Read Valdemar 06 - [Exile 02] - Exile’s Valor for Free Online

Waystations were stocked with sufficient supplies, and every Herald on circuit carried emergency rations. During their last year, each Trainee would get an intense course in survival hunting and disadvantaged combat, and there was no point in making the youngsters utterly and completely miserable for the sake of showing them what it was like to be utterly and completely miserable. Not even the Karsite Officers’ Academy did that to its students, and having seen what life was like at the Collegia, Alberich knew that the lessoning he’d gotten at the Academy was harsh, and not at all conducive to training youngsters like these.
    Besides, with the Tedrels gone, and Karse itself essentially neutralized for a while, the only enemies that Heralds were likely to encounter in the field were bandits and brigands.
    Now, as Alberich well knew from long experience, bandits and brigands are humans; they are essentially lazy, or they wouldn’t be trying to steal rather than earn an honest living, and they are just as attached to their own creature comforts as any other humans. Given a choice in the matter, they wouldn’t attack under adverse conditions either. By night—certainly. In ambush, definitely. In a blizzard? A flood? A raging storm? Not likely. In fact, in all of the time that Alberich himself had led his men of the Sunsguard against the bandits on the Karsite border, never once had he encountered a band moving against a target when the weather was foul. That didn’t mean it was impossible, just unlikely. That made the circumstance something to guard against, but not something that required extensive training.
    So, when the snows began to fall in earnest just after the noon meal, Alberich herded the next class to arrive into the salle itself. Which occasioned the inevitable delay in the cleaning of boots at the door, and the taking off of cloaks and gloves and hanging them up to dry along the oven wall before anything could get started. And then, because this was a mixed class of Trainees from all three Collegia and some Blues as well, there was more delay as Alberich sorted them out into the limited space inside the salle.
    Although there was no fire actually in the room—far, far too dangerous to have a fireplace in an area where someone could fall or be thrown into it—the salle was kept reasonably warm by a huge brick “oven” in one corner. A relatively small fire deep inside it was set alight in the first really cold days of autumn and never allowed to go out, night or day. That fire heated the great mass of bricks that made up the oven and chimney and the wall, and that mass, in turn, radiated heat into the room. It also wasted heat along the outside of the same wall as well, but unfortunately, that couldn’t be helped . . . and anyway, that outside wall was a nice place for the Companions to come and warm themselves on a cold and sunless day. The salle wasn’t cozy—but no one was going to freeze without his cloak.
    You could—and Alberich occasionally had—actually bake meals in that oven, if said meals were the sorts of things that required slow baking. You could—and Alberich did, quite often during the winter—leave a pot of soup or stew in there as well, to stay warm during the day. It was off limits to the Trainees, however, not by virtue of any orders but by common sense. You couldn’t open the cast-iron door without burning your hand unless you used a heavy leather blacksmith’s gauntlet, and Alberich prudently never left any of those lying around outside; you had to go into his quarters to get one, or, like the servant who tended the fire now and again, you brought one with you.
    Of course, on a day like today, every youngster in the class was doing his or her best to get close to the oven and the warmest part of the room, which meant that unless the Weaponsmaster took a hand in it— and remembered who had gotten that choice part of