The two children were the youngest in the crowd at the butts; they'd both been born in the first Change Year, and were shooting up with a long-limbed, gangly grace. Rudi was the taller by an inch or two; the hair that spilled out from under his flat bonnet was a brilliant gold tinted with red to her dark auburn-brown, and his eyes somewhere between blue and green and gray to her hazel, but otherwise their sharp straight-featured faces were much alike as they began to shed their puppy fat.
"Willow!" one of the assistants called to a round-faced girl of ten. "Don't hop and squint after you shoot. It won't help."
The girl flushed as classmates snickered and giggled; she shot again, then did the same up-and-down-in-place hop as before, squinting with her tongue between her teeth and the wet turf squelching under her feet. Today Chuck Barstow Mackenzie, the Clan's Second Armsman, had dropped in to observe.
Which made everyone a little nervous despite the fact that he lived here, even if it wasn't as momentous as it might be at some other dun. Now he silently reached over and rapped her lightly on the head with the end of his bow; she flushed more deeply, hanging her head.
The rest of the crowd at the butts ranged from nine or so to thirteen, children of Dun Juniper's smiths, stockmen, carpenters, clerks, schoolteachers and weavers, and of the Clan's small cadre of full-time warriors. Their work was overseen by a dozen or so elder students in their later teens, walking up and down the line offering advice and helping adjust hands and stances, and four Armsmen oversaw them; archery was very much part of the Mackenzie school syllabus, and much more popular than arithmetic or geography or even herblore.
"And Otter, Finn, don't laugh at Willow," Chuck added. "She shoots better than you do most of the time. Someday you'll have to stand beside her in a fight, remember." He cocked an eye at the darkening clouds. "All right, it's time to knock off for the day anyway; everyone unstring. Carefully!" he added, keeping a close watch on the process, as did the teachers and their helpers, lest cold-stiffened fingers slip.
There were a couple of quick corrections to those doing it wrong. Rudi braced the lower tip of his bow against the top of his left foot, stepped through between the string and the riser, and pushed down against the bow with his thigh while his right hand held the upper part of the stave steady. That let him slide the string out of the grooves in the polished antler tip-carefully!-with his left hand. There were the inevitable throttled yelps and a few tears from those who'd let go too early or put their stave hands too far up, and so pinched their hands between string and wood even through their gloves, but no real accidents. Even a light child's stave could be dangerous if the wielder let it get away from them, and the tip of a grown-up's war bow would rip through flesh and bone like a spear when it slipped just wrong. That was why you always kept it pointed away from your face when stringing or unstringing, something he'd learned years ago.
"You're getting pretty good, Matti," he said.
"I always had a bow," she said. "Not just here."
"Not a bow like that, I bet," Rudi said, grinning.
"Yeah!" she said enthusiastically. "It's great. We heard about Sam's bows, even, you know, ummm"-she didn't say Portland -"up north."
The longbow was one of Sam Aylward's; the First Armsman made Juniper's son a new one every Yule as he grew, and last year's was about the right weight for Mathilda. It was his bowyer's skill as much as his shooting that made him known as Aylward the Archer.
It's funny, he thought. She learned some things up there – she can shoot pretty good. But not how to look after her own gear. Weird.
They both wiped their bows down with hanks of shearling wool, slipped fhem into protective sheaths of soft, oiled leather, laced those tight-closed and slid them home in the carrying loops beside their quivers. By the time they'd put on the quiver-caps-getting wet didn't do the arrows' fletching any good- the snow was thick enough to make objects in the middle distance blurry, turning the faint light of the moon above the clouds into a ghostly glow. The thick turf of the meadow gave good footing, but the earth beneath was mucky, with a squishy, slippery feel.
Most of the mile-long benchland that held the Mackenzie clachan was invisible now from here at the eastern edge; the mountain-slope northward was just a hint of looming darkness. They could hear the little waterfall that fell down it to the pool at the base that fed Artemis Creek and turned the wheel of the gristmill, but only a hint of the white water was visible. Rudi cocked an ear at it, humming along with the deep-toned voice of the river spirit in her endless song, and enjoying the way the snow muffled other sounds: the wind in the firs, the sobbing howl of a coyote-or possibly Coyote Himself-somewhere in the great wilderness that surrounded them, creaks and snaps and rustles under the slow wet wind's heavy passage.
The teachers and their helpers chivvied everyone into order on the gravel roadway, counting twice to make sure nobody had wandered off into the woods and fields. Aoife Barstow hung a lantern on her spear and led the way; she was Uncle Chuck's fostern-daughter, a tall young woman of about twenty with dark red braids, and a figure of tremendous prestige with the younger children. She and her brothers Sanjay and Daniel had been on Lady Juniper's great raid against the Protectorate just after last Beltane, when Mathilda had been captured; Sanjay had died on a northern knight's lance point. Aoife had not only killed the knight who did it; she'd cut off his head and waved it in the faces of his comrades, shrieking and possessed by the Dark Goddess the while. Gruesomely fascinating rumor had it that she'd wanted to bring the head home pickled in cedar oil and nail it over the Hall's front door, the way warriors did in the old stories, but that Rudi's mother had talked her out of it.
Chuck mounted his horse and trotted along, quartering behind them and to either side to make sure nobody straggled.
"School's over until after Yule!" a boy named Liam shouted as they walked, which got him a round of cheers.
"I wouldn't mind school, if it were all like this," someone else said.
"Yup," Rudi said. "Even arithmetic and plants aren't so bad. It's that classwork about things before the Change. Boring!"
"Yeah." Liam nodded; he was several years older than Rudi, but far too young to really remember the lost world. "Presidents and atoms and rockets and all that hooey."
Chuck Barstow caught that, and reined in beside them. The other children grew a little silent, but Rudi grinned up at the middle-aged sandy-blond rider; Uncle Chuck had been as much a father to him as any man.
But Lord Bear's your real body-father, he thought, then let his mind shy away from the knowledge. He wasn't sure what he thought of that at all, and he'd only learned it for sure last year at the Horse Fair.
"What about King Arthur and Robin Hood and Niall of the Nine Hostages and Thor's trip to Jotunheim and A Midsummer Night's Dream?" Chuck asked.
"Oh, that's different," Rudi said confidently; there were nods of agreement from those within earshot. "That's more like real life, you know? Those are the cool stories. They mean something. They're not just weird names like Liam said."
For some reason Uncle Chuck gave a snort of laughter at that, and rode away shaking his head. "People that old are weird," Liam said.
Rudi nodded thoughtfully. Of course, there weren't all that many really, really old people around at all. They'd mostly all died the year he was born. Uncle Dennis was fifty-eight, and the oldest person in Dun Juniper by a decade. There were only six or seven people here older than Mom, who was forty.