana. What’s your name?”

“X… Xopil.”

He wasn’t dead yet. There was still time to save him. She just needed to find a source of life.

“I’m… my wife…” he panted. “Can you… tell her…”

“You’ll be fine. Just hold on a moment.”

She could make a new deal with Death. Sacrifice another memory. Unless…

There! A goat. Khana stood and carefully approached. The goat studied her as it chewed on a bit of grass, unimpressed. It was getting on in years, thoroughly domesticated and didn’t pull away when she put a gentle hand on its head. “Sorry about this.”

She inhaled, taking its aji as quickly as possible. The goat jerked, pulling away, but not far or fast enough. She drained it completely, knowing she would need every ounce to fix the damage under Xopil’s red-stained clothes. The goat collapsed onto the ground.

Faintly glowing with orange, yellow and black magic, Khana ran back to Xopil, relieved to see him still breathing. “I’ll need you to keep this a secret.”

“Wha–”

She pressed the goat’s life force into him, watching the magic sink into the three stab wounds and stitch up the damage. The massive bleeding slowed to a trickle, then stopped.

Khana breathed easier, gently prodding at the still-wet flesh. “You still have the wounds, but they’re shallow now. Make sure to clean and bandage them.”

Xopil gingerly sat upright, poking the holes in his wool uniform. He stared at her in wonder. “You…”

“Are nobody. Certainly not a witch. Do you understand me?”

Someone cleared their throat.

Both Khana and Xopil cringed. Khana looked over her shoulder.

A Reguallian soldier glared at them. Her hair was pulled back in a tight braid, and she wore a gray leopard skin cloak around her shoulders. Xopil’s two attackers stood behind her, gaping. Khana’s stomach sank to her feet.

“I do believe that we need to speak with the chief,” the soldier said.