The princess passed undetected and left the picket line of her father’s command tents with the ease of a ghost. It was true it should be easier to leave the command lines of the encampment instead of trying to enter them, but it was still no excuse for the guards. If anyone learned that she had done this, the night pickets of The People’s Army would have been whipped until their bones showed.

The clear night sky blazed above her, full of stars. The moon would rise soon, so it had been necessary to slip through the boundary of her father’s encampment before moonrise while the deeper darkness could still aid her.

She had only been caught once doing this. It was on her very first try when she was still young. Her father had let her brothers punish her for it. They were all young boy soldiers then, older than her. She had never been allowed to know them. They had been her father’s pride. They were to strengthen his line; inherit his power. Lead his people. She was only a red-eyed girl—barely a person.

She remembered as each one of her brothers was told to strike her, and she remembered the first taste of blood in her mouth. She still had her child's teeth then, and she had lost some from that beating.

When they were finished, standing around her, some of them laughing, she spat and cursed them all like she had heard the blinded slave witch curse. She was young, but she remembered the exact words. She had screamed the words filled with anger and power, her teeth loose and the spittle from her mouth staining the sand red.

Everyone remembered the curse for good reason. They never spoke of what happened afterward.

Her brothers had died—all of them.

Most did not believe in curses or the sight. And the single catastrophes each of her brothers met afterward were of the usual kind. Death of a natural way in a harsh world. But that didn’t mean that her father excused her for anything, regardless of whether she was to blame for the deaths of his sons or not. Ever since her father declared she would shave away her flame-red hair and keep her scalp bald.

That lesson taught her that beyond the prerogatives of a princess under the watchful eye of her tutors and the Cloistered, she needed to learn how to move unseen and how to fight. She needed to learn the things that a princess was not taught.

In the daylight, she studied, and in the night, she escaped into the darkness and the dark areas it held. It was in the gutters of the poor and in the gambling pits where she found true freedom and a true education.

She was not as tall as most of the children her age, boys or girls, but she soon found out she was stronger. She had a solid, compact sturdiness. She quickly fell in with the tougher children, learned the roughness of their lives, and learned to absorb the abuse they dealt. They glanced at her pink-red eyes, but they said nothing of them to the tough child that appeared in their midst.

She always brought them a cache of food. She would take choice cuts of meat and fruit from her father’s pavilion, scuff it and dirty it, and then give it to the children like a stolen gift.

Not long after that, they showed her the gambling pits, and they bet on her. She was glad. To her, it was a form of acceptance. And she won for them.

That first night, the pit master gave her a stick and threw her in with a young bullock drift lizard. She fought the lizard, staked it, and concealed herself in the family tomb at prayers for a week until the worst of her wounds healed.

She returned to the pits as often as she could. She watched how the animals fought. Watched how the men and women fought, and she remembered how they moved, their tricks, their feints, and the ways to kill.

She went to her father’s books, dug through the library chests till she found the ones on fighting, and then studied and memorized the movements of each style and technique.

They threw her into a pit that held only a metal shard and a newborn scarabscorp. She barely survived that encounter, but from the closeness of it, she confirmed she did have some ability to predict things.

She went to the Sisters and told them her father had instructions that she study their unarmed fighting techniques. The techniques they taught her made her lethal and efficient. In the daytime, she trained her body as the dispatch runners did.

In the pits now, she could only fight older children. It wasn’t long before she had to fight two or three at once. They equipped the others with armour and weapons. She was forced to enter the pit with nothing and still she made them submit. In these times of overwhelming odds, a rage would come over her, and it seemed the tougher things became, the more it fed her rage, like a fire out of control. At these times, she would have to be careful not to kill any of the other children.

And she revelled in it. She knew this was a way to make her father proud. She would be a fighter and be better than her brothers ever could have been. She knew she was good already, and she wasn’t even a woman yet. She would show him a woman could be a warrior.

It was the night she got her blood, and they put her into the pit with the old soldier. A soldier with too many gambling debts.

She stood in the pit across from the man. A smaller man, a veteran of years of campaigns. He had come from the soldiers’ camp, no longer a soldier.

His position had been that of the badger. A badger in the army was the man the new recruits met for their first combat training. It was how the inexperienced were first educated to the cutthroat way of the battlefield. The new recruits would first have to prove themselves by fighting one of the oldest soldiers. If they failed against him, they were still allowed to join under his tutelage or go into the slave ranks.

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He had fingers missing from each hand. They were not the type shorn off clean at the stump from theft punishments. His hand wounds were the uneven and ugly ones earned from deflecting a blade.

His body was thin and leather-brown from years of marching in the sun. His clothes were a mismatch of old-worn and lightness. He wore the short-hooded cowl of the Wayfarers, but it was thrown back, and his head was bald. He wore the cloth of the ground soldiers, light and woven with thorn stalks for toughness. The only visible wealth he had were his boots. Tall and black with delicate soles built by a master craftsman, possibly a bird brain. The scars that traced the old man’s skin were countless. And his eyes were the same as hers. She had never seen anyone that had red eyes like hers.

Since she had gained favour in the pit and had drawn crowds curious about her, she had been allowed the dress of a true fighter. She wore leather bracers and greaves. Her torso was bound tight with a cloth. She strengthened the wrappings around her midsection with flat, flexible carapace bands. On her head, she wore a heavy leather cowl, padded inside, that covered her shoulders and neck. She had learned that her ribs, head, and neck could be a weakness. Her hands and feet were bare.

The night she fought the old soldier, she knew she didn’t have many fights left before she started to show. She had started to bind her breasts, and it was already uncomfortable. That night turned out to be her last fight in the gambling pits.

The steel banged three times to announce the fight, and the jeering of the crowd above them grew. The pit manager stepped up on the pit’s edge and held his hands to the crowd. He was a heavy man, healthy, and held good station with the city. His long billowy shirt displayed his rank with a loop of embroidery on each wide flowing sleeve. Sweat glistened on his forehead.

“Old Badger is here to fight in his first pit match for our guild!” he hollered. “I ask you to welcome him!” The crowd cheered. They were a raucous bunch tonight.

“Old Badger, a veteran of the Peoples Army, you honour us with your presence.” The manager grinned at the old man.

“And all of us here are very glad you suddenly came into some substantial debt!” Many in the crowd laughed. After a few moments, he held his hands in the air again for their attention. It took a long pause, but the crowd grew still and quiet.

“So, Badger, to come to my pit, you must fight my champion. The nameless one. You think you have enough guile and slyness left in that old skin?”

A low rumble came from the crowd. More bets were being placed. She saw the odds marker swing against her. The pit manager had swayed the crowd in playing up the old soldier’s bearing and experience toward his much younger opponent.

She glanced at the tally board. There was the “Loss” column, and then below that, they could mark more difficult bets, “Pin,” “Submit,” or “Unconscious.” There was also a “Forfeit” column. There would be no bets in that one for this match. She knew this old man was no coward, and she had never given up a fight. The only other way to forfeit was to be caught sneaking metal into the pit.

She watched the old man, and he stared back at her, ignoring the pit master. The old man was already in the fight. She could see it in his eyes.

The pit master continued. “Guile and slyness you do have! We can all be sure of that here tonight. But your body, Ol’ Badger!”

It was time for him to swing the crowd to her favour and increase the gambling guilds’ take in the pot. Her odds marker was low on the board.

“Some missing fingers. Do you have enough of your body left yet to command, you old sly badger? Let us see, shall we?” The pit master flung both outstretched arms into the air once again. The crowd around him cheered.

He patted the air, asking for quiet, and the crowd hushed. She looked around the top of the fighting pit. She never recalled seeing a crowd so big as it was tonight.

“Then we have our nameless one. The child who battles like a fiend. Pure strength and endurance. Not to mention toughness. We all have seen, have we not, when the match should have ended, the nameless one refusing to submit! Stepping into a battle rage! Our child champion!”

She noticed how the crowd didn’t cheer with much enthusiasm. They had decided against her. They didn’t like her.

“But…” he said. “Tonight we witness battle among the old and the young. Old Badger, we have in our pit, and the youth, the nameless one. But unlike children, men have debts to settle. Old Badger here is just like all the others. Men with debts. He is also a veteran. A soldier. A warrior. So, he has our respect.”

She caught a glint of something the manager flung through the air in a lazy arc to land between them at the center of the pit. An obsidian blade, the same length as a short sword with a sharp edge chipped into it. It had no hilt—just a blade of chipped glass.

“Hold!” he yelled down to them. “Do not move! Hold your places!” Both of them had flinched with an automatic forward movement towards the weapon.

From what she had seen when the old man moved, she realized in that instant that he still had quickness in him.

It worried her, and she forced herself to relax. She would win this fight.

“We are opening a second round of bets. Previously posted bets are now declared in the first group to be paid out at the standard rate. From this moment on, new bets are open involving the blade…”

The old man stood as she crouched. She could see he listened expectantly, just as she did, for the manager to declare the requirement to win. Where the first cut would need to be applied: left hand, right hand, whatever the tag to win required.

“… forehead!” the master hollered. More cheering came from the crowd. It would be a long, difficult fight.

The pit master motioned for quiet.

“First strike to the forehead of your opponent. To. The. Bone,” he added. A definite rumble came from the crowd. One of them would lose tonight. This wasn’t just a usual betting fight. This fight was for the full title. She didn’t have any debts. If she won, she would gain access to the gambling guild. Percentage of the pit from now on. If the old warrior won, he would have his debts excused.

“FIGHT!”

She dove and snatched for the blade, and he stomped, catching both her hand and the blade against the sand. Quicker, she realized. Smarter. The stomp was a hard one, knocking her hand away and snapping the blade into two pieces. A long portion and a much smaller one. She went to grasp the closer half, and a shower of sand flooded her eyes. Instinctively, she rolled backward. The old man stooped, picked up the long half of the blade, and smiled at her.

She grimaced at the memory and self-consciously touched the old scar on her forehead. It had been a long time since she had fought as a boy in the pits. That had been her last night there, and she had lost. And that had been a long time ago. Since then, she had never ceased her training, and her time was on her now. She could feel the events unfolding, The People’s Army drawing near to their final goal. Tonight, she would begin her final path to victory. She would fulfill her quest, and absolutely nothing would stop her.

She left her father’s encampment behind her and moved out across the desert in the moonlight. The desert wind was nonexistent. She could not see the giant pyramid that sat squat in the distant desert; it would be too far away and too dark, but she could see the glint of the city of glass high above like a large star in the night with the blanket of smaller stars behind it.

She lowered her head and strode out across the desert. She would finally meet her true enemy this night.