Alanna The First Adventure - By Tamora Pierce Page 0,11

of warfare—which is what I am supposed to teach you.”

Alanna left the class thinking, something she seldom did seriously.

“Why the frown?” Gary asked, catching up to her. “Don’t you like Myles? I do.”

Startled, Alanna blinked at him. “Oh, no. I liked him a lot. He just seems—”

“Odd,” Alex said dryly. He and Gary seemed to be close friends. “The word you want is ‘odd.’”

“Alex and Myles are always arguing about right and wrong,” Gary explained.

“Actually, he seems very wise,” Alanna said hesitantly. “Not that I know many wise people, but—”

“He’s also the Court drunk,” Alex pointed out. “Come on—before lunch is over and we haven’t eaten.”

After lunch came an hour of philosophy. Alanna almost nodded off to sleep as the teaching priest droned on about duty.

At last Gary took her outside, down to the acres of practice courts and exercise yards behind the palace. Here was the center of training for knighthood. Alanna would spend her afternoons and part of her evenings here, going inside only when it actually rained or snowed—and sometimes not even then. Here she must learn jousting, fighting with weapons such as maces, axes and staffs, archery while standing and while riding, normal riding and trick riding. She must learn to fall, roll, tumble. She would get dirty, tear muscles, bruise herself, break bones. If she withstood it all, if she was stubborn enough and strong enough, she would someday carry a knight’s shield with pride.

Training was endless. Even once a knight had his shield—or her shield—he still worked out in the yards. To get out of shape was to ask for death at the hands of a stranger on a lonely road. As the daughter of a border lord, Alanna knew exactly how important the fighting arts were. Every year Trebond fought off bandits. Occasionally Scanra to the north tried to invade through the Grimhold Mountains, and Trebond was Tortall’s first line of defense.

Alanna could already use a bow and a dagger. She was a skilled tracker and a decent rider, but she quickly learned that the men who taught the pages and squires considered her to be a raw beginner.

She was a raw beginner. Her afternoon began with an hour of push-ups, sit-ups, jumps and twisting exercises. A knight had to be limber to turn and weave quickly.

For the next hour she wore a suit of padded cloth armor as she received her first lessons with a staff. Before she could learn to use a sword, she had to show some mastery of staff fighting. Without the heavy padding she would have broken something that first afternoon. As it was, she learned to stop a blow aimed at her side, and she felt as if she had been kicked by a horse.

Next she learned the basic movement in hand fighting—the fall. She fell, trying to slap the ground as she hit, trying to take her weight on all the right places and creating new bruises whenever she missed or forgot.

The next hour saw her placing a shield on a bruised and aching left arm. She was paired off with a boy with a stout wooden stick. The purpose of this exercise was to teach her how to use the shield as a defense. If she succeeded, she stopped the oncoming blow. If she didn’t, her opponent landed a smarting rap on the part of her she had left exposed. After a while they traded off and she wielded the stick while her partner headed off her attack. This didn’t make her feel any better—since she was new to the use of the stick, her opponent caught every strike she tried.

Feeling cheated, Alanna followed Gary to the next yard. Archery was a little better, but only a little. Because she already knew something about archery, she was permitted to actually string the bow and shoot it. When the master discovered she had a good eye and a better aim, he made her work on the way she stood and the way she held her bow—for an hour.

The last hour of her day’s studies was spent on horseback. Since Alanna had only Chubby to ride, she was assigned one of the many extra horses kept in the royal stables for some of her riding. Her first lesson was in sitting properly, trotting the horse in a circle, bringing him to a gallop, galloping without falling off and halting the horse precisely in front of the master. Because her horse was too large for her and had