Free Ranger's Apprentice 1 & 2 Bindup by John Flanagan Page A

were then returned to their quarters, where they had the opportunity to take a brief shower – the water was cold – before making sure the dormitory and ablutions block were absolutely spotless. Quarters inspection came after that and it was painstaking. Sir Karel, the wily old knight who carried out the inspection, knew every trick in the book when it came to taking short cuts in cleaning the dormitory, making your bed and stowing your kit. The slightest infringement on the part of one of the twenty boys in the dormitory would mean all their kit would be scattered across the floor, their beds turned over, the rubbish bins emptied on the floor and they would have to turn to and start again – in the time when they should have been having breakfast.
    As a consequence, new cadets only tried once to pull the wool over Sir Karel’s eyes. Breakfast was nothing special. In fact, in Horace’s opinion, it was downright basic. But if you missed it, it was a long, hard morning until the lunch hour which, in keeping with the spartan life in Battleschool, was only twenty minutes long.
    After breakfast, there were classes for two hours in military history, the theory of tactics and so on, then the cadets were usually required to run the obstacle course – a series of obstacles designed to test speed, agility, balance and strength. There was a minimum time standard for the course. It had to be completed in under five minutes, andany cadet who failed to do so was immediately sent back to the start to try again. It was rare that anyone completed the course without falling at least once, and the course was littered with mud pools, water hazards and pits filled with nameless but unpleasant matter whose origin Horace didn’t want to even think about it.
    Lunch followed the obstacle course, but if you’d fallen during the run, you had to clean up before entering the mess hall – another of those famous cold showers – and that usually took half the time set aside for the meal break. As a consequence, Horace’s overwhelming impressions of the first week of Battleschool were a combination of aching muscles and gnawing hunger.
    There were more classes after lunch, then physical jerks in the castle yard under the eye of one of the senior year cadets. Then the class would form up and perform close order drill until the end of the school day, when they would have two hours to themselves, to clean and repair gear and prepare lessons for the following day’s classes.
    Unless, of course, someone had transgressed during the course of the day, or in some way caused displeasure to one of their instructors or observers. In which case, they would all be invited to load their packs with rocks and set out on a twelve-kilometre run, along a course mapped out through the surrounding countryside. Invariably, the course was nowhere near any of the level roads or tracks in the area. It meant running through broken, uneven ground, up hills and across streams, through heavily overgrown thickets where hanging vines and thick underbrush would claw at you and try to pull you down.
    Horace had just completed one such run. Earlier in theday, one of his classmates had been spotted in Tactics I, passing a note to a friend. Unfortunately, the note was not in the form of text but was an unflattering caricature of the long-nosed instructor who took the class. Equally unfortunately, the boy possessed considerable skill as a cartoonist and the drawing was instantly recognisable.
    As a result, Horace and his class had been invited to fill those packs and start running.
    He’d gradually felt himself pulling away from the rest of the boys as they laboured up the first hill. Even after a few days, the strict regime of the Battleschool was beginning to show results with Horace. He was fitter than he’d ever been in his life. Added to that was the fact that he had natural ability as an athlete. Though he was unaware of it, he ran