“No, it doesn’t, my lord. It doesn’t mean being able to march twenty miles in armor and being fit to fight at the end of it, or knowing how to use sword and buckler, or maneuver in units to the word of command or fire volleys, or stand in ranks under fire and close up the files over the bodies of the wounded and the dead, or a hundred other things including being a genuine marksman. It does mean, however, that the one you’ve trained can run upstairs to the wall of a city, aim over the parapet, and shoot at a massed assault column. For that, all you have to be is able to walk and work the cocking lever and see something the size of a battalion in close ranks. Lioncel!”

The young squire had been standing motionless with Tiphaine’s sword cradled in his arms. Now he laid it respectfully down on one of the side tables and opened a basket. The crossbow came out and he stood with it at port arms, his young face calm and attentive.

“This is my squire, Lioncel de Stafford. He’s a very junior squire, a page until earlier today, and while he is in excellent training for his age and inches he’s thirteen years old and as you can see far from his full growth. That is a standard-issue crossbow of the sealed pattern. Lioncel, span and fire!”

The youngster brought the weapon up before his face in the first move of the drill-book sequence. His right hand held the grip, and his left went to a metal loop set into the base of the forestock.

The weapon was still made as the Lord Protector’s conscript engineers had designed it in the first weeks after the Change. The stock was hardwood, modeled after an old-time rifle called an M-14, with adjustable aperture sights over the trigger, a groove down the center for the bolt and a spring catch to hold it in place. The prod—the short horizontal bow bolted into a slot at the end—was a thirty-two-inch section of shaped automobile leaf spring.

Making the weapons was a Crown monopoly, and charging vassals for the ones they required to outfit their troops a source of revenue. The whole assemblage had a blunt, functional grace, rather like a war hammer.

Lioncel pulled on the loop, and the lever it was attached to pivoted down. Then he worked it, using his grip on the stock to make the two a scissors-style source of mechanical advantage. Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack , click-clack, click-clack, click-clack, as the pawl-and-ratchet mechanism in the stock forced the thick string back; then a louder click! as the trigger nut caught it.

The squire slapped the lever back into its slot and held the weapon by its forestock with his left hand as his right snapped down to an imaginary belt-quiver. He mimed pressing a short bolt into the groove, brought the weapon up to his shoulder and aimed at a snarling bear in the mural.