Paris drew the bow.
The wind was from the north — steady, cold, the kind that pushed an arrow off its line if you did not account for it. Antenor had spent three weeks teaching him to read the wind the way a hunter reads current: not as an obstacle but as a variable.
"Feel it before you loose," Antenor said. He was standing behind Paris, arms folded, his weathered face unreadable. "The wind tells you where the arrow wants to go. Your job is to tell it where it should go instead."
Paris held the draw. His fingers ached — he had been at this since dawn, and the calluses on his right hand were raw. But the bow felt right. It had felt right from the first day he picked it up, the way a sword had never felt right, the way a spear had never felt right. The bow was not an extension of his arm. It was an extension of his eye.
He loosed.
