Page 6 of Twenty-One Arrow Salute

With a raised brow, he unrolled the parchment and looked through my smudged writing. “A list of commands?”

“Translated into Common Elven. To make the drills easier.”

He flashed me a brief stare before squinting down at the text. Moving it closer to his eyes a few times and then further away again, he silently mouthed the phrases as he went along.

“Can you read it? Does it make sense?” Although I had a fluent command of Common Elven, writing in it constituted a slight problem. The rune forms resembled ours to some extent but weren’t identical. Besides, I hardly remembered the last time I needed to resort to using them.

“Of course I can read it. It’s brilliant.” He looked up, distracting me with the warmth of his bright-coloured irises. “As for it making sense… How can one word mean both repeat and stop? This has always confused me at practice.”

“Eh?” I glanced at the parchment. “That’s not the same word at all.”

“How so? It says gane. For both.”

“Oh.” I smiled. “Those are two different words. Gâne means stop. Ganê means repeat. Or continue. See? The stress pattern varies.”

Hernan gave a slow blink. “Huh. All right. But why is everything so…well, back to front?”

I couldn’t resist a snort. Firstly, because he made it sound so civil—usually non-Highlanders referred to the mountain dialect as arse before head—but more so at the scandalised resentment etched upon his face. “The word order might be a tad tweaked here and there, I give you that,” I admitted.

“Might? Tweaked?” Hernan seemed lost for words, peering at me and back at the parchment. “What the… It’s completely the wrong way around!”

“Just remember to stick the primary action to the end and you can’t go wrong.” I shrugged. “For example, if you wanted to tell someone to go fuck themselves—a handy phrase around here, mind you—you’d say, Iré tu-ehreň hexen, or ‘go yourself fuck.’ Simple. Unless, of course, you consider the action of them leaving of greater importance, in which case, Hexen tu-ehreň iré, or ‘fuck yourself go’ is more accurate. But,” I touched my lips with my finger, “why would anyone prioritise going over fucking? That would be illogical.”

Hernan’s eyes turned round and huge like wheels of cheese. In the end, he closed his mouth with a soft pop. “Sure. Because all the rest of it is sound and rational.”

His sullen tone got a laugh out of me. “Don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it eventually. The speaker has discretion over the word order. What can I say? Highlanders take freedom of speech quite literally.” Delighted with my own joke, I chuckled. “All right,” I handed the strung bow to Hernan, “enough nattering. Wrap your fingers around this beauty and tell me how it feels.”

Scroll dropped to the ground, Hernan weighed the bow in his hand, awkwardly changing his grip on it a few times. Holding a massive asymmetric bow two-thirds of the way down its length must have seemed odd to someone used to the centred grip on a smaller, even-limbed weapon. Our design, as Hernan would discover in time, maximised the bow’s rebound power while limiting the archer’s effort and fatigue.

“Well, no hiding the fact that yours is much bigger than mine,” he said at last.

“That’s what they all say.” I offered a modest grin. Or what I thought would pass for one. “I hope yours makes it up in girth, at least. If not, small but perfectly formed is fine, too. As long as you can get it up, that’s all I ask.”

I expected the Asirhwÿnian to throw me a haughty look complete with a sour remark on how dick jokes were only funny at age twelve. A notion I wholeheartedly disagreed with.

Instead, Hernan gave a strangled giggle.

Catching me off guard, that throaty sound rippled down my abdomen, tingling all the way to my balls.

What the hell is that about?

In need of a distraction, I pointed to the bow. “So what do you think?”

“I can’t believe how light it is, given its length,” he said, still turning the weapon around in his fingers, lifting it up and down.

The admiration in his voice brought a smile to my face. “That would be because it’s made of yaanöŭr. Not wood.”

Yaanöŭr—native exclusively to the Highlands—was a large evergreen plant belonging to the grass family. Its fast-growing, flexible and hollow stems surpassed steel in terms of strength and durability.

“I like it,” Hernan declared after a while, stroking the handle with care. “I do. It’s so well-balanced. Elegant, too.”

An odd warmth circled around my sternum. Why his appreciation mattered to me at all remained a mystery. I held few things in high esteem, but a mountain bow—the epitome of who I was and where I came from—I revered.

“I’ve wanted to own a mountain bow ever since I can remember. The only thing I’ve ever asked of my father was to engage a Highlander hyoshie to teach me how to use one. But he refused to retain a Dark Elf. Despite silver being no object,” he said on one breath, his pretty face contorting into a sneer. “The following week, he hired two Northern sword masters for my brothers without as much as a peep.”

I scowled. That piece of information allowed me to deduce two things. To start with, Hernan’s father sounded a bit of a tosser, as far as his attitude towards my kin and his own son went. Secondly, the Seinnés clan’s standing in society—clearly not crippled by a shortage of coin—must’ve been more significant than I’d presumed. Outside the Elven Forces, not many mountain archers offered private tutoring to non-Highlanders. And when they did, substantial sums of silver changed hands. The skilled fencers from the North didn’t value their art cheaply, either. Only principal noble families were in a position to secure such employment.

The downward slant of Hernan’s eyebrows as he experimentally handled the weapon smoothed out after a while. “What does it say?” he asked, interrupting my brooding.