It had taken Faye a few hours to calm down enough to sleep. By that time, the night sky was awash with stars, none of which were familiar to her. She had looked up at the night sky every chance she had been given but hadn’t taken the time to really study them. The town’s light sources weren’t anywhere near as bad as at home, so Faye didn’t have much light pollution to contend with.

Looking at an alien starscape was something that sent a thread of fear worming through her more than anything else that had happened to her so far. There was something profoundly wrong with looking at a night sky that was so obviously wrong. The moon alone, with its scar-like face rather than pockmarked… well, it was enough to send anyone round the bend.

She lay on her back in the grass of what she’d come to think of as ‘her’ park. It wasn’t a regularly travelled part of town, it seemed, so she wasn’t too afraid of sleeping in the open. She did want to avoid the awkward questions that it might raise, however.

Resting on her interlaced fingers, she traced patterns in the stars with her mind’s eye. There were more stars than she had ever seen with the naked eye spilling across the sky in waves. Having seen the band of stars that made up the Milky Way in photos, Faye was certain that whatever she was looking at wasn’t the Milky Way.

She calmed herself as thoroughly as she could. She knew that it wasn’t as bad as it had first seemed. She was alive, had been fed, for now, and was relatively safe. Compared to the nights she had spent in the wilderness, surrounded by wildlife that had wanted a taste of Faye-flesh she was practically a swaddled baby.

Though if people kept treating her the way they had been…

Faye kept going over the interactions she’d had with people since getting to the town, trying her hardest to keep the anger and frustrations to a minimum, and eventually drifted off into restless sleep.

Nearby voices broke into Faye’s fitful sleep, and she snapped awake. A bone-deep weariness had settled inside her, body and mind, but she pushed herself to her feet anyway. She wasn’t sure who the voices belonged to; they were fairly distant. She figured they weren’t coming to the park, directly, but were walking along one of the paths at the edge of the greenery.

Putting the pedestrians out of her mind as much as she could, she decided to abandon her fruitless attempts at sleep. She would rather be up and about, especially if there were other townsfolk that were. There was no reason for her to be arrested for vagrancy, or worse, if regular people were already moving about.

Stretching, Faye began a basic warm up routine. Exercise and training had always been a useful distraction for her ever since being a young girl. Her ability to stay alert after no sleep had dropped to basically nothing after so long without real rest but exercise would make it easier to stay awake, she hoped.

Taking her sword up from its hidden place, Faye took a deep breath. She dropped into a flowing kata. It wasn’t designed for the sword she was using, but it was what she instinctively wanted to practice at that moment. Eastern in origin and flavour, it was more akin to Tai Chi than a real offensive sword kata and she had made a habit of practising this over the years when warming up. It contained enough of her own personality that she was sure no one else practised the exact same thing.

The voices rapidly dropped off to the back of her mind. Thankful for the peaceful morning air, Faye closed her eyes as she went through the motions of her kata.

This was something that stretched the muscles, opened her airways, and got the blood pumping in a steady, controlled manner.

After a few minutes of careful meditative movements, Faye exploded into a different style.

Each sword movement that had been a flowing movement of beauty became a sharp, hard strike. Every dance step from before turned into violent stomps, rapid changes in direction, or soft balance changes that allowed her to strike at imagined opponents.

This, too, was part of her own method of training. It was more in the European fencing style, using the two-handed sword that she’d brought with her.

Most people imagine that swords, especially the longer ones, are exceptionally heavy. Real sword fighters know that a light, balanced blade is infinitely more useful than a heavy slab of metal. Whipping the blade from left to right with an economy of movement is the key to getting the drop on an opponent, the balance between life and death.

Or it should be.

Faye hadn’t ever found herself in life-or-death sword fights before finding herself here. She didn’t even count the animals that had been attacking her after she had come here. Yes, they’d been able to hurt her, but it wasn’t a sword fight. No intelligent opponent. They were… scraps that had more in common with a pub brawl than a fencing match.

Suddenly the voices she’d heard before came from incredibly close by.

“I can’t believe that you’re letting them get away with that payment. It’s robbery!”

“I’ve told you already, they pay what they can, not what we want them to.”

Her concentration suddenly broken; Faye stopped practising her kata. She was breathing heavily, but quickly got it under control.

“We are not alone,” another voice said, just as she saw three figures come into her view.

Faye felt her jaw drop. She’d played enough roleplaying games to know that these were adventurers. They fit the part exactly. Sleek armour, weapons on display, and one was wearing honest-to-God wizard robes.

“Are you a wizard?” she asked aloud, before realising what she’d said and ducking her head in embarrassment.

One of the men, the one wearing what Faye could only describe as wizard’s robes, scowled at her words, but didn’t say anything. His companions laughed, and the woman slapped him on the back.

“Hah, it’s been a while since you’ve evoked that reaction, Gavan.”

“All of, what, a month?” the final adventurer said.

The pair of adventurers accompanying Gavan burst into laughter again.

“Sorry,” Faye said. “I’m not from around here, I haven’t met many… wizards. I don’t know what they would look like, but you look like what I imagine one would look like.”

The other male adventurer turned his grin to Faye. He stepped forward and pointed at her sword.

“You know how to use that?” he asked. She was certain that he didn’t expect her to be able to.

Instead of answering, she took in the scabbard at his side with a glance and simply dropped into an easy middle guard.

“I think that’s a yes, Arran,” the woman called out. She was still chuckling a little but stood back with her arms crossed in front of her chest. The one called Gavan hadn’t really moved, his sleek form tall and rigid.

“All right, then,” the one called Arran said, as he drew his blade. “Let’s see what you’re made of.”

“Just don’t forget we’re on a schedule,” the woman called. Arran just waved a hand casually over his shoulder at her.

Faye was still in her middle guard. It was the most neutral of guards, and without knowing more about her opponent, it was an easy opener to adopt.

Her opponent, Arran the woman had called him, had intense eyes, but she felt the way he adopted his stance was too casual. He was making the same mistake than most of her opponents had made over the years.

Waiting for him to settle, his centre of gravity was just about… there.

She burst forward, stretching out into what would be a thrust at her maximum reach. Arran stepped to the side, almost casually, he’d been expecting it. But before the tip of her sword even got halfway there, she changed the trajectory of the blade.

It swung down in a short cut, aiming for his leading leg. His own blade came down to parry the attempt.

Faye pulled back, she had only moved her foreleg, and now she rotated around to her right. She was moving into the side that he’d stepped into to avoid the thrust and parry, which meant he wasn’t able to attack easily.

A small shuffle forward caused his blade to lash out, it was a thrust aiming for her centre of mass. Using the strong of the blade, the section near the hilt, Faye deflected the incoming thrust. She flicked her sword forward just as Arran’s blade was sent off its mark. He danced back out of reach.

She edged forward just as he edged backward. This was the engagement range and keeping him just within it was what she needed to aim for.

Arran’s blade was shorter than hers, but it was a one-handed sword. A little more ornate than an arming sword, and a little less protected than a basket-hilt sword. Whatever it was called, it meant Faye had the advantage of reach.

Or she might if she had been the same height as her opponent. Of course, with her shorter-than-average height that was rarely the case.

She made up for it with skill.

Switching now into a high guard, Faye used the rotation of her torso and shoulders in a powerful twist to generate a lot of speed and cutting power to the tip of her sword. It whisked through the air and made a faintly audible hum as it did — her blade was thicker than a live blade because it had been rounded for safety and it had the unfortunate side-effect of not making the sleek swish she longed to hear on a correctly aligned strike.

Arran had to move backward again, Faye’s sweeping horizontal attacks covered too much of the space to the left and right. His eyes were narrowed, now. But before he could move in with the counter, Faye rushed forward once more, looking as if she was reaching over her limit in her desperation to hit him.

His eyes flashed, and he grinned as he side-stepped and extended his arm in a stop thrust. But he froze when he realised his blade had missed and Faye had somehow hopped to his left, and the tip of her blade was pressed, gently, against the area just under his clavicle.

“The girl wins!” the woman called out. She sounded happy about it. Gavan didn’t say anything, but Faye had glanced at the two spectators when the woman had called out and she could tell the wizard was surprised.

She grinned. She enjoyed surprising people in her bouts.

Pulling her blade back and holding it in an imaginary scabbard — her real one still in the mountains somewhere — she gave Arran a short bow of her head.

“Thank you, that was wonderful,” she said, and meant it. Sparring was something she had always enjoyed. The thrill of the challenge, the stretch, the mind games. All of it was a rush.

Arran had sheathed his blade and was standing with his boots touching at the heels, his knees locked, and his gaze unreadable; but a bright blush rose across his face. Then he shook his head and broke out into a wide grin.

“I underestimated you, I apologise. How did you do that?”

The other two approached as well, the woman clapped Faye on the shoulder, the blow heavy enough to almost make her knees buckle.

“Well done, girl. I’m Ailith, the brains of this operation. Don’t trust what either of these two idiots say, eh? Us ladies have to stick together.”

Gavan didn’t say anything, but he wasn’t scowling at her anymore which she took as a good thing.

Faye nodded at them all. “I’m Faye, nice to meet you.”