The morning arrived with the kind of crisp, indifferent light that didn't care much for anyone's schedule. Brina had been standing at the training grounds for hours.
Hours.
She wasn't the sort of person who was merely on time. She was always early, sometimes by a quarter of an hour, sometimes by more, because in her mind late was already a failure before a fight even began. And yet here she stood, arms crossed, jaw tight, watching the guards trudge off toward the barracks to physically drag their company commander out of bed.
Commander Evereth. She had heard the rumors about the man, of course she had, but she assumed soldiers always embellished these things. Apparently not.
When he finally appeared, she almost couldn't believe it. He looked as though he had been pulled from the middle of a very pleasant dream and hadn't quite made peace with that fact yet. His hair was half-flattened on one side, his eyes still carrying that glazed, faraway look of a man who believed morning was an injustice. He was already grumbling under his breath before he even spotted her.
Brina unclenched her fists slowly. She breathed out through her nose.
He had forgotten. She could see it in his face, the slight blink, the way his gaze sharpened only once he actually looked at her standing there in full readiness, and then the reluctant, sullen recognition that followed. He had absolutely, completely forgotten about their bet.
For a long moment she considered saying something sharp. But her honor as a knight mattered more than her temper, and the fight wouldn't mean anything if she won it against a man who had stumbled half-asleep into the ring. So she gave him time. She made sure he was fitted in proper armor. She watched with barely concealed irritation as he rolled his shoulders and stretched with the enthusiasm of someone doing a task they deeply resented.
"I would rather be sleeping," he muttered, not particularly quietly.
"I know," she said flatly. "Warm up anyway."
By the time the referee and judges had assembled, a crowd had gathered that nobody seemed to have officially invited. Soldiers materialized from nowhere, clustering at the edges of the training ground, and the murmurs that rippled through them had the particular restless energy of people quietly settling bets they would never admit to placing. Brina recognized faces from her old recruit teams and felt a small warmth at seeing them there, even as she kept her expression neutral.
Sergeant Vorik stood in the center as referee, which was a familiar and reassuring sight. He had the kind of steady presence that made people behave themselves without him needing to say much about it.
He laid out the rules plainly. A controlled fatal strike to the head constituted an immediate win. Strikes to vital areas of the body were worth three points, and strikes to non-vital areas were worth one. The match would be three rounds of two minutes each, with a single minute of rest between rounds. Only Vorik could stop the fight. Voluntary resignation would be accepted as the opponent's win. If all three rounds concluded without a decisive blow or resignation, total points would determine the victor.
Brina walked to her corner. Evereth walked to his. She lowered her visor.
"Both corners ready?"
Vorik looked between them. Both of them nodded. The match began.
The first thirty seconds were quiet in the way that things go quiet before they become very loud. They circled each other, measuring, adjusting. Brina was the first to reach out and test him, a deliberate probe of the middle ground between them. Their swords met with a clean sharp metallic sound and they pressed into each other, locking for a brief moment before the distance opened again. Then they were moving, and the rhythm of it became something almost natural. Strike, parry, dodge, counter. She matched his reach and he matched her aggression and neither of them found the opening they were looking for. When they grappled, her strength held even with his, which seemed to catch a few of the onlookers off guard, though those who had known her since her recruit days merely nodded to each other.
She could hear her former teammates cheering from the edge of the crowd. She could also hear, with considerably less pleasure, a particular voice cheering loudly in Evereth's favor. That woman. Still as salty as the day they had last crossed paths. Brina filed it away and focused.
She spotted an opening. She was already loading the force into her arm, her fist driving toward the commander's solar plexus, when Vorik's voice cut through.
"Round. Stop."
She halted her fist a breath away from landing. Evereth didn't flinch, but she caught him exhaling.
Round one ended with nothing on the scoreboard for either of them. A clean draw. Brina walked back to her corner and breathed steadily during the rest, thinking. The gauging was done. She understood how he moved now, and more importantly she understood how he thought. The second and third rounds would not look like the first.
The gong rang. They returned to the center.
"Begin."
She launched herself.
It was the kind of speed that didn't give a person time to prepare for it, only to react, and Evereth reacted just barely in time. The blow landed on his guard instead of through it, but even so he was pushed back a full step further than he expected, and she could see in the shift of his shoulders that it surprised him. She pressed the advantage immediately. She always pressed it. Giving an opponent room to breathe meant giving them room to think, and she had no interest in either.
She came at him in waves, heavy and varied, never settling into a pattern he could anticipate. High, low, from the left, a feint, a real strike. His forearms were absorbing the weight of every blocked blow and she could see the toll accumulating in the slight stiffness of his movements. When he tried to clinch her to buy himself a moment, she was already expecting it. She grabbed him first, pulled him off balance, and drove a powerful strike into his body before releasing him.
The sound that escaped him was not dignified. He bent forward and she followed with a series of blows from her fists and the pommel of her sword, each one landing clean. Points. The crowd noise shifted.
She could feel the win. It was close enough to taste.
Then he moved.
She didn't see it coming the way she should have. Something in him seemed to lock into place, the sleep burned off, the pain processed and pushed somewhere else, and suddenly Evereth was not a man she was beating but a man who was fighting. His boot connected with her abdomen with enough force to fold her forward, and the air left her in a rush that she couldn't immediately replace. She clenched her stomach and tried to straighten and he was already on her.
The roles reversed in the span of three seconds. Now she was the one absorbing, deflecting what she could, eating what she couldn't. The gap she had built began closing with alarming speed. Points were being lost.
The bell rang.
She walked back to her corner. Her lungs were burning. She pressed a fist against her abdomen where the kick had landed and breathed carefully.
Across the ground, Evereth stood in his own corner. He looked, for the first time since they had started, genuinely awake.
The final round had not yet begun. She was not finished. But she needed to think, and she needed to think fast, because the man standing across from her was not the same man who had wandered in grumbling about his lost sleep.
The question was simple and impossible: how did she close this out before he did?