Veil and Vow

They were born in a village called Cresswell, on the western side of the kingdom, eleven minutes apart from each other one summer evening. Their real birth-names were written on the village rolls, but the rolls were kept in a wooden box that flooded one spring, and after the flood nobody could read the rolls properly, and after that nobody could quite remember what the sisters had originally been called.

Their mother had been calling them Veil and Vow since they were very small children. The names had stuck, the way names stick when they turn out to be exactly right for the person carrying them. Veil for the older sister, the one who was always at the front of any room they entered; Vow for the younger sister, the one whose voice carried across the fields and meadows behind their cottage. The girls did not, even as small children, mind the names. They had not been given a chance to mind anything else.

Their mother was a quiet woman who had been a hunter in her younger years, before she settled in Cresswell to raise the twins on her own. Their father is not in this chapter. He died when the sisters were two years old. The sisters do not remember him. Their mother carried the whole family on her shoulders alone from that point onward. She is, you should know in advance, an exceptionally good parent. She is not a character in this chapter — but she is the reason the chapter is possible.

She started teaching the sisters to shoot a bow when they were seven years old. She had grown up shooting bows herself; she did not think there was anything strange or unusual about teaching her daughters the same skill. She had two old yew bows kept in good condition and a sheaf of straight arrows that she had fletched herself, and she walked the sisters into the field behind the barn one autumn afternoon and showed them how to nock and draw and release the bowstring.

Veil was very good very quickly. By the end of the first month of practice, she was placing arrows in straw butts at thirty paces. By the end of six months, she was hitting them reliably at sixty paces. By the end of a year, she was shooting better than children twice her age and was the topic of conversation at every harvest gathering Cresswell held that season.

Vow was, for the first two years of practice, terrible.

She could not, at age nine, consistently hit a target at twenty paces. Her arrows wobbled in flight. Her grip was inconsistent across draws. She drew the bow correctly and aimed correctly and released correctly, and the arrows still seemed to find their own private routes through the air. Their mother said nothing about any of this. Their mother simply kept handing her arrows. Vow kept practising. She practised badly, but she practised every single day.

By the autumn the sisters turned ten, Vow had begun to wonder, privately, whether she was simply not made for it in some fundamental way.

What happened next changed both their careers entirely.

They were practising together in the field behind the barn one afternoon. Veil was at the front of the field, near the targets, perhaps fifteen paces from the closest straw butt. Vow was at the back of the field, ten paces behind her sister, both of them aiming at the same straw butt.

Veil drew her bow with her usual careful precision. She held the draw for a long moment, the way she always did before releasing. Then she released.

The arrow struck the butt cleanly, three fingers from the centre of the target.

As Veil lowered her bow, Vow — who had been about to take her own shot — looked along the line her sister had just shot. She saw, very clearly, the path the arrow had taken across the field. She saw the air the arrow had moved through. She saw, almost as a visible thing hanging in the autumn light, the line hanging in the field between her sister's bow and the butt.

She thought, very simply: Oh. That's the line.

She raised her own bow. She drew. She aimed, not at the target itself this time — at the line. The line her sister had drawn for her with her own arrow.

She released.

Her arrow followed Veil's arrow into the butt. Closer to the centre, this time. It struck almost exactly where Veil's arrow had struck a moment before.

Vow had — for the first time in her entire life — hit a target at twenty paces.

She did it again on the next shot. And the next.

When she shot without Veil in front of her, her aim was, again, poor. But when Veil was in front of her — when Veil had just shot and just shown her the line — Vow could place her own arrow along that line as if she were tracing it with her finger.

The sisters figured the principle out within a week of practising it.

Veil shot first; she opened the line. Vow shot second; she followed it through — and her arrow, because Veil's arrow had cleared the air ahead of it, kept going. Vow's arrows sometimes passed within inches of Veil's standing shoulder. Veil never flinched once. She trusted her sister completely.

By their eleventh birthday, the sisters could put two arrows through the same straw butt on successive heartbeats, one after the other, almost touching the same hole.

Their mother watched this practice from the edge of the field one afternoon and said quietly, "Veil opens. Vow finishes."

The phrase stuck.

They first introduced themselves with the phrase when they were fifteen, at the kingdom's annual archery trial in the capital. They stood in front of the judges, side by side as always, Veil half a step ahead.

Vow said, in her carrying voice: "My sister opens. I finish. We are Veil and Vow."

They won the trial decisively. They were the first sister-pair to do so in the trial's recorded history. The judges were uncertain what to do with them. The kingdom's military was politely interested but ultimately confused — there was no place in a standard infantry line for two archers who shot best in series, rather than in parallel. The trial judges spent a long week debating the matter behind closed doors. The sisters waited patiently in a small guest house behind the trial grounds, drinking weak tea and not particularly minding the wait.

A scout for the chess academy, passing through the capital on other business, heard about them in a tavern conversation. He had been at the academy for ten years by then. He understood, almost immediately, what the sisters were.

He sent word to the academy master the same evening.

The academy master, who had been searching for someone to teach the X-ray pattern for almost a decade — the pattern where a piece threatens another piece through a third piece in between — sent for them within the week. He met them at the academy gates himself, in person. He brought them into a quiet upper classroom and set up a chessboard on the table.

A rook on a1. A black queen on a4. A black king on a8.

The sisters had never played chess in their lives. The academy master explained the rules to them, briefly. They understood quickly. They had practised in series for eight years; they understood lines.

The academy master pointed at the rook. He pointed at the queen. He pointed at the king. He said, "The rook is attacking the king. The queen is in the way. But the rook does not have to move the queen first. The threat passes through her, all the way to the king. This pattern is called the X-ray."

Vow said, immediately, "That's our shot."

Veil nodded once. "I open. She finishes."

The academy master hired them within the hour.