Page 116 of Legacy Elite

That's the entire problem with today's exercise, and Voss knows it, and I am ninety percent certain he built the course specifically to make that point at me.

"Again," he calls. "From the top."

I come round the end of the line of barrels at a dead run — and running as a direwolf is still the single best physical sensation of my life, all that reach out in front and the ground just going — and I hit the first turn clean, and the second turn clean, and then I have to thread the gate.

Four feet.

I get my shoulders in.

I do not get my hips in.

The right-hand post comes out of the ground with a noise like a small tree dying and cartwheels about fifteen feet down the field.

"Miller."

I sit down on the wet grass and look at the post.

Then I look at Voss with what I would like recorded as an expression of complete innocence.

"That's the fourth one this week."

I can't answer him, obviously, because I'm currently the size of a horse and made mostly of teeth. But I'm reasonably confident my face is doing enough.

"She's enjoying herself," Soren says from the fence.

Traitor.

"She's supposed to be learning to fit through things," Voss says. "Fitting through things is the entire skill. Any idiot can go through a fence. Go and get the post."

I go and get the post.

It takes me a while, because carrying a six-foot wooden post in your mouth is significantly harder than it looks, and by the time I drop it at Voss's feet Soren has turned around and is examining the treeline with great interest and his shoulders are not entirely still.

Here's the thing, though.

At the beginning of the year, I couldn’t even shift on command.

Now I'm doing drills. Voss says shift and I shift, most of the time, in under four seconds, which he tells me is unacceptable and which I know for a fact he's written down as progress. I've run this course seven times this afternoon. I've done stop-on-command until my legs shook. I can hold this body for over an hour now without it feeling like something I'm borrowing.

I still can't get through a four-foot gate.

But I'm here.

"Again," Voss says. "And this time think about your back end. You keep steering the front of yourself and leaving the rest to catch up."

We finish at five.

I shift back on the line where I stopped — two seconds, maybe less, which nobody comments on and which I notice — and stand there in the cold with my hands on my knees, breathing like I've been beaten with a plank.

"You're rushing the third turn," Soren says.

"I'm not."

"You come off the barrels too wide and then you're carrying speed you can't lose before the gate."

"I know I'm carrying speed—"

"So lose it earlier."