“I’m sorry, but here’s my point: why dance through fifty moves when a single one will suffice?”

Melio stared at her with a look of alarm in his eyes. She reached out a hand and pulled him to his feet, smiling as if all she had just said had been some sort of joke.

From then on their fencing was never as it had been. Mena learned the rest of the Forms, memorizing and mastering the moves quickly. She did so in a perfunctory way, as if she was simply appeasing him. She focused her full attention on fencing, convincing Melio to fight again and again “to the cut.” Initially, Mena scored more strikes. Melio seemed reluctant to commit to the stated rules, which were that from the moment they began each of them tried to immediately strike their blade into the other’s flesh. Smarting from blow after blow, he quickened to match her. Soon their quick bouts of three or four moves had stretched to seven or eight. Before long their matches went into double digits.

Mena writhed at night, sleepless, her body like a weed twisting with rapid growth. She was raw with bruises, with abrasions, with stressed bones and muscles daily shredding and knitting anew. But she knew she was improving. She began to think of techniques Melio had not taught her, as when she pressed her body close to his and stuck like glue against him so that for some time neither of them could strike effectively against the other. Another time she abruptly dashed him with her shoulder, using it as if it were a weapon also, springing away from the impact with a vigor that caught him by surprise. She learned how to smack his blade with a collision that several times knocked it from his hands, and how to touch blades in a manner that made the two stick together instead of bounce apart. At times she slowed the rate of her movements unexpectedly, feeling that the center of her timing was in her abdomen. With a deep internal contraction she changed her rhythm so completely it left Melio stumbling to adjust.

Mena could not be sure how skilled her tutor actually was, but on a morning toward the end of the last month of spring the two fenced their way to a standstill. She stunned him by striking at several different points on his body with a single cut. Though Melio parried her, the shock on his face registered. He realized as well as she that with a single downward blow she had nearly cut him at the neck, on the side, and at the back of the knee, without losing any of her initial momentum.

After this, Melio stood some time, panting, watching her from behind the dark locks of his hair that stuck to the sweat of his forehead. “Who would have thought that Princess Mena Akaran would be the first to challenge me with the true use of the sword?”

“Don’t look so surprised about it,” Mena said. “All I’ve proved is that we are equals.”

“Easily enough said, but perhaps you don’t know what it means.”

“Of course I do. It means I’ll have to find someone else to fight. You know of the stick fighters?”

Melio voiced his opposition to the idea over and over again. He explained things she already knew but which he could not help but voice, as they seemed too important for her to ignore. She had not been trained to stick fight. The art and technique of it was vastly different from the swordplay they had been practicing. The sticks didn’t cut, but this didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous, even deadly. Stick fighters came from the hill villages of the islands. They were the poorest of men. They claimed warriors’ blood but could do nothing with it but test themselves against one another, trying to earn quick bounty from betting. They danced as if they were entertainers, strutting and preening and catering to the betting crowd, but when they attacked they did so with all the force they could muster. They dislocated shoulders with downward blows, broke forearms with twirls, thrust into abdomens so hard that the bodies bled on the inside. He had seen a man’s skull cracked open, watched another man blinded in one eye, another with his collarbone smashed to pieces so that it would never heal properly. And yet another fighter, a master of the craft, had managed such force in his whirling strike to a man’s back that the victim was unable to walk thereafter. He crumpled to the ground, devastated by what had just happened to him, and never again rose to stand on his legs.

“These are men you want to test yourself against?”

If she entered the circle with one of them, she risked a hundred injuries and would gain nothing for it. Why do that? It simply did not make sense. She was vain beyond all reason if she believed a month of sword training had prepared her for such a test. And, anyway, if found out, the wrath of the priests would fall upon her, endangering everything.

Thus was Melio’s rant. It did not do the least bit of good. Mena chose the day she appeared in the rough ring of the stick fighters. She dyed her skin with blackberry juice, leaving it a strange tint but not entirely unnatural. She wrapped her torso in a binding cloth that flattened her small breasts, dressed as a laborer, and bound her hair as Vumu men did. She held her open eyes above a smoky fire long enough to redden them, like those of a mist smoker. No doubt she looked unusual, but none who saw her imagined her to be the priestess of Maeben.

With Melio as a guide, she found the stick fighting gathering at the far side of Ruinat. Discovering it was the easy part. Getting into the ring, she thought, might be more difficult. She shouldered her way into the throng of men. They were young and old, laborers and dockworkers, hill farmers and urchins of the town, the smell of them rank and thick, the air clouded with sweat and mist smoke. She knew these people. She recognized faces from ceremonies. But she was not Maeben now. There was no distance separating them now. She was not arrayed in the guise of a goddess.

The ring man approached her, taking her in from head to toe, grinning. She thought he might ask her to explain herself, to justify being there. But he had no interest in her credentials. He was all business. He informed her that all new fighters had to earn the right to compete. Their first match was always with the one who held the ring’s title. The new fighter had to put up the entry fee. The sum, of course, was essentially forfeit. She would lose, but afterward she would be able to compete with lesser fighters.

“If I win,” Mena said, keeping her voice clipped and low, “am I then the title holder?”

The man laughed. “If you win, you’ve earned a place at the bottom, that’s all. Do you still wish to fight?”

“Of course.”

“Then you fight Teto,” the ring man said.

Teto, the said champion of the ring, was happy to oblige. He pushed through the sweaty bodies and stepped into the circle of cleared sand, where Mena awaited him. His stick, which he held toward the point and carried pressed up against the back of his arm, slid through his loosened fingers until his fist tightened around the hide-wrapped hilt. He moved with a demeanor quite different from Melio’s. His bare feet were careful in their placement but playful. He was light upon the toes, his legs rubbery bands of muscles that supported a floating, tranquil torso. His head seemed the weightiest portion of his body, eyes deep set in the skull and hard on her.

Mena did not have time to think much. Teto opened the duel; she responded. Within a few seconds she decided to fight him with the deadening defense. It was not something she had practiced before or named in advance. But from the first moments she knew that his strength was his greatest attribute and his pride in this was likely his greatest flaw. Instead of exerting extra energy in the impact of their sticks, she let her own force give when she parried. She stopped his strike but without the normal impact he was used to. He struck again harder and harder, his anger showing on his face and in the quickening pace of his strikes. But each time he touched her stick, it gave against his with a limpness he clearly found disturbing, as if he had struck a heavy rope that somehow diffused his force.