Chapter 14: The Archer

I got down on the stones and put my hand flat over the place where the arrow went in.

It was warm and wet under my fingers.

"Don't pull it," Katell said, kneeling on Enora's other side. "Whatever you do, don't pull it."

"I wasn't going to pull it."

"Everybody pulls it," Katell said.

The man in the brown hood was gone.

"Up the crag," a hill farmer said. "Toward the passes. He went up like a goat."

Gwenn came down the path faster than I'd ever seen her move.

She sat down on the stones and took Enora's head in her lap and held it hard.

"I knew you'd come home and get yourself hurt," she said to her granddaughter. "I counted on it."

"You count everything," Enora said through her teeth.

Katell's oldest boatman had pulled arrows out of men on the river before.

They carried Enora up to the chapel on a stall door.

When he came out an hour later he was wiping his hands on his shirt, and he nodded once at me.

"Clean," he said. "Missed the bone. She'll keep her arm if she keeps still, which she won't."

Erwan came back on the second evening.

Then he rode through the gateless gate with ten men behind him, and a rope from his saddle ran back to a man on foot.

The man had lost his brown hood somewhere in the hills.

His hands were tied in front of him, and his face was scratched from the gorse.

Erwan got down in the middle of the yard and threw the rope end at my feet.

"He came up the pass road at a run yesterday morning," he said. "We were sitting on it."

"You were watching the passes," I said.

"Somebody had to."

He looked at the chapel door, where the women had been going in and out with water all day.