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.

Tung, and a slight whapping sound as the string vibrated.

“Again.”

He repeated the process. A crossbow didn’t have the suave elegance of a Mackenzie longbow; the short prod had to draw at much more raw weight to give a bolt the same speed and range as the superbly efficient spring the long subtly curved yew stave made, and arrows were more aerodynamic than the stubby bolts. Even with the built-in spanning mechanism, a good bowman could get off three shots to the crossbow’s one. But it had the supreme virtue that you didn’t need to start at age six and practice all your life to master it, and at short range the bolts had a brutal authority that would make nothing of most armor.

“Again.”

When Lioncel had fired three imaginary bolts he came to port arms again. Tiphaine looked around the table.

“Reverend Mother, may I borrow your attendant Sister . . .”

“Sister Fatima.”

“Sister Fatima for a moment.”

“Yes, my lady,” the abbess said.

Sister Fatima stood immediately, standing with her eyes slightly cast down and hands linked before her. Tiphaine nodded approval; she’d seen soldiers less disciplined.

“Sister Fatima, you are . . . what, twenty?”

“Nineteen, my lady.”

Nineteen, and of no more than middling height and slim, though healthy-looking, as far as you could tell with the voluminous habit.

“Your birth?”