Thomas Rimor arrived at his old shieling alone; there, amongst a large cache of quality arrows, he slept for hours. He’d glamoured himself twice; for villein Land he’d reshaped into a soldier he’d known in France. He had to admit to a certain enjoyment in acting the parts.
Filib Lusk and his brother stood up the target they’d roped together. It was lumpy and more of a deformed oval than a circle, but the canvas was as tightly bound to the packed straw and reeds as a good mattress. The bull’s-eye was an oblong stain of rust. They stood it end-on with the hillside at its back. Thomas had explained that for the first days if not weeks, they would spend more time chasing after their arrows that missed than they would collecting those that struck home. Kester in particular rejected this idea, and just to prove it, he fired off four quick shots, not one of which touched the oblong target at all.
Filib made no comment. His brother had always been hot-tempered. Not only had he missed the target, he had not properly laced the leather brace around his wrist, so that the bowstring had burned an angry welt along it. Cursing, he sucked at the welt as he stormed off to retrieve the arrows. He’d grown thick over the years, a result of too much time spent in taverns. The bald crown of his head gleamed in the sunlight as he hunted up the arrows.
Kester had never gotten over the loss of Sìleas. He’d been closer to her as a boy, the brother she ran to when she was in trouble. He felt that in some manner he’d let her down, that it was his fault she hadn’t run to him the night she disappeared. He was convinced he could have saved her, and picked apart every remembered syllable of their dialogue (some of which Filib doubted had even been spoken). In his cups he railed about how he would have cut down anybody who tried to steal her away. He was sure it had been those pilgrims who’d passed through. He convinced himself they had caught her and done terrible things to her before burying her somewhere or tossing her body in a river. Over time he was left with nothing but that black unhealable wound, around which all of him had stitched itself. The news that it had been elves changed nothing.
Kester was still collecting his wayward arrows when Tàm Lynn emerged from the shieling to meet them. Where three nights before, Filib would have sworn that Tàm hadn’t aged a day, now he saw distinct changes—streaks of white in his dark hair, more white sprinkled through his short rough beard, lines and creases in his face. He looked near as old as Janet Lynn now. Filib suspected the transformation. Perhaps what he’d seen was a face smoothed by moonlight and memory, but he doubted it.
Would Janet have told Tàm of her ailments? Maybe. Tàm Lynn looked stony and cold, a fair distance from the friendly young knight who’d shored up their little house and laughed with the boys and their sister. His was an expression as dour as Kester’s while nursing his festering guilt and anger.
“Men,” called Tàm as he leaned his bow against the stone hut and took off his belt quiver. They came walking, Kester with his four recovered arrows. “Let me see what you’ve bought.”
They each held out their bows. “Target bows,” he said. “Good. That’s best for you right now. Decent arrows, and that’s more important.”
“What’s the difference to your’n?” asked Kester.
Tàm reached over his shoulder and grabbed his bow. Right away it was obvious that it was taller, and smooth throughout its curve, lacking the grip in the center that each of theirs had. “For one thing, a war bow is for shooting at a greater distance.” He took Filib’s bow and laid it upon his palm. “Every bow is different. You want to find its center, its point of balance.” He floated the bow on his hand. “You try it. Just feel.” Filib took it, and Tàm asked for Kester’s. He winced at the red raw skin along Kester’s wrist. “Kester, didn’t you purchase a bracer?”
“Aye, but—”
“There’s no ‘but.’ Put it on, keep it on, or you’ll peel your wrist right down to the bone. We’re like to have only days before they come. I can’t turn you into bowmen in two days, but I won’t be able to teach you anything at all if you’re spending all that time growing new skin on your arm.” He held up his own arm, with the long leather cuff and the loop that ran between his index and middle finger. “This. Come on, then.” He glanced at where they’d set the target. “Our target’s not on the level, but that’s probably good. Nothing that happens will be to your liking or advantage. The enemy won’t stand on a nice piece of flat ground on a sunny day and ask you to shoot them. Once you get the distance, then we’ll try standing on stones, or maybe even halfway up this hut.”
Kester looked doubtful.
“You don’t think so?” asked Tàm. He picked up his longbow, and drew three arrows from the quiver. Two dangled from between his knuckles as he held the bow. He stepped past Kester, but turned around and fixed them both with a look. Then he walked back to where one rocky outcropping jutted over the hillside. He took a step up onto it. Turned and fired, leaped down and started running. Halfway to the hut, he fired again and then sprang past them onto the curved wall of the hut and loosed the last arrow.
All three found their marks in a straight vertical column. If the target had been a man, he had shot it through the neck, heart, and belly. He set down his bow and walked past them to retrieve the arrows. Kester gaped. Filib nodded to himself. This was the knight who had fought in battles, become a mason, a farmer, but most of all an enemy of the elves. Of course he had the skill.
“You want to be able to shoot accurately,” he told them, “no matter the situation. Even if you’re running for your life. Especially then. Because most likely you will be.”
“How much can we learn?”
“Well.” He slid his arrows back into his quiver. “That’s what we’re here to find out.”
Filib glanced at his brother again. Kester’s features had curled with a kind of demonic glee. Where before he’d been the brooding brother desiring a revenge he could never obtain, now he’d beheld a way to exact it many times over. “We want tae learn everything,” he said.
“I know,” Tàm replied. “So did I.”
After four grueling hours of aiming and shooting, aiming and shooting, while Thomas shifted their stances, pressed on their elbows, and talked them through shot after shot, their arms were aching, and the hint of skill they’d begun to display in the third hour began to deteriorate. Thomas called a halt. “We’ll take this up again tomorrow morning.”
But Kester refused to quit. He faced the target and fired again. The arrow hit it, but low. The second shot fell short, skidding in the dirt and stopping just shy of the target. He made a noise of rage, pulled and fired, compensating too much. The arrow embedded in the hillside above the target. Kester threw down the bow and stormed off to get his arrows.
Thomas walked up beside him. “Kester, stop now.”
“You don’t know, Tàm Lynn,” said Kester. “Ye don’t know how long I’ve waited tae be able to do something for Sìleas.”
“Don’t I?” He stopped and let Kester go ahead and retrieve his three arrows. Then, as Kester sullenly returned, he asked, “Do you want to know how your sister died?”
That brought him up short. He stared hatefully at Thomas. “I suppose you know?”
Thomas hesitated, but there seemed nothing for it now. He said, “They were hunting that night—hunting me in particular, pretending to be pilgrims so they could get near, find out how many people were around. How many they were going to slay. Me, Janet, Morven at the very least. Sìleas wandered into the middle of it all. She knew no cause why it was different from any other night she went a’walking. They grabbed her, took the two of us back to their world, their kingdom. It was me they wanted, but she was to be their teind, yeah? To punish me. They stood me up and made me watch her die, your sister who’d done nothing to them. It was the same way they’d murdered my brother near thirty years ago. They wanted me to witness it. They wanted me to know the fate planned for me, for Janet, for Filib’s children. For you. For whoever they pick.”
Kester’s expression seethed. “Tell me it.”
“They dropped her into a well, one that has neither water nor bottom, one where time slows down so that death seems to go on and on and on for years while the well pulls you apart.”
“Jesus,” muttered Filib.
“I doubt she knew what was happening. They’d glamoured her, placed a spell upon her. But not on me. And not on you.”
Kester hung his head. He had imagined her death a hundred ways. Before now it was as if she’d been lifted into the air, gone. He would have liked if she’d become an angel, but his mind had gone elsewhere, shaping her death at the hands of villains. He knew how girls disappeared in the world, and it wasn’t from God carrying them aloft. Thomas knew only what Filib had told him of Kester’s grim obsession, and doubted that the facts would do the young man any good. And even telling them these facts, he could never have brought himself to reveal that their sister had died because she was mistaken for Janet. What could they have done with such information? It would only have shredded their guts, as it had his. No one else deserved to share that burden.
“But why?” asked Kester. “Why do they need sacrifices—why do they need us to be their sacrifices?”
“Us,” Thomas replied, “so that none of them has to.” He stopped then, realizing he didn’t know why they needed the sacrifices in the first place, either. The Unseelie, Taliesin had said: the Yvag wanted to escape from the Unseelie. But then he had never explained what the Unseelie were. What could be so fearful to the elves that they routinely threw bodies into the well of all worlds to ward it off? He wished now that Taliesin hadn’t been so mercurial. What were the Unseelie?
But Kester was waiting, and Thomas needed to cement his loyalty. He said, “When you tell me you want vengeance for your sister, just remember that I want it for her, too, and for my brother, and for a girl they snatched from Carterhaugh years ago. And for the ones you two have seen taken since then. We three and Janet are the only people who even know this is happening. Now, I—”
He seized up then. His arm flicked to the side. Lightning shot through his head and his vision narrowed until he’d gone blind. “Not now, not now!” he thought he cried aloud. He collapsed, writhing.
The other two looked on helplessly. Kester took a step. Filib said, “Wait. Don’t touch him.” A moment later, Thomas flipped onto his back, arms twisted out above him as if warding off an unseen angel, and he choked out the words:
“Armed against death,
It’s death you will rain.
Betrayed by a compeer
