“Now you.”
She fitted the arrow, fingers clumsy, the string resisting her efforts.
“This is unnecessarily difficult,” she muttered.
“Pull steadily.”
“I am.”
“You are trembling.”
“That is because I am furious.”
“You need not be.”
She fired the arrow. It veered off immediately, landing nowhere near the target. A ripple of polite amusement passed through the watching guests. Cassandra flushed at it.
“That was a test shot.”
“Of what?” he asked mildly. “Gravity?”
She glared at him and tried again. The next arrow struck the outer ring. The one after that missed entirely. Her jaw set. She was not accustomed to being openly bad at things. Not with witnesses, at least. She adjusted her stance, narrowed her eyes, and pulled harder than before.
“Do not force it,” the Duke said. “Let the bow do the work.”
“I refuse to let an inanimate object defeat me.”
She released. The arrow flew– not toward the target, but far beyond it, disappearing into the trees with a faint, distant sound.
Silence fell.
Cassandra lowered the bow slowly.
“Am I in trouble?”
He laughed, properly this time.
“No,” he said. “But you may owe me an arrow.”
She exhaled, half mortified, half relieved.
“I warned you.”
“I find that you do very little by halves,” he replied.
She glanced at him, surprised by the warmth in his tone. They walked in the direction the arrow had vanished, side by side, leaving the cluster of guests behind them.
The grass grew longer near the trees, the ground uneven beneath Cassandra’s shoes.
“I did not intend to disrupt the entire activity,” she said. “I simply wished not to be humiliated.”
He glanced at her.
“You were not humiliated.”
She let out a quiet, incredulous laugh. “I missed the target repeatedly in front of half your guests.”
“So did others,” he replied.
