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Farah’s hair tickles her face, breeze brushing it across her cheek as she lifts the bow.
Her head is full of the Headmistress’s words: magic can be sapped, stolen, sacrificed, you have to know how to defend yourself without it. It’s all well and good in theory, but Farah is the worst in the entire year at hand to hand and so far, her talents for using weaponry have remained as hidden as her ability to throw a punch.
The Headmistress’s sneer bites at her cheek along with the cold. ‘A contest,’ she said, to conclude the lesson, ‘at the end of term, to sort the strong from the weak.’ A pointed glance in Farah’s direction told her everything she needed to know about the reason for the announcement: not a yearly ritual for third years, but one designed to humiliate her specifically.
Farah digs her teeth into her lip. She won’t fail at this. She won’t give the Headmistress the satisfaction. She won’t hamstring her own career before it’s even begun, nor stand on the training ground, hands shaking behind her back, while her flaws are screamed into her face and her classmates smirk with poorly concealed glee. She squints at the target: a large bullseye drawn hastily on an oak trunk thick enough to denote it’s stood there for more than a hundred years.
Bare branches rattle in the breeze above and night is already drawing in, even though it’s barely five o’clock. Her fingers are stiff with cold, and her breath fogs the air as Farah takes aim. She pulls the string back, careful not to go too far in case she snaps the bow. She looks down the shaft, willing the arrow to hit the target. Come on come on come on.
The string twangs as she releases it. Farah knows that she’s failed, even before the arrow topples from the bow to the frosty ground a few meagre inches from where she’s standing. Her huff of frustration makes a cloud on the air.
“Fucking useless.”
She retrieves the arrow with an irritated wave of her hand, reloads it, and tries again. The outcome is no better, but she gets into a rhythm: load, fire, fail, retrieve, reload. All of her arrows fall short and, eventually, it’s too dark to see the tree anymore, let alone the target.
Farah walks back to the school, hoping it isn’t a metaphor.
The library is quiet, just the way Farah likes it. She moves through the shelves to the empty librarian’s desk, thumbs through the catalogue looking for archery, trying to summon to her fingertips the book that will explain what she’s supposed to feel, how to make the arrow do what she wants without having her magic to help guide it. It would be so easy with magic: a little uplift on the air, just enough power to drive the arrowhead into the bark. She has the best aim of anyone in the class when it comes to hitting a target that way; she stifles a bitter laugh at the idea of being the best at what she’s here to learn and failing anyway.
She sits in the corner under one of the stained-glass windows, the stacks laid out in front of her like troops awaiting inspection. It’s one of her favourite places to sit, a celestial frieze overheard, with Orion peering down on her. Perhaps a good omen. But she didn’t come here to be fanciful. She opens the first book, Archery Principles & Practice, skims the history in the introduction, pauses to take in the diagram labelled with all the parts of the bow mechanism. Top limb, limb tip, limb bolt….
Try as she might, she can’t make them stick, the words too prosaic to feel at home in her head. She flips through the pages until one catches her eye, runs her fingers over the diagram. Fig. IV. Trajectory. The lines should make sense, she knows they should. She should be able to tell what the dotted one and the solid ones mean by now, after weeks and weeks of trying to get it right. She turns the page, hoping there’ll be an answer somewhere in the text, but the more she reads, the more fatigue pulls at her. They’ve been working day and night all term: lessons during the day, training, drills, and patrols at night, the threat of Burned Ones ever present. She can’t even sleep without imagining she’s hearing the alarm sirens.
Farah sighs at the book and flicks it closed. She drags another across the desk towards her, but if anything, it’s more technical than the last one—endless pages on advances in bow design and the advantages and disadvantages of each different type. She stares at it anyway in the hope mere proximity to the words will push some sort of knowledge into her brain. She has to crack this, and soon. She reads a line, closes her eyes, tries to remember it, and when she can’t, fists her hair until her fingers are tight against her scalp.
It’s gone midnight when she decides to call it a night. She gathers her things, and heads out of the library, down the creaking staircase, and out into the courtyard under the wavering light of a crescent moon.
“You. Stop.”
Farah starts; Saul emerges from the shadows, bow holstered on his back, his fingers itching to reach for it as he eyes Farah warily. There have been rumours circulating all week of a Specialist being killed by blood witches who posed in the faces of his friends. No one can say for certain who it was, but everyone’s on edge regardless.
“It’s me. Farah.”
“What you doing out of bed, Dowling?”
“Could ask you the same thing.”
Saul lifts an eyebrow. He’s usually too stern to be challenged, but Farah’s not intimidated by him, and he knows it. Uncertainty radiates off him and he shifts his weight, defensive and not wanting to show it.
“Patrol,” he says, frowning at how much it sounds like a question.
“On your own?”
“Looks like. Gonna answer the question?”
Farah crosses her arms. “I’m not out of bed because I haven’t been to bed. As I would’ve thought was apparent from my apparel.”
Saul’s gaze falls down her body; Farah’s stomach somersaults. She’s not sure, now, why drawing his attention to her—including the mud on her boots and her no doubt erratic, windswept hair—was something she thought a good idea. Too often, she finds herself miscalculating like this around Saul, finding an excuse to stand closer, then regretting it as soon as her skin goosebumps at the mere waft of his sleeve against it.
“I was in the library,” she says.
As a fully-fledged third year she’s more than entitled to be there, and she’s had much bigger scares than encountering a Specialist late at night. But still, her heart thuds. She’s starting to suspect it’s less to do with being caught roaming the school at night, and more to do with by whom.
“You got a test or something?” Saul says.
“Of a sort.”
“Don’t buy it.” At Farah’s questioning glance, he goes on. “You’re one of the biggest brainiacs in the entire year. If you were up there swotting, everyone would be.” Saul runs his hand over his chin, tilts his head, entreating, as if he’s trying to persuade her to trust him. “What were you doing, really?”
Farah weighs the options. There’s no reason to tell him. He could report her, of course, but she already knows that he won’t. It’s been a long and uneventful night for him; she’s the best thing to have happened all evening. She could lie, but what would be the point?
She uncrosses her arms and holds out the book she had cradled against her chest. “If you must know,” she says, “I was studying this.”
“The Complete Guide to Archery? You thinking about switching teams? Becoming a Specialist?”
“It’s mandatory,” Farah says. “New initiative for fairies in case we have to defend ourselves without magic.”
Saul’s mouth tightens as he digests the information. “Seems a bit pointless.”
“I assure you it wasn’t my idea. There’s going to be a contest. No magic allowed. Last place will leave Alfea for good.”
“Harsh.”
“There’s a war coming, Saul. It’s not the time for carrying passengers.”
Saul steps towards her and takes the book, fingers just brushing against hers. He opens the cover and regards the contents page with a critical expression before handing it back. “Good luck, then,” he says. “You’re probably gonna need it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Saul shrugs. “You can’t learn archery from a book.”
“No?” Farah says, and Saul shakes his head. “How did you learn, then?”
“By shooting things. Deer, birds, squirrels.”
Farah sighs. “I’m a way away from posing a threat to the local wildlife, I think. I can barely hit a tree.”
“How many you get off?”
“What?”
“Shots. Arrows.” Saul pauses, notes her confusion. “You didn’t come straight to the library. You must’ve tried first.”
Farah’s boots creak as she rearranges her stance. They’re standing a lot closer than they were, although she’s not sure which one of them moved. Their sleeves are almost touching. It feels disconcertingly like they’re suddenly a team, like she can trust him. Like she wants to trust him. And Saul might be one of the more thoughtful and decent Specialists, but it’s still an unfamiliar feeling.
“Thirty-seven,” she says, quietly, knowing she’s building the secret between them brick by brick.
“And how many times d’you hit the target?”
“I grazed the side of it. Once.”
Farah leaves out the part where she only achieved that by throwing the arrow in frustration. She looks at Saul, his eyes glinting in the dark. In this light, he looks like a black and white photograph, a relic captured in a book, static and just a little bit out of reach. She wishes she could run her fingers over the page he’s contained on, study him like a diagram.
“When you keep missing, which side?” Saul says, low and quiet.
“What does it matter? I’m useless. I should just start packing.”
“You’re right-handed, if it’s the left side it’s probably your aim, it’s the right it’s probably your stance.”
“You can’t possibly—”
Farah looks him in the eye. She expects to find a hint that Saul’s having her on, readies herself to fire a laugh at him to show she gets the joke, to call him out on trying to bullshit her. When Farah’s gaze lingers on people for too long, they usually get uncomfortable, look away as if a lack of eye contact will prevent her from picking their thoughts like daisies in a field. But Saul doesn’t seem to mind it—or he understands, perhaps, that she could take a stroll through his synapses any time she wanted and there would be little he could do to stop her, short of putting a bullet in her brain.
There’s something there, in his thoughts. Sympathy, perhaps, for having to face another trial to earn—again—her place at Alfea. He’s faced plenty of them himself and no doubt has the scars to prove it. He gazes back at her earnestly, as if he really wants her to understand what he’s conveying, as if he wants to help.
“So how do I fix it?” Farah says.
“Depends. Look,” Saul says, glancing away over the courtyard. “Why don’t I meet you tomorrow and take you through it?”
“Why would you do that?”
“Why wouldn’t I? You need help, I can offer it.”
Farah tries not to show she’s taken aback; fairies collaborate much less than Specialists, whose survival often depends on being able to work as a team, she supposes. Maybe she needs to learn that as much as she needs to learn how to fight without magic.
“Alright,” she says. “After training? Five o’clock?”
The grounds are dusted with a light smattering of snow, just enough to coat the trees in white and make the last of the sunlight sparkle on the grass. Farah follows Saul’s footprints, fitting her boots to the shape of where his crushed the snow into shadow, as if that means something. She finds him standing next to the oak with the target on, hands in his pockets, considering the circles she drew hastily in chalk.
“They’re wonky, I know,” Farah says, and Saul turns halfway to catch her eye.
“Doesn’t matter.”
Farah claps her hands together to get the feeling back in them. Now she’s here, she’s not sure why she thought this a good idea. The bow on her back feels ridiculous, like she’s shown up wearing her mother’s clothes.
“Show me what you’ve got, then?” Saul says.
Farah draws the bow out of the sling, takes an arrow out of the quiver—at least those terms have stuck—and positions herself in front of the tree, twelve paces or so from the target. She slots the arrow against the rest, and fits the string into the nock on the end of the shaft, trying to remember the things the instructor said were important about tension, but all she can recall is the feel of the Headmistress watching her, waiting for her to make a mistake. Longing for it, almost.
She takes aim at the tree, squinting until the centre of the target is in line where she’s clutching the bow. It’s so simple in theory: take aim, fire. She’s done far more complex things than this, but the pressure of Saul watching makes her breath uneven. Half of her wants to hit the bullseye, prove to Saul she doesn’t need his help; but if she did manage to hit the target, what would he think? That she wasted his time? Feigned weakness to get close to him like a pathetic damsel in distress? She squints at the bullseye to clear the thoughts, focuses on the spot right in the centre, trying to picture the bark splintering when she finds the shot.
The string digs into her fingers as she pulls it back, feeling the weight of it in her shoulder and all the way up her already aching forearm. Whatever muscles she uses for spell casting, they’re very different to these. She takes a deep breath to steady herself and fires.
The string twangs, and the arrow soars—an improvement on yesterday—but it veers to the left, way past the tree she was aiming for. It leaves a furrow in the snow as it lands.
Farah glances at Saul, not sure what she’ll find in his expression. Specialists can be cruel and crass with their humour when it comes to deriding the efforts of fairies, a way to attempt to balance the scales of power, she supposes.
Saul frowns in consideration.
“Verdict?” Farah says. “What am I doing wrong?”
“Nothing,” Saul replies. “Not really.”
Farah magics her arrow back to her with deliberate and unnecessary flair. “Quite obviously I am, or I’d be doing a victory lap of the forest.”
“I mean there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with your technique. Seems you’ve got a grasp of the basics. Your stance is pretty good, actually, for a beginner.”
Farah swallows. The last thing she was expecting was a compliment. She’s never been much good at handling them. “Why can’t I hit the tree, then?”
Saul murmurs but doesn’t answer. Instead, he retrieves his own bow from the sling on his back, takes the arrow from her, and aims at the tree. Without even seemingly lining it up, he hits the smallest circle at the centre of the target dead on.
“You make it look easy,” Farah says.
Saul frowns again, pulling the arrow free of the target and pacing back and forth in front of the oak before holding the arrow out to her. “Let’s start closer to the tree.”
“But the contest is from twelve metres.”
Saul digs the heel of his boot into the snow, barely four metres from the oak. Its roots push up making a little mountainscape around the mark, valleys and peaks like a miniature world. He gestures for Farah to stand on the spot.
“Try from here. Trust me.”
Farah rolls her eyes but stands on the patch of cleared earth anyway. Below the snow, the grass looks dark in the dwindling light, oak leaves that fell in autumn caught amongst it. The target seems less intimidating from this distance. She can clearly make out the texture of the bark, the crevices and hollows where leaves have collected. It would be utterly humiliating to miss from here. She glances at Saul to make sure she’s understood correctly that she’s just to fire as normal, and Saul nods, with curiosity as well as encouragement.
The motions are starting to feel less unnatural as Farah loads the arrow and lifts the bow, looking beyond it to a little blot of red at the centre of the target that’s losing its colour as the sun sets behind the school.
“Any pointers?” she says.
In her periphery, Saul shakes his head, breathes out long and slow. “Just want to watch, for now.”
Farah focuses on the target again and lets go of the string.
The arrow flies, more purposeful somehow than before, and impales itself in the body of the trunk just north of the target.
A bird startles out of the trees at the noise of the impact.
“Good,” Saul says.
Farah retrieves the arrow, working it out of the bark, biting the inside of her cheek so she doesn’t show her sense of satisfaction at the flicker of paleness under the craggy bark she’s exposed. “Not good enough.”
Without waiting for instruction, she reloads the arrow, tries again.
Like before, she hits the tree. Not on the target, still, but a little closer to the ring of chalk.
She tries again and again, inching further towards the outer rim of the target each time, frustrated that she’s making progress at last but not nearly fast enough. She’s been like this since she was a child: so little patience with herself, irritated by her own inability to be expert in anything as soon as she’s learned the basics. She squares off against the tree again, trying to use her determination to steer the arrow, but no matter how hard she wills it, she can’t do more than graze the outer ring.
After a dozen tries, she turns to Saul. “How do you hit it?” she says, not bothering to conceal her frustration. “How do you hit it so perfectly every time?”
“You’ll get there. Keep practicing.”
“I don’t have time, Saul. I don’t have time to keep practicing.”
“She wouldn’t really kick you out, the Headmistress. You’re one of the best students, if not the best.”
“She doesn’t think so.”
“She does. She just doesn’t want you to get too confident because soon as you do, you’re a threat to her authority.”
The casualness with which Saul says it stings. It’s not flattery or even kindness; he genuinely thinks that what he’s saying is true. Farah stares at the snowy ground. She can’t imagine what he’s seen of her that would allow him to draw such a conclusion. She loads the arrow, fussing with where the string sits against the notch in the end of the arrow.
“Show me how you do it?” Farah says. “Properly.”
“What?”
“I mean—” Suddenly Farah’s not sure what she means, only that she’s picturing Saul’s hands on her hands and her insides are fluttering as if they’re already there. “If I feel it,” she says, “maybe I’ll understand it.”
Saul cocks his head for a second, trying to work out if she means what he thinks she does, before he nods.
Farah’s heart thunders as Saul steps into her space, his breath making clouds on the air and drifting out to nothingness around her. He catches her eye before touching the back of her hand where it’s clutching the grip in the middle of the curve of the bow, indicating that she should raise it. He stands behind her, so close Farah can hear him breathing and smell whatever it is he uses that makes him smell like a woodland after rain. She focuses on the tension of the string, the way it takes a taut line between the two flexing ends of the bow, tries not to react at all as Saul’s arm snakes around her to touch her other hand too. He guides her hand as it draws the string back, quicker than she’d been doing it, more confident, more definitive, as if showing the bow who’s in charge.
“Now,” Saul whispers, “you just line the tip of the arrow up with the centre and—“
His fingers ghost over where Farah’s sit on the grip to position the shot. His touch is gentler and more precise than she expected, makes a shiver dance down her back, hairs on her arms standing up underneath her sleeves. She tells herself it’s the wind, the falling temperature; Saul’s so close she wonders if he can feel her reaction, hear the quickening of her breath. He’s used to hunting, to observing the tiniest flicker of a change in his surroundings, but she doesn’t feel like prey. In fact, it’s been a really long time since she felt this lacking in vulnerability.
Saul’s stance shifts, altering hers too as he peers at the target from her shoulder, his head so close to hers their ears would bump if either one of them moved an inch.
“There,” he says, lower than a whisper, almost like a thought.
The string is taut against her fingers, almost painful, and Farah focuses on the feel of it digging into her flesh. The solid wall of Saul’s body presses against hers. That he wants her to succeed makes her shiver again, almost more affecting than his presence.
“The wind’s coming from the East,” Saul murmurs, “that’s typical for this time of year, so we’ll just—” He makes a minute adjustment to their position and slowly moves his hand away from hers, but not very far, as if he’s scared to knock her out of the carefully constructed alignment he’s set up. “Now try.”
Farah fires the arrow.
With a resoundingly deep, resolute sound, it thunks to a stop a few inches away from the bullseye. Farah daren’t breathe. Rather than jubilation, she feels a quiet intractability, like an insect caught in amber. She wants to swallow the feeling down, but daren’t even do that for fear of rendering everything—from the feel of Saul’s arms around her to the sight of the arrow impaled in the tree trunk—to a dream.
Something in the forest scuttles through the leaves.
Farah takes a step away from Saul, skin still prickling with the feel of him against her. “Well that’s a first,” she says.
“First of many.”
“Yes. One hopes.”
Farah feels like she’s playing dress up again, using her mother’s words to cover for her inability to handle the feelings running through her body, her heartbeat so loud in her head it’s drumming out any chance of coherent thought.
“It’s getting late,” she says, “shall we leave it there?”
Saul nods, a little disappointed. They walk back to the school, Farah with her hands in her pockets so he doesn’t see them shaking, and Saul at her heel.
When they get to the point where they’ll part ways, he just says, “tomorrow?”
And doesn’t wait for an answer, because he already knows what it is.
Saul meets her every day for a week. They move back from four metres from the tree to six, then eight, then ten, always the same wordless dance: she fails to land the arrow properly and he steps in to adjust her hold or her stance, a hand on her hip or a fingertip on her wrist, tilting it just so. When he stands with her, she succeeds. When she feels what he feels when he shoots, she hits the target. When he touches her, it makes sense.
At night, Farah lies awake, restless in case there’s an alarm, her thoughts dallying on Saul’s fingers ghosting down her spine. Would he be as deft with her as he is with weapons? Would he know instinctively what would make her react? Would he touch her in the same gentle but purposeful way? She spends her nights in sleepless contemplation, but rather than the feeling dragging into the daylight hours and manifesting as exhaustion, she feels invigorated, as if the more she thinks about Saul, the more life flows into her veins.
But she still can’t hit the target on her own. Perhaps she still doesn’t understand the principles, or perhaps when he’s just watching her, Saul’s eyes are too intent for her to focus. More and more often lately she’s had to rely on reading his thoughts to play catch up, trespassing where she shouldn’t to cover for herself, telling herself she’s just tired and it means nothing; everyone loses their ability to pay attention now and then.
A clash of steel on steel snaps Farah back to the training ground. The Specialists are attempting to teach a couple of fairies how to parry a blow from a broadsword with a small hunting knife to demonstrate something or other about resourcefulness in a fight. The Headmistress strolls the perimeter, hands clasped behind her back, surveying them all with poorly concealed disdain.
As the two fairies swap position, blood glints on the temple of the one now facing Farah. The earth fairies notice it too, huddle together, on edge, eager to race in and heal the wound, but they daren’t without permission. Their unease flows over Farah and she moves further away towards the Specialists, whose boredom is easier to handle.
Saul stands to one side of the raised platform, gaze on the footwork of his colleagues until the Headmistress knocks them both to the ground with a lazy wave of her hand signal the end of the bout.
“Thought it was time to put you out of your misery,” she says and turns to face the rest of the fairies with a stony expression. “Your progress this term has been beyond abysmal. You’re all a waste of my time.”
She looks at each of them in turn to see how her words have landed; it’s as much of a contest as the sword fight was, with an equally high chance of being left bleeding. The fairy with the head wound wipes at the blood trickling down their face, spits a mouthful of it out onto the snowy ground, where it splatters into an abstract artwork.
“Little incentive to get your act together?” the Headmistress says. “The archery contest will now take place tomorrow. The bottom three will leave rather than just one.”
A couple of Farah’s classmates gasp.
“War doesn’t wait for you to finish your homework,” the Headmistress drawls. “It comes when it comes. Be ready, or leave.”
Farah swallows. She has no idea how her classmates are doing, hasn’t seen any of them out practicing, but perhaps like her, they took measures to conceal themselves from prying eyes. She lets her gaze skip across them one by one, trying to ascertain from their reactions to the announcement how they feel about their chances of winning—or just surviving the cut.
Her gaze alights on Saul. He’s peering at her intently, questioningly. Farah lets her face turn into the smallest perceptible grimace. She has no idea if she’s done enough to secure her continuing place at Alfea, and unlike Saul, she’s taking the Headmistress at her word.
The class disbands. Most of the Specialists head off to relieve the patrol that’s about the return and the fire and water fairies have military exercises to get to. Farah stays where she is, thinking she’ll spend the break practicing with her bow, not expecting it when Saul drifts to her side and nods towards the woods.
“Aren’t you on patrol?”
“Swapped with someone,” Saul replies.
As they head to their spot on the edge of the forest, it feels illicit, even though the sun is still in the sky and the school hums with activity behind them. Saul’s chosen to ally himself with her where others might see; Farah can’t place why it makes her feel jittery and exposed.
The mark they left on the frigid ground yesterday is still there, a little line in the grass that’s hardened with the frost into a furrow. It marks the twelve metres she’ll have to take the shot from in the contest. Saul wanted her to take a look at it, to understand that it’s really not much further than the ten metres she’s becoming more comfortable with. He talked about visualising the distance, understanding the slight increase in power needed to propel the arrow further, trying to put it in ways that she’d understand by talking about how it’s like moderating her magic. He’s started to talk more, she’s noticed. She never thought he lacked for confidence before, but something has shifted, his terse answers becoming several sentences at a time, as if he’s learned that he can open up, share his thoughts without fear.
Saul points at the marker. “Ready?”
Farah meets his eye. “I don’t get to warm up first?”
“Jog on the spot if you want,” Saul says.
Farah flexes her fingers before shaking her hands out against the December chill. To say the bow feels comfortable in her hands would be an overstatement, but it’s starting to feel more instinctive to raise it, draw an arrow from her quiver, and load it. Were the contest merely focused on this part, she might stand a chance.
The trunk of the oak is peppered with mini fractures in the bark where she’s managed to hit it, and she tries to drink them in, to let the sight of them inspire her, as she would by feeling the power in a magical artefact. It’s fanciful, to believe that merely looking at evidence of her success can somehow convey the conditions of creating it to her fingers, but it’s all she can think to do to quiet the stammering of her heart when she thinks that this could, conceivably, be her last day at Alfea.
The tip of the arrow glints in the low afternoon sunshine as she raises the bow into position. The tree seems much further away than it did yesterday, or maybe it’s just the impending disappointment of her family when she has to ring and tell them she’s been dismissed throbbing behind her eyeballs.
“Steady,” Saul says.
Farah swallows. She hadn’t realised her hands were trembling, every tremor translating all the way down to the tip of the arrow.
“Fuck,” she mutters.
“Just breathe,” Saul murmurs.
Farah’s breath stutters as she tries to do just that. She pulls the string back almost all the way to her ear, already feeling defeated, releasing the arrow with a huff of frustration. The arrow veers to the left and ricochets off a rock jutting up out of the ground. It’s the worst shot she’s taken since Saul started joining her.
“Fuck.” Farah kicks out at the ground. “Fuck fuck fuck.”
She tightens her grip on the bow, wanting to hurl it at the rock to illustrate her dissatisfaction with herself, but showing up tomorrow with a broken weapon will do nothing but hasten her departure.
Saul raises an eyebrow but doesn’t say anything.
It’s worse than if he’d called her a quitter and a baby to her face.
Farah stalks to collect her arrow from where it landed on the frosty ground, collecting herself along with it. She will not fail at this. Not now. Not in front of Saul. She walks smartly back to the spot, turns to face the tree, and takes aim again, this time with a furious determination that makes her feel hot all over. She lines the head of the arrow up with the bullseye, pulls the string back until it’s taut against her ear, then inches it back fractionally more, Saul’s words about power in her head.
Saul steps closer, hands out as if to catch her, but she’s used to him being close now, used to having the blurry shape of him in her periphery. She keeps her eye on the red dot in the centre of the tree trunk. I will make it this time, she thinks. I just will.
She releases the string. The arrow propels itself forward, true and straight. She sees where it will land while it’s still in flight: not quite the middle of the bullseye, but within the red perimeter of it.
The thunk of impact confirms her thought: she’s hit the target right in the middle.
Farah throws her arms in the air, bow still caught in her hand, and Saul is right there, arms outstretched and a look of surprise and delight on his face. He catches her in an awkward hug, jigging up and down on the spot, and in the jumbled chaos of it, Farah plants her lips on his.
After a startled second, Saul presses back, then lifts her off her feet in jubilation and spins her around, half laughing, half whooping in her ear.
When they break apart, they’re breathless, and Saul is bright eyed in a way she’s never seen him before. Unsure what to say, Farah huffs an approximation of a laugh and looks away towards the tree, retrieving the arrow with her magic, examining the point when it returns to her hand.
In the distance, a siren rings, signalling they need to return for a drill. Farah’s relieved and annoyed in equal measure to be let off the hook. She glances at Saul. His cheeks are flushed with either cold or the exertion of lifting her off the ground, and he looks curiously nervous.
“Tomorrow night,” he says, “some of us are going to the pub in town. You should come. Celebrate.”
“I’d rather not count my chickens,” Farah says.
“You did it once. You can do it again.” Saul steps closer, looks at her as if he desperately needs her to believe him. “You felt it that time. I know you did. Once you feel it, you can’t unfeel it. You’ll be alright.”
Farah nods. They walk back to the school, Farah’s heart doing backflips, the rest of her unsure whether it’s her success or the prospect of a drink with Saul tomorrow that’s the cause.
The training ground is the iciest it’s been all year. There are rumours that a blizzard will hit later—the kind that might even cut them and the town off from civilisation—but even that isn’t enough to deter the Headmistress from pressing ahead with the contest. She’s assembled the entire school outside to watch. The first years stamp their feet against the bitter temperature and mutter complaints to each other to disguise their unease at being forced to spectate. They all know that if a highly trained third year can be summarily dismissed, any of them can.
The fairy contestants loiter near the frozen lake, awkwardly making jokes about how little practice they’ve been doing while two Specialists carry a target out from the store behind the school. They deposit it where the Headmistress instructs them to further down the bank of the lake, where rushes poke up out of the ice and glisten with frost. The white landscape and the cloudy sky makes the red and blue rings of the target stand out, stark, dangerous, like a threatened creature marking itself out as too much trouble to bother with.
The Headmistress takes twelve paces from it and impales a small red flag in the ground as a maker.
“We all know why we’re here, so let’s not mess about. Atkins,” she says. “You first.”
Atkins steps up. He’s tall and rangy, all limbs. He hits the target, but not definitively enough to prevent the arrow from dropping out again.
“Unfortunate,” the Headmistress says. “Baker?”
The next fairy misses, shooting the arrow into the lake, where it skids on the ice before spinning to a stop.
The next two fairies hit the target, but not particularly confidently or near the centre.
The Headmistress eyes her coldly. “In your own time, Dowling.”
Farah steps towards the marker. She takes a moment to adjust her stance, the way Saul taught her. The conditions will revolve around you if you wait and let them, he said. He’s watching her closely from the ring of Specialists forming a perimeter around the fairies. His hands are balled at his sides, his thoughts focused on willing her to succeed, her outcome worth as much to him as if it were his own.
Farah draws an arrow from her quiver, the same one she hit the bullseye with yesterday. It’s not superstition, but a feeling that she understands how this arrow flies better than the others. She loads it into the bow and raises it up until the target transforms from a blurred series of rings to something she can clearly make out the details of—the pucker of the fabric, the pitted holes around the outer rings, the cluster of pierce marks right at the centre.
She had no idea what Saul meant about conditions revolving around her until now: the grounds seem to still, and all she can hear is her own breathing and the flutter of the flag in the wind. The first years are still muttering jokes to each other, but she blots them out with ease. It should feel like chaos inside her head: her thoughts and Saul’s, the calculations of trajectory and how to account for the wind, the weight of anxiety, the pressure of expectation, the looming axe of failure.
But for the first time since she came to Alfea, Farah feels calm. More than calm: controlled. As if she’s in control not just of the bow and arrow, but about what happens next. She snatches a glance at the marker flag, flickering away in the breeze, and feels perfect clarity about what to do.
Farah takes a step back to thirteen metres—then another, then another. She’s about twenty metres away, probably, from the target when she stops and takes aim.
She’s never tried a shot from this far away, yet alone made one. But she tilts the bow up just a little, squints one eye closed until the tip of the arrow obscures the bullseye completely. She imagines Saul’s hands over hers, the steady rhythm of his breathing against her ear. The breeze ripples across her body, fanning her hair into her face. East to West. She listens to the trees in the distance; there will be a lull if she holds for a second.
When the wind drops, she fires.
The arrow sails through the air as if she’s guiding it with magic: not straight and direct, but a graceful arc. It pierces the bullseye with a reassuring thwack and stays, vibrating slightly with the remnants of the power she put behind it.
Farah breathes in, long and slow, before she turns back to her classmates.
Several mouths are open.
“Well well well,” the Headmistress says. “Looks like we have ourselves a show-off. Doesn’t look good for you Baker, does it?”
Farah meets Saul’s eye, and Saul smiles, like he’s the one who won a prize.
The night sky is bitter and star strewn, frost sparkling on the grass. The blizzard that threatened hasn’t yet manifested but feels like it might in the next hour or so, the temperature plummeting. Farah fingers her shot glass. The sensible thing would be to head back soon just in case, but she doesn’t want to do the sensible thing, not now, not here.
Farah didn’t know the local pub had a garden out the back; but then no one ever invited her to it before in order for her to find out. Saul was surprised to see her at the gate, a little impressed that she felt no qualms about ignoring their curfew or stepping out of the grounds with a bunch of rowdy Specialists, and more than a little intrigued that when he suggested a whiskey, she asked for a double.
He hasn’t left her side all night. Farah wonders if it’s some impulse to defend her from the crass jokes and insinuations or if he’s just become used to being there. Whatever it is, she’s glad of it—not because the crass jokes bother her or she needs defending, but because his presence is calming and enlivening all at once, in a way she absolutely does not understand. When she needed some air, and Saul didn’t hesitate to grab their drinks and follow her, brushing the frost off the low brick wall so she could sit down. That she could melt it herself with barely a thought didn’t seem to even occur to him.
Farah stares out at the craggy landscape, listening for the rush of the river on the other side of the town. She rarely ventures out here, especially at night, but perhaps she should do it more often. Perhaps she should ask Saul to come with her, to sit beside her with a drink. She’s fairly certain he wouldn’t require much persuasion, if any at all.
As if he’s already agreeing to it, Saul sways into her shoulder, nudging it with his.
“Glad you’re staying,” he says, and then frowns. He intended it to be a question rather than a statement, but he’s had five shots and his ability to articulate what he means is dwindling by the second.
Farah snorts a laugh. “Bet you are,” she says, knocking her own shot back. “You’ll need someone to carry you home.”
She drops her shot glass into Saul’s empty one, a neat little stack of two that necessitates leaning across him briefly, pressing them together from hip to knee. When she sits back, he’s closer than she expected. She presses her fingers into the brick of the wall to steady herself, fearing—irrationally—that the intensity of his gaze might topple her backwards.
“Mean it,” he says, and he tilts into her until his nose presses into her temple.
Farah’s hair tickles her face, Saul’s breath brushing it across her cheek.
Normally when they’re this close to each other there’s a target to fire at, a purpose, a reason, an excuse for proximity. But they’re here now without any of it. And it’s as if Farah’s inside out, the rush of her blood in her veins loud as the torrenting river, the thumping of her heart more obvious than a stampede.
“Me too,” she says.
She’s not sure the words she’s said make sense, but she’s sure nonetheless that Saul understands her meaning. She turns her head enough that they’re looking right at each other, wondering if he’ll flinch if she leans in, and when he doesn’t, Farah inches in to meet his mouth with a soft kiss, brushing her tongue to his lip like a question. Saul’s hands come up to cradle her face, and whatever it was—an exploratory, cautious, five shots sort of thing—it becomes something else entirely when neither or them pulls away, laughing at the night.
Instead, Saul murmurs, urgent, deepens the kiss, his fingers gentle and purposeful as they make their way into her hair. Farah wraps her arms around him, pressing him closer to her, his desire making hers stir up through her body like smoke escaping a fire.
When they draw apart, there’s snow in Saul’s hair, and Farah glances beyond him to see it must’ve been coming down for a while.
“You cold?” Saul says.
It strikes Farah as a peculiar thing to ask in the circumstances, but she shakes her head anyway.
“You can have my jumper, if you want.”
“I’m fine,” Farah says, “but perhaps we should make our way back?”
They leave their shot glasses on the wall and walk back to the school, snow falling around them and quietening the landscape, until it’s nothing but whiteness and shadows. They brush hands, bump shoulders, mutter apologies for doing so that are neither wanted nor meant, something unfurling between them, unspoken and deafeningly loud in the silence.
At her suite, Saul presses her against the door. He murmurs kisses to her lips, her face, her neck, and Farah thinks about the diagrams in the books on archery, the dotted lines and the solid ones indicating the flight path the conditions create. The image illustrates something which now seems obvious: she is Saul’s fairy, and he is her Specialist, and this is the inescapable trajectory they’re on, now.