“Hmmm,” he said. He studied the shot and could see the file marks where she’d smoothed off its circumference. He approved of people making their own weapons and projectiles. Particularly someone who was a princess and could have handed off the task to the armourers at Castle Araluen.
“Right, five shots. One for each helmet. Let’s see how good you really are,” he said. He placed a slight emphasis on the word “really’ and watched to see how she reacted to it. She glanced at him, her lips tightening into a thin line. A challenge had been issued and she was about to take it up.
“Which one first?” she asked. He screwed up his lips in mock consideration.
“Let’s see. Those five helmets represent five Temujai warriors charging towards you, bent on separating you from your head. Which would you choose as the first target?”
The answer was obvious. “The closest,” she said and he nodded, then gestured towards the line of helmets.
“Of course, by now he would have been upon you and your little sling wouldn’t be doing you much good, would it?”
She took the hint.
He watched as she turned side on, advancing her left foot towards the target, letting the loaded sling drop back behind her extended right arm. She let it swing once, setting the shot in the pouch, then brought her right arm up and over in a near-vertical arc, whipping the sling over and releasing as she stepped through with her right leg.
CLANG!
The helmet she had selected as a target jumped in the air under the impact of the heavy lead ball and clattered on the ground, rolling from side to side. Almost immediately, she had reloaded the sling and cast again, this time at the helmet on the extreme left of the line.
CLANG!
The shot struck off centre and the helmet rotated wildly on the pole. But she was already lining up a third target. She cast again. But she was a little hasty and the lead ball whizzed past the helmet, missing it by thirty centimetres.
She hesitated, not sure whether to shoot at that target again.
“He’s still coming at you,” Will said quietly. Quickly, she reloaded, cast again and sent the helmet jumping off the pole and spinning in the dust.
One shot left. She loaded, lined up the nearest remaining helmet and threw. The sling whipped overhead. The lead shot whizzed away and smashed square into the front of the helmet, putting a huge new dent in its battered surface.
She looked at him, her face flushed.
“How do you think that went?” he asked her, his face and voice devoid of expression.
She shrugged, trying not to look too pleased with herself. “Well, four out of five. That’s pretty good, isn’t it?”
He regarded her for a few seconds in silence.
“There were five Temujai warriors charging you,” he said. “You hit four of them. Presumably, the fifth one reached you. In that situation, four out of five isn’t pretty good. It’s pretty dead.”
She felt herself reddening with anger and embarrassment. He was right, she thought. In this world, four out of five wasn’t good enough.
“Keep practising,” he told her.
“Until I get it right,” she said. But he corrected her.
“No. Until you don’t get it wrong.”
Seventeen
Maddie was practising with her sling. It was a week since her first session and now Will had her working at it every day. First she would spend an hour with the bow. Then another with the knives. They would break for lunch and then Will would set her to practising the sling in the afternoon.
She was still using the five old helmets as targets, but each day, Will moved the poles so that they always formed a different pattern.
“No good getting to rely on one particular set of angles and distances,” he told her and she conceded the point. Her accuracy was improving. These days, she could usually manage to hit all five helmets three out of four times. But the perfect score that Will insisted on still managed to elude her.
She had noticed an interesting phenomenon. With each set of five shots, as she hit target after target, the nervous strain increased and her muscles began to tighten on that all-important final shot. As a result, she tended to rush the shot, to try to get it over with as quickly as possible. The usual result was a miss.
She mentioned this to Will and he nodded.
“It’s a natural reaction,” he said. “You can see that perfect score looming and the nerves begin to build up. Try to control it. Relax. Don’t rush. We’ll work on your speed later, but at this stage, it’s better to take a little longer and hit every target, rather that rush through it and miss one.”
She was on her second set of five shots. Her first sequence had been perfect. Five casts for five solid hits. She had followed that up with four more hits and was now on her fifth. She paused, allowing her breathing to settle. She could feel the excitement, the temptation to rush and get it done with. But she resisted.
Better to hit the enemy late than miss him entirely, she thought to herself. She glanced covertly at Will. He was sitting to one side with his back against a tree, his legs stretched out in front of him. For once, she noticed, he didn’t have that ever-present sheaf of reports or the leather binder. Thinking about it, she realised that it had been some days since she had seen the leather folder. His cowl was up, obscuring his face, and he appeared to be asleep. She was willing to bet that he was anything but.
She took another deep breath, settled herself, eyed the target and forced her muscles to relax. Then she whipped the sling up and over, stepping through with her right foot as she did so.
WHIZZ… CLANG!
The helmet leapt several centimetres in the air under the impact, then settled on the pole again, off centre and wobbling.
“That’s ten shots for ten hits,” she said.
Will said nothing. She looked at him again. He hadn’t moved. She sighed and moved forward to the target posts. Two of the helmets had been knocked off the poles and she replaced them. There were several lead shot lying in the dust and she retrieved them, studying them. They were distorted from the impact with the iron helmets, flattened on one side or with deep gouges scored in them from sharp edges on the helmets. She couldn’t shoot with them again in that condition, but she could always melt them down and re-mould them. She picked them up and placed them in a pocket, then moved back to the shooting line.
She whipped another five shots away, moving smoothly and gracefully, controlling the power and speed of each shot.
Five hits.
She felt excitement mounting in her chest. Three rounds and not a single miss. She had never shot three perfect scores in a row before.
If I miss one now, I’ll ruin it.
The negative thought stole into her mind like a thief. She angrily dismissed it, then paced up and down several times, breathing deeply, shaking her hands and arms to dispel the tightness that was beginning to take them over.
She rolled her neck and shoulders to loosen them. In her mind, she saw herself cast the next shot. She visualised a perfect cast, co-ordinated and accurate and powerful, seeing the blur of the lead shot as it flashed across the clearing to slam into the selected target.
See it. Then do it, Will had told her. She nodded to herself and, very deliberately, set a shot into the sling’s pouch. She advanced her left foot, letting her sling hand fall back and down to her right, the loaded sling swinging gently back and forth like a pendulum.
Will had her shooting at the targets in reverse order with each set of five. The first set, she would shoot at the nearest first, progressing to the most distant. Then for the second round, she would shoot at the furthest target first.