"You're on."
"What in the world is wrong with you?"
I demanded, once Luxy and Savage had left us alone in the woods outside town. The biggest thing I had ever personally killed was a deer, and now a stranger with glasses wanted me to solo a troll inside sixty seconds.
"Relax.
You'll do it with fifty seconds to spare," Namey said, entirely too confident for a man who'd known me for roughly an hour.
By that point my anger had curdled into something closer to curiosity.
"How," I asked, and I meant it.
"You genuinely don't remember me at all," he said.
It wasn't really a question either.
"Not even a little," I admitted.
"We've got time to fix that.
For now, take this," he said, and pulled a bow from wherever travellers keep things that shouldn't fit in their packs.
It was gold, worked with the carved face of a woman at its center, angel's wings spread down each limb. The string looked like it was spun from blue glass, impossibly delicate, and yet it drew taut in my hands like the finest sinew. Every curve and etched line on it belonged to a design language I had never once seen, made by hands that clearly knew exactly what they were doing.
I stared at it a full beat longer than dignity allowed.
"I can't take this," I said, my nerve draining out of me fast.
"I'm not, I'm not good enough for this."
"Your archery rating is a hundred and fifty on a scale that tops out at a hundred," Namey said.
"You're the best archer currently walking around inside Aftermath."
"I never told you I could even shoot a bow.
How do you know any of this?"
"When it's time, I'll tell you everything," he said.
Then, more quietly, holding my gaze: "But listen to me first, because this matters more than the bow itself.
This is the Lanternwood Bow. It doesn't just pull on your arms when you draw it big. It pulls straight out of you, whatever 'you' actually means, in a body built the way yours is built.
A shot the size of what I'm about to ask you to make is going to cost you something real. You'll feel it after, not during.
Don't loose it twice inside an hour, or you'll drop where you stand and I won't be able to explain that to Luxy in a way that doesn't get me murdered."
I remember thinking, at the time, that it sounded like the kind of warning a man gives you right before letting you find out the hard way anyway.
The next day I went troll hunting with the three of them. Aki and Yoshi impressed the whole group more than I expected; apparently beast tamers weren't easy to come by out here either. A shame Aki wasn't quite big enough yet to carry all four of us.
Yet.
We hiked north on foot until the gentle rolling hills of the midlands gave way to the snow crusted flats of the Pale. Miles of tundra later, we found a rocky rise scattered with mammoth bones, a crude animal skin tent braced up with a mammoth tusk, and pouches of fermenting cheese drawing flies in numbers I didn't think were possible in that cold.
Past the camp stood a huge, upright, furry shape swinging a wooden club, herding cattle in a loose circle with the patience of something that had never once considered that it might not win a fight. Its only clothing was a skirt of woven straw and cracked bone, mammoth bone probably, strung around a gut that hung heavy over the whole arrangement. Every breath it took hung in the air as frost.
"Alright, Jon, whenever you're ready," Namey said.
"Shouldn't he get closer first?"
Luxy asked, glancing at the distance between us and the thing.
"That's an awful long shot."
"Not a problem," I said, with more calm than I actually had.
I drew my new bow and nocked an arrow I'd been quietly hoarding for something special: a light, sturdy ionite shaft, silver banding for balance, eagle feather fins to keep it true.
"What in the frig is that supposed to be?"
Savage demanded.
"That has to be cheating."
"Nobody ever said I couldn't give the man a bow," Namey said, grinning like he'd been waiting all day for someone to tell him not to.
I blinked twice, slowed my breathing until my heart followed it down, and let my whole world narrow to the troll under the tip of my arrow. Every breath it took got my full, undivided attention.
I remembered, unbidden, the promise I'd made myself years ago in that barn full of stolen animals: I don't take a life I don't have to. If I have to meet an animal's eyes while I'm ending it, I don't think I could ever manage it at all. That's the real reason I never could hunt with a blade the way Hans did.
A bow puts distance between you and whatever you're about to do. It lets you not have to look.
On the exhale, I let the muscles in my arm go loose, and the arrow left the string.
The strike ended in a small, blinding explosion of light that climbed high enough into the sky to briefly outshine the sun itself, and when my vision cleared, all that remained where the troll and its cattle had been standing was a scatter of charred outlines burned into the frost.
Then the cost arrived, the way Namey had promised. My whole right arm went numb from shoulder to fingertip, a dull, buzzing static that took long seconds to fade. My ears rang with a high, thin whine that swallowed every other sound.
The edges of my vision went soft and gray, and hunger hit me so suddenly and so completely that my knees actually buckled, and I would have gone straight down into the snow if Namey hadn't gotten a hand under my arm in time.