Rangers of Linwood (The Five Kingdoms Book 1) by LeAnn Anderson

half-mile. She wanted desperately to enter formal training as a Ranger, but still had to wait another three years.
    Something that she always noticed, though, was that nobody was ever on the ropes course immediately after breakfast. It was one of three obstacle courses set up in the camp. Aside from a difficult, generalized obstacle course that was used by advanced trainees, with scores and times used in determining whether or not a Ranger was read for his or her bow or blade, there was one made of rooms requiring a knowledge of lock picking and the disarmament of traps.
    And then there was the ropes course. Netting and straight ropes to climb, with and without knots to help a climber, were intermixed along with artificial vines, rock walls requiring ropes to scale them and two wide ditches to be swung across, one with the rope already tied to a beam and the other where the trainee needed to attach the rope to the beam themselves.
    Those were the stories Tesni had heard, anyway. Each of the courses was closed in, a trainee’s scores and times magically written onto a piece of parchment for Arya and Ryder to check later. Right now, though, Tesni didn’t care if she got caught. She didn’t care how bad her score was. She just wanted a new challenge, and that ropes course looked awful tempting.
    So, instead of showing up for her chores, instead of even going through the normal breakfast line, Tesni grabbed some dried fruit and nuts, ate them right before her run, and, as soon as she got back, she slipped through the door of the course, which immediately closed behind her.
    The first part of the course was easy. Above a pit lined with feather mattresses was a large net. The goal was to get across, and Tesni found that her smaller size was a bit of a disadvantage, as she could easily slip a foot through between the ropes.
    Still, she made it across quickly, and then up a climbing net that started at a shallow angle, then went to a steeper angle, and then straight up. When she got to the top, she found that she needed to swing across to another platform. She grabbed the rope, stepped back a couple of steps, then ran those steps forward and launched herself.
    Again, her smaller size left her disadvantaged. Her lower weight meant that she had less momentum, and she barely got her balance when she half landed, half fell onto the next platform, having overcorrected her balance to keep herself from falling backwards onto the feather mattresses below.
    On the other side of the platform, there was a zip line, and Tesni had no problems with it other than, again, her lower weight contributing to a lack of momentum. Still, it went fast enough, and she landed without losing her balance at all.
    Next she climbed a straight rope with knots in place, leapt to a wall of netting and used it to get around another pit, climbed up a straight rope without the knots, and found herself at another platform. Here, she found her greatest difficulty, hooking the grappling hook just right around the rafter so that she could swing across. This gap was shorter, however, and her lack of momentum wasn’t as much of an issue.
    Tesni could see another zip line leading to the artificial vines on the rock climb and finally the exit door on the other side of the next gap, this one with a rope stretched tightly over it. This gave Tesni pause. Her balance was not in question, and she could clearly see the feather mattresses at the bottom, but what would happen if she fell?
    She took a deep breath, took one step out, then a second, and then felt the world drop out beneath her.
     
    
     
    Tesni hadn’t shown up for breakfast, and now Arya couldn’t find the girl anywhere. She wasn’t in the stables. Nobody had seen her leave camp since coming back from her morning run. She wasn’t in the mess line. She wasn’t in the tent. She wasn’t even watching the archers intently as she sometimes did.
    Then she saw that the door to the ropes course was closed.