Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 105: Army Marching Song

Lightning had carried Echo up piggyback and left her on the watchtower roof with a promise to return at sunset. Until then, Echo was alone with the view.

It was a good view.

The town spread below her in the morning light, compact and busy, smoke rising from chimneys, people moving between buildings with the purposeful energy of people who had survived the winter and were now doing something about it. To the west the river caught the sun and threw it back in long wavering strips, like satin being pulled slowly downstream. On the eastern bank the snow still held; on the western side the first green was showing through the melt, a ragged line between winter and something else. The wind off the river smelled of earth and cold water. Clean. She had never encountered a wind quite like it.

She had known six different winds in her life, and she kept a taxonomy of them.

The sea wind at Port of Clearwater: faintly salt, soft, irregular. The monsoon in the capital: hot and humid and unreliable, arriving in heavy gusts that tasted of wet stone. The mountain wind through the Impassable Range: thin and constant and bitterly cold, the kind of cold that got into the thinking. And before all of those, the wind of Ironsand City, which was either absent entirely — a stillness so complete it felt oppressive — or catastrophic. No middle ground. The storm wind in Ironsand City did not blow; it struck. It mixed the gravel and the sand into a moving wall visible from a distance, looking like a dark beast rolling across the flats, and when it arrived you were already inside it.

Echo did not miss Ironsand City. She was aware this was not a morally simple position, given that her people were there, or had been. She held it anyway.

The Osha clan. Her father, killed after surrendering, by a man she had watched do it. Her brother — the clan’s strongest — burned alive in a sacred duel by a trick, black oil on the Tibia whip that water couldn’t extinguish, their formation breaking in the chaos of his death, everything unraveling from that moment. She had been taken from behind before she could do anything. She did not know how many of her people had survived the exile to the Endless Cape, where the ground itself burned. She suspected not many. She had stopped calculating.

When her power awakened she had hoped, briefly, that it was something she could use. But she could make sounds. She could imitate animals, calls, noise — and she had begged the Three Gods for something more and received nothing, and she had understood eventually that the Three Gods had never been listening and perhaps had never existed in the way she had been taught. After six months in Port of Clearwater she had stopped praying entirely.

She had been sold twice. She had learned dances and music and other skills that a superior slave was expected to have. She had arrived in Border Town by accident, rescued by women who would not explain themselves.

That was all behind her now. She breathed it out, slowly, the way Wendy had shown her.

A billow of green smoke rose from the eastern bank.

Echo watched it. Anna was working again — the green flame climbing the tree line, the black smoke mixing with the fog of the snowmelt, rising in a column above the pines. Wendy had told her about Anna on the first day. About what the green flame could do. Echo had felt something adjacent to envy, which she had also put aside, because envy was fuel that burned in only one direction.

She cleared her throat.

The melody the Prince had given her was strange and simple and she had not been able to stop thinking about it since he first hummed it. He had hummed it once — just the line of it, no explanation — and she had retained it completely. That part was ordinary for her. What was not ordinary was what the song did when she played it back. Something in the interval structure, the beat underneath the melody, the way the rhythm refused to be ignored. She had played music for men who wanted to be entertained, had learned the songs that were supposed to be beautiful, and none of them had felt like this. This song moved. It insisted on movement. You heard it and your feet wanted to confirm it.

He had asked her to layer it: flute first, then drums, then strings, all simultaneous.

That had taken work. The drums kept wanting to swallow the flute, and she’d had to learn a new coordination — he had suggested she tap the beat with her foot while playing, build the rhythm in her body before adding it to her voice. After several days she had found the seam where the three sounds could coexist, each distinct, each necessary. Flute as the body of it, drums as the skeleton, strings as the thing that made it feel alive.

She began from the beginning.

The flute line came first, then the drums building under it, then the strings threading in above both. She let it run. She increased the tempo by degrees, the way he had asked her to, watching the point where faster became urgent rather than rushed. She felt the familiar pull toward singing — the melody wanted words, wanted breath, wanted to become something a voice could carry.

She gave it that.

She sang in her own language, not the common tongue, the words of an old working song from Ironsand City that matched the rhythm by accident or design. It didn’t matter that no one below her could understand the words. The music understood them.

Roland set down his last card.

“Attack value exceeds yours. My win.”

Soraya covered her face with both hands and sat in that position for a moment. Then she looked up. “One more round. This time I choose ten cards from your hand.”

“It’s late,” Roland said. “You should —”

“You always say that when you’re only barely winning.” She was already reaching for the deck.

He had explained the rules once. She had understood them in full on the first pass, asked three clarifying questions about edge cases that he had not adequately specified in his explanation, and proceeded to nearly beat him on the second game. He had been forced to use three of his best special cards to hold her off. When she’d asked to have special cards of her own designed, he had declined, and she had accepted this with the expression of someone filing information for future use.

The cards themselves had come together quickly. With a template in front of her, Soraya’s output matched a printing press for speed and exceeded it for quality — each card an exact copy, precise enough to be shuffled blind. Within a week he had two complete decks.

Through the open window came the melody.

Soraya stopped mid-shuffle and turned to the window. Then she went to it and leaned out, looking upward toward the watchtower.

“Echo?”

“Sounds like she has it,” Roland said.

He leaned back in his chair and listened. The three instruments, perfectly distinct, perfectly woven. She’d found the tempo he’d been imagining, the place where it became something you couldn’t stay still to. He had taught her the melody and she had done everything else herself.

The First Army’s field training was expanding. In the next phase they would move in formation through open ground — not the town’s streets, but real terrain, uneven, demanding — maintaining a proper firing line while covering distance. For that kind of maneuvering, a drummer kept the pace, but a drummer and a slogan and nothing else produced mechanical forward motion at best. What a marching song produced was different. It made men want to cover ground. It put something in the chest besides duty.

He had known the song his whole previous life — heard it at school performances, at public ceremonies, had sung it with two thousand other people in a crowd once and felt what happened when a rhythm moved through a body of people simultaneously. He knew the melody completely. He knew enough of the words to teach the syllables, even if no one here would understand the original language. The meaning could be adapted. The music was the thing that mattered.

Soraya had turned back from the window and was watching him.

He realized he had been singing along, quietly, in the language of his previous world. He stopped.

“What language is that?” she asked.

“An old one,” he said. “The words are simple: we are sharpshooters. We are soldiers with wings. Unafraid of tall mountains or deep water. That kind of thing.”

She considered this. “It sounds like it means it.”

“That’s what a good marching song does.”

Outside, Echo’s voice carried across Border Town, over the river, over the remaining snow on the eastern bank, out into the morning that was already losing the last of winter.

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