Lumen Archer

The Lumen Archer is a volley-line designation rather than a name; the Meroveil Empire's Lumen school issues one per twelve-soldier line-cohort, and the bearer of the designation on the Cathedral-roads cohort is Sorrel Hane, age twenty-three, third year on the line. The Lumen school issues its bows without strings. The string is a beam the archer draws out of their own light, and every draw takes a little of it, which is why the school issues the hood black and records, in place of rank, how far along the hood the black has gone: the light the archer spends comes out at the edges, an inch a season for an ordinary draw, and the school's muster is a list of hood-lines. Sorrel's hood is gone to the crown. They are the only third-year on the roll of whom that is true, and the school has not decided whether to promote them or to take the bow away.

Their combat-grant is the disciplined draw — beam-fire on the volley-officer's signal, arrival-timing governed by the length of the draw against the cohort's count — applied by an archer who draws longer than the signal asks for. The school's third-rank instruction is to loose at the count; Sorrel has loosed inside the window on all nine hundred and forty-four volleys in three years, and on four of them the long draw arrived early and hit harder than the volley needed, which the volley-officer has noted as 'within window, above requirement' and has not asked to have explained. The cohort stands the Cathedral roads at dawn, when the haze off the Aurel hill hides the beam until it is already there; since the hill fell, those roads are as near the Cathedral as anyone on the line can stand. Sorrel does not say what the long draw feels like. The cohort has stopped asking. The hood, they say, is the answer.

They stand the same roads as the Cathedral's field-detachment and are on quiet, distant terms with Sister-Weaver Ottilie Danvers, who has offered to weave them a new hood on the loom-cloister's loom and was declined, politely, on the grounds that the hood is a record and a record is not replaced. Danvers has left the thread on the loom. Aria Lockwood has twice stood the Cathedral road at dawn beside the cohort without giving an order, and both times the haze held a minute longer than the almanac said it would, which the volley-officer has recorded and Sorrel has not. They keep the one hood they were issued. They have never asked what the school does when the light reaches the eyes.