even a human would see the misuse of clan resources and poor tactical stance the old man had taken.
If a human warrior did not learn how to fight his stronger counterpart by training with them, the clan was left weakened and vulnerable when their enemies might well outnumber them in Chrechte warriors.
“Who did you practice with then?”
“Each other.” From the look of things that was not exactly stone sharpening stone.
“Who taught you?”
The men looked down and at each other but would not meet Barr’s gaze.
“Answer me.”
“Rowland said we had to earn the right to be trained by staying on our feet for one minute with an elite soldier. We never could.”
Of course they couldn’t. Without proper training, a human soldier had no chance against the wolf nature of even the poorly trained Donegal Chrechte. “Rowland is an idiot.”
A shocked gasp sounded. But the man who had spoken looked like at least he openly agreed with Barr.
“He’s our laird,” Muin said in a scandalized tone as he jogged up.
Barr didn’t hesitate. He knocked the Chrechte flat on his back with a blow meant to get notice. “I am your laird. Rowland is an old man who forgot the importance of every member of his clan. I don’t make those kinds of mistakes.”
“No, my laird.” From what he’d seen the former laird was close friends with Muin’s grandfather, but there was no hesitation in the younger warrior’s agreement.
“You earn your right to be trained by giving your loyalty to your clan,” Barr said to them all.
The youth he’d been sparring with drew himself up, his face set in hard lines. “We’ve done that.”
The other men nodded.
“Aye?” Barr prodded.
He did not doubt it, but they needed to be made aware in their own minds that they spoke bone-deep truth.
“Aye.” The youth’s tone was vehement, his head jerking up and down in agreement. “We build homes and repair our keep. We hunt to put food in hungry bellies, no matter our circumstances or the weather like to freeze us. We stand by our families, serving them as we do the clan as a whole. We try to learn to fight, but are left to train amongst ourselves.”
The other men nodded, adding comments of their own, the frustration they knew at the hands of Rowland and his ilk evident in every tense fist and grinding jaw. Their loyalty had been met with mockery and disdain.
Barr would allow no such travesty to happen again.
“Teaching you to hold your own against superior strength, skill and speed is my responsibility. I don’t fail at the tasks I take on,” he warned them.
Several of the men smiled, looking pleased by his promise. They weren’t smiling two hours later, but they weren’t complaining, either. Though each and every one of them, including Muin, sported fresh bruises and some had been bloodied as well.
They stopped their practice when Earc returned with the Chrechte hunting party.
“Did the boar get the best of you?” The hunters looked as beat up as the soldiers Barr had been training.
“You can damn well smell the blood.” Earc’s nostrils flared. He was clearly in no mood to be teased. “You know we caught our prey.”
But the final kill had obviously been a hell of a lot harder than it should have been with three wolves, even if only one of them could control his change.
Earc would mate soon enough and gain the ability to shift at will. That was one thing Barr and Talorc had argued over. Talorc maintained that sex constituted a mating. The wolves in his pack not born with the ability to shift at will like Barr could had to wait until mating to make that happen. To his knowledge, only the white wolf and its descendants were born with that ability. Others had to have sex after their transition to adulthood in order to control the change. It made little sense to Barr, but then there was much in his world that remained a mystery.
The inability to shift at will put Sinclair warriors at a tactical disadvantage to clans like the Balmoral, who had no such mores assigned to sex outside a mating.
He did not know what the Donegals practiced.
Circin and Fionn came forward, carrying the boar on a sturdy branch between them.
“Fionn looks like he wrestled the boar before you killed it.”
“Let’s just say he needs to learn a subtler way to hunt.”
“You instructed him?”
“He didn’t listen well the first time.”
Barr doubted the pig had been the only one in the forest