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When she was nine, she raised her eyes in the court to stare at a guest of the king, and he laughed and pointed her out to his companions as a 'homely little thing'. Later, she was beaten for it, and afterward while she fumed the king's daughters tried their best to console her without ever denying that she was ugly. The guest later died, in the war, and Pyrrha hated that she would never be the one to kill him.
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When she was eleven, the rumor began that her mother had done some black magic to protect her from harm. Certainly, she began to be faster than the other girls, faster even than some of the boys, and she took her beatings with a stoic face and not a glint of repentance. Not that she was often allowed near the boys. Neither had she any real intimacy with her cousins, the king's daughters; she was deformed, and her mother reminded her to stay draped to avoid their scorn.
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At twelve, she fought her oldest cousin, and so black was her rage that Antylla only survived by stabbing her in the heel with a hair comb. The haze of anger gave way to contagious, childish terror: girls screamed and scattered at the sight of Antylla's broken hand and Pyrrha's bloody foot. None of them had ever seen blood like that, though half the world was dying on the gates of Troy; certainly none of them had ever seen Pyrrha, strong gawky Pyrrha, bleed.
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By fifteen, Pyrrha was alone with her rage; she tore up branches and beat the walls to vent her wrath, shredded good linens, ground her jaw, ran laps in the garden, struck at the animals. No cousins would bear her company for long. At night, exhausted, she listened to the poets chant and imagined them singing the song of her wrath.
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Not long after, a peddler came to court, no doubt a survivor of the neverending war. He carried ribbons and jewels and swathes of fine linen, and the cousins-- all planning their weddings, and the births of fine sons who would also die in the war-- dove into the cart of treasures with squeals of delight. Pyrrha would have stayed away, but under the fripperies she spotted a strong shape: a pole, a haft, something no girl would lift without effot. No girl, perhaps, except Pyrrha, with her strange, deformed, over-strong body.
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This was how Pyrrha came to lift the spear out of the peddler's cart, and from underneath that a shield; this was the first taste of fierce and vicious joy for her, holding instruments meant only for killing and meeting the smug assessment of the peddler with a snarl. This was the first time she heard the name 'Achilles,' and understood that her body was not after all deformed, and knew that when she died in the war with all the others, the poets would learn to sing of her rage.