Nick Hook stopped at the edge of the trees in a place where holly bushes hid him. He was one hundred paces from Perrill, who was cursing because the ruts in the lane had frozen hard and the great elm trunk kept catching on the jagged track and the horse was balking. Perrill had beaten the animal bloody, but the whipping had not helped and Perrill was just standing now, switch in hand, swearing at the unhappy beast.

Hook took an arrow from the bag hanging at his side and checked that it was the one he wanted. It was a broadhead, deep-tanged, with a blade designed to cut through a deer’s body, an arrow made to slash open arteries so that the animal would bleed to death if Hook missed the heart, though he rarely did miss. At eighteen years old he had won the three counties’ match, beating older archers famed across half England, and at one hundred paces he never missed.

He laid the arrow across the bowstave. He was watching Perrill because he did not need to look at the arrow or the bow. His left thumb trapped the arrow, and his right hand slightly stretched the cord so that it engaged in the small horn-reinforced nock at the arrow’s feathered end. He raised the stave, his eyes still on the miller’s eldest son.

He hauled back the cord with no apparent effort though most men who were not archers could not have pulled the bowstring halfway. He drew the cord all the way to his right ear.

Perrill had turned to stare across the mill pastures where the river was a winding streak of silver under the winter-bare willows. He was wearing boots, breeches, a jerkin, and a deerskin coat and he had no idea that his death was a few heartbeats away.

Hook released. It was a smooth release, the hemp cord leaving his thumb and two fingers without so much as a tremor.