The Forest Laird by Jack Whyte

stiffly to display the corded strength of his forearms, the bull-like thickness of his massive torso, and the pillar of his neck. Beneath the taut arch of his ribs, his belly bulged with twin columns of muscled plates.
    “Here’s what you’re lacking, lads,” he said, making his belly muscles twist and writhe from side to side like some thick snake. “Thews. Archers’ muscles.” He dropped his arms and reached for his tunic. “You’ll never pull a bow until you have them, and the quarterstaff’s the only thing that will give them to you. You’ll use it every day, hour after hour until you can’t lift your arms and the staff falls from your fingers, and then you’ll rest until the blood returns and start all over again.”
    He faced Will. “You want to be an archer, William Wallace? Well, I’ll teach you to be one and you’ll hate me while I’m doing it. But I promise you, within this year you’ll see the benefits of the quarterstaff. You’ll see muscles growing where you don’t have places yet. And once you’ve seen the first of them, you’ll never want to stop. Believe me on that.” He pointed at the two lengths of stripped elm that we had set aside at the start. “Those are your first ones, and they’re green with sap—wet and heavy and cumbersome. They’ll introduce you to the pains of becoming a warrior. Tomorrow, after school, I’ll teach you how to hold one.”
    He spoke the truth, and we spent the whole of the next evening learning how to hold a quarterstaff. Anyone with hands can grasp a stick, we thought at first, so whence was the promised difficulty to come? The answer, of course, lay in what we had not yet considered: a quarterstaff is not a mere stick of wood but a potent weapon, and there are many ways to hold one but only a very few in which to hold one effectively. And so began three months of torment as we sought in vain to please our tutor, whose amiable nature had vanished when we first laid hold of those elm staves. He made us work so hard, so endlessly, that by day I found myself falling asleep at my lessons and often incapable of closing my bruised fingers on my pen, a situation that too often drew my tutors’ disapproval.
    But then came a day when I survived my entire schedule of lessons without lapse or mishap and began to realize that the agonies that had plagued me for so long were no longer noticeable. I went directly to Will with the news, and he told me that his, too, had died away, and we marvelled together over the difference, wondering what had caused it. The regimen so grimly imposed on us each evening by Ewan was no less brutal or demanding; he still badgered us relentlessly for hours each day, driving us harder and faster every time, but the pains had receded and the effort we expended on our drills no longer sapped us to exhaustion.
    Three months had elapsed by then. A month later, Ewan had been summoned to Elderslie by Sir Malcolm, leaving us with an unaccustomed gap in our after-school training. It was late summer, and so Will and I had gone swimming in the river that flowed near our house.
    “Wait,” Will cried out as I prepared to dive back into the pool from which I had just emerged. He was standing neck-deep in water, fanning his arms to hold himself in place against the sluggish current. “Wait you. Stay there.”
    “What?” I said hastily, looking down at my loins. “Is there a leech on me?”
    He launched himself forward and swam until he was directly below me, then stood again and peered up at me, flicking the wet hair out of his eyes. I still could see no leech, though the thought of one unnerved me. I loathed the things.
    “Where is it, the leech?”
    “There’s no leech,” he said. “I see muscles. Your belly’s hard and your shoulders have grown out. And look at your arms.”
    I looked, but could see no difference there from the last time I had looked. And then I realized what he was talking about, even before he went on to say, “Ewan