The Drunk Wolf novel · Chapter 5 of 32

Chapter 5: The Cadet Yard

Struan pulled the nail out of the door with his fingers.

He read the notice twice.

Then he folded it into his apron pocket.

"Three days," he said. "He's giving me three days because he thinks I'll still be shaking."

"Will you?" Ailsa asked.

He held out his hand. It shook.

"Probably," he said.

The old cadet yard is behind the castle stables, a square of packed sawdust inside a stone wall, with the stave rack still on the north side.

Nobody had trained there in years. The Guard had built a new yard with lights.

We went at night, so the castle couldn't watch.

The first night was bad.

Struan picked up a stave and nearly dropped it.

Ailsa knocked him flat in four seconds.

"Again," she said.

He got up. She knocked him flat.

"Again."

By midnight he was sitting in the sawdust with his head between his knees, and I was holding a bucket for him in case.

"Ten years ago you'd have put me in the wall," Ailsa said. She didn't say it kindly. "Murdo knows that. He was there."

"I know he was there."

"Then get up."

On the second night, his hands still shook, but they shook less.

He blocked her twice.

Then a third time, and he turned the stave in the same motion, and Ailsa sat down hard on her backside with her mouth open.

He looked at the stave.

"There he is," I said.

"Don't," he said. But he was almost smiling.

On the third night I took the stave myself.

I'm not a stave fighter. I'm tall and I'm stubborn and I'm faster than I look, and I'd been watching for two nights.

He went easy on me for the first three passes.

"If you do that again I'll tell everyone you let a girl beat you," I said.

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