If I had ever complained of lack of time before today, I regretted it now. Four hours were spent staring at complicated diagrams of human anatomy. Thousands of foreign sounding names for the parts of the vessel and the various rules one was expected to understand in order to mend. We learned about the most common complaints during a knight’s service, and I was surprised to see how much time was spent going over natural maladies. Battle wounds were, apparently, too advanced for the week’s orientation. Instead, we were to focus on the most common inflictions: jungle rot, frostbite, burns, and dehydration. Alex and I had an advantage thanks to our years in the family apothecary. Unfortunately, most of that knowledge was lost to some frazzled recess in the corners of my mind. Darren’s warning from the night before kept invading my thoughts, destroying any semblance of concentration I had. The next few hours were even more disheartening. Piers had kept our regular conditioning, with its various laps and lunging and stretching between, but he had traded our staffs for heavy, weighted sacks of grain.
