Marta accompanied a number of men as they hacked their way through the jungle. The rest of the squad consisted of Lieutenant Farcreek, Sergeant Clawridge, and five privates. Marta had been promoted to Corporal shortly after basic training, a role she didn’t care for, but which she’d stoically accepted.

  Private Marshdust was on point, cutting his way through the ever-present bamboo with his sword. As was typically the case, he was a muscular young man, who Marta had a certain empathy for, because he’d also been conscripted.

  The squad would normally have been in armor, but the mission was meant to be a quiet one and the Lieutenant had opted to travel light, because armor clanked. Thus, everyone wore only their day-to-day uniforms, which were of a color chosen for jungle camouflage. To enhance the effect, everyone had covered their faces with various green and brown shades of greasepaint.

  The squad walked in a line, with Marta in the middle, between the Sergeant and Lieutenant, who treated her like a precious commodity, since she was a witch. Marta didn’t like it, but they prized her life over their own, because there were so few witches compared to regular soldiers.

  The war had been going for five years and Marta wondered if it would ever end. Skobia had started the war, but despite the fact they were losing, they refused to back down and fought with everything they had, like men defending themselves, while Dugaria continually pressed the advantage of magic.

  Marta had her doubts about those facts, as they’d been presented to her. It didn’t make sense for a country one-third the size of Dugaria to attack, especially when it was a well-known fact that Dugaria openly accepted witches, for the sake of using them defensively.

  In point of fact, Marta’s main concern about the facts was that conscripted witches were only supposed to be used defensively, according to Amelia’s reading of the constitution, but so long as Dugaria publicly upheld the pretense of the war being a defensive action against a nation that refused to make peace, the King could use witches for an invasion. In short, it was all far too convenient, but she dare not speak her concerns aloud.

  Marta’s mood dipped into black depression, yet again. Five years as a dog of the military. Five years as an Artillery Witch. Five years of violating the vow she’d taken as a child, leaving her feeling so dirty, no amount of soap ever made her feel clean. Five years of looking for a way out, only for no solution to present itself. She was trapped in the worst kind of nightmare, in which she took the starring role, as the monster that burned men alive.

  Every day, she secretly hoped she might become numb to the pain of others, but knew when that day finally came, it would be far worse than any that came before, because then she really would be a remorseless mass-murde-

  “You’re up, Corporal.” Lieutenant Farcreek whispered and set a hand on Marta’s shoulder, interrupting her private thoughts.

  Marta gloomily nodded and stepped past the Sergeant, joining Marshdust on point. The Private used his sword to part the last of the tall grass at the edge of a clearing, giving Marta a view of a small fortification.

  Fort Foxtrot Charlie Echo, as it was named on Dugaria-made maps, was little more than a wall made of local stone, with posts made from trees. When the heavy, wooden main gate opened to allow three squads of armored men to go on patrol, it became obvious the place was far larger than it appeared from the outside, because Marta spotted a number of small buildings, again made from local stone. No fort had buildings, unless there was something important inside, or it had been there for years. Either way, they indicated a high-value target. The WIA, short for Witch Intelligence Agency, had been right about the place, as they usually were.

  Marta raised her hands, rubbed them together and quietly began the chant she’d been taught, speaking the ancient words of power for ‘fire’, ‘burning’, ‘wide-area’ and ‘soldier’. The word for ‘fuel’ came next, with a twist of pronunciation designed to link it to ‘soldier’, followed by the word for ‘limited’, again with a twist to link it to the previous word. When she parted her palms, flames danced within her cupped hands. It was painful to hold, because it was so hot, but she wore a pair of dragon-leather gloves that protected her from actual harm. Marta charged the spell for a time, then finally spoke the word of power for ‘ash’, yet again with a linking twist. With the spell complete, it drew magic from Marta’s body like a leech sucks blood.

  Marta had nothing to do but hold the spell and give it power for the time being, so she looked up. The gate opened again and men entered the fort, after a long day’s patrol. They looked tired and above all, young. They couldn’t have been older than sixteen. They looked glad to be back at base and their guard was down, unlike the men manning the walls and gate.

  Marta glanced over at young Marshdust, who was about the same age. It might have been easy to disregard the humanity of the enemy, if they’d been a different ethnic group from her own men, but Skobia and Dugaria had the same cultural and ethnic roots. To Marta, they looked no different. Even their armor was similar, with only a colored sash in a different shade marking the difference, green for Dugaria and yellow for Skobia.

  Marta couldn’t do it. She couldn’t kill those young men and began defusing her spell by harmlessly bleeding off the energy she’d gathered between her palms.

  Marta was thirteen years old and glared at Mother as she worked to dilute a full-strength healing potion to make six rather ineffective ones that would heal, but only over the course of days, long enough that people could rationalize away the effects as herbs.

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  Sulking in the corner, Marta demanded, “Why do you help those stupid people? You’re strong enough to take over the village, but you don’t! Instead, you’ve spent your whole life serving them and quietly healing them! It doesn’t make sense!”

  “I love them.” Mother smiled as she worked, “They’re my friends and neighbors. I went to school with them and I deliver their babies. I agree that they’re stupid and ignorant, but that will never change the fact that I love them all, aside from the Mayor, but I make an exception for him, because he’s so frustrating, though even he’s just doing what he feels is right, even if it should be wrong.

  “Besides,” Mother winked and smiled, “being in charge is too much work. If I used magic to take over, how much peace do you think I’d have? It would be work, work, work, all the day long, just to hold onto the power. No one with any sense sticks their thumb into that kind of thresher. That’s why I stay out of politics.”

  Marta’s fury over the scolding Mother had given her about a mischievously-cast spell was fading. Marta had cast a spell to make a boy she rather disliked grow a fresh batch of pimples over the course of a few minutes, which would eventually turn into uncomfortable boils, but Mother had seen the mumbling and wave of a hand. For the first time in her life, Mother had slapped Marta and dragged her home for a huge scolding, which was why she was in the corner.

  They’d been arguing off and on all afternoon, because Marta had been stubbornly holding onto the idea she’d been right to give that boy pimples, but she was beginning to reason Mother was right. After all, she usually was.

  “You’ve got a point.” Marta admitted.

  Mother nodded and asked, “Do you remember the first thing I taught you about doctoring?”

  “The right way to bandage a wound?”

  “No, before that.” Mother grinned.

  “But that was the first thing, Mother!”

  “I distinctly remember teaching you something else. It’s a shame you seem to have forgotten, because it was the primary reason I slapped you. Think about it, and let me know what you come up with.”

  “Fine.” Marta grumbled and set her mind to work. After a few minutes, she grimaced and spoke, ” ‘Do no harm.’ ”

  “Precisely.” Mother stopped working and gave Marta a very witchy glare, making Marta feel extremely uncomfortable, “To give that boy pimples with magic, you had to know how pimples work and I know where you learned that, because I taught you as part of your training to assist me with my doctoring work. You made that vow to me and today, you violated it. Even worse, you harmed someone with magic.”

  Marta finally understood and she felt wretched. She’d always taken that vow seriously, because it was important, but she hadn’t thought it applied to pimples. On the other hand, even causing discomfort could be considered a form of harm.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Now, tell me: what will you change to prove that you mean that?” Mother demanded, still giving Marta that witchy look of authority.

  Marta vowed, meaning every word she spoke, “I’ll never use any knowledge you give me to harm another! I’ll never harm anyone with magic, ever again!”

  “Corporal, what’s the holdup?” Sergeant Clawridge stepped beside Marta.

  She had no desire to hurt anyone, let alone with magic, but if she didn’t, there would be far worse consequences. Amelia had some kind of plan in place, but she’d cautioned Marta to play along and cooperate with the army. She’d often quietly asked what the plan was, but Amelia had always refused to tell her, for the sake of plausible deniability. Marta trusted Amelia with all her heart, but she was getting tired of taking the lives of innocent men, just to save herself.

  Marta lobbed the spell over the wall of the fort, where it split, becoming several hundred identical balls of flame, which streamed in all directions, filling the place with screaming agony as a smell not unlike beef frying in pork fat filled the air! She’d heard the dying cries of men before, but it never got any easier. Every time she went home on leave, she woke to the sound of screaming in the middle of the night, only to be told by her personal attendant that it had been her own.

  Worse however, was the sight of the many men writhing in agony as they perished, much like Marta’s mother had. She wanted to look away, but looked on as the men turned to ash, to confirm her spell was working, a necessary part of her job.

  Marta had cried every previous time she’d hurled such furious magic, because it broke her heart a little more, but this time was different, because she didn’t care, reasoning within herself, Better them than me.

  She followed the rest of the squad into the fort, after the screaming finally died down.

  Surveying the piles of ash Marta’s spell had turned the defenders into, Lieutenant Farcreek complimented, “Excellently done, Corporal Blackwell.”

  Marta nodded.

  Sergeant Clawridge shouted, “Secure the fort! Backup should be here in five minutes!”

  Marta picked up a chair beside a table and dumped a pile of ash off it, then sat down to rest, because she could hardly walk after using such powerful magic.

  Her mind wandered back to casting the spell and how easy it had been to kill more than a hundred men, realizing she hadn’t cried.

  “I really am a mass-murderer.” She spoke bitterly and the tears finally came, not for the men the others were treading all over the fort, but for herself.

  While hanging over a yawning abyss of despair within her own mind, she considered how she might end her life, to save at least a few men from dying. In her mind’s eye, she saw an option: the very next time she was ordered to kill men with magic, she would immolate herself and maybe the rest of her squad. After all they’d done together, it would be just to consign them to the same flame.

  “Corporal Blackwell, are you there?” The voice was that of another witch, who was far away, in Rimestar.

  The voice had an unusual ring to it, because there was no echo or reverberation, since it came from inside Marta’s own skull. It was a common communication spell used by the WIA, that worked from the lips of one witch to the skull of another. Bone Transduction, the technique was called. Marta knew how it worked, but wasn’t able to do it herself, while the witch at the other end typically made it work both ways, so they could hear each other.

  Marta spoke quietly, because the volume of her voice hardly mattered, “I’m here.”

  “Report.”

  “Foxtrot Charlie Echo captured, all enemies eliminated without damage to the fort. No friendly casualties.” Marta answered.

  “Good.” There was a short delay, while the other witch was silent, “Command wishes me to pass along new orders: your squad is being stood down, because you’re needed in Rimestar.”

  “Do you know what for?” Marta asked for the look of things, despite the fact she didn’t care.

  “They said something about a demonstration and claimed you would know what that means.”

  Ah, Amelia needed help “demonstrating” another prototype. Well, that would give Marta a chance to talk with her sister, because if Amelia didn’t provide a way out of the nightmare, then whatever plan she had in mind would have to happen without one of her sisters.

  “Thank you. Anything else?”

  “No. Over and out.” The other witch spoke to mark the end of the conversation and the spell.

  Peace settled into Marta’s mind, because one way or another, the nightmare was going to end.