Chapter 32: The Archery Meet

Getting the provisions Jonathan needed from the market had included a protracted negotiation with the wine merchant. After sampling six kegs, he settled on four, agreed to meet the merchant halfway on their price, and gave the necessary directions for loading them onto his wagon. That done, and his other purchases settled to his satisfaction, Jonathan strolled back to the spice stall where he’d told Cyri and Manfred to meet him.

He felt no more than a flicker of uneasiness when they weren’t there, a feeling he easily put aside by telling himself they were almost certainly still in the main square, where the entertainers were interspersed with the food stands.

The crowds in the square were thinning as fairgoers moved on to the archery contest. When he didn’t find Cyri and Manfred among the handful of spectators still watching the jugglers and contortionists, Jonathan set off to look for them in the mass of people gathering in the nearby field.

Having seen firsthand what arrows did to human targets, Jonathan had no interest in archery as a sport. He was, however, well aware of the intense, almost religious, passion the annual contest inspired in the local men, so the tension he sensed as he entered the milling throng didn’t worry him until he overheard someone on one side of him mutter something about sorcery and someone on his other side say, quite distinctly, “witchcraft” and the same voice again saying, “I heard it from the gatekeeper.”

Telling himself not to panic, that this couldn’t have anything to do with Cyri, Jonathan elbowed his way forward, now searching frantically for the sight of Manfred’s tall, gangly figure or Cyri’s red hair.

It was Garburk who started those dark and potentially deadly whispers—but not out of spite, even though he had been irritated when “Mistress Cristiana” marched past him and through the gate alongside her besotted boyfriend. He would have gone after her and told her that spectators weren’t allowed on the field, but five more contestants came running up, and by the time he’d settled with them, the contest’s judge had given the signal for the first round to begin.

Witchcraft had not been on his mind then, only surprise when he saw the girl was holding the bow and standing in line with the men and that the judge didn’t object. (The judge, a local man, didn’t consider it his business to question who Garburk admitted to the field, while the other contenders, who—except for Griswold—assumed the contest’s outcome was a foregone conclusion, took it as a joke.)

Playing along, Garburk made a show of laughing when Cyri stepped forward to take her first shot. His laugh, however, died in his throat when she not only hit the target but won that round . . . and the next . . . and the next, while her boyfriend sat cross-legged on the ground behind her with a vacant, mooning look on his face.

The gatekeeper was by no means alone in his superstitious fears of sorcery and witchcraft, but his were particularly intense, especially his dread of beautiful women turning out to be witches in disguise.

The son of impoverished peasants who’d had to work from dawn until dusk just to have enough food to keep from starving, Garburk had mostly been cared for by his grandmother, an embittered woman whose smoldering rage over a lifetime of abuse—first by her father and then by her husband—had slipped out in the dark and scary stories she’d told Garburk when she put him to bed. At first the tales had been about bad little boys being enchanted and eventually eaten by wicked, powerful old witches. Later, as he’d grown old enough to feel yearning for girls, they’d been about lustful young men snared by a seductive enchantress and turned into mindless slaves forced to do whatever they were commanded until the witch grew tired of them and, after ordering them to dance themselves to death, moved on to her next victim.

Garburk’s grandmother was long dead, but sometimes in his dreams he seemed to be in one of those stories and to be one of those hapless men tricked into giving the sorceress something that belonged to him and telling her his name—and by doing so giving her “the power to weave her wicked spell and add another soul to the little clay jar she kept on her kitchen shelf.” Now, even though he was wide awake, Garburk heard his grandmother’s harsh, rasping voice in his ear as he recalled to his horror and dread that this “Mistress Cristiana” had asked his name and now held the bow that he had made in her hand.

When the genuinely terrified gatekeeper was finally able to speak, it was to croak out those words, “sorcery” and “witchcraft,” as he pointed at Cyri waiting for her turn to shoot, and the two words were picked up and carried through the crowd—mostly comprised of men who’d wagered too much money and drunk too much ale—like sparks in a dry wind.

By the time Jonathan was elbowing his way through the crowd, what had been a boisterous throng was on the brink of turning into a savage mob.

Propelled by the growing sense of menace around him, Jonathan forced his way to the fence that separated the onlookers from the archery field and was able to see what was happening there.

The defeated contestants were standing off to one side, while the three remaining contenders were lined up behind the shooting line. Most of the men in the shire had been to the Sleeping Dragon at one time or another, and while the town favorite, a slender blond man named Gideon, was not a regular at the inn, Jonathan knew him to be one of the local sheepherders whose skill with a bow was a source of community pride. Next to the town’s man, somewhat to Jonathan’s surprise, was the heaviest drinker among the sheriff’s guards. The third was Cyri.

While the crowd behind Jonathan was seething, the field itself was completely silent as Gideon, Griswold, and Cyri waited to take their next shots.

The contest’s judge, Wodwen, was the town woodworker. He was a man of whom it was jokingly said that his expression was as wooden as his cabinets, a phrase that accurately described the emotion—or rather the lack of it—on his face as he pointed to Gideon.

The young sheepherder stepped forward, closed his eyes, and bowed his head. Then, after crossing himself, he took up his bow, drew back his arrow, and, after a long moment’s deliberation, let it fly.

It struck well inside of the center circle. The locals in the crowd stopped their muttering to cheer.

Next, Wodwen pointed to Griswold. The grim-faced guard took his place, spat out a wad of phlegm, raised and steadied his bow, and landed his arrow so close to dead center as to make almost no difference. As Griswold spat again and stepped back, there was a smaller outburst of cheering from the handful of visiting fairgoers who had picked the oldest and toughest-looking of the entrants.

Wodwen pointed to Cyri. She took her place, took careful aim, fired—and bested Griswold’s shot by a finger’s breadth.

Jumping up, Manfred cheered and clapped.

With the crowd about to turn ugly, Jonathan vaulted the fence to get to Cyri and shield her as best he could.

Cyri turned around after taking her shot and saw Jonathan striding toward her. She took in Jonathan’s desperation and then the hostile throng behind him. What she had done to give herself away didn’t matter; it only mattered that she had, and now her only hope was to run, maybe not to escape herself but at least to draw the angry mob away from Manfred and Jonathan. She turned her head an imperceptible degree to the right. The other archers blocked the way, one of them balling his hands into fists.

She dropped her eyes to her one remaining arrow. There was no chance she could get it from the quiver before the nearest man was on her, so she let her bow fall aside and slipped her hand under her cloak for her knife.

As she took hold of its smooth, cold handle, there was a movement to her left—Christian priests! Three of them! The foremost with his hand outstretched, pointing at her!

Silently swearing she would not enter the next world without taking at least one of her foes with her, Cyri drew the knife from its sheath.

None of the shire’s three monks was young, and Brother Anstice, the oldest of them, was sufficiently hard of hearing to miss the increasingly heated accusations and threats emanating from the angry crowd. With no reason to imagine himself in peril, he hurried toward Cyri to declare her the contest’s winner and announce that the prize calves were hers. What would have happened next would certainly have left a flood of innocent blood spilled across the archery field, but before Anstice could make the fatal mistake of getting within knife range of Cyri, before she could react in what she would have believed to be self-defense, and before the incensed mob could surge forward in screaming fury, there was a pounding of hooves from the direction of the town’s main square, and Stefan rode into view, his troops in close formation behind him.