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sure that it wouldn’t involve being accepted into Battleschool.
    He hesitated, needing some slight extra push to get him going. It was the fat sergeant who provided it. Will heard the heavy intake of breath, the shuffling of the man’s studded boots against the flagstones as he gathered his equipment together, and he realised that the sergeant was about to make one of his irregular circuits of his beat. Usually, this entailed going a few metres around the tower to either side of the doorway, then returning to his original position. It was more for the purpose of staying awake than anything else but Will realised that it would bring them face to face within the next few seconds if he didn’t do something.
    Quickly, easily, he began to swarm up the wall. He made the first five metres in a matter of seconds, spread out against the rough stone like a giant, four-legged spider. Then, hearing the heavy footsteps directly below him, he froze, clinging to the wall in case some slight noise might alert the sentry.
    In fact, it seemed that the sergeant had heard something. He paused directly below the point where Willclung, peering into the night, trying to see past the dappled, moving shadows cast by the moon and the swaying trees. But, as Will had thought the night before, people seldom look up. The sergeant, eventually satisfied that he had heard nothing significant, continued to march slowly round the tower.
    That was the chance Will needed. It also gave him the opportunity to move across the tower face, so that he was directly below the window he wanted. Hands and feet finding purchase easily, he moved almost as fast as a man could walk, all the time going higher and higher up the tower wall.
    At one point, he looked down and that was a mistake. Despite his good head for heights, his vision swam slightly as he saw how far he had come, and how far below him the hard flagstones of the castle yard were. The sergeant was coming back into view – a tiny figure when seen from this height. Will blinked the moment of vertigo away and continued to climb, perhaps a little more slowly and with a little more care than before.
    There was a heart-stopping moment when, stretching his right foot to a new foothold, his left boot slipped on the weather-rounded edge of the massive building blocks, and he was left clinging by his hands alone, as he desperately scrabbled for a foothold. Then he recovered and kept moving.
    He felt a surge of relief as his hands finally closed over the stone window ledge and he heaved himself up and into the room, swinging his legs over the sill and dropping lightly inside.
    The Baron’s office was deserted, of course. The three-quarter moon streamed light in through the big window.
    And there, on the desk where the Baron had left it, was the single sheet of paper that held the answer to Will’s future. Nervously, he glanced around the room. The Baron’s huge, high-backed chair stood like a sentry behind the desk. The few other pieces of furniture loomed dark and motionless. On one wall, a portrait of one of the Baron’s ancestors glared down at him, accusingly.
    He shook off these fanciful thoughts and crossed quickly to the desk, his soft boots making no noise on the bare boards of the floor. The sheet of paper, bright white with the reflected moonlight, was within reach. Just look at it, read it and go, he told himself. That was all he had to do. He stretched out a hand for it.
    His fingers touched it.
    And a hand shot out of nowhere and seized him by the wrist!
    Will shouted aloud in fright. His heart leapt into his mouth and he found himself looking up into the cold eyes of Halt the Ranger.
    Where had he come from? Will had been sure there had been nobody else in the room. And there had been no sound of a door opening. Then he remembered how the Ranger could wrap himself in that strange, mottled, grey-green cloak of his and seem to melt into the background, blending with the shadows