Like two dancers the fighters dove and wove around each other, silent except for the clanging of their blades. Their hooves made only whispers, twisting and cutting into the earth as they spun faster and faster around one another. Long, only slightly tapered white blade met a curled grey scimitar as the two pairs of steely eyes locked and stared. The dust in the courtyard was whipped into a frenzy as the two fauns dodged, parried and feinted.

It was clear though that they were very differently formed. For a start, one was small and dainty, hefting her scimitar like it was a holy weapon. The other faun was over six foot, and it was clear she was holding back, smiling and deliberately going slowly. The small faun did what she could, skipping to and fro but with excellent skill for someone of her size and clear young age. As they spun and fought a quiet laugh rose from the girls’ lips and she copied a movement almost exact from the elder one, before ducking underneath a thrust of a white blade - and held hers to the older faun’s abdomen.

“I win this time, mother.”

“Of course you do,” Philomel replied, though not breathless in the slightest. “You were very good.”

She gave a bow to the younger faun as she stepped back, holding up her weapon in mock surrender. Her daughter, Celandine with a glorious bounty of chocolate-coloured hair puffed out her chest proudly and nodded imperiously.

“Thank you,” she said in a fancy voice before giggling. Then she gasped and a light came to her face. “I will go tell Gosling now!” she shrieked before turning on her heel.
Then she paused to point at the courtyard gate.

“Huntsman comes to the mountain!”

With grace she nodded again before twirling on the spot and rushing away. Leaving Philomel to roll her eyes but be left there smiling. The many eyes that had been watching them let out a polite applause as they paused in their work - guard duty, training or other. The older faun bowed to them as she twisted to the closest watcher to her. A man leaning on the wall, his arms folded and his face cast in shadow by his messy, greying hair.

“You shouldn't let her win like that,” Vaeron, the girl's biological father, said. “Don't encourage her.”

Philomel frowned as she stepped out of her ready stance and slid her sword away. “She needs encouragement, Vaeron. Not loss every time because I am around six times faster than her - or anyone.”

The human grunted, tipping his head back to rest it on the stonework. “When I was that young, I was never treated with dishonesty like that.”

“And I was,” Philomel answered quickly, waving him away and looking over to the gatehouse, where the sharply winding path began, the only access to the fortress up the sheer cliff it was built on. “So I will do as I fit when training her.”

“Just watch it does not make her lazy,” Vaeron sighed. But Philomel was already walking away, walking towards the gate where Celandine said her guest would soon be arriving.

Invited because she had one thing to say to the drow who had saved her daughter's life. A man she had taken prisoner, mistreated, stolen from his country and still not paid. She had still not as yet told him she was sorry.