“Do you have an arm guard?” she asked. She saw a slight look of disappointment cloud Will’s face, then it was gone as he turned to rummage among the equipment in the oilcloth. He found a leather cuff and handed it to her. She slipped it over her left arm.
“A bow like this would hit like a whip without an arm guard,” she commented.
He grunted and something in his attitude attracted her attention. She looked at him closely.
“Don’t tell me,” she said. “The first time you shot one of these, you didn’t wear an arm guard, did you?”
He glared at her and she felt a wicked sense of delight.
“You didn’t, did you?” she repeated.
He gestured stiffly at the target. “Just get on with your shooting.”
She shook her head in mock disbelief. “Boy, you must have been so dumb.”
“Any time you’re ready to shoot will be fine.”
She set herself into the shooting position and raised the bow. As she did so, she couldn’t resist one more sally.
“Bet you had one for your second shot.”
“Get on with it!” Will snapped at her.
She flexed her shoulder and back muscles, drew the bow as far as she could, sighted quickly and released. The arrow skimmed into the ground a metre before the hay bale.
She frowned, reloaded and shot again. Same result. She looked sideways at Will.
“What am I doing wrong?”
He inclined his head at her. “Oh, do you think someone as dumb as me might be able to tell you?” he asked in a mock-sweet tone.
She sighed and rolled her eyes. There was no answer to that and she resigned herself to letting him have the last word. When he spoke again, his tone was brisk and businesslike.
“You’re not used to the weight of the bow and you’re too eager to release it. That means you’re dropping your bow hand as you shoot and the arrow flies low. Hold steady a little longer. Not too long, or your arm will start to tremble. But keep it steady until after you’ve released. Release the arrow and count two, while you hold the bow in its shooting position.”
She tried again, straining to hold the bow steady for a few vital extra seconds. This time, as she released, she saw the arrow streak away and slam, quivering, into the left-hand edge of the bale. She grinned delightedly.
“Not bad,” Will said.
She reacted in a scandalised manner. “Not bad? Not bad? My third shot ever and I hit the target! That’s better than not bad.”
“If that had been a man,” Will told her, “you would have grazed his left shoulder. If it had been a knight, he would probably have been wearing a shield there and your arrow would have glanced off while he kept coming. Not bad isn’t good enough. Not bad can get you killed.”
They eyed each other for a few seconds, she glaring angrily, he with one eyebrow raised in a mocking expression. Finally, he jerked his head at the target.
“Twenty more shots,” he said. “Let’s see if you can progress to halfway reasonable.
She groaned softly as she drew another arrow back. Already her shoulders and back were aching.
I shouldn’t have made fun of him, she thought. But the realisation came too late, as it so often does.
Sixteen
The twenty arrows grew into forty. Then Will finally relented and let Maddie rest for the day.
That night, the muscles in her shoulders, back and upper arms ached and cramped as she tossed on her bed, trying to sleep. The strip of light under her bedroom door told her that Will was still awake. After an hour, she rose, tiptoed to the door and opened it a crack, peering through. Her mentor was sitting by the fire, with a sheaf of papers on his knee—reports from other fiefs, she knew. As she watched, he took a sheet and placed it in a leather folder on the side table by his elbow.
“Could be him,” Will muttered softly. Then he took up the next report, angling the page so that the candle light struck it directly.
Frowning thoughtfully, Maddie went back to bed.
“What was that all about?” she wondered. Somehow, she sensed it would be a mistake to quiz him on the matter.
The next day, after she had completed her housekeeping duties, Will had her at it again. She shot twenty arrows, rested for ten minutes, then shot another twenty. Again, her back and shoulders shrieked with pain. But she gritted her teeth and kept at it. By the end of the week, she sensed that it was becoming a little easier to draw the bow back to the full length of the arrow. Her technique was improving and her muscles were toughening. The pain was still there, but now it was a dull ache, not the searing cramps of the first few days. And it was decreasing with each passing day.
As she practised, she noted Will’s continuing preoccupation with the regular reports from Rangers in other fiefs. He would sit, his back against a tree, scanning new reports as they came in. She knew by now that it was standard practice for Rangers to keep up to date with events around the Kingdom. But she sensed that this was something more than routine. Every so often, he would add a page or two to the growing file in the leather folder.
After two weeks, she found she could draw the bow with relative ease and hold it steady for several seconds. As this happened, she found her accuracy was improving and she was hitting in the centre of the bale more than half the time. Her misses and near misses were becoming less and less frequent.
As he saw her technique and strength growing, Will began to work with her on her accuracy.
“Don’t try to aim down the arrow shaft,” he told her. “You have to sense where the arrow will go. You need to see the entire sighting picture—the bale of hay, the bow and the arrowhead. Learn where the arrow will fly.”
She frowned. “How do I do that?”
“There’s only one way. You practise. Over and over again, so that aligning the shot to the target becomes an instinctive action. After a while, after seeing enough arrows fly, you’ll instinctively know where to position the bow in the sighting picture. As the range increases, you’ll also need to gauge how much elevation you give the arrow—how far above the target you need to aim to hit the centre.”
Of course, archery wasn’t the only skill she was practising. He also set her to practising with her throwing knife and the saxe knife, using a pine board set against a tree for a target. As she became more proficient in putting the knives into the target from a short range, he moved her back so that she had to judge how to spin the knives twice on their way to the pine board.
At least, she thought, this didn’t leave her with aching, cramped muscles. She had to admit, there was no sound in the world more satisfying than the solid thunk of a knife burying its point into the pinewood.
And nothing more frustrating than the vibrating rattle of an inaccurate throw hitting the board side on and bouncing harmlessly into the trees.
There were other lessons, too. Will showed her how the mottled, uneven design of the cloaks they wore helped them blend into the background of the woods around them.
“The mottling breaks up the regular shape of a person’s body. There’s nothing even. Everything is irregular and random, and the colouring matches the greens and greys of the trees and undergrowth.
“But the real secret is to stand absolutely still. Most people are spotted when they think they’ve already been discovered and they move. It’s movement that gives us away. But if you stand perfectly still, you’d be surprised how close a searcher can be and still not spot you. Remember the basic rule: Trust the cloak.”
The words echoed in his own mind as he spoke them. He remembered the countless times Halt had said them to him. He found there was something surprisingly satisfying in passing this knowledge on to a younger person—particularly as he found Maddie to be eager to learn. The skills of a Ranger fascinated her. She was an adventurous spirit, like her mother, and she was more suited to learning about stalking and shooting than sewing and embroidery.