Page 16 of The Witch who Trades with Death

Chapter Sixteen

News of the night creature spread through the town even before Phramanka made her announcement. Suddenly, everyone regarded Khana with even more suspicion and wariness. A customer even walked right back out the door when he spotted her setting up the dining room cushions. He hadn’t even taken off his boots.

Heimili pulled her into the back. “They think you brought the night creature,” he explained. “Or summoned it, somehow.”

“I didn’t,” she insisted, scrubbing a dirty pot.

“I know. You’ve been running yourself ragged helping with this place and healing their ungrateful asses.”

Khana rinsed the pot with already-murky water. “I didn’t realize Pahuuda doesn’t have a standing army.”

“Not really. There are some career soldiers, and most of the Old Families have household guards, but the bulk of the force is militia. Almost anyone can volunteer, if they’re physically fit,” Heimili grumbled, limping across the kitchen to pull some chuta out of the oven.

“Will you be enlisting then?” he asked.

Khana stared at him. “Why would I do that?”

“It’s how most refugees make a living here. They even get bonuses, like voting for a chief after three years. Normally you need to have lived here for seven.”

Khana tried to picture herself in the wool and pelt armor of the Ghuran soldiers, spear in one hand, animal skin shield in the other. She tried to imagine what it would be like facing down an army of night creatures. Facing Yamueto.

Her hands began to shake. She covered it with vigorous scrubbing. “I’ve healed dozens of weapon injuries. I don’t need to inflict them.”

“They’re looking for medics, too.”

“So are the civilians,” she countered.

Heimili hummed and didn’t say anything further.

It was a slow day, the type where there were hardly more than two customers in the dining room at a time. Khana couldn’t tell if that was her fault or not. Haz barely had anything to do, leaning against the spot on the kitchen counter that let him see the dining room.

“I’m going to enlist,” he said out of nowhere.

Khana’s heart sank. Heimili nodded and limped over to give his son a half-hug. “Good. I wish I was right there with you.”

Haz smiled. “Someone has to help Mimi with the inn.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll save plenty of work for you when you’re done.”

“Aw, Baba!”

Heimili snickered. Then he looked past Haz at the dining room and smiled. “Hey, you! I haven’t seen you in forever!”

He limped over to the fresh customer who greeted him just as cheerfully. Khana cleaned another dish. Haz crossed his arms and joined her. “What about you? Are you signing up?”

“No.”

He frowned. “Why not?”

“This isn’t my home,” she snapped. Why did they both want her to fight Yamueto? Didn’t they realize how terrifying he was? Everyone needed to start packing and evacuate, not ready their swords.

“Maybe not, but being a soldier is one of the most honorable things a person can do. I’d have enlisted years ago if Baba and Mimi didn’t need me around here.”

“You think hurting and killing people is honorable?” she demanded. “That leaving your family to die on the battlefield, and have them mourn you for the rest of their days, that’s honorable?”

“Defending your home and the people you love is honorable,” he corrected. Another customer came in, cheering at Heimili. Haz side-stepped Khana. “You’d better finish those dishes. We’ll have a rush soon.”

Khana and Haz avoided each other the next day, which was easy as Haz joined the long line trailing from the town hall to go to war. Khana poured tea for herself as she sat alone in the dining room, eating her midday meal. Sava hadn’t been by since finding the night creature, too busy preparing the town and getting ready to train thousands of new recruits. Khana knew that. Understood that. She still wished he was here.

Instead, it was Amati who walked up to her, taking those small, deliberate steps women do when they reached the age of fragility, and carefully sat herself on the cushion across from her. She held up an empty teacup, and Khana filled it.

“Slow days are good now,” Amati said. “Lets us save our strength.”

“True,” Khana agreed.

Amati sipped her tea, savoring the taste before swallowing. “Heimili told me you don’t intend to enlist.”

Khana sighed. “I wasn’t aware that was a requirement for living here.”

“It isn’t. If everyone was a soldier, who would farm the fields? Build the houses? It just seems a shame that a woman of your talent isn’t going where it’ll be most needed.”

“I thought my only talent was bringing bad luck.”

Amati gave her a stern look. “I was thinking of my grandson.”

Khana looked into her cup, ashamed. She hadn’t considered that joining the troops would mean she could look after Haz. After all he and his family had done for her, she owed it to them.

But that would require going toward Yamueto and his undead army, not away.

Amati coughed. She’d been doing that a lot. Khana held out her hand. “Do you want me to…”

The old woman shook her head. “It’s old age. You can’t cure that. Shouldn’t cure that.”

Khana withdrew her hand.

Amati sipped her tea again, taking the time for her throat to recover. “When I first got here, decades ago, we had a border skirmish with Tlaphar. One of many. They had always nipped at our lands until Regualli drew their attention. Anyway. Enlistment started. I thought it was dumb. Especially recruiting women. Women shouldn’t fight. And besides, I had just got here. Had only been here a few months. Why should I fight for them?

“It wasn’t until I’d had the chance to get to know these people, especially Heimili’s father, that I realized that this is a place I wanted to fight for. That these were people I wanted to fight for. So, I enlisted.”

Khana blinked, staring at the frail old woman before her. “You were a soldier?”

“Combat medic. I still don’t like the idea of women fighting, but it is what it is. The pay was quite good, too. Certainly more than tips from a shabby inn. Probably enough to cross the tundra and the rest of the continent, too.”

“Now you’re just goading me,” Khana grumbled.

“A little,” Amati agreed with a toothless grin.

Khana sighed, looking at her dark reflection in the teacup. “You don’t know the emperor like I do. We should be running, not fighting.”

Amati set her cup down. “You’re afraid.”

“I’m terrified!” she burst. “Do you know what will happen to me if they find me?”

“The same things that’ll happen to all of us if they take the town,” Amati countered. “We’re all afraid, Khana. Some are just better at controlling it. Fear is natural. Useful, even. But if you think running away will get rid of it, you’re wrong. It’ll fester, like a wound. And you’ll never be free.”

“But I’ll be alive,” Khana argued. That was all that mattered, the only true victory she could claim.

“Will you?” Amati challenged. “What happens after the empire takes us? Takes the kingdom? Even hundreds of miles away, will you be safe? I lived in the same empire you did for decades. They conquered my homeland when I was a baby and treated my people like filth, so I left. I thought I was safe. Now…”

Khana didn’t say anything. Yamueto had several flaws, but impatience and lack of endurance weren’t among them. He’d waited over a century for the perfect moment to strike at a target kingdom. Some of his conquests required generations of strategizing and fighting. The first year she’d been in his palace, his guards captured and dragged in one of his daughters who’d escaped decades previously. He’d looked for her all that time, finding her as a weathered old woman with a husband, children, and grandchildren. Yamueto killed all of them, starting with the youngest, and turned them into his night creatures.

Amati was right; Khana would never be safe. Never be free.

“You still think you’re alone,” Amati commented. “But I assure you, you’re not. When you face this fear, you’ll have an entire army with you.”

Amati’s words rang in Khana’s head for over an hour as she cleaned guests’ rooms and prepped the kitchen for Heimili. Haz came back with his official enlistment paper – the only piece of real paper Khana had seen in this town – signed with a wax seal imprinted with a wolf. He proudly showed it to his family.

Amati tutted. “If you were a few hands shorter, I’d give you my uniform.”

“Aw, you’d let me look better than you did in your own clothes?” he teased. Amati tugged at his ear and sent him to his chores.

Khana hurried after him, catching him on top of the stairs. “You’re really doing this?”

Haz shrugged. “Everyone is. We can’t just let this happen to our home.”

“Have you thought about what it’ll do to your father and grandmother if you die?”

Haz’s smile was surprisingly kind. “We all die, Khana. At least this way I’m going out in dashing armor.”

He walked away. Khana stood numb. He was going to war.

Haz was her friend – or at least the closest thing she had to one – and he was going to war. With creatures she had helped create. And if they successfully cut through him and the other soldiers, they would come for Heimili and Amati. They’d do worse to the leaders of the resistance: the Bvamsos. Sava.

Khana grabbed her cloak and ran outside.

The town hall was packed so tight with recruits that they lined up outside in the cold, the frost crunching under their boots and the northern mountain wind cutting through them. The atmosphere was surprisingly amicable: people laughed and told jokes, an old man told war stories to his adult grandchildren, a trio of musicians sang righteous war songs to collect tips in their hats, and one clever woman sold butter tea mixed with flour, which created a sort of stew excellent for eating on the go.

Khana noticed several people standing together: a father half-hugged his adult son as they waited, a young woman grumbled to her friend about how she wasn’t going to fit into her uncle’s armor, and a married couple held hands.

Eventually, she made it inside. The courtroom had been converted into a recruitment station. Four desks – made of wood, no less – were placed where the mob had been at her trial. Official-looking people knelt behind each of them, taking down names and handing out the enlistment papers. One of them was Sava.

His Reguallian lessons had certainly paid off, since almost everyone he took was a refugee who didn’t speak much Ghura. He’d come far since she’d first met him over three months ago, barely stumbling over his words. His eyes met hers as she reached the front of the line, and he stood. “Khana! Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she muttered, trudging to his desk.

“You look like you’re going to be sick.”

“I might be,” she admitted. “I need to enlist.”

He opened and closed his mouth. He glanced at the lines of curious onlookers, mumbled, “I’m taking a break,” and gestured for Khana to follow him.

Curious, Khana obeyed, and they walked out of the room into a back hall.

“You don’t have to enlist,” Sava said. “You plan to leave, anyway.”

“I know,” she said faintly. “But that’s going to take a while.”

“If someone’s pressuring you to do this because of your powers or lineage or–”

“Sava,” she said, warmed by his concern. “I have to do this.”

He studied her, mouth thinning into a frown. “I really don’t like the idea of you fighting.”

Frustration bubbled within her. First everyone wanted her to fight, and now that she had decided to, they’d changed their minds?

“Well, that’s not your decision,” she said, the words slipping out before she could stop them.

Sava huffed. “I know. But in Pahuuda, we’re all taught the basics as children. Almost everyone serves for a few years, even in peacetime. You’ve never even touched a spear.”

“No, I don’t know how to fight. But Amati said something about being a medic?”

He gave a tired sigh. “We take medics. But we also put them through the same basic training as the rest of the soldiers, in case they find themselves attacked. You’ll be in a training unit, probably with Reguallians, and then transferred to a healing unit when training is over.”

She nodded. “Can you put me in the same unit as Haz?”

He started to loosen. “All right. I can do that.”