Richard walked amongst his guards going through their basic training. Among them were a number of different age groups. Some were children as young as nine. This year's batch of trial participants was rather large and because of that, his forces had an influx of trainees.
The training groups were broken down from nine to eleven, twelve to fourteen, then at fifteen they joined training with the adults. Other than surviving the trials at age nine by entering the forest, the other factor that granted his domain the strongest soldiers in the kingdom was that their training began at nine and continued until they retired, deserted, or died.
