Page 21 of The Witch who Trades with Death

Chapter Twenty-One

Things were a bit looser among Red Frogs Nine after glass diving. Itehua barely insulted anyone on the way back to town, except to rib Khana for how long she took. “No wonder the rope frayed. She was there for half the day!”

“That’s definitely what it felt like,” she muttered.

“My father’s squad had a woman who took over an hour,” Yxe said. “Every time she’d get a piece of glass, she’d drop it. She took so long she had to be pulled back up twice to rest before going down again.”

“I had to train for my first dive for months,” Neta admitted. “I was terrified.”

“Really?” Khana gasped. At Neta’s raised eyebrows, her face heated, and she sputtered, “Sorry, I’m just… you don’t strike me as the type of person who’s afraid of anything.”

“Everyone’s afraid of something. If you’re not, then you’re not alive,” she said. “But in my case, my cousins dangled me over a well when I was five. A single slip would’ve killed me, and I was terrified of being upside-down and of darkness for years after.”

Everyone stared at her. Itehua blew out a breath, muttering, “Shit.”

“So, in the lead-up to enlisting, when I was about Yxe’s age, I trained myself out of it. I dangled myself from the ceiling of my room for a few seconds at a time, then minutes, first during the day, then at night with only a couple of candles, then in pitch darkness. It worked.”

“Are those the same cousins who got promoted to serji and midya over in Green?” Lueti asked.

“The very same,” Neta said. “I won’t say there were no consequences. Their father Athor was forced to pay my mother enough money that she was finally able to live on her own and grow her own business, and my father Aravi left town in shame. He lives on the other side of the tundra with his new wife and children.”

Khana watched the broad shoulders of their serji – more specifically, the snow leopard cloak that covered them. She wondered why Neta so stubbornly associated herself with such horrible people.

Lueti offered to have their obsidian trophies fashioned into jewelry. “I know a boy who does excellent work for cheap. He made me this bracelet.” She showed off a woven bracelet with bits of painted glass sewn in. It wasn’t the jewels and gold from a dozen conquered kingdoms that Khana was used to seeing, but it was pretty, so they all agreed.

The casual attitude continued for the next couple of days as focus shifted from strength building to learning how to properly use their weapons. Neta led them through forms that were similar to Khana’s dance routines, except far more forceful. Xopil and Itehua, having already learned them, took on roles of co-instructors.

“Wider legs give you a strong stance, brings you closer to the ground, and also makes you a smaller target for enemy spears,” Xopil said, pushing Haz and Khana’s bent knees wider. “So you’ll be almost invisible!”

“You want to be as immovable as the Shit Pile Mountains over there,” Neta agreed, pushing against Khana’s back. She moved, but didn’t fall, her feet holding firm.

“Better,” Neta said. In the weeks since they’d started training, she’d given out praise only a handful of times, and each time Khana felt like the sun had risen in her chest. “Hold your spear higher. Just because you’re tiny doesn’t mean the other soldier will be.”

That day of training started with the sky covered in clouds lit from the inside. Halfway through, as Khana thrust her spear at an invisible enemy, something white and cold drifted down from above and landed on her gloved hand.

Confused, Khana stared at it, until another one fell. And another. And another. It was like rain, but it was that snowy stuff from the mountaintops. Why was it falling from the sky?

“Khana!” Neta barked. “We’re restarting.”

“But…” She pointed up, confused as to how nobody else had even noticed. It fell more frequently, drifting down like little dancers. “Is that normal?”

“The snow?” Neta asked, sounding dubious.

“Have you never seen falling snow before?” Yxe asked, sounding bewildered.

Khana shook her head, her face feeling hot. She’d thought snow just appeared on the mountains, caused by a reaction with the stones. Apparently, it just… fell from the sky. Haz tried to catch one on his tongue.

Xopil chuckled. “I remember the first time my wife and I saw falling snow. We thought the world was ending. She sacrificed an entire goat to the gods to appease them. Just wait until we get the first few inches. It makes the town look so beautiful, like a magical otherworld.”

“You’ll get sick of it the first time you have to shovel it,” Itehua promised.

“That’s probably going to be tonight. Baba always makes me shovel,” Haz groaned.

“All right, that’s enough,” Neta said, snapping her fingers. “Everyone take it from the start.”

Khana got back into position as the snow fell on everyone’s hair and shoulders, giving them white halos. It was frightfully cold, but oddly beautiful.

Khana had just gotten a handle on basic spear forms – namely, how to hold it so it didn’t drop on her own head, and how to maybe stab someone – when Midya Chaku ordered them to do the line game.

“The what?” she asked, her confusion echoed by Yxe and Lueti.

“Do you have tug-of-war where you’re from?” Neta asked.

“Yes.”

“It’s the opposite of that.” She pointed to a couple of full-time soldiers setting up two lines of rocks in the field running parallel to each other, leaving only a few feet between them. Snow had continued to fall in the last few days, on and off. But the field was in so much use that what should have been at least ankle-deep was trampled to a crusty white skin.

“That strip represents some of our narrowest mountain paths,” Neta explained. “Two squads face each other and try to push each other off or get to the other end of the strip. If you get pushed over the line, you ‘die.’ Your squad wins if you ‘kill’ the other or push them all the way back.”

“I played this when I was a boy,” Haz cheered. “It’s fun.”

“They’ll be pulling squad numbers from a helmet soon. Bring your shields, no spears.”

Two other squads – Red Frogs Three and Red Frogs Eight – began the first game. The squads organized themselves into pairs to fit on the narrow strip with the biggest and strongest in the front, shortest and smallest in the back.

“We’re playing clean games here,” Chaku said, his clear voice carrying over the tundra. His silver-streaked beard waved with the wind. “No punching, kicking, or hair-pulling. Just pushing. We clear?”

“Clear, Midya!” the two squads answered.

On Midya Chaku’s count, they rushed each other, shields slamming with a crack that made Khana cringe. They pushed, shoved, and jostled each other. There were two referees, one on each side of the line, and they called out whenever anyone had at least one foot over the line. Both teams lost half of their squad before a winner was declared.

The ones still standing helped the others up as two more numbers were pulled from Chaku’s helmet. “Lucky Seven and Unlucky Nine!” he called.

“That’s us,” Neta said.

She arranged the seven of them to her liking: Xopil and herself at the front, Itehua and Haz behind them, Yxe and Lueti behind them, and Khana in the back. Khana had gotten stronger in the past few weeks, able to run farther and do more push-ups than when she’d first enlisted, but she was still the weakest.

“Put your shield on your back,” Neta ordered her. “Your job is to push against both of them at the same time to add to their energy. Go low, not high.”

“All right.” Khana put her shield at her back – a turtle with a shell too big for its body. Everyone got ready. She put one hand on Lueti’s back and one on Yxe’s, their armor giving little ground against her gloved hands. The bottom of Lueti’s braid brushed against the back of her wrist.

Chaku counted down, and at “Go!” they ran.

Khana knew they’d be stopped by the other squad, but she still ran into Yxe’s back face-first, squishing him against Haz. She regained her footing and pushed both him and Lueti with all her might, focusing on their lower backs, right above their tailbones. But no matter how much she dug her boots into the slippery tundra grass, she couldn’t get any traction. Couldn’t move forward. She even slid back a few inches.

Then Haz slipped, which caused Xopil to do the same, and he was roughly shoved off the line. Haz quickly followed.

Itehua rushed to fill the gap while Neta slammed her shield against a moving opponent, getting him over the line and out. Khana slipped back another few inches.

One of the other squad members reached over his shield and punched Neta in the face.

“Hey!” Haz barked from the sidelines. “He hit my serji!”

Chaku shrugged. “I didn’t see anything.”

Khana gritted her teeth. You lying little –

Neta spat a mouthful of blood into the face of the man who punched her. He stumbled back in disgust, and Red Frogs Nine pressed their advantage. Khana thought at least two of their opponents would step or stumble out during their retreat, but while they came close to the rocks, they didn’t take that fatal step.

One of the unit Seven soldiers managed to get under Itehua, lifting him off the ground and over the line. Before Yxe or Neta could fill in the gap, Neta was roughly shoved aside, over the rocks and onto the ground.

Uh-oh, Khana thought, just before Seven was on them. Yxe and Lueti gave it their best, and Khana dug in her heels continually pushing them forward, but the three of them didn’t have enough muscle to push back six beefy recruits. One of them broke through, cutting between Yxe and Lueti, and pushed Khana herself.

As she stumbled, trying to regain her footing, he bashed her cheek with the edge of his shield. Pain bloomed across her face. Copper filled her mouth, and her teeth clacked together as she fell to the ground, eyes watering.

The man spat on the ground. “Necrotic filth.”

A shrill whistle brought everyone’s attention to Chaku. “That’s enough,” he scolded. “If I see that again you’re getting a week of latrine duty.”

Unit Seven groaned as Nine picked themselves up. Khana pushed herself to her feet, wiping the blood from her mouth. Neta, face also bloodied, made right for her. “Let me see.”

“I just bit the inside of my cheek,” Khana said, allowing the serji to move her face this way and that. She’d been so focused on the inside of her mouth that she hadn’t noticed the cut on her cheekbone until Neta wiped it with her thumb. Her other hand was used to pinch her own nose, stopping the blood flowing down her chin. “Why did they punch you?” Khana asked.

“Being a bastard is one thing. No one really cares so long as the parents are working to raise you,” Neta explained, her voice watery, congested from blood. “But being half Old Family and half ‘refugee scum’ is more than some people can swallow. Doesn’t help that my father blames me for his mistakes – he left my mother and tried to get out of financially supporting us, and because of that, nobody wanted to court him. Not until he left town and found someone who hadn’t heard about it. So the Families don’t offer me nearly as much protection, and the refugees see me as a spoiled brat. You get damned by both sides.”

“I’m sorry,” Khana said, because she couldn’t think of anything else. She and Neta weren’t friends; the woman was her commander. But she deserved far better than that.

Neta shrugged. “It’s the way it is. Do you know how to handle this without using life force? I can’t justify killing a goat for a scratch.”

“I’ll be fine.” The bleeding was already slowing down. She dug a kerchief out of her pocket.

The company played for the rest of the afternoon, shuffling units so nobody had a repeat, but Khana’s head wasn’t in it. Everyone was distracted and downtrodden, their unit winning only two of a total of ten rounds. They were all grumpy and glum when Chaku dismissed them.

“Tomorrow’s a rest day, so you can all screw your heads on straight,” Neta said, waving them off. At least nobody else got punched.