Following Earl Gweddry’s closing speech, the flowered carts and crowds of visitors begin to disperse. Terwaen easily finds Tric and Heppa, having noticed their location from her brother’s cheers during the awards ceremony. “I hope you are both well,” she greets them cheerfully. “I got your… message that you could not come practice dueling yesterday morning.”
Tric reflects that the only way to get his upbeat sister down would be to swing a “dishonorable” weapon at her. He and Heppa are both relieved that she understood the magpie Tric sent. The messenger in question is currently in Tric’s backpack, poking his head out from under the top flap after taking a nap. “Yes, we’re still trying to teach him,” Tric tells Terwaen. “He’s a slow learner. A slow, slow learner.” The magpie responds with a tired stupid, stupid, and Tric shushes him quietly, encouraging him to go back to sleep. Mate had just as busy a night as he and Heppa did. “We’re okay now,” Tric continues. “A friend of ours had a rough time, but we took care of it and she’s feeling better.”
Terwaen acknowledges this with a nod and then turns to Hepalonia. “Do you still wish to spar?” Heppa happily agrees, extending further apologies about missing the previous appointment. She is privately relieved that the knight is not mad about it. Heppa has disappointed her mother so many times that she cannot help but imagine what her response to this would be: You could not have sent a better message than some black and white bird? Terwaen, however, remains her usual positive self and invites Heppa out onto the empty field to spar right now. Together they slog through the mud to its center and draw their swords.
They engage in three bouts. Terwaen has never fought an elf before, and in the first round, she concentrates more on evaluating her opponent’s skill and style than in landing a solid blow. Heppa wins this match. In the next bout, Terwaen quickly puts Heppa on the defensive, and the elf over-compensates by focusing more on evasion than sword-skill. She telegraphs her movements too much, allowing Terwaen to anticipate them. The experienced knight offers encouragement and advice as they cross swords, providing pointers on ways to move more subtly. Apparently otherworldly grace can only get one so far on the battlefield. The final bout is focused heavily on instruction, particularly on sword technique. Although Heppa loses this fight too, and therefore the whole match, she counts the entire experience as a win. She has learned so much from this chipper and supportive warrior! “I wish you were the teacher. Then I probably would have stayed in school,” she compliments Terwaen.
“And thank you for your gracious acceptance of my tutelage,” Dame Terwaen replies with a salute.
* * *
Tric Manu calls after the women to have a good, clean fight, but he remains out of the way. He buys a bag of snacks from one last departing vendor and then watches the sparring from the sidelines. Other than Heppa’s couple duels the other day—during which he was admittedly distracted—Tric has not had a chance to observe an elf and a human in combat. This is a good opportunity to compare the two styles. As he munches on the white puffs of some kind of fired seed, he offers commentary to no one in particular. “Moss below, this sword stuff is overrated. You should either be in their face, or ten yards away. There’s no in between.” Tric is content with his fists, knife, and bow.
He is startled by a voice at his shoulder. “Errr, Son…” The piece of popped corn he had just tossed up to catch in his mouth instead hits him in the face. “I was hoping to catch you before you left. I didn’t know how long you were planning to be around.”
Tric turns to see Mhaev beside him. “I think we’ll probably be leaving tomorrow morning,” he tells her. Heppa might try to drag it out to the afternoon, but Tric is ready to get moving. “Things went great last night,” he adds. “Henrick did a great job. I think the javelineers and the archers made it out all right.”
“Yes, the report was very favorable. And… um… here.” She thrusts a strange-looking bow out at Tric.
He takes it and examines it for a moment. “This isn’t yours, is it?”
“Yes, it is mine. I’m not prepared to give you my mother’s bow at this point.”
Oh. Tric is a little blind-sided by this. He was not expecting to even see Mhaev again, let alone need something to give her back in exchange. Looking from the bow up at her, he notes that she seems a little nervous. Maybe she is worried that he will turn down the gift. “This is really nice,” he assures Mhaev, hefting the bow. She then hands him a bone ring. He notices she is wearing one herself on her right thumb. His own nervous energy leads him to start flipping the ring and catching it. “What is this piece for?”
“It’s to protect your finger when you draw.”
“Hmm.” Tric looks down at the tips of the index and middle finger on his right hand. They are callused, certainly, but drawing has never been a problem for them. Maybe the draw weight is more on this bow? He adjusts his grip on the bow and starts to draw the string back with his fingers.
“No, no, no. That’s not how you draw this,” Mhaev admonishes him.
“All right, then. How do you draw this?” Tric asks, some mirth slipping into his voice. Imagine, a human giving archery advice to an elf! The folks back home would not believe that story.
Mhaev takes the bow back from him, holding it in her left hand. “You probably nock on the wrong side, too, don’t you?” She draws an arrow from her quiver and sets it against the exterior of the bow.
“How do you keep your arrow from veering off to the side then?” Tric asks.
“You aim,” she says simply. Then she grasps the string with her right thumb, where her ring is. “Look, if you really want to wrap your thumb for extra support until you learn how to do it properly, you can.” She folds her index finger down over the tip of her thumb, which keeps the arrow in place against the string. Then she pulls back and looses the arrow, sending it safely into the ground a few yards away.
“Huh.” Tric has never seen a technique like this before, but he can respect that it is just a different way of doing archery. Goodness knows he does enough things differently himself that he is not in a position to judge.
Mhaev points out that the thumb is the strongest finger as she hands the bow back to Tric for him to try the technique. “There’s also less chance of flubbing when you just use the thumb. With multiple fingers on the draw, one could get caught, fouling the release.”
Tric assures her that he never has that problem. He considers for a moment and then decides to learn this shooting technique with his opposite hand so that he will not confuse the muscle memory he already possesses. He will have his elvish shooting side and his human shooting side, and this way, the arrow is always on the same side of the bow.
He continues flipping the thumb ring around a bit, as he psyches himself up to shoot this new way. “It looks like a really nice bow, and it seems like it will be really precise. I appreciate the irony of an elf receiving archery instruction from a human… but I get it. It’s a different kind of bow. But I think I can learn this. I’m something of an accomplished hunter.” Tric decides to tell Mhaev about the ghost. She fought with Gweddry’s army, so she certainly faced the undead. “Heppa and I ran into some undead in the hills. Ghosts… you’d think an arrow would go right through them, the way the cloth billows about, anchored only by a skull. But if you hit just the right spot, you can kill them. And if you hit just the right spot twice you can take them down for good. I shot it once and it seemed to be dead, but it just returned. My second shot dismissed it. This was all with the same arrow, believe it or not. Actually, you got to see that arrow, because I gave it to the young archer at the tournament, the launderer’s daughter. You may have noticed that her arrow had a different fletching than all the others.”
There are enough details in Tric’s story that Mhaev can tell he actually did fight a ghost; he is not just making up a tale to impress her. The best ways to take them down quickly are fire and magic; arrows usually go right through, as her son has acknowledged.
Feeling more confident now, Tric checks that the area is clear and then takes a shot using his mother’s style. The draw feels awkward, as his muscles are not used to this, and he misses his target. He makes excuses about the thumb muscle being used primarily for dowsing, a very different skill. However, he does see the potential in the technique. He thanks his mother again for the gift and asks, “Is there any message that you would like me to relay back to anyone in Estbryn? If not, that’s totally fine,” he hastens to add, seeing the look on her face. As she mulls over her response, he continues, “Reaching Thrandolil is easy—Uncle Thran. And I’m going to track down Anador. If there’s any message you want me to deliver to him…”
With a sigh, Mhaev pulls her thoughts together. “I appreciate the effort you went through to locate me, and I’m willing to give this a go,” she tells Tric, gesturing between the two of them. “But my relationship with Anador ended thirty-some years ago.”
“That’s fair,” Tric agrees. “If it’s a right hook, it’s a right hook.” He wanted to give her the opportunity, but he recalls that she said the break-up was so bad that Anador sent Nasir to pick Tric up when the time came to leave.
“No,” Mhaev says. That part of her life is over.
“Well, I appreciate this,” Tric says, fiddling with the bow. “Thank you for all your help in town. And definitely, whenever we next visit… There’s a festival in the fall, too? How many festivals do you have in this town?”
“As for large festivals that draw crowds, it’s mainly the spring and the fall ones. But there are observances at other times of the year as well…” She lists a few of them. “People need things to keep them occupied.”
“I guess so,” Tric says. He was always able to find things to do in the forest, but maybe things are different for humans. They certainly seem to have less schooling. “I’ll take good care of this,” Tric says of the bow. “Hopefully I don’t get made fun of too much for it back home.”
“Well, you can give them a right hook if they do,” Mhaev suggests with a smile. She wraps him in a slightly awkward hug.
“Thanks… Mom.”
Mhaev leaves, and soon Terwaen does, too. As it is now midday, the elves head back to the Parting Glass. Along the way, Heppa grills Tric about his new bow, and they discuss whether or not it counts as a family heirloom. So far he has received a knife as a child and a bow now as a young adult, so maybe giving weapons is a family tradition.
“At what age do you think you will get your armor?” Heppa jokes.
Tric tells her he has no interest in the heavy chain his mother wears since he is not a soldier and it would look ridiculous in the forest. He does show off the thumb ring to her, and at first she is excited that it might be an artifact. When he tells her it just protects the thumb, she points out that it does count as a kind of armor then. Their discussion of the thumb-draw techniques takes them all the rest of the way to the Parting Glass.