This is not the kind of question archers normally ask Rembrandt in the middle of a royal round, but he supposes that's on him for immediately asking the brand new archer if she wanted to shoot competitively.

He scratches his ear. 

"Soooo... if you're not shooting targets then you're doing combat archery. For that you need to wear armour and be authorised. And then you can shoot as fast or precise as you like, depending on if someone's charging at you or if you're behind friends with shields, and how good you are at not hitting your friends." 

"And you need both those, so royal rounds competes both?"

"Yes! This round you get as much time as you like, but only six arrows. In the fourth round you get as many arrows as you like, but only thirty seconds. So you want to do them differently, right?"

In the background, Joy calls, "Last arrow!" 

"Yes." Okay, with this account of why to try to spend more time between shots she'll try it, though she doesn't want to change her form any mid-competition. 

"Bows down! Retrieve arrows!" Joy calls, and Rembrandt shoos Iomedae down range to fetch her arrows back.

Iomedae will fetch her arrows! And then she will fire them again, taking longer between shots to pay attention to the wind and her footing and the precise place she wants to hit but aiming and firing with the same motion which is the one she knows how to do.

"Nice shooting!" Rembrandt adds up the points on his fingers. "Five, five, three, three and one is seventeen. Very nice shooting. We're at forty already, which is where we'd start calling you a marksman, if you can keep that average." 

"Marks-man?" Meaning that she shoots as a man? That would be a very satisfying title to earn. She beams at him.

"Marksman, yes, the rank above archer. Next set is going to be the furthest target, then the speed round. You got this." He is now strangely invested in this baby archer, wherever the hell she came from. 

She can recognize the tone; he is being encouraging. She is not, actually, nervous; it's not that she's ever done competition shooting before, she hasn't, and it's not that she doesn't care very much about proving she can shoot as a man, but it's just impossible to be nervous with a weapon in hand. It is helplessness that is frightening; if one isn't helpless then all problems are just tactical ones. 

"I got this." She'll shoot at the farther target.

"Four, four, one is nine. Don't worry about the three you missed. Nine is really quite good here. Forty-nine, so, if you hit eleven you'll be hitting the bowman threshold. Still need to hold that average over three rounds for the rank, mind you..."

Joy calls to retrieve arrows, and Rembrandt pauses the explanation. 

Her father would not miss a stationary target at this distance even once, and he is hardly an archer out of legend, so Iomedae is mentally modifying what she can understand of these reassurances to be 'really quite good for a girl'. She smiles at him all the same and heads off to get her arrows again.

And when she comes back Rembrandt has found his stopwatch. 

"Alright, this round is going to be the speed round, so you can start shooting when I say go, and you get as many arrows as you can shoot in thirty seconds. I'll time you and I'll give you a warning at ten seconds left. So now is the time for that fast shooting, yeah?"

Rembrandt has handfuls of arrows in a quiver ready if Iomedae turns out to need thirty somehow. 

Iomedae...kind of only has one shooting speed. She should really work on that, she is aware, but she hasn't spent as long as she should practicing because swordfighting is more fundamentally satisfying and seemed more likely to be the grounds on which people didn't respect her. She'll take the shots, but not really any better or worse than when she was hitting the same target untimed.

Rembrandt gives Iomedae the warnings when her time is about to elapse, and then stops her when his stopwatch beeps for thirty seconds.

"Okay, bullseye, three, three, two and a miss... that's sixty two." Rembrandt whistles, impressed. "You need to submit three royal round scores for a rank, officially, but if you can maintain that average then the rank will be bowman."

"Bow- man," says Iomedae, beaming at him. As good as a man is a very high compliment as far as she is concerned. "Thank you for bow. I very grateful, you very good."

"You don't know if I'm good. You haven't seen me shoot," Rembrandt points out mildly, but accepts the compliment. "Do you have other things you want to do today? You can shoot multiple royal rounds right now if you like, but you probably want to see the rest of the event." 

"Bow man can fight swords, because man?"

"Uh. Can you rephrase that for me?" That seems like a complete non sequitur to Rembrandt. 

"They sayed, I no can fight swords, because I a foster child. Is it that if I am a bowman, I can fight men?"

Rembrandt takes a deep breath and studies the young lady in front of him. She just shot like someone who's been shooting for a decade, and she really does seem at home in garb - none of the air of selfconsciousness that newbies sometimes have in their first Gold Key tunics - but she's clearly a new newbie. Better not to forget it.

"I don't know what the rules are for fostering because I don't know anything about fostering, really, but at the archery range you can compete with the adults, and I think on the heavy field you can do that when you're sixteen. Bowman is a rank, it means if you get three scores like the one you just did then you are a better archer than if you only scored forty or fifty. It's a good rank. If you earn it then the baron and baroness will give you a badge in court, and if you get the next rank up then the crown gives you a badge." 

"But still a foster child, if you get badge?"

What sort of question even is that? Did this kid's parents abandon her to the foster system because she wasn't good enough at archery? 

"Um.... yeah, I don't think anything we do in the SCA is going to... bring your parents back, or magically make you an adult, I'm sorry." His voice softens slightly. "I wish I could, kid, but I'm just the archery marshal." 

She doesn't catch every word of that but she catches enough to gather that - he regrets that it does not work that way, he does not have the power to make it work that way but he agrees it would be good. There is something enormously soothing about that, as little as she generally wants to be pitied, about someone agreeing on some level that it would be unfortunate to be enslaved in a foreign land even if it is not actually something they can do anything about. "I understand," she says. "Thank you."