"And now, dinner," he said. Sandra's fingers came down to rest on his arm, and he turned to lead her up the great curving stair.

Dun Juniper, Willamette Valley, Oregon

December 12th, 2007/Change Year 9

The girl drew carefully, using the shoulders and body as much as the arms. The yew bow bent:

"Bull's-eye!" Mathilda Arminger whooped as the shaft thumped home in the circle behind the wooden deer's shoulder.

"Not bad, Matti," Rudi Mackenzie said. "Not bad!"

It was late afternoon going on for evening, and overcast. The sudden chill and wet mealy smell in the fir-scented air meant snow coming soon, rolling down the heights from the wall of mountains eastward. Rudi finished another round of practice and then looked up and stuck out his tongue; sure enough, the first big flakes came drifting down, landing with a gentle bite and a somehow dusty taste. Snow was rare in the Willamette, where winter was the season of rain and mud, but Dun Juniper was just high enough in the foothills that it could get heavy falls sometimes, though they rarely lay for long. This would be a big one, by the way the air tasted and felt.

The two children were the youngest in the crowd at the butts; they'd both been born in the first Change Year, and were shooting up with a long-limbed, gangly grace. Rudi was the taller by an inch or two; the hair that spilled out from under his flat bonnet was a brilliant gold tinted with red to her dark auburn-brown, and his eyes somewhere between blue and green and gray to her hazel, but otherwise their sharp straight-featured faces were much alike as they began to shed their puppy fat.

"Willow!" one of the assistants called to a round-faced girl of ten. "Don't hop and squint after you shoot. It won't help."

The girl flushed as classmates snickered and giggled; she shot again, then did the same up-and-down-in-place hop as before, squinting with her tongue between her teeth and the wet turf squelching under her feet. Today Chuck Barstow Mackenzie, the Clan's Second Armsman, had dropped in to observe.