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It was a beautiful day and Lissa was in a good mood for no reason other than that. In fact, she was in such a good mood that she started to sing, making up the words as she went along, and basically narrating her surroundings.

"The leaves on the trees dance in the breeze while the salty air plays with my hair!"

She sang enthusiastically, and not without skill, and so she felt confident enough in singing that she didn't bother to dampen her volume. She sang as loudly as she wanted. After all, it wasn't as if there was anyone around to hear her anyway. Almost nobody came to the stream this time of day, which was why it was such a perfect time and place for her to go to think, even if she wasn't doing much thinking.

Signild could not understand why all of her friends had suddenly turned into giggly morons over boys. She lived with boys. They weren't that great. And yet her friends had somehow reached a different conclusion. Worse, some of them thought her brothers were worth giggling over. It was a disaster.

She just needed to get away from silly girls for a while. That was all. She had already learned from experience that it did no good to try to point out to them that the boys they were suddenly giggling over were the same ones they had been calling awful and jerks less than a season ago.

Alas! It seemed she was plagued with silly girls. From not too far away Signild could hear someone singing about trees and the air and other equally stupid things. The fact that the singer had a good voice was immaterial. They had to be stopped.

Lissa was blissfully ignorant of the fact that she had a disgruntled audience for her silly little ditties. If she had known, she might have been embarrassed by the simplicity of the words, but she was confident enough in her singing that she would not have been ashamed by the melodies or her singing voice.

It was only when an outraged yowl demanding that she "Shut up. Shut up! Shut up!" that she became aware of her unappreciative audience, at which point her surprise did render her temporarily mute. Her silence didn't last long, though, as her good mood was spoiled by her heckler and she couldn't let that slide without calling them out.

"If I choose to sing I am well within my right to do so. I certainly don't care what some anonymous critic, too flower-blooded to show themselves thinks about my singing."

Signild probably would have been content with the silence, but instead she was called out and insulted. That was just the last straw for the grey freeborn, who was already having a bad day.

"Call me flower-blooded again. See what happens," she snarled as she lurched into the open so that she and the singer could have a proper confrontation.

She was genuinely shocked to see that she was about to throw down with one of the pride's known girly-girls, who she obviously recognized. Naaja, Lyti, and Karaliskas were impossible not to recognize, even though they were no longer the centers of attention and arbiters of taste that they had been during Njal's reign. Signild didn't consider for a second withdrawing her challenge.

Lissa turned to face her heckler and was taken aback when she saw that it was a lioness younger than herself. Based on her attitude, she was probably one of those lionesses who wanted to go viking and behave like a male, thinking it would get her more attention, but Lissa knew reavers weren't looking to marry lionesses who were crude and violent. At least, that was what she had been told.

"Are you serious?" she demanded.

Despite the fact she had less than no desire to be a reaver, Lissa was a freeborn Stormborn, and she could fight if it came to it. She would, if the younger lioness insisted on making an issue of it. After all, she had been insulted first.

"Oh, I am so serious," Signild replied, stepping closer, which actually meant stepping into the water, which was a frigid shock to her system.

"Who wanders around singing anyway? Do you think you're some lioness from a saga or something and some handsome captain will hear you and fall in love with your voice?"

It was probably tactless of Signild to bring that up, since it was no great secret that Karaliskas resented being the only one of her friends who was not betrothed to anyone. But it had been tactless of Karaliskas to call her flower-blooded, too.

"That doesn't happen. I don't see why everyone thinks acting like an idiot is going to get them a husband." This was mostly grumbled to herself, but wasn't actually inaudible.

All right, that was it. Lissa was not going to put up with being mocked for her single status. It wasn't her fault that her father was too busy dealing with his squabbling wives to make connections in the pride, and her mother too busy rubbing Melinoe's face in the fact that she was the favored wife to make arrangements for her daughters' futures. A lioness shouldn't have to arrange her own marriage.

"Fine," she snarled. "Come over here and we can do this. Or would you rather take it to the sands?"

Given her druthers, Lissa would prefer to do this here and now, before she lost her nerve and where there would be no audience if she did not emerge victorious, but she was willing to fight in defense of her honor and her situation. Some things were insupportable.

If Signild was startled to find herself actually being challenged by Karaliskas, she did a decent job of disguising her surprise as fury. She was having a rotten day and being called flower-blooded and then challenged by a lioness who probably couldn't even beat a hare in a fight was just too much.

"I'm fine with doing this here and now," Signild replied, shouting across the water. "But I'm not coming over to you. Why should I? You can come over here."

For one thing the water was freezing and she didn't relish the idea of going through it only to have to do battle while cold and wet. For another, she was the one who had been insulted first. It ought to be her right to have her attacker confront her on her chosen ground, which happened to be on her side of the stream.

"You insulted my singing, that's why," she called back.

Not to mention the water looked really cold and Lissa was still hoping to salvage at least some of her day. Spending it cold and damp didn't seem like the best way to go about doing so.

For good measure she added, "Plus you're already standing in the water, so you might as well cross the rest of the way."

Ugh! This was so stupid. Lissa didn't even like fighting, but now she couldn't get out of it. Well, she'd just have to win it and hope that the grey lioness never mentioned it to anyone.

"Are we fighting or not?"

Had she insulted Karaliska's singing? Signild supposed her demand that the purple lioness shut up could be construed as an insult, though it was really more of a strongly worded, emphatically spoken request. Still, it was useless to argue those sorts of details at this point.

"Oh, we're fighting," she assured the older lioness. "But know right now that my crossing the stream in no way means I think you're correct on any point."

Except maybe the one about her already being in the water, because that seemed pretty much indisputable. But whatever she was crossing the stream and then it would be on. Girly girl or not, Karaliskas would regret calling Signild flower-blooded!