“Tell me,” Kersath said as he pulled up alongside Kre, “who was riding in front of you?”
Kre shrugged, “I don’t know. Dain, I think?”
“You think?” Kersath hissed back, an angry tone rising in his voice.
Caught off guard, Kre backpedaled a bit, “I mean, maybe? I don’t know exactly. I wasn’t paying attention to who was in front of me.”
“Why not?” Kersath’s voice shifted back to his normal cool tone. “You are part of a company of riders. Their safety is your concern, your duty even, especially as you ride in the tail position.”
“I could see them up there, so I know that they’re okay,” Kre said defensively. He felt insulted that Kersath seemed to be insinuating that he wasn’t doing his job properly.
“Ah,” Kersath smirked, “you raise a good point. Though, I would be remiss if I did not point out that knowing whose name to call out in a dangerous situation is critically important. Those precious few seconds where you try to determine what to yell or for someone else to try and discern what your intent is could be life and death seconds.
“Tell me,” Kesath said, pulling two arrows out from his saddle quiver, “which of these is used to kill a man?”
The two arrows he held were fairly similar in size, both about a full arm’s length and thicker than Kre expected them to be. Both had razor sharp triangular heads at one end and a trifecta of feathers in two different sets of colors tied at the other end. One arrow bore a white feather adjacent to two black feathers, and the other was fletched with a yellow feather tied next to a pair of light blue feathers.
Kre looked them over as Kersath deftly twirled them around in his fingers. “The white and black one, I assume,” he answered, taking the chance on a fifty-fifty guess.
“Wrong,” Kersath said as he thrust both arrows towards Kre’s chest. The young man nearly tumbled from his saddle as he reflexively tried to leap backwards from the attack. “Examine the orientation of the arrow heads,” the Ylveryan advised. “Note that they are both vertical as I hold arrows such that the key fletching is on the correct side.”
As he scrambled to correct his seat in the saddle, Kre mentally cursed Kersath and his teaching methods. Still, he did not that the odd colored feathers were both pointing in the same direction off to one side while the arrowheads were in a vertical position.
“I don’t know what that means,” he admitted. He figured that admitting ignorance was far easier than trying to work out whatever it was that Kersath wanted him to learn.
The dark-skinned teacher gently tapped Kre’s ribs with the arrows. “If I were to shoot you with these, the arrowheads would stick in your ribs, preventing them from penetrating too far into your body. A sideways arrowhead,” he pulled another arrow out from a quiver hidden on his back and held it so that its sharp bladed bit was perpendicular to the other two, “will slide through your ribs and destroy your lungs fully.”