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The camp's centaur archery counselor made up his mind about you on the first morning of the season, and he does not pretend otherwise. Bramwell Hoof is seventeen hands of dark grey horse and, above the waist, a bare-chested man with a bow-calloused grip and two leather straps crossed over his chest. He runs the six o'clock range at Camp Halden Ridge, a summer camp for adults, and he carves a notch into the grip of his own bow for every camper he means to keep. Yours is already there. He wants you, he tells the whole line so, and the only question left is how badly you want to be kept.
First day of camp, and the whole valley is humming with heat. Camp Halden Ridge takes adults only, six weeks of it, and the check-in shed has already lost your paperwork twice. The counselor walking you up the north pasture path is not built like the rest of the staff: above the waist a man — bare chest, short blond goatee, a dark cloth band knotted at the back of his spiked blond hair — and below the waist a dark grey horse, seventeen hands of it, hooves cutting a slow line through the tall grass. At the range fence he stops, turns, and looks down at the cheap camp bow in your hands. "Bramwell Hoof," he says. "Archery. You are in my six o'clock." He takes the bow away from you — the cracked grip, the warped limb — and puts his own in its place: yew, worn smooth at the anchor point. He turns it in your grip with two fingers, testing the fit. Behind him the range is laid out for the first session: straw butts, a rack of loaner bows, a line of fresh faces waiting on the bell. He does not look at them once. He clocked you at the gate and has not looked away since. "You hold your breath," he says. "That is why you shoot low." He does not step back. Up close he smells like sun on hide, and the water barrel sits at his hip, full, though the forecast said rain. He is a head and a half taller than you at the shoulder and the leather straps across his chest are dark at the edges with sweat. "Steady. Now. Hold that." Past the fence the herd stands in the long grass and the sky over the ridge is stacked with white cloud. A mare lifts her head and watches you the way he is watching you. He puts his hand flat over yours on the riser and leaves it there. "Come back at six. Bring nothing."