Free Gilead's Craft by Nik Vincent

GILEAD’S CRAFT
    by Nik Vincent
    Gilead always retrieved his arrows after a battle or a hunt, but he seldom found them whole. Fletching was often missing, and shafts broken.
    The elf cut a long spruce branch, straight and true. Four feet was the minimum cut length for his reach, before planing, sanding and oiling.
    He flexed one dowel at a time to check its spine. Fithvael had always used a weight and a gauge, but they were in his pack, to which Gilead did not have access. He’d been weighing and balancing arrow shafts in his hands for long enough to know which were true and which should be rejected.
    The first arrowhead was leaf-shaped, carved from bone a hundred years previously by Fithvael. Gilead used it more often for hunting than in combat and it had killed more beasts than he cared to recall. He had shot the woman with it because she was slight and her armour was nothing more than various leather off-cuts cleverly stitched together. He disliked killing women, even those capable of accurately throwing a spear at a moving target, and he always used smaller, finer heads when firing on them.
    Gilead had found the arrow on the battlefield. The head was bloody, but the shaft had been broken deliberately, as if over someone’s knee. So, he had not killed the woman after all.
    The bone head had shrunk with age and Gilead had to taper the end of the shaft to accommodate it. The head weighed very little, so he simply notched the other end of the dowel for the nock, making sure that the groove bisected any split grains along the shaft, adding to its strength. Gilead took the shaped goose feathers from their pouch and tied them against the shaft with a tight wind of sinew, cut and treated by Fithvael and kept wound around the old, iron bodkins that Galeth and Gilead had used on practice arrows when they were boys.
    Gilead wondered whether Fithvael would ever mentor another young charge. He thought it unlikely, and it saddened him.
    Gilead had retrieved the six heads of the arrows he had fired that day. He had not drawn his sword. These human-hunting humans deserved no better, and the hunters had become the hunted as the elf picked them off, one-by-one, from his vantage point higher up the wooded slope.
    Gilead generally fired his collection of elf-steel broadheads at beasts and monsters, but the man had been so big, and his chain-mail so complete, that Gilead had chosen his favourite broadhead arrow to bring down the hunter. Despite the armour, the broadhead had done its job, and Gilead had to cut through the shaft to retrieve it. The arrow had penetrated chainmail, chest and back, and torn through the flesh between, flooding the battleground with a good deal of hot blood. He cut free the nock, too, which balanced the weight of the head.
    Gilead spent several minutes weighing each of the shafts he had cut and planed, checking the tightness of the grain and how evenly it ran the length of the shafts. He chose one and flexed it in his hands before rolling it between his palms to judge how true it was. When he was satisfied, he tipped a little sap oil onto a cloth and began to polish the shaft with it so that moisture could not penetrate the wood and lift or warp the grain. He also used a straw to blow a fine mist of the oil over the goose feathers that he had cut long with triangular ends for the fletching, adding more weight to the nock end.
    He tapered both ends of the shaft, and then began to clean the nock and the head, removing all traces of the old shaft, along with glue and the scab of old blood that had dried on the head.
    Gilead turned the shaft this way and that in his hands, fixing the head and nock in place, constantly weighing and balancing, choosing the position of the fletching and the length of sinew he would need to fix it in place.
    The elf repeated the process with the other four arrowheads, made from flint that he and Galeth had napped, and the white bone nocks that belonged to them. That day, the flintheads