Small arrow tattoo on a foot

Hal Brackley was the fletcher's boy at Carrow Keep, and he counted the way a heron fishes, without moving. Every shaft he made had three feathers bound with waxed thread, and he would not let one leave the yard without a small cross scratched at its middle, the way his mother cut a mark into the loaf before it went in the oven. Lady Osric laughed at him for it. She laughed less the spring the siege came up the valley.

The garrison had one bow that could reach the far bank of the river, and the only man who could draw it was dead of the flux. So Hal took it down from the peg himself. He nocked a shaft with the heavy triangular head he had filed from a horseshoe nail, and he looked along it at the ford. The wind was from the west, pushing at the reeds. He did what his mother did with bread and waited until the wind stopped its talking.

The arrow flew true and struck the ford's far post, and the siege broke up before dark. Men say it was the cross that did it. I say there is no magic in a cross, only a lad who could keep still long enough to aim. Now mind the step on your way out, and take the cracked stone by the gate with you. Hal carved his mark on it the morning the Earl's men came home, and nobody has had the heart to move it since.