Author’s note: I originally wrote this in the summer of 2020–that first, hot summer of COVID-19 isolation. My friend’s kids were writing stories inspired in part by Rick Riordan; I wanted to see if I could write a short story that showed them some of the influences I loved, like Ray Bradbury, Orson Scott Card, Lois Lowry, and Ursula LeGuin. Unable to go to a public gym, I was running at night for exercise, sweating in the 80-degree-plus nights of Washington DC, threading through the US Capitol and the Supreme Court and the sprinkler systems that went on when it got dark. I thought about this during a few of those runs, and came home and wrote it in about two sittings.

Ket deliberately slowed his breathing as the cry of “Ready!” went up from the senior instructor. He looked steadily across his raised hands into the eyes of his opponent, the junior-elder whose years so far outstripped her rank in the school. She was shorter than he was and had at least twenty pounds’ advantage, her square shoulders the most visible sign of her notorious strength. She returned his gaze with cold dispassion, her body stiller than Ket’s, whose stance more fully expressed the school’s emphasis on dynamic readiness: a prepared energy, balanced but flowing. The senior instructor had sucked his teeth more than once and criticized the inelegance of her stance and she always tried to oblige, but in this alone she seemed incurably clumsy. Yet in any fight outside the school, this dull stillness worked to her advantage, as new opponents always mistook it for a sign of slowness.

“Begin!” A heartbeat passed, and Ket began a conservative combination: one, two, three alternating hand strikes followed by a dominant kick, a step back, then a repetition of the kick. All were met with measured, calm blocks, precise counters: the combination was standard, if not trivial to execute well, and Ket’s movements were fast and crisp, the representative example of what the instructors spent each day patiently trying to somehow get into the younger students’ heads. It was not intended to test his opponent, much less surprise her: it was simply a beginning, a way of starting the dance. He had learned many fights ago that waiting for her to strike first was a vain exercise: he had never seen her strike first against an opponent who was a peer. In informal fights outside the school she had made several foes regret even pausing to breathe after squaring off with her, so quickly had the disabling strike exploded past their guard. But in a real match, her opponent always had to decide how to begin the story.

Ket had decided on his strategy the day before. She sat one seat above him, and commanded all the standard rights of a senior pupil, an elder sibling. He remembered when he had been two table-lengths removed from her and an inch or two shorter: since that time he had risen steadily, but she had stayed where she was, third from the top. Three students had left the school from above her, and she had been passed from below.

At first, Ket had been astonished: her victories against those who challenged her unsuccessfully seemed so devastating, so inevitable, that he did not understand how anyone had ever beaten her. It was true that she received more criticism than the other senior students: the instructors often criticized aspects of her technique, though the criticisms were often stylistic. And when new tactics or ideas were being taught, she sometimes betrayed a surprising dullness in picking things up. But a day or two later, she’d have whatever it was down, and she’d return from a black sullenness to being merely grumpy and laconic. But this hardly seemed to matter in actual fights, where the ideals of form and combinations inevitably met the real world, where being solid and adaptable and not too hidebound became the key to many victories, and she was a rock: never off-balance, never confused, never impassioned. Perhaps the most common thing to happen was that her opponent would try one of the more difficult combinations they had learned, often something more recent, and Ket had gotten to the point where he could see it coming. A moment of awkwardness, a transition that was a little loose, a beat too long spent at the end of one motion that needed to be leading immediately to the next strike and she was suddenly inside it, breaking the combination apart like kindling. Often the strikes themselves were elementary: the ones first-years repeated until they sobbed from boredom. Sometimes people laughed: it was as if her opponents had embarrassed themselves. It would suddenly feel like a teaching fight. But she was always punctiliously respectful, bowing low to her sometimes red-faced opponents, praising their technique.

But Ket had seen her fight their instructors in brief demonstrations, and now he had seen her beaten three times by students. There was no great secret, he realized: one had only not to make any mistakes.

Their school was not the most prestigious in the area: when parents spun improvised epics of adventures and battles for their children at night, the heroes never hailed from the Water-Mill school. But it had been around for longer than most other schools, and had a strong tradition of sensible leadership and well-liked graduates. Water-Mill students did not become bandits, or beat their children, or turn into tavern haunts, and they were readily welcomed into local militias when they needed to be raised. Students often returned home afterward and became respected members of their home villages, happy to live a few huts down from their parents.

There was a deep constancy to Water-Mill’s practice that Ket had only come to appreciate with time, and it was founded in actual practice on fundamentally sound notions of what real combat was about. Their techniques avoided show, but they still came from a long tradition of dedicated artisans of the trade of using one’s body to defeat another body opposed to it. Many graduates didn’t master the most technically difficult combinations and movements, which was generally regarded as quite normal. Unless one wished to become an instructor, their practical value was debatable.

Ket, however, had come to believe that the only reason these techniques were left on the table by so many students was their difficulty. For anyone with the dedication, talent, and wit to appreciate them they were effective. The reason they so often led to humiliation against foes like his opponent, or even the relatively untutored in the world outside the school, was a simple one: they had to be done correctly.

Ket had become a student of the correct. In a sense, it came naturally to him, as someone who warmed to the people around him and felt a different drive to be competitive than the more typical one. In playful fights with other students, he would often stop a second or two after having broken the other’s guard, or left them briefly reeling with a successful strike. “Sorry, I messed that up,” he would say. “I’ve got to be looking into the right then down for the sweep half-way through that palm. Could we start over?” “Ket doesn’t care about winning; Ket doesn’t care about losing,” the senior instructor would say approvingly.

And, of course, this kind of dispassion led Ket to win, with increasing frequency. And he became someone who could win with the hard stuff: the complicated combinations that their instructors would demonstrate at festivals, the kind students had to get through for rank promotions, but that rarely showed up in rank fights, much less outside brawls.

Ket led into two more combinations, increasing his pace slightly, allowing himself to enjoy the musicality of it. And then his opponent responded with her own: this one more complicated, and with the typical ferocity that made her so intimidating to watch. But Ket felt no fear: there were no surprises here. As long as they were both on book, there was nothing she knew that he didn’t, and, frankly, even less that she would actually try. The lack of fear created a sense of elation in Ket, something he had not experienced in previous fights. Here was an opponent who had always been superior, who had fended off challenges from students he had long seen as far above him, but whom he could now face on equal terms.

It felt like such a significant moment, worth staying in, that he was surprised at how quickly his opportunity came. She struck up at his face, then swirled into a fierce elbow and cracking kick toward his forward leg, briefly confusing him. It’s true that this combination could often knock a person out of their stance, especially if they were lulled into any kind of passive anticipation of alternating sides of attack: this was three sledge-hammer strokes to the right, going from top to bottom. But it could be countered: there was a twelve-step followup that targeted a critical imbalance created by striking that way that left your opponent with no options left but bad ones. As long as you didn’t falter. And Ket didn’t. The twelfth and final step was a brutal spinning kick that caught her on the side of the head, right on the ear: a knee and one hand hit the ground hard as she caught herself.

The watching students would have cheered had it been allowed: they rarely saw something so spectacular in a real fight. Ket returned to the same dynamic readiness with which he had begun the match, consciously slowing his breathing once again. His opponent got back to her feet, tugged at her uniform quickly, then lifted her hands.

This time, Ket thought, I want you to suggest the path. I’ll start with the same question. Tell me where we will go this time. He began with the same combination as before. Strike, block, strike, block, kick—

And he found himself horizontal: instead of blocking, she had grabbed his leg, yanked him toward her, and they were on the ground, her weight pinning him as she cranked his leg in a direction it should not go. There was no hesitation: “I submit!”

She released him and got to her feet, brushing the dust off her uniform legs, not looking at him. Ket, stunned, rose as well, quick to bow in acknowledgement of defeat, his blood pounding in his ears. Where had that come from? He’d certainly never seen the move before, and he swallowed hard against the feeling of humiliation that rose up alongside an even stronger sense of admiration. To have held something like that in reserve for so long!

“The match is over. Ket will be promoted to the third seat. Tael is now fourth.”

“What?” The response burst from Ket’s lips before he could stop it: he was never insolent. “She won!”

Ket did not understand the look of irritation on the senior instructor’s face. “This is not a tavern or an alley or a school yard,” he said, his tone clipped. “A challenge determines who is the more capable practitioner of the techniques practiced at this school.”

Ket looked over at his opponent, looking for support from her in his consternation. To his surprise, she was bowing in defeat. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Your fighting is magnificent. I look forward now to learning from you.”

And so Ket sat to the right of Tael at the evening meal for the first time. But if he hoped she might talk to him about what had happened or, indeed, say anything at all to him, he was disappointed. She never had before, and she didn’t then.

Three weeks later, she was gone.

“Tael is behind you, Ket. I want you to think about what could be in front of you. You’ve stewed for weeks with injured pride over being promoted on a technicality, unwilling to realize that your own sense of what was important in what you were being taught may have been incorrect.” Ket’s new teacher looked at him sidelong as they sat in the long grass of late summer near their school. “Do you think I can still beat the other instructors at this school in a match? Do you think I would bet my breakfast that I could still beat the top student?” He snorted. “Even you might catch me on a bad morning. But once you become a teacher, you no longer have to defend your position.”

Ket was silent.

“Why? Because teachers follow a particular truth. They have seen something real, tested in the heat of combat, and discovered a thing itself. They have found beauty. Were you not taught from the beginning to praise the good in your opponent?”

“Respect and courtesy is foundational to all martial discipline.”

“That is a student’s way of putting it. Respect and courtesy are the emergent form of all truth seeing. They come from the simple fact that our art only arises between two people. A fight against someone incapable of creating beauty with us is hardly worth speaking of.”

“A fight against someone incapable of creating beauty can stop a usurper. Can defend someone who is powerless. Can protect the land of one’s family. Can preserve the just laws of a village against those who would break them for their own gain.”

“True. And all the disciplines aspire to bring about these goods, and others. But why can an entire village be defended by a single fighter?”

Ket’s brow furrowed. “Trained fighters are untouchable by the untrained.”

His teacher laughed. “Maybe! If the untrained put down their weapons and step into a circle and bow their heads and wait for the ready call!”

“I don’t understand.”

“Ten grain farmers who woke up on the wrong side of their beds could send a village’s champion fleeing over the hill if they decided to make a go of it with their pitchforks. Farmers just don’t tend to do it that way!”

“No one would fight that way.”

“That is not entirely true. To the degree that it is true, it’s true because the ugliness of a fight with pitchforks is in our very blood. We desire beauty above all, and the longing to bow to someone who has beaten you at your very best is the strongest impulse we have. But there’s no law that makes it so.”

“There are hundreds of laws that make it so.”

“There’s no natural law. The laws are just reiterations of the same point, the same choice. If people stopped feeling this way, the laws would blow away like leaves.”

Ket looked out across the field to where the cropped fields began, their produce yellow with the readiness of harvest. “So teachers pursue the beauty that makes us fight like civilized beings?”

“Teachers seek to make manifest the truth that structures all of our lives, the experience of beholding which is called beauty. You were creating a poem in your fight: your opponent saw the emergent mastery in what you were writing and chose to dash it to the floor. It doesn’t matter that you were unable to prevent her from doing so. Now you will focus on learning the best of what this school has. There are more difficult things to learn than you have even seen so far, and you cannot begin to approach them if you are focused on winning the particular, quite unimportant fight you happen to be in at any moment. Your eyes must be lifted higher.”

“I’m ready,” Ket said. But he wondered.

Ket gazed down into the valley where the warlord was encamped, barely able to keep his expression neutral.

“What is that smell?” one of the other fighters, a woman from the school of light and water, gasped.

“It is flesh,” Ket said simply.

Ket did not speak aloud the thought that was in his head: that there was beauty in the smell as well as horror. That he did not find it impossible to believe that the warlord now traveled with almost a hundred warriors, some of whom wore the hardened skin of animals as armor, and who called themselves by an old name: hunters. And in their encampment they used fire to blacken the flesh of animals they pursued and killed. And then they ate it.

In the beginning, humans had sailed through the stars in ships. When they came here, their ships were made of metal: as much metal as could be found in lifetimes of digging in the fertile soil of our world. And that metal could transmute will and energy in powerful ways. And the humans were hard and fearful creatures: and their hearts believed that there was never enough. And their bodies were malformed with muscle: the males twice as large as the females, and what they could take, they took. And for an age, the metal in their hands killed, and the humans burned the animals and consumed them, and they spread their metal and fire and stone across the land. But the metal did not last, and new metal was so scarce. And the grasses and the grains and the fruits were so plentiful that the humans began to change. Some said that the young ones began to resemble those who had been here before: but it was hard to say. For the ones who had been here before were all gone.

“I am honored beyond the ability of an unschooled man to articulate,” said the warlord, not without sincerity. “Surely ten fighters of your caliber haven’t been seen outside an annual tournament in generations.”

“We do not enjoy leaving our schools,” Beld said, her jaw working as she stood in front of Ket and the others, facing the young man in his animal-skin armor where he sat on the ground in front of a small fire in the center of camp.

“I’m sure you don’t,” he replied, looking away. “You know, I was there, five years ago. I was there when you won. After two years not even making it to the tail end of the competition, coming back and winning with the most spectacular technique we’d ever seen. Your feet didn’t touch the ground! I’d swear it. To meet you like this is not the way I would have liked it.”

“Yet here I am.”

“And why? Why? These farmers cannot afford to employ you all.”

“Who is safe from one like you?”

The warlord spat. “Everyone is safe! I am annexing land that belonged to my family. What was taken before can be taken back.”

Ket spoke. “Families have fought for generations, but they presented declarations of war. They sent out their champions to battle each other. They did not set fire to villages or rip apart fields or employ machinations to subvert their opponents’ strength. What you cannot take, you destroy.”

The warlord’s voice shook as he responded to Ket. “These laws, these practices stripped my family of all honor and wealth that we had. They prop up those who have power. It is no privilege to follow these laws from the rotting center of a compost heap.”

“Were you hungry?”

“My heart hungered.”

“When will it have its fill?”

“Believe me when I tell you that my whole being thrills to the thought of trying to answer that question.”

The fire cracked, sending sparks into the air.

Finally, Beld spoke. “Your campaign ends here. Which of your people do you choose to face me? Do you dare face me yourself?”

A smile broke out on the warlord’s face. “Do you see a ring in this encampment? Get them.”

There was a whistle as a small dart landed in Beld’s neck and she sank to the ground, senseless. Four of the others found themselves borne to the ground quickly under a pile of attacking bodies, their limbs immobilized. Ket caught a glimpse of the other three fighting multiple assailants desperately as he leapt in the air, catching one attacker on the right side of her jaw and cartwheeling her over before catching the neck of a man coming behind him and flipping him over his shoulder as he landed in a crouch. A sudden sweep to his left sent a third sprawling, and Ket found an opening. Scarcely slower than sight he was through it, racing toward the edge of the camp with the speed of a bird. Then the warlord’s many fighters had cause to regret their clothing of other being’s skin, for Ket, in his woven robe, was as fleet as shadow, as soon gone as out of reach. They turned their attention to binding their captives.

Ket sat, cross legged, on the bald outcropping he had chosen, with a clear view of the long valley below, the heavy summer air thinned and cooler at this height. At first, Ket had felt cold, as the steady wind sucked away his sweat and the heat with it. His sweat had long since dried as he waited. Once he had been sure that only one figure pursued him, he slowed the haste of his flight and had begun looking carefully for a suitable location to face whoever it was. He wanted a location with even terrain, without positions of clear advantage, and with a certain representative beauty.

When his pursuer finally climbed up onto the smooth patch of weathered stone, Ket’s eyes were closed and his breathing barely discernible.

“Do you sleep?”

“Please,” Ket responded, not opening his eyes. “Sit and rest. I have had the advantage of several hours.”

“Even now, you cling to your customs?”

At this, Ket opened his eyes. Standing ten paces from him was the first and enduring mystery of his training, clad in indigo-dyed woven cloth, barely sweating or breathing heavily herself, despite the unbroken pursuit of several hours on foot.

“Apparently you bear some affection for them, too. If your commander rejected a challenge of individual combat in his camp, I cannot imagine that he had second thoughts and sent you to smooth things over.”

“I do not care about his rudeness nor about your challenge. I came to find you.”

“Why?”

“Because I am better than you.”

Ket closed his eyes again, unable to otherwise conceal his confusion. He waited several long moments, then said, “Please do sit. Maybe you do not need it. But stillness suits the time before a fight.”

He heard the scraping of stone as she sat and silence fell between them for many minutes. An insect buzzed from a nearby outcropping and the wind, though not severe, blew without ebb.

“I know,” Ket said at last. “Apparently better than you do, if you seek me out to discover whether what you believe is true.”

“You speak like a teacher.”

“I have been a teacher for many years.”

“Have you forgotten how to fight?”

“No,” Ket said, his voice hard. “And I have you to thank for that. I have never been content, thanks to you. If not for you, I think I could have followed my path, known the truth of a path. But you showed me something my teachers would not teach me, something they did not perhaps know themselves, and the result is that I have never crossed over to the serenity of truth-seeing. I have learned to engage civilly in the philosophizing of our school, but I have also had to learn to lie. And every thought I have as I lie awake at night is of fighting.”

“Every night!” she said, laughing drily. “How many nights? Ten? A dozen?”

“It has been almost twenty seasons since I last saw you, though your face does not show it.”

“Yours does,” she said coldly. “Though your strength does not seem diminished. I am pleased that I will not have as much of an advantage there as I did before.”

“Why do you seek me?” Ket asked, finally. “You beat me. Do you care that the teachers ruled your technique out of bounds?”

There was a moment’s silence. “I myself deemed it out of bounds. It was a technique you knew nothing of. It revealed nothing about our relative ability.”

Ket furrowed his brow slightly. “You found a way to incorporate a fighting technique unlike anything in our school and unlike anything in the other schools we faced in competitions and employed it with the deftness of a teacher, and you do not feel it said something about our relative ability? You showed how hidebound I was. How hidebound we all were.”

She spat. “You could do the same with time.”

“That’s a meaningless hypothetical. I had used every moment I had to get to where I was. You had done the same.”

At this, she laughed for a long time. Her face worked for a few seconds, as if she were struggling to form the words to speak. “You have no idea what I have done with my time.”

A full minute passed before Ket asked, very quietly, “Why does your face look not a day older than when I saw you last?”

At that, she rose, brushing the gray dust off her garments. “I am tired of this conversation. What I am interested in you can only say with your hands and feet. If you fight your best: if you make this wait worthwhile, I will let you flee afterward.”

“Why do you fight with him?” Ket asked, not rising. “Do you not see what a threat he is to all of us? Do you join him in flesh-eating? Do you not see that someone who will hunt and kill a breathing being will someday kill one of his own kind? The very sky will turn black from shame. He is anti-life.”

“So many have tried what he is trying. If you had any idea what a cub he is: what a faint echo of what was he represents. He will disappear into the summer call of the chirruping insects and lapping waters and yellow grains. This world laughs at your sanctimonious morality, Ket, which it taught to you.”

There was a soft scrape of gravel on stone as she hurtled toward him. In a single fluid motion he rose and jumped, exploding upward with his arms extended. At a height of almost two meters, his feet rising beneath him, he found himself intercepted. She had leapt into the point of his ascent, his response to her attack anticipated and her jump chosen before he had moved. She grabbed him around the thigh and twisted, hurling him at the ground.

He spun and managed to land with arms and legs outstretched, absorbing the impact, then rolled to the right and dropped into a protective crouch, hands coming up to guard. A ripple passed through his opponent’s body after she landed as she checked a motion already half begun. Ket’s suspicion was confirmed: she had expected him to jump again and was prepared to hurt him twice as bad the second time, retaining the advantage of the first attack.

He lashed out a low kick toward her rear leg as she restabilized. She crunched down into a block then spun into his kick, attempting to grab his leg. The kick had been all speed and no force, however, a feint from which he was already pivoting into a hard drive from his alternate elbow into her face as she moved forward. She gave a surprised cry and moved backward, hands at ready, expression hardening into fury.

Ket straightened up, facing her. His tone was gently remonstrative. “You used that one already.”

She came at him. Though Ket was able to read and block her strikes it was like dodging lightning: her movements were not as fast as the top-level competitors Ket had fought during his championship days, but any edge they had on her in speed was almost compensated for in the brutal strength behind each attack. And they were strange: in every fight Ket had ever been in, it was a fight with an individual and with their style and with their school.

Every fighter came from a tradition, and knowing the strengths and weaknesses of one style versus another was vital to success. There was no perfect style, as teachers were so fond of saying: any technique that involves only advantage is not part of a style, it is a foundational technique used by all. Everything else is choice: the acceptance of one kind of weakness in order to gain another strength.

But if she hailed from a tradition, it was one he did not know. Ket’s ability to stay ahead of her movements was possible only because of the extraordinary effort he had made in his years of training to focus on reading his opponent, on flexibility. He had never forgotten the lesson she had taught him in their last fight: that all the cleverness of knowing the correct counters became dust when one’s opponent left the book behind.

After several minutes of furious onslaught, she cried out, “Are you capable only of holding your hands in front of your face? Where is the famous champion of the Water-Mill?”

“I dare do nothing else,” Ket said.

With her next attack, Ket reacted before he knew what he was doing. The furious right arm with which she led was simply too wide: though Ket knew nothing of the pattern or combination it led into, his body reacted to the imbalance with a speed much quicker than thought. He was inside her guard: a strike from his palm, a blow to the side of her head with his elbow, then an explosion of force from below.

He felt her grab hold of his wrist; she pivoted, his arm folded in with her as she wrenched it close to her body, and then all was pain as he heard a sound like the snapping of a bundle of sticks. She released his hand and he sank to the ground, gazing at his wrist in disbelief. He cradled his already swelling hand against his stomach: his wrist was shattered. His eyes rose to his opponent and, to his surprise, her face was wet with tears.

“You bird-boned fool,” she said through gritted teeth. “I didn’t mean to! It just—it happened too quickly for me to think.”

Ket, dizzy and almost rapturously awed with pain, said, “You were still holding yourself back? I cannot understand you! You feel you have something to prove to me, you feel there is something in me you need to defeat, and yet you fight as a teacher with a child, who at any moment has the power to humiliate her pupil. You have learned more than I have even seen.”

“I have had more lifetimes than you can dream of to learn it in.”

She turned away and walked to the edge of the outcropping, gazing out over sand-colored stone and jagged descent to the plains below, covered in a sea of yellow grass.

“You cannot imagine the scale of the lives of my people before your ancestors came to this planet, Ket. Of the long echoes of our poetry, our art. The wind’s carving out of canyons and reshaping of mountains was harmony to our songs. You speak about the anti-life of the warlord! When your people came, they spread with the speed of dry fire, and we could not decide whether we felt more pity at blips of time with which you grew, reproduced, and withered away or fury at our utter helplessness before you.

“You can barely speak the name of the warlord’s hunters! Ha! This moral outrage from the lips of the creatures who killed as readily as they drank water. Who do you think taught me to fight like this? You knew so many ways to hurt: and if it hurt us, it was only because it was used so often and so successfully to hurt your own. You used to kill each other, Ket.

“So I became a student. I could alter my form enough to pass among you. Though I hardly need to anymore. You look so much like us, now. I vowed to master your ways.”

Tael slowly sat down, her movements weary. “But you were also learning. This planet that boasted so much to eat, where no animal killed, where every season bore the renewing message of plenty, of innocence, of peace… it started changing you. And as quickly as I could learn from you, you learned from it. You are all such terribly quick learners. You have learned in fewer seasons than it takes me to catch my breath what has taken me generations far beyond my ability to keep track.”

There was silence for several minutes.

“You do not deserve it. You do not deserve to be remade in my world’s image. To inherit its gentleness. Its beauty. You have forgotten everything that you did to us. And I can never forget.” Tael’s body began to shake with silent sobbing.

Ket shifted his weight awkwardly under him, pain lancing up his arm as he moved. He half-rose and shuffled across the stone to where she sat. Cradling his arm tight against him as best he could, he reached his other arm around her and held her delicately to his side while she cried.

After a few minutes, Ket said, “Then tell me.”