"I no English, can you show?"

Joy is now abruptly very nervous, but Rembrandt is giving her reassuring nods and thumbs-up from a distance so she keeps going.

"Okay so you see this line?" she says, pointing to the line of weighted rope laid out on the ground. "You must be behind it when people are shooting, and you must not shoot unless everyone is behind it. With me?" 

"No shoot when people there, they die." This is a perfectly sensible safety rule and you do not need much America context to interpret it.

"Yes, exactly. And sometimes you might not see everyone who is there, if they're behind a target looking for arrows. So you must wait until a marshal says the range is clear, and they - I mean I, well, I or Rembrandt will say 'fire at will' - then you can shoot, but only if you have one foot on each side of the line. Like this." Joy takes a position straddling the rope line, holding up her bow to point it in the right direction without firing it. "You understand no shooting until you hear fire at will?" 

Another rule that makes so much sense she can fill in the missing words. "No shoot. Even if other people shoot, no shoot. You say, fire at will, shoot."

"Yes! Exactly. And if anyone says hold, it means stop shooting and put the bow down. Anyone can say hold. You don't have to be a marshal. If you see something dangerous, like a child or a dog running in front of the arrows, or a bow breaking, or someone pointing an arrow the wrong direction, you shout HOLD. If you are wrong, a marshal will just call to fire again, and you won't be in trouble for having called it. That part is very important so I want to know you understand it - what do you do if you hear 'hold'?"

Joy is being very very thorough because she is pretty sure that she will fail her Marshal In Training authorization if the non-English-speaker kills a child or shoots the Baron or something, and she doesn't know anyone who has actually failed, so it would be terribly embarrassing. 

"Like in swording. Hold, no move, no shoot."

"Yes. But in fencing or heavy you can usually keep hold of your sword. At the range, we want you to take the arrow off the string and put the bow down." This rule is often not followed by experienced people being casual at practice but Joy has decided that on her watch it will be followed to the damn letter by the newbie stranger who does not speak English. 

Joy nocks an arrow and hands Iomedae the bow. "Show me what you do if you hear hold called." 

"Take the arrow off the string and put the bow down," Iomedae repeats with pretty good pronunciation, though actually figuring out what that means takes a bit more work. She wouldn't hold the bow drawn because that's stupid and will just get your arm tired. Put the bow...on the ground? What if someone steps on it. Unstring the bow? That seems like it's kind of making holds into a big hassle. Crouch holding the bow on your knees?

Joy takes the bow back from Iomedae. 

"String," she says, pointing to the arrow string. She gestures with the arrow. "Arrow."

She turns the bow sideways to nock the arrow with an exaggerated motion, showing Iomedae how the feathers lie flat against the bow if she aligns the arrow correctly. "Nock the arrow on the string."

Once the arrow is nocked, Joy is very careful to point the bow at the ground and not at the people still setting up targets downrange. "If anyone says hold, I take the arrow off the string and put the bow down."

She removes the arrow from the bow, separates them with an exaggerated motion, then puts the bow on the ground to her right and the arrow on the ground to her left. "So everyone can see it is safe. You understand?"

Kalomeros keeps a stock of modern plastic bows that are fairly indestructible, so newbies can throw them on the ground without damaging the kit. Joy intends to loan Iomedae some cheap plastic arrows and doesn't expect to upgrade her to nice wooden ones today. 

"String. Arrow. Bow." She points to each. "Hold, arrow off the string, put the bow down." She demonstrates. She does not throw the bow, even if it is in an unfamiliar American material; she sets it down gently. "This is arrow off the string put the bow down?"

"Yes!" Joy says. "Great. That means you're safe. It's harder to accidentally shoot without realising you're still in a hold."

She takes a similar level of care to explain to Iomedae about being behind the line when not shooting, and straddling the line when shooting, and not dry firing a bow, and not retrieving arrows or stepping over the line at all until 'retrieve arrows' is called, and not trying to pick up anything she drops over the line until 'retrieve arrows' is called, and not pointing a nocked bow at anyone, and leaving her bow behind the shooting line when retrieving her arrows, and not standing within ten feet of the shooting line if she is not doing archery, and then she will emphasise again that Iomedae really must not point a nocked arrow at anyone at any point.

"Only if they killing people, need to stop them, can't stop them any other way. But this many people, can stop them with hands."

Joy is now really quite confident she is out of her depth but Rembrandt (who watched her going through the first half of that checklist before deciding he was satisfied she was doing a great job) has wandered off and started talking some junior archers through the Royal Round rules.

"Um."

She thinks about this for a long several seconds. That really sounded concerningly like Iomedae might actually shoot someone - well, no, it didn't, it's just that nobody has ever tried to argue for an exception to the no shooting people rule before, and it doesn't really seem like the sort of thing someone would bring up if there wasn't something wrong. 

"Nobody is going to kill anyone today, and even if someone did, it is someone else's responsibility to stop them and not yours. Lots of people are going to hit each other with swords and stuff, and it's completely okay and they aren't hurting each other and we have lots of people making sure everything is safe, okay? So - no shooting people, under any circumstances."

Maybe Jenny will rescue her. She looks at Jenny. "I can only let her use the range if I know she's safe and, um, she has your permission...?"

"Iomedae, you're safe now. You don't have to be ready to attack anybody, and you shouldn't attack anybody, no matter what. If there's a problem the grownups will handle it."

"There is knights here, only the knights can hurt people real not pretend, if a bad person come sword us I should no fight?"

"No bad person is going to hurt anyone."

"But if they hurt anyone, I do something or no."

Joy does not want to get into the ethics of shooting entirely theoretical attackers who are not going to materialise in the middle of a fete. She makes up her mind not to. "You cannot shoot anyone with my bow and my arrows that I am lending you at my archery range, no exceptions, I don't care if they are the devil himself. I am not in charge of what sort of self-defence you might learn elsewhere, but nobody is allowed to be shot with any arrows at my range today. Are we clear on that?" 

"Yes ma'am." Iomedae is perfectly fine with and in fact part of her heart sings for the beauty of 'you may not shoot a devil with my arrows'. She just wants to be clear on what to do instead of just assuming that no bad things will happen or would need planning for.

By the time they're done with explaining the rules it is almost time for the range to open.

"Do you want to shoot too?" Joy asks Jenny. "I can find arm guards and finger guards and loaner arrows for both of you, if you like. If you don't want to shoot I need you to stand ten feet away from the line with the other spectators." 

"I think I'll pass, thank you!" She will go stand with the spectators.

Finger guards are for whiny children who will never learn to really - oh right the priests here don't have healing.

Joy has a whole box of finger guards and arm guards! She finds some that she thinks will fit Iomedae.

"This straps to your arm, like this," she says, and gestures to her own left arm. Her own arm guard is a gorgeous red-stained leather bracer with a depiction of various phases of the moon in white along its length. The one she offers Iomedae is a plain black plastic with some nylon-web straps. "So the string won't hit you." 

"The finger guard protects these fingers so you don't get nerve damage." She shows Iomedae the much smaller fingerguard which slides onto the first three fingers of her right hand. 

Iomedae doesn't know what nerve damage is but it is obvious why, if you can't have a priest channel at the end of the day to help the skin regrow when you've fired several hundred arrows and your whole hand is bloody, you'd want these objects. She will put them on.