Chapter 86: Not Just a Soilsinger
"You use a bow?" Darion asked.
"I can," Seren said.
He looked at her for a moment.
"For what purpose?" he asked.
She shrugged. "Something to do. Sitting around isn’t useful."
Darion turned to Garren. "Is there a bow, a targeting board and arrows?"
Garren glanced at Seren from across the table. Then he pushed back his chair.
"There should be one in storage," he said. "Old equipment from before. Give me a moment."
He left.
Darion and Seren remained in the great hall.
Seren didn’t show any sign of restlessness, she wasn’t moving or adjusting or doing anything that suggested discomfort with the silence. She was just sitting there, looking at the window and the pale morning light coming through it, apparently content to wait for however long waiting took.
He watched her without being obvious about it.
She didn’t fidget or try to fill the quiet with conversation. She didn’t even look at him to check if the silence was a problem. She simply occupied the space she was in with calmness.
Garren returned carrying a bow, a quiver with arrows, and a target board tucked under his arm. The bow was older, the wood darkened with age, the string replaced at some point but not recently. The target board had been painted at some point with a faded red mark at the center that had bled slightly into the surrounding wood over the years.
"Found them in the back storage," Garren said. "Not new. But usable."
Seren crossed the room and took the bow from him. She turned it over in her hands, checking the limbs, testing the string with two fingers: a pull and release that produced a clean sound without the dull thud of a string that had gone slack.
She checked the nocking point, adjusted her grip once, and looked at the arrows briefly, pulling one out and checking the fletching.
"It’s fine," she said.
"Better to go outside," Garren said. "More room."
They went through the castle and out into the front area, the two guard knights at the gate watching with mild curiosity. They had nothing more pressing happening and were willing to be interested in this.
Garren found a suitable spot slightly to the side of the main approach. It was open ground, nothing in the line of sight that mattered, clear of the gate traffic.
He propped the target board against the base of the outer wall, adjusted the angle so it sat square, and stepped back. The faded red center mark caught the morning light.
He paced back from it. A reasonable distance, not close enough to be trivial, not far enough to be a statement about anything.
Seren had followed them out and was standing to the side, the bow in her left hand, an arrow already loosely between her fingers. She was looking at the target board with an assessing look. Someone reading a distance rather than admiring it.
Darion stopped beside Garren.
"Can we watch?" he asked.
Seren was already pulling the arrow to the string.
"Sure," she said, not looking at them.
The first arrow hit the board to the right of the red mark. Not far off, maybe three inches from the edge of it, but off.
"Yikes," Seren said, to nobody in particular.
She lowered the bow and looked at the board. Her expression was one of someone making a technical assessment rather than feeling bad about the result.
She adjusted her footing slightly, shifting her weight, then raised the bow again.
The second arrow hit closer. Still outside the red mark but the gap had narrowed.
The third was inside it.
She didn’t say anything about the third one. Just reached for the next arrow.
Darion stood beside Garren and watched. The two guards at the gate post had stopped pretending to look elsewhere and were watching openly now.
Seren worked through the quiver quite nicely.
She wasn’t too fast, each shot had a moment of preparation before it, the bow coming up, a breath, the brief stillness before release.
She wasn’t shooting for speed. She was shooting for aiming perfection.
By the time she had worked halfway through the quiver, most of her arrows were landing inside or very close to the red mark.
By the time she reached the last few, three of them hit the center in sequence.
She lowered the bow and looked at the board.
"Better," she said.
"Better than what?" Garren asked.
"Than the first one."
Garren looked at the board, at the cluster of arrows distributed across it, the earlier ones scattered and the later ones grouped at the center, and said nothing, which was his version of being impressed.
Darion had stopped paying attention to the arrows about halfway through the session.
Not because it wasn’t worth watching. It was worth watching: she was good, genuinely good in a way that improved visibly over the course of twenty minutes, which suggested an underlying ability that the rust of disuse had been covering rather than the absence of one.
Four months in a holding pen didn’t improve your archery. She had been competent before Gonnb and she was finding that competence again now.
He had been thinking about what that meant.
It led him to Percvale’s archers. He had checked the barracks inventory when he first arrived and the number had been zero, no archers in the knight order, no dedicated ranged capacity, nothing.
Some knights could shoot though, but then, they weren’t real archers...
What bows existed in the barony were hunting tools, and the men who used them used them for hunting, not for military application.
The difference between a hunting archer and a combat archer wasn’t just technique. Instead it was more of training, formation and sustained accuracy under conditions that were intense.
He had been working around the absence of real archers since the first Bogoart hunt, using elevation and spears and whatever improvised ranged capacity he could manage.
It had worked well enough but it was a gap. In any real military engagement, anything beyond the kind of asymmetric operation he had been running against Valdenmoor and Gonnb, the absence of reliable ranged capacity would matter.
Seren could shoot.
Not at a combat archer’s level yet, but she was good.
But Seren was one person.
What he was thinking about was broader than Seren...