Chapter 28

The first of the Apprentice Trials, archery, was held in the afternoon of the first day. Usually, Halt led this trial, but this year he had requested that Crowley choose another Ranger to lead it so that no one could accuse him of favoritism toward Will. Halt walked with Will and Toot toward the archery range. Round woven straw targets were set up in a field not far from the Common clearing. Quite a few Rangers lined up to watch the apprentices; it was entertaining to see the competition and afterward the older Rangers always held an impromptu competition of their own. Generally Halt won and was widely recognized among the Corps as the best archer, so there was a buzz of talk at the fact that he had stepped down from the Archery lead. The Ranger chosen to lead was one Will had never met from one of the smaller southern fiefs. His name was Geoffrey and he had an easy manner and warm smile in his tone that put Will at ease. Before the trial began, Halt pulled Geoffrey aside and explained the wind rattle and its purpose, asking if he could hang it in front of the target when Will shot.

"It doesn't change the target in any way?" Geoffrey asked.

Halt affirmed that it did not, so Geoffrey gave his permission.

The five boys drew straws to determine the order. Will was assigned the last target on the right.

Each boy would shoot ten arrows. To pass the trial an apprentice needed a minimum of 75 points. (Points on the target from the center outward begin with 10 in the exact center out to 1 on the outer edge.)

Halt quietly walked along the starting line and dropped a stick on Will's line. He and Will had prepared it earlier, smearing it with what they had come to call "Toot sauce." Whenever they needed to mark an object or location for Toot to find, they smeared it with this mixture of lard, honey and bitter herbs, easy for Toot to smell and find but bitter enough that he didn't want to spend time licking it.

Now, the innocent-looking stick clearly marked the line where Will would stand, 70 meters from the target. Casually, Halt hung the wind rattle on Will's target and then stepped back. It was all up to Will now.

The sides of the field were packed with spectators. Everyone was curious about the blind apprentice and whether he would be able to shoot by sound alone.

"Find your marks!" Geoffrey called.

"Toot! Find it!" Will told the dog in a low voice. Toot immediately headed toward the distinct smell that he knew. He arrived at the stick, sniffing it thoroughly. Will touched his head and trailed his hand down the dog's nose to touch the stick. He lined up with his toes touching the stick and pulled his bow off his shoulder. In an easy, practiced motion, he reached down the length of the bow to be sure the bottom string nock was set. Then he set the end of the bow in the loop of leather on the heel of his right boot. He bent the bow over his back and slid the upper loop of the string into place. He plucked the string, listening to the satisfying sound it made.

"Ready!" Geoffrey called when he saw that all of the boys' bows were strung. Each boy fitted an arrow onto his string.

Will felt in his quiver looking for the notches. He didn't want to take the time to find the arrows in numerical order, so he merely used the notches to nock the arrow with the cock feather out.

"Draw!" Geoffrey called, and wood creaked as five bows were pulled back to full draw.

"Aim and shoot!" This was not a timed trial; that would come later. With this round, they could take as long as they wished to aim and release. Will stood with his bow drawn, listening to the wind rattle move in the light breeze. In his mind, he was back in the practice field at home, shooting rounds of fifty arrows at a time, gathering them back up ten by ten, checking his shots.

An ordinary archer practices until he gets it right. A Ranger practices until he never gets it wrong.

Will had begun aiming for specific parts of the wind rattle, and he'd hit it so many times they had to make a new one. After that, he began aiming just below it, and he told Halt to hang it so that the longest rattle touched the center of the target. He hoped Halt had done so.

Will centered his weight, drew a breath, let it halfway out and released.

The shot felt off; he knew the moment the arrow was away. Tensely, he waited to hear the results.

An announcer called the scores: from left to right: 8, 9, 9, 8, 8. A ripple of applause ran around the field and a burst of surprised conversation. Will closed his eyes for a moment. An 8. He could do much better than that. He should have done much better than that.

He selected another arrow and nocked it to the string.

"Aim and shoot!" Will scored an 8 again. He was disappointed with himself, but he at least had a consistent score with the other four boys.

Each time he shot, a murmur of talk rose from the watching Rangers. Twice Will shot a 9 and once a 7. Once he hit a 10 dead in the center, earning enthusiastic applause from the crowd. Overall, his score was 83. Will drew a deep breath of relief. He had passed the first assessment!

The next round was the timed trial. A sand timer would be turned and the boys were to shoot as many arrows as they could in one minute; then their accuracy score would also be checked. Each boy was expected to fire twelve aimed shots in a minute at the very minimum.

Will stood loosely, holding his bow by his side. He and Halt had practiced this over and over; Will's downfall was having to feel for the notches to get the arrow nocked the right way up. They finally hit upon the solution of rounding the tip of the cock feather so that his fingers had more of a clue in a faster time. Holding extra arrows in his bow hand wasn't allowed, although in a real fight, that's probably what he would do.

"Ready!"

"Start!" With the signal, Will smoothly drew an arrow, his fingers around the fletching and his thumb on the nock. He knew smoothness was more useful than wild rapidity, so he nocked, aimed and drew in a smooth rhythm as if there was someone beating out time on a drum in his head.

"Stop!"

Will waited, heart pounding with anticipation.

The voice of the assistant called out the scores for each boy. Will had landed fourteen arrows, with an accuracy between six and nine. He was as consistent as the best of the other boys but had the fewest arrows on his target.

Then, just for fun, Geoffrey tossed an apple into the air to see if any of the boys could hit it. Each boy tried but only one hit the apple. Will's arrow didn't come anywhere near it, since he couldn't hear it at all.

Geoffrey announced the trial results: all five boys had passed the trial. The crowd burst into loud applause. They loved it when the apprentices did well, and they were amazed at how well Will had done. He simply drew a relieved breath and unstrung his bow. The assistant returned his arrows to him, and he put them carefully back into his quiver.

Halt said his name as he walked up, so that Will would know it was him, and they walked to the spectator area together. Several of the other Rangers and one of the apprentices came up to congratulate Will, commenting on how difficult it must be to shoot only by sound. Will soon had a circle of listeners as he told briefly about how he had worked out his method of shooting blind and how he practiced using the numbered arrows.

One of the Rangers said thoughtfully, "that's a good idea to number your arrows. I'm going to try that myself."

Soon the impromptu Ranger tournament began. Halt won without even seeming like he was trying, shooting ten perfect ten shots in a row. Will wondered if he would ever be that good. Then, Halt surprised them all by tying a strip of cloth over his eyes. Blindfolded, he shot again at Will's target that still had the wind rattle attached to it. To everyone's surprise, he shot several eights and nines among the lower numbers. He took off the blindfold and all he said was, "still working on it."

The group broke for an evening meal of Ranger stew, cooked over the campfire, and then everyone sat around the fire in the twilight talking. Much of the talk was about the shooting that afternoon. The apprentices all basked in the praise they received, but Halt retired to his tent early, not wanting to hear comments about his shooting. He was a skilled archer, not for praise, but for his own satisfaction and because his life often depended on it.

Many of the boys and a few of the older Rangers asked Will about Toot and his training, questions Will was only too happy to answer. Will hoped that Gilan would be among the group asking him questions, but he didn't hear his friend's voice. Finally, he crawled into his tent and at last fell asleep.

The next day's trials were Unseen Movement in the morning and tracking after lunch. For the Unseen Movement test, each boy was given a fist-sized rock. They lined up at a starting point, and the task was simple: get the rock into the central cooking pot without being spotted by Gilan or his crew of searchers.

Will had lost sleep over this trial and having it led by his friend made it even harder. He knew he was good at hiding in the dark at night. His ability to move without the aid of a lantern gave him an edge there. But here? In broad daylight?

Toot followed the group to the starting area, but Halt retrieved him and held him to prevent him from following Will and giving him away. The starting line was beyond the wood and near the creek in the back of the horse pasture. Most of the boys would be moving furtively through the woods, Will knew, hiding near clumps of trees, trusting their cloaks to conceal them. He needed a different plan. He decided his primary goal was to stay as far away from the searchers as he could. During their one-minute head start, while most of the boys headed for the woods as Will had guessed, he went in the opposite direction toward the creek. He slipped off his cloak, leather jerkin, linen shirt, breeches and leather boots. Wrapping them into a bundle, he pushed them far under a bush next to the creek. Then, in bare feet and underlinen only, he stepped into the muddy water.

It was a warm day and the water felt good. He lay on his stomach until the water covered his body up to his neck. With only his face and hair above the water, he considered what to do to conceal those. He picked up handfuls of mud from the bed of the stream and smeared his face and hair.

Then, careful to move smoothly and not splash, he crawled and slithered on hands and knees through the water. Every time he heard anyone approach the stream, he froze. As he moved gently along, he kept his eyes closed, knowing they were a bright spot in his mud-smeared face. He followed the stream to the point where it ran the closest to the camp, not far from the common area. There was a path there where people had been collecting stream water for cooking and drinking. He paused, leaning his mud-covered head against the opposite bank to the path, and stayed still, listening.

Two Rangers approached the stream with a cooking pot, planning to fill it with water to begin the midday meal. Rangers took turns with the cooking and it was a source of pride to have a meal complimented by the group or to have a certain recipe requested.

Will knew that the stream was on the opposite side of the common area to the wood where the other apprentices likely hid, since the stream curved around to the side of the common area. He had been traveling upstream, since the Rangers preferred to take their water before it ran through the horse pasture, and they set up the Gathering accordingly.

Before the Rangers with the cooking pot reached the stream, they stopped in the path to chat, paying little attention to the stream.

Will backed up until some bushes concealed him from the two Rangers. He stood slowly and carefully in the stream, letting the water trickle off his body as he did so. Once he stood upright in the knee-deep water, he began coating every part of his exposed body with mud. It felt heavy and sticky and it smelled nasty, but he continued.

The Rangers with the cooking pot arrived at the stream and knelt at its edge to fill their pot. Then they rose to go back to camp to boil the water and Will knew this was his chance. As quietly as he could, he stepped around the bushes that hid him, and onto the smooth dirt path. He winced as a sharp stick poked his foot but it did not cut him, and he went on.

He knew he needed to get to the common fire as quickly as he could and he didn't have time to waste searching for it. So he followed the two Rangers with the pot of water, hoping it was also their destination. As he followed them, a shout came from the direction of the woods, far from Will. One of the other apprentices had been spotted.

Will drew in a slow, steadying, silent breath. The most dangerous part was yet to come: when his exposed, not-very-muddy back would be visible to anyone in camp who happened to be behind the two Rangers. Of course all the Rangers tried to spot the stealthy apprentices, but it wasn't considered sporting to give their positions away to the searchers if they were spotted by a spectator only.

He didn't hear a lot of activity on this side of the camp; a lot of the Rangers were watching the woods where there was plenty of cover. The stream had little cover aside from a few bushes here and there, and nobody paid it much attention. It was an accepted feature of the landscape. Since unseen movement training generally involved standing wrapped in the Ranger cloak among the trees or lying face-down in the grass covered by the cloak, the idea that someone would leave the cloak behind didn't seem to occur to anyone.

Crouching slightly, Will followed the two Rangers through the open common area to the fire. Once there, they busied themselves hanging the pot over the fire to heat. Will needed to find the empty pot and put his rock in it, but he didn't know where it was located. Gilan had simply said "by the fire." Will wondered if it was cheating to ask someone, and decided that even if he did, they likely wouldn't help him. Just as they wouldn't say anything to the searchers, they wouldn't say anything to him either.

He decided there was nothing for it but to just start looking. He stood for a moment, listening to the crackle of the fire and feeling its warmth on his muddy knees. He had become so used to moving around the campfires they built while traveling, this was second nature, but he still needed to be cautious. He could feel the bare earth with his feet and he began walking slowly around the circle that held the fire.

He only got a quarter of the way around the circle when his toes struck something hard and he sucked in a breath at the stab of pain. Crouching, he felt the outlines of an empty pot sitting just in front of the fire. He placed his rock into it, then sat down next to it on the ground to wait.

He waited.

And waited.

Still no one said anything to him.

There was another shout in the woods, quite a bit farther south than the starting point had been. Someone had tried to work his way in a large circle around the common area.

It wasn't long after this Will heard a third shout, and then running feet. Another shout told Will that the other four apprentices had all been seen.

They came walking out of the woods then, along with the group of searchers. When they saw Will, sitting crosslegged by the fire, covered in crispy drying mud, several began to snigger.

"Will!" Gilan said in surprise. "What is all this about?"

Will shrugged and gestured to the pot. For a moment everyone looked into the pot, standing around it in stunned silence.

After several minutes, the group of boys and searchers finally sat down to talk out their strategy and analyze what each had done.

"But where is your cloak?" Gilan asked, perplexed.

"Back near the stream," Will answered.

"I thought you were supposed to use your cloak," added one of the other apprentices.

"The rules didn't say that," argued Will.

"That's true, they didn't," one of the searchers, an older Ranger, put in.

"But the whole point is to use your cloak and your training to move unseen," said Gilan despairingly.

"I thought the point was to get the rock into the pot," said Will.

"Well, yes, that was the goal," Gilan admitted.

"I did that," Will reminded him, gesturing to the pot.

"One of the skills of Unseen Movement is to move creatively," the older Ranger said.

"I'm not sure it should be this creative," Gilan said.

"May I explain?" Will asked and when silence met him as an answer, he took it as permission to continue. "When I went blind, I figured I was done. As a Ranger. Maybe as a man. The only blind person I'd known growing up was a beggar. But gradually, Halt and I decided to try things. It took a lot of thinking way outside the boundaries of how I'd learned to do things. It took a lot of problem-solving and creativity to figure out how to do things again. Things I wanted to do that are hard without sight. But Halt told me one day that something a good Ranger does is take any liability and turn it into an asset. Well, I can tell you, blindness is a huge liability…" some sympathetic chuckles came from the silent crowd. "...but I've figured out ways to make it an asset, and one of those assets is being able to think far enough outside the boundaries of what other people expect that I can get the advantage.

"Here, for example, you all expected me to wear my cloak and sneak through the woods. But you were waiting to catch me there and believe me, the fact that you can see and I can't is a huge advantage on your part. I had to do something completely unexpected to give myself the advantage. So I stripped, got all muddy and crawled through the stream. That had two advantages for me: it wasn't being watched and it guided me along without getting lost. Getting from the stream to the fire was hard again, but I followed these guys," Will gestured to the cooks, who were also listening with interest. "That way I could find the fire and the pot."

Will finished his speech and sat back, leaning on his muddy hands. There was silence in the group for a long minute.

"He's right that moving unexpectedly is one of the skills, and in a real situation, I'd certainly rather be muddy and alive than cloaked and dead," said one of the other searchers, whom Will recognized now as Geoffrey from yesterday's archery trial.

There was a murmur of agreement in the group.

"But…" Gilan started to protest and couldn't think of anything to say.

As they were speaking, more and more of the older Rangers had joined the group, listening to the discussion. Now one of them spoke.

"I'm with Gilan," he said flatly. "It's unbecoming of a Ranger to walk around naked and covered in mud. He ought to have used the Ranger skills to complete the trial." There were a few additional murmurs of agreement.

"He did use Ranger skills," argued another of the searchers. "And he was the only one to complete the task."

"He wouldn't have done it that way if he could see," the older Ranger declared. "He doesn't belong here."

Now it was out. The very words Will had dreaded all year long.

"He did the task!" cried Geoffrey, his voice rising.

"He cheated!" another Ranger called.

"It's not cheating if he is within the rules," someone else said, jumping to his feet. Others also rose. Everyone began talking and arguing at once.

"Calm down, calm down," Halt's quiet voice somehow carried over the hubbub of voices. "We'll decide this later. For now, lunch."

This effectively distracted the group, and they scattered to get their eating bowls.

Halt pulled Will to his feet.

"I don't feel like eating," Will said miserably.

"Hush," Halt directed. "Go back to the stream and get cleaned up and dressed." He pressed Will's staff into his hand. "Go."

Will walked slowly with bent shoulders toward the horse pasture. It wasn't fair, he thought. He had completed the trial, given the Rangers a creative solution and they didn't like it and didn't want him there. He supposed Gilan felt challenged again. It was his trial after all, and Will suspected that he had been looking forward to catching Will right away and proving that he didn't belong here. Instead, Will had broken his game, and he was mad.

"Well, let him be mad," Will muttered through ground teeth.

When he reached the horse pasture, Tug came up to him and laid his soft nose on Will's muddy shoulder. Will closed his eyes, soaking in the comfort from his friend. They stood that way for a long moment. Will was tempted for a minute to jump on Tug and just ride. He didn't care where. Just get away from the Ranger Gathering.

They were elites, the Rangers. The best of the best. They worked directly for the King and they took pride in their skill and reputation. Now, though, that pride was blinding them to Will. To his worth to the group. He wished he could just leave, quit trying to prove himself.

But where would he go? Being a Ranger was the thing he wanted most in the world to do. If he wasn't a Ranger, he'd have to become a farmer, and that sounded like boring drudgery to Will, and also hard to do without sight. Everything was hard to do without sight, he thought despairingly. Except climbing. That was still easy. Too bad there were no professional tree climbers.

He walked to the stream, with Tug following at his shoulder.

When he arrived, he waded into the water and began splashing and scraping the mud off. Some of the dried mud peeled off in flakes or chunks; other areas were more stuck. It took quite a bit more effort than Will expected, especially his hair. He scrubbed and picked, venting some of his frustration on the activity.

At last he was clean, and he walked along the bank in the sunshine looking for his bundle of clothes. He was dry by the time he found it so he dressed himself again.