Arrow and lettering quote flash sheet

The shafts came down from the ash woods upriver, straight-grained and pale. Each one had to be trued against the window light before a feather went near it. Brannock kept a stack of spoiled ones by the door, and when a girl grew sulky over a crooked nock, he would hand her one and tell her to sight down it until the line stopped lying. "Wood tells you what it wants," he said. "Your job is not to argue."

That autumn the Duke's levies came through asking for a thousand arrows by midwinter. Tamsin worked until her fingers cracked, cutting grey goose wings and binding three feathers to every shaft. Brannock sat beside her at night and fitted the last barbs himself. On the final evening he took a cold chisel to the lintel above the door and cut four words into the oak, then stood back and would not say what they meant.

The levies took the arrows west. Months later a rider came back with a broken bow and a bundle of spoiled shafts that had been traded at a village fair. One had been carved in blunt capitals along its nock: LET IT GO. Tamsin ran her thumb over the letters and felt the grain give under the knife. Brannock had never been teaching her to hold a line. He had been teaching her when to open her hand.