XXX
Story: [Arturia's Buff Maiden]
Summary: Rin tries to break Archer free from Alaya, and lands him with getting reborn into a female body in pre-Camelot Britain.
Genre: Adventure, Humor?
XXX
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
XXX
In hindsight, Rin probably should've expected that something would go wrong. However, she'd been more than a bit busy with trying to more-or-less physically break into the afterlife and punch god in the face.
Alaya might not be a god per se, but that was a bit like splitting hairs. And calling it the afterlife was also somewhat incorrect, for all that the people kept in there were already dead. Regardless, breaking into the afterlife and punching god in the face was pretty much as close to a description of what'd happened as any.
Which might mean that this final complication was actually a result of her karma coming back to bite her more than anything else.
Rin gritted her teeth, indignant fury bright in her eyes, for all that the exhaustion made them droop.
Biting her, would it? She who'd raised her karma since childhood? Always not punching people in the face? Always smiling sympathetically about things rather than kicking them whilst they were down? How very well dare it come back to bite her? She didn't raise it to be like this! She raised it to be a productive member of society, not to go biting innocent people who did sensible things like punching gods in their smug faces!
Tweaking the ritual on the fly was something only a madman or a genius might try doing, but since Rin was the latter and had dealt with Zelretch for long enough that her grasp on reality worked in about sixteen more directions than what should be humanly possible for a brain to process, tweaking the ritual was just common sense.
She would set him free. The idealistic idiot deserved at least that much. Even if he was a cynical asshole of a man.
Rin paused, halfway through a calculation that she was sure should be correct-... Oh. Oh, she forgot to carry the three, didn't she?
Oops.
XXX
He had no idea how she might've managed it. But he definitely blamed Rin for this.
A grudgingly fond kind of blame in truth, seeing as – awkward though it was – she'd given him something he'd been striving towards for a long time. A chance to undo his own foolishness in binding himself to Alaya.
Going all the way into being reincarnated wasn't something he'd really considered, but he could guess that it was part of how Rin had managed to wrestle his soul free from that place. No, the reason that he blamed Rin for this mess, was that he knew just how bad she was with getting everything done correctly. She'd always mess up some kind of tiny little detail that she'd overlooked.
In this case, that tiny little detail was located between his legs. Or rather, the lack of that detail was there. So he was blaming Rin for that one.
Then again, it wasn't like he'd ever been overly attached to being a male. To being a swordsman, yes, and to archery perhaps distantly. But to being a man? The person most attached to that had been Saber, and her relationship to that gender were... complicated.
He certainly wasn't going to let Rin sweep this under the rug when he found her, if only because it'd be funny to see her squirm about it, but it could certainly have been worse.
He hadn't smelled any traces of magecraft in their household, so his odds of being dissected were minimal at best.
That'd been a really unpleasant weekend.
XXX
It took him – her – an embarrassingly long time to notice that finding Rin was going to be a lot more complicated than initially assumed.
They didn't exactly have phone-books before phones had been invented. And considering how some of the other children talked about not only knights and dragons, but very specific and obscure knights and their grand deeds, rather than video games or Disney films? It seemed like Rin had landed her in a small town in the middle of feudal Europe.
The fifth child to a low-bred – if fairly wealthy – noble merchant. The kind of child that's only of use in how they could be married off to someone else, and with enough siblings that even that wasn't really worth bothering with.
That Archer had ended up with the name 'Emilya' seemed somewhat ominous in how similar it was to the name Kiritsugu had once left Archer with, but not overly so. All of her new siblings were called some name starting on 'E' and there was a limit to how many of those could really be thought of without repeating oneself.
Still, Emilya's new childhood was awkward for everyone involved. Stubborn to a fault, headstrong, sharp-tongued, and more interested in battle than embroidery. The girl was considered something of an embarrassment for their parents, and someone to be wary of to anyone willing to realize that her sharp tongue could've easily belonged to someone three times her age.
She seemed to be fluctuating between being the creepy sister who knew too much, to being the amazing sister who could do anything, to being the hated sister for whom everything came so much easier. That Emilya hadn't really tried making friends since-... Shirou Emiya had never really bothered with making friends, regardless of how he'd seemed to have gathered them in his youth.
Honestly, outside of Rin – and to some extent Luvia – Archer hadn't really had a friendly conversation with anyone at all for decades. And that wasn't including the whole business around becoming a Counter Guardian, and the jadedness that'd come from slaughtering his way through a thousand to save ten-thousand, for untold stretches of time, more natural disaster than human.
To be a magus is to walk with death, a path that can only ever be traversed alone. And for all that Archer had never really been a very good magus, some of those statements still shone through in his life.
A sword is a sword. It can be kept and maintained as easily in a happy home as on a battlefield, but it can never truly take part in that happiness that it's surrounded by, whilst it can so easily participate in the bloodshed.
Quite plainly, Emilya spent more-or-less all of her time alone, only deferring to her disapproving parents in the most hollowly polite of ways, and generally ignoring everyone her own age.
There'd been more than a few servants and neighbors who were very much opposed to her existence. And whilst that usually just amounted to frowns thrown her way when they weren't forced to ignore her or risk insulting her parents, there'd been one tutor who'd dragged her into the church to make sure she wasn't possessed by the devil.
Emilya would've been more amused if the spectacle of it all hadn't been beyond aggravating. She'd never been told that her math-skills were that amazing before, and she would've preferred to never hear it again. Even if the tutor's belief likely stemmed more from her age than any true skill on her part.
Still, after a thorough drench in holy-water and a lot of yelling from the local priest, everyone decided that the tutor had been massively overreacting and should probably not be left alone with Emilya or her siblings ever again.
So she was considered inapproachable at best by her peers, not that she much cared for their opinion on her.
And then came puberty. Where Emilya just... continued growing.
It wasn't like she knew any magecraft to make herself taller, and she probably would've screwed it up if she had known it, but it was nice to regain most of her once-lost height. Considering that she would've still towered over Rin with a head to spare, the few inches she'd lost didn't seem all that important.
Mostly, Emilya just enjoyed having a decent reach again.
Her family on the other hand, were clearly despairing over their daughter having grown even taller than her father. After all, if all she was good for was marrying her off, the idea of her managing to scare off her suitors – long before she'd even opened her mouth and released her sharp tongue at them – then that was a serious problem.
Before puberty they'd been able to at least rely on the possibility of prettying her up and simply making sure she kept her mouth shut in polite company.
Not that Emilya was entirely sure how they would've been planning to hide the rather obvious fact that she had the arms to bench-press a knight in full armor. Loose sleeves could only hide so much, and they apparently weren't in fashion now either.
Fifth child of seven, she had one older brother and one younger one. And nobody had the time to follow her around and force her to not exercise, when they could spend that time much more effectively by finding proper suitors for her four sisters.
Life was... calm.
And then came the war.
XXX
The thing about war was that it – despite common misconception – always seemed to change. Whether it be new tactics, or the influences of different cultures, or politicians pulling strings in awkward directions, or magi and their ilk lurking behind the scenes, or weaponry forcing entirely new ways of warfare, or infrastructure doing much the same?
War always seemed to be changing.
The people in the wars changed too, for all that they all tended towards a sort of 'average human' baseline, no matter how that might shift and change over the course of the centuries. Still, there were certainly things that echoed, time and again.
People died, people mourned, people killed, and people tried to escape it. And as with most things, the people who died the most were the people the instigators were most willing to discard. Lowlifes and ruffians, poor people and sick people. If they were going to die anyway, give them a spear and tell them to charge.
It was one of those things that Shirou Emiya had always instinctively opposed. And Emilya couldn't particularly say that she disagreed.
No matter how shiny the armor of the knights were, or how flashy and impassioned the propaganda might be, at the end of it all lay only shallow graves and the cloying stench of funeral pyres.
But the rich and powerful wanted their war, and nobility or not, Emilya's family had been asked to send their sons out to die in it. Or, well, technically they'd only been asked for the one son. After all, the eldest was a merchant by his own right nowadays, and had instead been asked to help with the logistics of moving the army.
No, the one they'd asked to die was the youngest child of the family. The thirteen-year-old. Not that they'd likely paid any attention to the call beyond making sure that there was a male in the family to call.
Theoretically, their father could refuse. Possibly blame it on Elliot's young age and their mother's poor heart, but that was a sketchy excuse for a woman who by all accounts were in perfect health in a household filled with womenfolk who could take care of her in case it spontaneously failed her. And as a minor noble, the consequences for refusing the call to arms were... potentially very dire indeed.
Revoking someone's title wasn't done on a whim, but that kind of refusal was easily spun into outright defiance of the crown, and at that point they'd be lucky to even escape the headsman's ax, let alone rebuild their livelihoods in the aftermath.
So, one boy needed to risk his life, or the rest of the family died.
The conclusion was simple, really.
Emilya scoffed in her father's face, locked her little brother in his room, grabbed a suitable sword and clothes, and rode out to meet the one sent to collect her little brother on her own. And then she was off to join the army.
They'd needed one son from the family, after all. None would care to know if her little brother was thirteen or eleven, when their family had already sent a child off to die in the king's war. And with her tanned skin and thick arms barely hidden underneath the clothes of a man, Emilya looked about as much like the fragile girl the female gender was expected to be, as Illyasviel had ever manage to look like an adult.
He could've questioned her for her age though, not that he did. He just nodded in harried apathy when she gave him the name 'Emil' instead of the 'Elliot' he'd been sent to fetch. Nobody actually cared about the names of the individual children of a minor noble. Not unless they were planning on marrying into the family or something, and they really weren't anywhere near important – or rich – enough for that to be a worry.
If he'd asked, she would've simply barked that little Elliot was barely out of the cradle, and that someone had messed up the paperwork. She was the only man capable of answering the call to arms for her family.
Unless Emilya distinguished herself to the point of ridiculousness, nobody would truly delve all that deeply into her family-records. And even should someone take it up with a certain local priest, her parents were at least rich enough to make sure that he didn't cause a scandal unless specifically asked about her gender. Which he wouldn't be, unless Emilya tried to court a woman or something, and at that point it would really only be her own damn fault.
XXX
There were certain things one had to be wary of as a woman dressing up as a man.
One was to make sure to not enter any females-only zones, whilst at the same time being very sparse in entering any males-only zone. After all, when there are only men around, menfolk have no need to worry about such things as wearing clothes. And no matter how easy it might be to pass as a male whilst dressed in men's clothes and under some degree of armor – especially when nobody thought to think too closely on how feminine your face might look, regardless of the muscles on your arms – taking those clothes off left very little to the imagination.
Emilya did have curves. Not big ones, certainly not big enough to get in the way of important things, but present enough that it'd be painfully noticeable even should she ever strip to her undergarments alone.
Thankfully, nobles weren't exactly prone to spending time around other nobles without the ability to posture. As in, they needed to be wearing clothes in order to show off how much gaudier their jewels were in comparison to those of their friends. Jewels, polished armor, heavy embroidery, these were all tools in that ever-continuing arms-race among nobility to climb above their station and to have their peers accept that climb as a reasonable one.
Emilya wasn't overly fond of either gaudiness or shining armor – reflective armor caught the sunlight a little bit too clearly to be used outside of a painfully obvious battlefield, and those should always be avoided into the last – and she had a healthy respect – or fear, fear was also a functional adjective – of somebody flashing jewels and gems at her face.
However, with things being as they were, Emilya was from far too minor of a noble family for shining full-plate armor to be available to her. Leather and chain-mail went a long way, even if it was made of such badly forged iron that it still made her wince to even look at it, and without full-plate to back her skill with a sword there weren't any objections to her willingness to grab a bow.
Oh, it was scoffed at, and a lot of people frowned in vague disgust. But it was more because of her cowardice and apparent poverty, despite being a noble, than because of anything personal.
Which was a bit of a bonus, seeing as that made it all the more obvious to everyone that nobody needed to make friends with her, and thus nobody needed to spend too much time paying attention to her, or any clues about having something to hide that she might leave open to be found by an experienced eye.
The king's war was... mostly pointless.
A couple of tiny kingdoms joining forces under one banner in order to make sure that a few other tiny kingdoms and the banner that they were gathered under wouldn't take away their lands.
A petty squabble between petty nobles, with two opposing sides both proclaiming themselves as the 'true king', not caring about the thousands of people they were sentencing to die for their petty cause.
Emilya had long since mastered the art of keeping her face carefully clean of any feelings she might have on her superiors, but that perfectly blank face wasn't exactly making her popular in the ranks either.
Another noble falling into line, too unimportant to care about, too poor and cowardly to ride around in full-plate on the battlefield, and without any real distinguishing characteristic whatsoever.
Emilya was vaguely proud of her disguise.
XXX
There was a knight in full-plate charging at her, lance lowered.
Emilya didn't exactly enjoy killing, and if she got herself killed early on in this war it'd probably cause the least amount of trouble for her family, especially if she managed to get trampled enough in her death that she became mostly unrecognizable.
But this was all Rin's fault, and if Emilya went and got herself killed before Rin could show up, then who knew what would actually happen. Maybe she was completely free of Alaya for forevermore, maybe she was free for a lifetime, maybe Rin had managed to mess up some kind of large-scale reincarnation-system of the world and Emilya dying would cause the universe to implode.
Best to check with Rin first.
Also, for all that she'd been called suicidal in the past, Emilya had never been the kind of person to simply let someone kill her. If a person came at her with death in their intent, then she had no qualms with delivering death to them in turn.
One arrow, through the gap in his visor, and then a few hurried steps away from where the horse would turn and where the armored corpse would be thrown off its back. Then another arrow into the visor of the knight coming up behind the first one.
It was pathetically easy to kill someone in full-plate, when you were skilled enough that your arrows never missed. Even the best of armors had weaknesses, that was just the way of such things, and arrows were generally a clean enough method to get straight through those weaknesses, as long as the aim didn't falter.
Two knights, three knights, four knights, six knights, two horses turning around towards the break in the ranks, and then a hurried retreat.
Theoretically, she might be able to continue fighting alone against an entire army, but she had no interest in causing that much death, let alone doing something so blatantly noticeable.
She'd pushed her luck far enough as it was with six full knights dead at her hand alone. No, this was the time for a retreat, even if she had to wrap her fellow archers in chains and physically drag them along to a safer spot.
Thankfully it didn't come to that, with the others around her having broken into a desperate flight for survival almost the moment the knights came close enough to lower their lances. Emilya's bit of violence had broken the knights' formation enough that this rather disorganized retreat didn't end up with the whole lot of them cut down from behind, but it still wasn't pretty.
With the archers falling back rather than providing covering-fire, the flank of their infantry broke, and as the infantry scrambled to hold, their cavalry was being very neatly picked off.
Apparently, for all that both sides were equally petty, at least one side had a decent commander in charge of giving orders.
Hereditary titles might help in allowing the heir to learn all that their predecessor might've known, teaching it all from a very early age, but there was no accounting for sheer military genius.
And they were quite bluntly, horribly outmatched.
Emilya wished that she could pretend at surprise on the matter.
XXX
In truth, they would continue to be outmaneuvered and beset on all sides. Their commanders might learn how to deal with this one new flanking maneuver, and might even be able to predict the emergence of another maneuver to follow in its wake.
But to deal with a third one? Or a fourth? Or a sixteenth?
The gulf in ability was massive, and no rousing speech or solid fortification would be enough to stem the tide.
No, they would lose this petty war. And then perhaps their enemy would be merciful in victory, or perhaps their king would be executed for the treason of opposing them. In the end, it mattered little.
The nobility would remain as nobility, the king would still demand taxes that the commoners would slave away under, and what did it ever matter to anyone what name was hailed in song?
Emilya didn't care beyond knowing that she could easily be put to the sword by the conquering king. It wasn't the most likely of events, with her being so minor a noble that her rank was only in name. No command had been given to her beyond the bow in her hand and the unspoken understanding that no commoner could ever truly scold her for her actions, whatever those might be.
It wasn't all that dissimilar from working with the Enforcers of the Clock Tower during their more large-scale hunts, back when she'd still been Shirou Emiya. A slight shift outside of their direct chain of command, whilst still undoubtedly answering to them.
She was happy with that. She'd never been fond of ordering people to their deaths, even when the reasons for doing so weren't the petty posturing of spoiled children endlessly wanting for more.
Unfortunately, their king was a great believer of promotions based on merit. And in the chaos of the cavalry-charge, they'd also managed to lose their commanding officer. So, suddenly a new member of the nobility needed to be hurriedly added to their ranks, unless such merit for a promotion could be found.
Which put Emilya, a minor noble who'd killed several enemy knights in mere moments and been an integral part in securing their retreat – no matter how faltering – in a bit of a pickle.
She didn't want to be given command, and yet to reject such an honor outright would be... detrimental to her continued well-being. In no small part because it would draw significant attention to herself.
She couldn't accept it with humble silence, because the mere thought of it made her skin crawl. She couldn't reject it with humble words, because that would just convince the king that he'd made the right choice and give him cause to continue pushing for it. She couldn't reject it with honest words either, because that would toe a thin line of treasonous thoughts.
That left her with arrogance and some measure of logic. Hopefully, it would convince the king that she was still far too young and quick to insult her fellows to be shrewd in her willingness to skimp on responsibility.
Said and done. "I must humbly decline, your majesty. A commander should know the full ability of his men. And what do I know of arrows failing to strike true? No, if you must give it to someone, then present it to the one whose eyes are keen and whose arrows still misses the target, so that they may know the strength of the weakest link in the chain and compensate accordingly."
It was the kind of blistering thing a young man might say more as an insult towards their fellows than as actually good advice to their superior. And Emilya had no doubt that somebody would by the end of this be more than a bit cross with her for her lack of faith in their abilities. But better to make the enemy of one man who'd likely posture enough to make the rest of his command sympathetic to the ire she'd caused, than to rise in ranks herself.
It was just a delaying effort, regardless.
There was no way that their side would last past the year.
XXX
In a move that surprised only the people who'd doubted their leader's good sense – and the few who were more obsessed with loyalty than with reality – they surrendered before autumn began to consistently leave frost on the fields in the mornings.
Unfortunately, their side's desperate attempt to flex their muscles and outdo their opponent, meant that the regular folk of the land hadn't been able to spend as much time caring for the crops and the cattle as they probably ought to.
So now a whole bunch of people were going to be starving. All because of the petty squabbles of nobles.
Emilya doubted that the nobles responsible would have the good sense to be one of the victims of the inevitable famine either. No, that too would fall on the heads of the commoners.
And people wondered why the peasants had resorted to bloodied revolution to take down the aristocrats.
Regardless, as the surrendering side, their army was at the mercy of the winner. As in, they'd sort out the ones that remained loyal to the cause, and the ones who were too mercenary to be trusted, and the ones who probably weren't worth the effort of trying to decide if they were one or the other.
Their opponent proved to be a highly practical individual, and simply set up a brief tournament for the nobles who hadn't been in command of anything particularly important. After all, the ones who had been in charge of important things would need to have their loyalties investigated further regardless, seeing as even should their skill be lacking they could prove themselves a thorough thorn in their side.
That the commoners were overlooked was... likely too engrained in the nature of nobility for anyone to really think too deeply on the matter. There were a lot of them, and few would prove their skill worthy of further investigation, and even if they did there was a distinct lack of worry about the influence of a regular soldier.
What could a commoner do when they didn't participate in discussions about battle-strategies, nor spend time in close-contact with important nobility? The truthful answer was 'a lot', but it wasn't an easily definable threat, so that it was being overlooked was really to be expected.
In the end, the commoners were being treated the same from either side of the conflict, so the attitude had some merit to it. There was no reason to worry about their loyalties, because neither side would've paid enough attention to them to cement those loyalties.
On the bright side, Emilya finally got a glimpse of their not-quite-crowned King.
It was Arturia Pendragon, with Caliburn at her side, and an unspoken dream of Camelot in her heart.
Because nothing in Archer's life could ever be easy.
XXX
The tournament was clearly biased towards 'proper nobles', with fencing and jousting being the main parts, and cowardly things like archery being a distant second.
Emilya didn't mind that, seeing as the less of an impact she made on the audience, the less likely she was to attract attention back to her family. This same reason was one of the main contributors as to why she didn't want to join the Round Table, no matter if it would let her linger in Arturia's presence.
She was in love, not stupid.
Still, it would be best if she didn't demonstrate herself as being quite as capable as she was, lack of audience or no. Best to boast a bit about making a seemingly impossible shot, and then fail at it, or to be off the target by an inch here or there. Anything that would paint her abilities with a bow in the light of a braggart with decent skill.
Of course, the problem with boasting about making impossible shots was to try and remember what other people classified as such. Emilya couldn't exactly use herself as measurement when she knew that there really weren't any shots she couldn't make.
There was a reason why EMIYA was always summoned as the Archer-class, despite the way swords were at the very core of his legend and life.
Also, Emilya wasn't exactly fantastic about boasting in general, having always preferred to simply shoot the people who needed to die in the back when they least expected it. Minimizing the amount of casualties had always been the most important part.
So she'd been forced to settle on simply 'proving herself', by – after never having quite hit the exact center of the targets – asking a particularly annoying rich noble to leave his helmet on the range. It wasn't really that Emilya had any intention of 'teaching him a lesson' as much as it was that anyone watching would be expecting a braggart to take offense to the man's continued needling.
With the closed helmet being what it was, simply managing to dent it from the distance Emilya was aiming from would be enough to help silence the man, even if it would also serve to disprove the impressive story of her piercing through the eye-slits of several charging knights.
Talented and prideful, with a tendency to exaggerate. As common as the second son of a minor noble could be expected to be.
Unfortunately for Emilya's plans, that was the moment when Arturia entered the audience and the helmet-less noble beside her said something uncharitable about her being a bastard-son whose pet-sorcerer likely cheated to let Arturia draw Caliburn from the stone.
It wasn't any worse than any of the rumors Emilya had heard before. But Arturia was right there, and Emilya already had an arrow knocked.
She'd never claimed to be a calm and calculating sort of individual. That'd been Kiritsugu. EMIYA had at best reached a kind of hollow zen of murder, killing in endless repetition until his heart stopped registering the individuals. Emiya Shirou had been an emotional person from the very start, caring too much, hoping too much, endlessly striving towards an Ideal that could never be fully realized.
Emilya drew back. And let go. Smooth motion of eternal repetition. Then she turned to her fellow noble.
"I believe you'll be needing a new helmet, sir Fern." Because the one in the distance had been pierced through entirely by a single lone arrow, the eye-slit allowing it to strike true into the metal of the helmet without glancing off. Like threading a needle. The resulting impact to the inside of the helmet would take a talented smith several hours of hard work to have it even be wearable again.
And from the pale face of the noble beside her, he was all too aware that should they ever have met on the battlefield, that could've been his head inside of it.
XXX
It'd been barely six months since Arturia drew Caliburn from the stone, giving up everything of herself in order to fulfill her duty as King.
She didn't regret it, but the months had been long, and the reactions of the nobles of the land was frustrating at the best of times. At least half of them had had qualms with following the kingship of a youth, and a large portion of that half had decided to declare such outright.
So now they were at war. Arturia to unite them into the single kingdom that they were meant to be, and them to usurp her or to divide the kingdom into however many pieces they could manage between them.
Even among the soldiers there was a divide. Not as pronounced as the one among the nobles, but even the soldiers in her own army had qualms about swearing their loyalty to her. They swore it to their specific nobles, and their nobles might then swear to her, but it was a tenuous kind of fealty.
Certainly, a few were proud to be on the side of the king who wielded Caliburn, but even among the fiercest believers in the cause, there was a lack of immediate respect towards her. Certainly, they would never hesitate to be polite or consider disregarding her orders, but Arturia knew full well that many of the men had seen commanders younger than herself be hurriedly cut down in battle. They'd learnt from experience to not put all that much faith in the youths wandering the battlefields.
It was a much better reception than if Arturia had been revealed to be a woman, but that was neither here nor there. She'd surrendered that part of herself for the sake of her kingdom when she drew Caliburn.
Still, a kingdom couldn't become united if those who were included in it were divided, and so Arturia had to arrange for the armies of those she bested in battle to be subsumed into her own. Preferably without the new recruits stirring unrest and discontent towards her rule.
Regardless, a tournament for that purpose had been arranged with this newest defeated enemy, and Arturia was... mostly unimpressed. There'd been a few rough gems hidden among the rest, and quite a number of men with good arms on them, so it wasn't that she was dissatisfied with the outcome. It was an outcome that'd been expected, and it was an outcome that she'd received.
Now, with the swordsmanship over and done with, the tournament had moved on to less appealing but equally useful skills. Archery might be nowhere near as glamorous as others, but on the battlefield it could very much change the tide of a battle, and Arturia would be foolish to disregard it.
She'd lost several knights, even ones covered in armor, to lucky arrows striking true.
However, the lack of glamor didn't stop the archers from being as fond of bragging as any man. And though Arturia disapproved of braggarts on principle, she didn't mind being peripherally aware of it when it happened. If they succeeded to do what they bragged they could, then she could pretend ignorance, and if they failed she could glance their way for just long enough to properly humble them with her presence.
A useful kind of system, designed to keep the more obnoxious of her men from acting out.
This particular man had finally had enough of the other noble's constant belittling of his abilities, and a bet of sorts had been set up. To prove his skills truthful, the man with the bow needed to hit the other man's helmet. A clear, if now mostly empty, threat of what could've been.
It was quite the distance, and the slit of the helmet was barely wide enough to fit the arrowhead through, let alone having someone shoot through it from a distance. A boast that would fall apart quickly, and preferably keep the man from acting out any further than his sharp tongue had already done.
Arturia's ears picked up a mutter as her presence was discovered by the two of them. It stung a little. It wasn't the kind of thing she could really refute, being that she wasn't supposed to have been able to hear it being spoken at all, and even if she did decide to act on it it would only affirm its truthfulness in the eyes of those who'd believe it. After all, she would have no reason to loudly decry it and punish the one speaking of it, unless it was true enough that she worried others would believe it.
The man with the bow tensed. A minimal kind of twitch that spoke of someone physically reining themselves in from doing something they'd regret. And then, face perfectly blank, he raised his bow in a practiced motion that was... different somehow, from the way she'd seen other archers do it before. The arrow flew. The helmet was pierced through.
"I believe you'll be needing a new helmet, sir Fern." A voice that didn't sound in the least bit surprised. As if that impossible lucky shot had been as easy as breathing.
And in that one moment, Arturia sincerely doubted that this man even understood what boastfulness was. He spoke the words, perfect for a smug kind of superiority, but there was... nothing there. It was more a threat than a boast. A way of chastising someone for speaking out of turn, rather than of scrambling for respect.
Arturia suddenly had a horrible suspicion that she knew where all those many 'lucky arrows' that had claimed the lives of so many of her armored knights had come from.
A polite smile, more a mask worn comfortable with habit than any true need to mask himself, and then-...
Arturia's eyes met his, and for one moment she was certain that-...
Arturia blinked. A little bit startled, a little bit confused, and she watched the man make his way back to the throng of people.
It took her a bit of time afterwards, to track down the man's name.
'Emil', a minor noble of little importance, a family of poor merchants more than anything.
And yet their eldest son could use a bow with skill Arturia had never seen in any of her own soldiers. She was intrigued.
XXX
A/n: I started writing this over a year ago, and I never managed to reach the end goal of having Archer pose as a double-identity of being "Arthur's knight, and possible boy-toy, considering the blatant eye-fucking that they always do" and "Arthur's poor innocent wife who pretends as if Arthur's gay indiscretions are not bothering her at all". A setting which is inspired and part-requested by Lyragoblin from over on tumblr.
Finally gave up on ever managing to write it out to reach that gloriously hilarious setting, and so it remains trapped in un-worded imagination.