Free The Runaway Wife by Elizabeth Birkelund

arrows hung carelessly from her back. Jim advanced behind her quietly, as if he were a spy. She was within fifteen, now ten feet. She, and now he, faced a circular target with a yellow bull’s-eye at the center. The target was tacked to a hay bale about ten strides away.
    â€œDon’t move,” she said in a voice that was rich anddeeply accented—a dancing, playful voice, warm with the last drops of sunlight.
    Jim stood motionless. Kestrels chirped above him. The wind stirred the woman’s hair, and wisps fell from her braid. The world was vibrant in the moment, heated by the last glimmer of the sun.
    She drew the arrow back in one fluid motion and then released it. The arrow hit the target an inch off the center of the bull’s-eye and vibrated there in its certainty.
    Still the woman did not turn around.
    â€œWhat took you so long?” she asked.
    Jim looked behind him. Was she addressing someone else?
    She reached behind her, her elbow pointing up in the air for a brief moment, and extracted a second arrow from the small leather pouch on her back.
    â€œIt took you longer than you expected,” she said, threading the arrow into the bow and slowly drawing back. Her French accent was fused with a British one. Her voice resembled all the sisters’ voices in his head. It was her: Calliope Castellane.
    With surprising swiftness and in one move, she turned and pointed the arrow at him. The arrow’s target was his heart. Had Calliope’s solitary existence transformed her into a madwoman? A lock of light-brown hair fell over her eye.
    â€œYes,” he said. He didn’t move. She was more beautiful than in her photograph. Her cheekbones were more pronounced and higher, her nose was a straighter line—but it was her large, intense blue-green eyes that demanded attention.
    She laughed, then twisted her body back in the direction of the target and released the arrow. In the dimming light, he could see that she’d missed the bull’s-eye by only a fraction. As she retrieved her arrows, he noticed that the ribbon that held her braid was identical to the maroon velvet one that Thalia had given him from around her neck.
    From the picture the sisters had shown him, he’d expected an attractive older woman of forty-nine, but here, now approaching him, was a woman in full bloom, with a rosiness in her cheeks that spread down her jaws. She was, as her daughters had described her and as the photograph had suggested, the physical embodiment of her daughters. He noticed the high cheekbones of Clio, but in her mother, more refined; the blue eyes of Thalia, in her mother, deeper set and more intense; the stubborn defiance in Helene’s chin, in her mother’s face, more pronounced.
    â€œNow it’s your turn,” she said to him.
    He noticed a thin line of perspiration above her lip as she handed him the bow. She reached behind her back and offered him an arrow.
    He tried to still his ricocheting mind. The last time he’d shot an arrow, he was twelve years old at Camp Chippewa in Wisconsin. He stood perpendicular to the target, as she had, and placed the arrow on the shaft of the bow at eye level. Hesquinted down the spine of the arrow and pulled back the string, trying to ignore the throbbing in his thumb; he’d lost his T-shirt bandage during his climb up the ledge. He was about to release the arrow when he heard her laugh, an extended throaty laugh. He pointed the arrow to the ground, then turned to see what she found so amusing. Was she distracting him to rattle his concentration? She was distracting, that was undeniable. Her eyes were now the gray blue of the nearby lake at dusk.
    He returned his focus to the target.
    She laughed again.
    â€œThe last time I did this—” he began.
    She did not let him finish. “Then it’s fresh in your memory.”
    It was Thalia’s voice, but lower in pitch, more assured, more worldly, if a voice could be