Chapter 233: The Hawk's Lesson
The northern parapet of the Great Wall stretched out into the cold morning light.
Natalie Tokks stood at the edge with the Whisper-String Bow in her hands and fifty miles of clear, open plain laid out below her.
Lord Tokks stood ten feet behind his daughter with his arms folded.
"Shoot," he said.
She shot.
THWIP.
The first arrow of condensed wind crossed nine hundred meters and took a rusted iron post through the center.
THWIP. THWIP.
Two more. A drifting scrap of tarpaulin caught in a crosswind at eleven hundred meters, and then a fragment of the same tarpaulin as it fell.
Lord Tokks did not say anything.
She kept shooting. For a full hour she put arrows into everything he pointed at, at ranges no other archer in the Vanguard could see without a scope, in a wind that shifted three times.
She did not miss once.
And her father did not say a single word the entire time, which unsettled her far more than any criticism would have.
