[TAURIEL]
She made the choice at the first nock.
She was on the practice yard at the second hour after sunrise, in the long grey leather coat she had been wearing for archery work since the late summer, with the long quiver at her hip and the short quiver across her back and the small bone-handled knife she had been using to dress the strings tucked into the second loop of her belt. The new archer class was assembled along the long line of the south yard — twenty-three of them, mostly young, three older, all of them new to the bow at the level the course had been pitched. They had been her students for nine weeks.
This morning was the first morning she had set foot on the yard in two weeks. She had been at the petition wing every morning of the fortnight past. She had handed the morning archery sessions to her second, Aerin son of Aerien, who was a competent archer and a competent teacher and who had, by the small ritual nod that the boys gave Tauriel on her return that morning, not been able to keep three of them from watching her too closely.
She walked the line.
She stopped at the seventh nock.
The young man at the seventh nock was named Mardin. He was twenty-two. He had a clean draw, a careful eye, a steady wrist. He had, however, set the lower limb of his bow on the wrong angle to his foot. The bow was canted half a finger's width inboard at the rest. He had not, before the nine weeks of the course, been told that this would, in the long count of summers a man fired such a bow, twist the muscle of his lower shoulder over a year and a half. Aerin had not, in the two weeks of his teaching, caught the cant.
Tauriel stopped at Mardin's nock.
She did not, at first, speak.
She did, however, register the small reverence Mardin's shoulder had taken on when she stopped beside him. He had pulled in. He had straightened. His draw had altered, very slightly, in the direction of the form he had been taught was the form Tauriel of the Greenwood drew the bow in.
The first thing she did was wait for him to release.
He released. The arrow flew. It struck the target two finger-widths from the mark, which was, for Mardin, a good shot, and which would, by the small inward arrangement of his shoulder under the reverence, have been a finger-width from the mark on any morning Tauriel had not been standing beside him.
She did not, for a beat, speak.
She turned and looked at the boy.
Then at the two boys further down the line, the third and the fourth nock, who had also gone slightly still on her walk-past.
She did the thing she had decided at the gate, when she had walked in and seen the three of them register her in the way she did not want, on the yard, to be registered.
She said, in the same voice she had used in the petition wing the previous morning when she had asked Celwyn for the upper-east case:
"Mardin."
"My Lady."
"Lower the bow."
He lowered the bow.
"Set the foot of the bow on the ground in the rest position, then step back. Aerin — show him the rest position. The boy is canting half a finger inboard. The cant has been there for three weeks at minimum. It is shoulder-work in the long count. It does not show on the morning's shot. It will show on the second summer's shot."
Aerin came down the line.
Aerin showed Mardin the rest position. Mardin set his bow. Aerin adjusted the cant of the lower limb. Mardin's lower shoulder eased a thumb's breadth.
She watched.
She made the note on her tablet — the small flat thumbnail mark she used for student requires further check on long-form alignment — and she moved on.
She did not, in the moving on, take any other tone with Mardin than the tone she had taken with Celwyn over the closed axe case.
She walked down the line.
She watched the third nock. The third boy was firing high; she stopped, observed two releases, identified the wrist-roll, named it to him in three words, and moved on. She watched the fourth boy, who had been firing through correctly, and said nothing.
She walked back up the line.
She took the bow at the head nock — the bow that had been set in the rack at the head of the line, the working bow she kept on the yard for demonstration — and put three arrows into the target at thirty paces in the time she had once, in the long-ago years on the long terraces of Thranduil's hall, put thirty arrows into a target at a hundred paces for the king's amusement on a feast-day she did not, here, name.
She set the bow back.
She turned to the line.
She said: "Reset to the second mark. Twenty draws. I will walk the line again at the tenth. Aerin will count."
Aerin counted.
The boys reset.
The boys drew. The boys released. The boys drew. The boys released. The morning's small clean rhythm of fletching and string and the soft thump of arrowheads into the long straw target settled in along the yard. The rhythm took, in Tauriel, the place the rhythm of her petition-pen had been taking in the wing the previous afternoon — the same precise satisfaction, the same fine clean register of the work is being done, and the work is mine.
She walked the line at the tenth draw.
She corrected three further small errors.
She corrected them in the same voice.
The voice, she registered with a small inward calm, was hers in both rooms.
At the twentieth draw she ended the morning. The boys lowered their bows and walked off to clean their strings at the long bench by the eastern wall, and Aerin came over to her with the small folded copy of his teaching-record for the fortnight, and she went through it with him standing at the rack, and they worked out, in eight minutes, the two adjustments to the rotation of the lessons that the fortnight's record made plain.
She set the rack-bow back in its slot.
She turned.
Aldric was at the gate.
He had been at the gate, she registered, for the second half of the morning. He had not, by any movement she could read at this distance, come onto the yard. He had stood at the gate with one hand on the post, in the way he had been standing at gates for a year, and he had watched.
She did not, immediately, walk over.
She finished her notes with Aerin. She wrote them in. She closed the small tablet. She handed the bow she had drawn with to Aerin, who set it in the rack. She picked up her coat from the bench where she had set it at the start of the morning. She put the coat on. She fastened the small leather strap at the throat. She turned her quiver right way around on her hip.
She walked to the gate.
Aldric did not, on her coming up, move from the post.
She stopped two paces from him. She did not speak first. She waited to see whether he would speak first, and what the speaking-first would carry.
He inclined his head — the small private inclination he gave her in places that were public-adjacent — and said, very quietly:
"Mardin's lower shoulder."
"You saw it."
"I saw something. I did not know what I was seeing. I saw the lower limb at the rest and the small thing in his foot that did not look as the other feet looked. I did not have the word for it."
"Cant. Half a finger inboard."
"He will heal it."
"He will heal it. Aerin missed it for two weeks. I will not, in the future, leave a class without a second who carries the long-form check. That was my error."
"It was your error."
"Yes."
He did not press.
He set his hand briefly on the post by his hip and then on the small space between them, palm down at the level of her wrist, in the small gesture he had been making with his hand for two years that was the gesture of a man who would have taken her hand if they had not been at the public gate. She inclined her own hand a fraction toward his without lifting it from her side. The gesture, from a distance, was not visible.
She said: "I will be at the wing this afternoon."
"You will be at the wing this afternoon."
"And tomorrow morning at the third hour, here again."
"I know."
She turned and walked back to the yard.
He stood at the gate for the count of perhaps a minute more, and then he went back to whatever he had been on his way to. She did not watch him go. She was, at the rack, helping Aerin set the day's bows into the long-rest for the noon polish, and her hands were working at the same rhythm her hand had worked the petition-pen the day past, and her mind had stopped, for the morning, asking whether the body she was working in was hers.
The body was hers.
She had not, at any point in the morning, taken it off.
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