Page 31 of The Witch who Trades with Death

Chapter Thirty-One

The last week of training was a blur of jogging on the tundra in full armor, smashing shields in the line game, and endless combat drills. Neta warned them that soldiers passed and failed as a unit, and that Midya Chaku analyzed each individual to see if they were combat ready.

“He’s going to have each unit show him their sets for spear, axe, knife, and empty hand,” she said for about the twentieth time in as many days. “And we’re all going to participate in the line game. If we all don’t nail those sets and secure at least three wins, we’re out. You’ll get paid for your time in training, but only half.”

Khana gulped. Other than her powers – which she couldn’t use without cost – she was the weakest link in the unit. If they failed, it would be on her. Part of her wondered if that would really be a bad thing. After all, soldiers went to war. They could die. Failing the whole unit meant that her friend Haz, young Yxe, and kind Lueti wouldn’t be subjected to that. They’d be safe and sound in town.

But Neta was so driven, so clearly ready to go to war, that Khana didn’t dare oppose her. Not out of fear – at this point Khana knew that Neta would never hurt her – she just didn’t want to disappoint her.

Failing the unit meant depriving the Ghuran militia of seven capable warriors it desperately needed. She wouldn’t be able to use her necromancy skills to heal injured soldiers and keep them in the fight, lowering the town’s chances of success even further.

And it meant depriving herself – and Xopil’s family, Haz’s family, and the others – of the money they all needed.

“What, exactly, is stopping Chaku from failing us even if we do everything perfectly?” Itehua asked.

“The fact that I asked Sava to be present,” Neta replied.

“Ah.”

Khana dropped her face in her hands. Somehow, that made it worse.

She continued to work on drills, kept up Neta’s extra late-night training sessions on shovel days, and worked out with the rest of the company without complaint.

She continued to wake from nightmare-memories long before the sun rose. Sometimes she could get back to sleep. Sometimes she had to wander the town to exhaust herself first. And sometimes she just made herself tea and waited for sunrise.

On graduation day, Khana and Haz arrived on the field to find Lueti handing a small cloth bag to Neta. The serji waited for everyone to assemble before opening it. “Lueti’s friend is finally finished with our obsidian.”

Khana had almost forgotten about the glass diving. Neta handed out their hard-earned prizes, and Khana cooed when she realized the jeweler had shaped the black glass to look like a frog, just a little fatter and rounder than the real thing.

“Sorry it took so long,” Lueti said, analyzing her own obsidian with a critical eye. “But you can’t rush quality.”

“I like it,” Xopil said, adding it to his shoulder next to his other piece. “My wife will be so jealous.”

Each of the little frogs had a string of leather wrapped around a hole in their backs to tie into place. Itehua put his on his spear, Lueti fastened hers as a bracelet, and Khana positioned hers as a necklace, like Neta.

“Regardless of what happens today, you are Red Frogs Nine,” Neta declared. “You are warriors, and some of the bravest, most infuriating people I’ve had the privilege of training.”

Khana’s chest warmed at the sentiment. Haz grinned. “Aw, serji, we love you, too.”

“Everyone says we’re going to fail, partly because nine is an unlucky number,” Lueti mused. “Khana, what did you say about the poison frogs?”

“They live in the Reguallian jungles. Predators don’t dare go near them because their skins are coated in venom. One touch will kill you. And they’re surprisingly adorable.”

Haz grinned. “Adorable and deadly? That sounds like us.”

“None of the commanders will call us anything besides Red Frogs Nine,” Neta said. “But between us, the Poison Dart Frogs sounds more fitting.”

Midya Chaku whistled for the company’s attention, scowling as the spring breeze toyed with his long beard. Sava stood next to him, arms crossed.

“All right, you dumb frogs. Let’s get this over with,” Chaku snapped. “Five laps around the field. Go.”

One lap was just under half a mile. They’d never gone more than four in a day. Khana kept pace with Haz on one side and Yxe on the other, Xopil, Lueti, and Itehua in front of them, and Neta in the lead. Red Frog units One through Eight were ahead of them, and Ten and Eleven were behind.

As they jogged, Khana noticed Yxe getting more and more pensive. The Tlapharian boy was always quiet, but this was new even for him. “You all right?” she huffed, her breath puffing in white clouds before her.

“I’m worried,” he admitted quietly. “If we fail, it’s going to be because of me. I’m the weakest one here.”

Khana blinked. Then laughed, a big-bellied laugh that almost made her lose her place in line. “I was thinking the same about myself!”

“Oh, that’s a relief,” Lueti called from up ahead, braid swishing back and forth as she ran. “I thought the weakest member of the unit was the old whore.”

“You shouldn’t talk about yourselves like that,” Xopil scolded. “You’ll all do great.”

“Yeah, we busted our asses making you halfway decent fighters,” Itehua added. “You’re saying you don’t believe in us?”

“I believe you’re only in this unit to make the rest of us look prettier by comparison,” Haz goaded, showing the gap between his front teeth.

“Fuck you and your little glass frog.”

Khana and, to her relief, Yxe both giggled as Haz and Itehua verbally poked each other for the rest of the run.

They all quickly sobered when, after they stopped and were allowed to catch their breath, they realized they’d already lost a unit. Someone from Red Frogs Ten had stumbled off the trail and refused to get back up. Not unable, as they were perfectly fine, just unwilling. Chaku immediately failed them, and the rest of the company watched the unit walk away with bowed heads and slumped shoulders.

“Now that playtime is over, let’s get back to it,” Chaku called. “Red Frogs One, let’s see your spear form.”

He went through each unit, watching them go through all their forms, Sava a silent specter beside him. Red Frogs Three was sent home when one of their men fumbled the spear, dropping it in the snow. They almost lost Five, but the woman who nearly dropped her axe caught it again in the last second. The midyas let it slide.

“Unit Nine,” Chaku snapped. “You’re up.”

They lined up and got in their starting positions. Khana’s back was to Sava, and she could only hope she didn’t make a fool of herself.

They went through the spear form first. Khana retreated into her mind, just a little, falling into a quasi-meditative state. She focused on the feeling of the bone in her gloved hands, the sound of the blade cutting through the wind, the cold air in her lungs. They replaced spears with axe, then knife, then fists, attacking imaginary foes.

When they finished, Sava glanced at Chaku – his mouth flattened into a thin line.

“Unit Eleven, you’re up.”

Yxe almost collapsed in audible relief. Lueti scooped him in a hug and half-carried him off. “Well done!”

“Thank you,” he said weakly.

“Two tests down, one to go,” Haz said, stretching his arms. “We’ve gotten better at the line game.”

Neta hummed. She seemed perfectly calm, but Khana was nervous, and so were the others. The line game was their weakest point. It’s not that the team was weak, but they had old Lueti, lanky Yxe, and tiny Khana. The weakest members of most other units were built more like Haz and Itehua. Not for the first time, Khana wondered if that was on purpose.

“I don’t think a double line is going to work, serji,” Itehua said, studying the remaining nine units. “Maybe we should try one of the new ones.”

“I think you’re right,” Neta replied.

Khana’s stomach twisted. In the last week, they’d been experimenting with different strategies. Sometimes they did a single line rather than two, trying to cut through the opponent’s middle and push them apart. Other times they tried a tiny phalanx, a reverse of the usual formation: instead of one person (Khana) in the back, one person (Neta or Xopil, usually) was at the front. The physical constraint of the lines made a proper phalanx impossible, which was probably why Neta said, “We’ll go with the single-file line. The usual order.”

“Maybe we should switch it up a little,” Xopil mused.

“Now isn’t the time to experiment.”

“Hear me out,” he implored. “Before Pahuuda, I was a rebel soldier in my town. They conquered us in my grandfather’s day, so we never liked them. We fought against imperial soldiers, and won a couple of skirmishes, too.”

Khana’s jaw dropped, matching the timeline in her head. “You were part of the Namari Belt Rebellion? You caused such a headache messing with those supply lines that Emperor Yamueto wanted to skin all of you and feed you to his night creatures!”

He grinned, the pea-shaped birthmark on his cheek wrinkling. “That was us, though only the conquerors call it Namari. It’s called the Kostikli Belt. Anyway, we once had a fight over a stream. It was autumn, and half-frozen and treacherous. So we decided it was best to jump over it to get to the enemy archers. Our smallest fighters were in the front with the shields. They stopped just short of the water, and while the archers got new arrows, the rest of us jumped onto their backs and over the water, right into the archers.”

“We’re not fighting archers,” Itehua complained. “And there’s no stream to serve as a buffer.”

“No, but it serves as an element of surprise,” Neta said. “All right, we’ll try this for the first one…”

She quietly explained the strategy. Khana was almost as dubious as Itehua, but it couldn’t hurt to try. The worst that could happen was they made utter fools of themselves and had seven more attempts.

They were called first for the line game, the two rows of stones neatly laid out. Chaku assigned them to fight Red Frogs One, one of the best units in the company.

Mumbling started from the others as soon as they saw the lineup: Xopil was in the back, not the front. Not a good position for their strongest to be.

Other than that, they were in double rows: Neta and Itehua in front, Haz and Yxe behind them, then Khana and Lueti. Everyone had their shields out and up front as Chaku counted them down.

At “Go!” the six of them jogged, leaving Xopil behind, to their spectators’ growing confusion. Though they moved fast, they didn’t sprint, instead letting the enemy unit pass the halfway point. Right before they ran into One, Neta ordered, “Down!” They stopped running and took a knee, bracing themselves like a rock before the crash of waves.

And crash they did.

Red Frogs One slammed right into their shields. The forerunners of the unit almost tripped over them, not expecting them to be so low. Not a single member of the Poison Dart Frogs budged, taking the brunt with only a few grunts.

Before they could recover and figure out what happened, Khana heard Xopil’s hurried footsteps in the snow.

This was the part she was skeptical about, even though Xopil had assured all of them that he’d done this before across slippery river stones covered in ice.

The four behind Neta and Itehua moved their shields up, covering the top of their heads. Khana tilted hers a little behind, making it easier for Xopil to get on top.

His weight hit her shield, enough to feel like she was being crushed, then it was gone in a flash as he stepped on Haz and Yxe’s, using the boys as a launching point to jump over Neta and Itehua, straight into Red Frogs One.

It was like dropping a massive stone into a puddle, rippling the water. Khana couldn’t see much at the back and behind her shield, but she saw two unit One soldiers tossed out by the force of Xopil shoving his way into their ranks. Another was pushed over the line before she could properly brace herself. The pressure unit One had put on them was practically gone, having almost forgotten them in the shock and confusion.

“Up!” Neta ordered.

The rest of the unit got to their feet and charged, Xopil now at the head as they shoved Red Frogs One down the row.

Haz whooped when they won, half-tackling Xopil in a hug. Khana grinned.

The celebrations were cut off when Chaku whistled. “Unit Nine is disqualified. That is an illegal–”

“No it’s not,” Sava interrupted.

Chaku glared at him. “That strategy would get their man shot full of arrows.”

“Probably,” he admitted. “But it’s not an illegal move in the line game. Merely unorthodox. They pushed the other team to the end of the lines without drawing blood. That’s the rule.”

Chaku glared at him. Khana bit the inside of her cheek, waiting.

“Winner,” Chaku said through gritted teeth. “Unit Nine.”

The Poison Dart Frogs cheered in victory. Sava did a bad job of not looking smug.

“Not bad, rebel,” Itehua said, rubbing the top of Xopil’s head. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to pull that off a second time.”

“No, the element of surprise is what did it,” Neta agreed. “And we shouldn’t push our luck with Chaku. But it’s given us a good start…”

They strategized for the rest of the round, coming up with plans for each possible opponent. Khana couldn’t contribute much, as this was not her area of expertise by any means, but the excitement was contagious, and she found that she was looking forward to the next match.

Looking back, she realized it was the team’s enthusiasm that carried them. Out of the eight matches, they won six and tied a seventh, a shocking reversal of their usual ratio.

By the end of the day, a grand total of four units out of eleven – twenty-eight recruits – were sent home with rejections. The Poison Dart Frogs, on the other hand, stood tall and proud when Midya Chaku said, “Congratulations. From this point on, you are all soldiers of the Ghuran militia.”