Annaliese absently tucked a strand of hair behind her ear: loose, deep chocolate curls tumbled down her back. Julchen had often considered this one of her finest features, the envy of her neighbours and her favourite thing to grab onto in several situations indeed.

She let her gaze trace the waves of locks now, under the guise of a nonchalant look over her shoulder. “What about this isn’t fair?” Julchen asked, reaching for another arrow.

Annaliese lowered her own bow, extending a slender, accusing hand. “She’s had more practice than either of us, I’d imagine.”

(Julchen had spent enough time around Annaliese to recognize the particular lilt of her voice when she teased at a challenge: a conductor’s baton, held aloft in the stillness of a dim concert hall.)

On the brunette’s other side, Eliza’s lips curled into a smile, her eyes trained on the target, body poised like some warrior goddess from a time all three remembered. “I wouldn’t call it ‘practice’ so much as ‘necessity.’”

She loosed the arrow: both onlookers followed it as it lodged itself in the painted target. Eliza blew stray bangs from her face. Her hands were bare; Annaliese and Julchen wore gloves; her sleeves were rolled to her elbows; their wrists were covered. Eliza wore men’s britches, a habit Julchen and Annaliese were both too proud to admit they enjoyed.

Julchen scoffed, lining up a shot. Like Annaliese, she wore her hair down, a shocking white curtain well past her shoulders. Eliza’s was braided (Annaliese had offered, and had hummed as she’d worked her fingers in the other girl’s hair) and, combined with late summer freckles, gave her a familiar boyish, mischievous look. “Spoken like someone whose confidence is shaken.”

“Certainly not.” Even in the middle of the woods, Annaliese had a way of covering her voice in sugar, a velvet timbre that skewed Julchen’s shot to the left. She swore; Annaliese had the decency to cover her laughter with a cough.

Julchen scowled. “Go on, then,” she said, nocking another arrow in one fluid movement. “Prove it.”

Her shot punctuated her dare, striking the centre of of the target, the tip buzzing like a cicada. Eliza raised a knowing eyebrow.

Annaliese pursed her lips, looking over Julchen to Eliza, who merely shrugged, watching. Her gloved fingers hovered over the arrows before curling around one. Shaking her hair from her eyes — rays of Sun caught in it and glittered like it was woven through with precious stones, not a far-fetched thing for Julchen to picture — she raised her bow again.

Loose: it buried itself in the target with a thwack.

Julchen clucked her tongue. “Your aim is a little high.” She rested her bow on the rack and leaned towards the other girl, hands on her hips in mock scrutiny. “But then again, that’s nothing new, is it?”

Annaliese rolled her eyes, but Julchen noted the rosy dusting on the apples of her cheeks, the tightening of her grip on the polished oak of the bow.

“Lower your arm, here.” Julchen reached out, her hand on the other girl’s forearm: silk sleeves, a pale blue that made Annaliese’s eyes crackle with violet light. She felt her tense, a fraction of a second, before composing herself. Annaliese, after all, was no stranger to intimacy in the role she played.

As if in testament to this, Eliza dropped her bow and wandered over, her gaze green and curious.

Julchen’s other hand slid over the small of Annaliese’s back, lingering over the ribbed boning of whatever godforsaken corsetry she was laced into.

“Better?” Annaliese asked, her voice a whisper of honey that coated Julchen’s ears and skin in warmth. She turned, and Julchen breathed in her perfume, vanilla and spices and centuries of golden majesty.

For a moment, she forgot to respond. “Much,” she managed, her lips at Annaliese’s temple. “Wouldn’t you agree, Eliza?”

Breath on Julchen’s ear. “Looks good from where I’m standing.”

Julchen’s arms tightened around Annaliese until (mercifully) she let go of the third bow, and skilled hands — musician’s hands — trailed up her arms.

Locked in place between two girls that were, loathe she was to admit it, better at this game than her, Julchen let herself be kissed, her head turned and Eliza’s mouth, soft and grinning and hungry, against hers with no resistance.

Ever dutiful, Julchen passed it along: Annaliese tasted as sweet as she sounded (a potentially dangerous trait), lips painted pink and her hair tickling Julchen’s neck. One hand brushed over the other girl’s side to link fingers with Eliza’s.

Tangled together, in a way as they had been for years, they fell backwards into the grass with breathless laughter.

When Annaliese and Eliza kissed, brown-haired princess and pauper, Julchen watched in quiet reverence. When those skilled hands slid up her dress, Julchen murmured their names like she was reciting prayer. Eliza’s legs were slender, her neck laid bare by her braid; Annaliese drew out her name like a song.

They lay in the grass, hand in hand in hand, a circle aimed skyward. The eagles surveyed the abandoned range once more before flying home, and time pressed forward again.

“You know,” Annaliese said, “you’re not a very patient teacher.”

“Maybe you’re just a shit student,” Julchen commented.

Eliza snorted. “Maybe you’re both shit.”

“Oi.” Julchen smacked her; Eliza doubled over in laughter.