The Royal Ranger: A New Beginning: 1 (Ranger’s Apprentice: The Royal Ranger)

“IT’S BEEN EIGHTEEN MONTHS SINCE ALYSS’S DEATH,” GILAN said. “In that time, can any of you remember seeing Will laugh, or even smile?”

Sadly, the others shook their heads. They exchanged uncomfortable looks.

Then Pauline spoke.

“It’s heartbreaking. He was always such a cheerful, happy person. Always grinning, always joking. These days, it’s as if a light has been extinguished inside him.”

“Of course, we can’t expect him to just shake off the effects of losing Alyss in a few months,” Halt put in. “She was his soul mate, after all, and losing her was a terrible shock to him.”

Alyss’s death had been the result of a terrible, tragic mischance. She had been returning, with a small escort, from the Celtic court, where she had overseen the renewal of the defense agreement between Araluen and Celtica.

It was a routine trip and a routine mission. But on the way home, she chanced upon a situation in Anselm, one of the southern fiefs.

For some months, a gang of criminals, led by a former mercenary named Jory Ruhl, had been preying on villages in Anselm and its neighboring fiefs.

They would capture children, then demand ransom payments from their parents. Since villagers weren’t usually wealthy people, often the entire village would be forced to contribute to the ransom.

A local constable had received word that Ruhl and his gang were meeting one night at an inn called the Wyvern. Coincidentally, this was where Alyss had chosen to stay. The constable organized a posse of volunteers and marched on the Wyvern with them.

Unfortunately, the attempted arrest was badly bungled. Ruhl received warning of the approaching posse, and he and his men were making their escape when the constable and his force arrived on the scene. A fight broke out and one of the posse was killed. Seeking to create a diversion while they escaped, Ruhl and one of his men set fire to the inn. The dry thatching of the roof was soon ablaze, and smoke filled the small saddling yard. Guests in the inn began streaming out, seeking safety, and soon, in the swirling smoke and the mass of shouting, frightened people, the constable had no way of knowing who was who. In the confusion, Ruhl and his four henchmen escaped into the forest.

Alyss and her three armed guards were among the guests who escaped from the burning building. But as she stood in the saddling yard outside, the blond Courier looked up and saw a face at an upper window.

It was a five-year-old girl, struggling desperately to unfasten the latch on the window, which was jammed. As her panic grew, smoke filled the room and she began to cough, her eyes streaming. Blinded by the smoke and disoriented, she staggered away from the window and was lost to sight.

Without hesitation, Alyss plunged back into the burning inn, ignoring the warning cries from her guards. She fought her way up the staircase, which was already aflame, and headed for the front of the inn, her eyes closed and her face shielded from the raging heat by her forearm. She moved instinctively, feeling her way along the wall with her other hand.

She found the door latch and forced it open, lurching into the room where the girl had been. She dropped to her hands and knees, where there was a small pocket of clearer air, and crawled toward the window. It was visible only as a vague square of light against the black, roiling smoke.

On the floor below the window, she could just make out the crumpled form of the young girl. Alyss crawled rapidly toward her and rolled her over, seeing with relief that her chest was still rising and falling as she breathed, striving hopelessly for a lungful of clean air. Alyss stood and drew her heavy dagger. She jammed it into the narrow gap between the window and its frame and jerked on it with all her strength. With a splintering crack, the window flew open, banging back against the outside wall. Alyss stooped and gathered the girl in her arms, heaving her up onto the sill. In the yard below, her guards were watching, horror written on their faces. They could see how badly the inn was aflame. The section where Alyss now stood was one of the few places untouched so far.

“Catch her!” Alyss yelled, and shoved the unconscious girl out the window, sending her sliding down the slope of the thatch. As the girl tumbled over the edge, the three guards moved forward to catch her. The weight of the falling body sent one of them sprawling in the dust and the other two staggered. But they managed to break the girl’s fall successfully. Then they looked back up to the window, where Alyss was beginning to clamber out.

A wall of flame shot up out of the thatch, between Alyss and the edge of the roof. The timbers and rafters below that point of the roof had been burning, unseen, for some minutes, and the fire suddenly broke through.

Alyss was lost to sight. Then, with a terrible rumbling crash, the entire section of roof above and around where she was standing gave way and collapsed in a mass of flames and sparks. In a fraction of a second, there was nothing left but a gaping, smoking hole in the front of the inn. Then more timbers burned through and the entire front wall of the inn collapsed in on itself.

Alyss never had a chance.

• • •

“I know,” Gilan said now, breaking the long silence that had followed Halt’s statement. “It’s not an easy thing to get over.”

They all cast their minds back to the terrible day when they heard about Alyss’s death, seeing it in their minds as it had been described by Alyss’s distraught guards.

“It was so typical of Alyss,” Cassandra said quietly, “to give up her own life like that. Her guards said she never hesitated—just ran into the fire to save that girl.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t have been so hard on Will if we’d been able to bury her,” Pauline said. The fire was so intense that Alyss’s body was never recovered. “Funerals may be terribly sad affairs, but at least they give some sense of finality to the people left behind. I know I feel as if there’s a gap that hasn’t been filled. It must be so much worse for Will.”

Gilan waited a few seconds before he spoke again. “I can understand his grief and his sense of loss over this whole matter,” he said. “That’s something he’ll have to come to terms with eventually. And I’m sure he will. But there’s something else.”

The others all looked at him curiously. But Halt sensed he knew what the

young Commandant was talking about.

“Jory Ruhl and his gang,” Halt said quietly.

Gilan nodded. “He’s become embittered about the fact that they escaped.

He’s set himself the task of catching them. He’s on a personal quest for revenge, and the obsession is feeding the blackness in his mind and soul until he thinks about nothing else.”

Cassandra gave a sad little cry and put her hand to her throat. The thought of Will, her longtime companion—almost a surrogate brother—being driven and dominated by such a black passion brought tears to her eyes. She remembered their days together on the island of Skorghijl long ago, when he had protected her and cared for her and kept her spirits up through the darkest of times. Remembered him in Arrida, coming to their rescue at the last moment, just as Halt knew he would.

You couldn’t think of Will without seeing his unruly mop of brown hair and that cheerful grin on his face. Will had always been filled with an inner energy. He was enthusiastic and inquisitive, forever seeking something new and interesting in life. It was this trait that led the Nihon-Jan people to christen him chocho, or butterfly. He seemed to flit cheerfully from one idea to another, from one event to the next.

Cassandra had seen Will several times since Alyss’s death, although he tended to avoid his old friends. He was a grim-faced, gray-bearded figure these days. There was no sign of the old Will. Pauline was right. It was as if a light inside him had been extinguished.

“He needs something to take his mind off this idea of revenge,” Halt said.

“Can’t you assign him to a mission—give him something to occupy his thoughts?”

“I’ve tried that,” Gilan said with a frown. He paused before continuing.

“He’s refused on two occasions.”

Halt was shocked by the words. “Refused? He can’t do that!”

Gilan made a helpless gesture. “I know, Halt. And so does Will. If it happens again, I’ll have to suspend him from the Corps.”

“That would kill him,” Horace said.

Gilan looked at him. “And he’s well aware of it. But he doesn’t care. And that means I can’t afford to assign him another task. He’ll refuse and I’ll have to take action. At the same time, I can’t afford to have my most effective Ranger sitting on his hands brooding about Jory Ruhl and his gang and planning how to catch them. All that aside, he’s my friend and I hate seeing

him this way.”

“I thought he’d already caught some of them?” Horace asked.

“Three of the five. He caught one only two weeks ago. Henry Wheeler was his name. Will confronted him and Wheeler tried to escape.”

“What happened?” Halt asked, although he dreaded to hear the answer.

People didn’t just “escape” from someone as skilled and deadly as his old apprentice, and he didn’t want to hear that Will had blood on his hands.

Gilan seemed to sense his thoughts. He shook his head abruptly.

“Wheeler is dead. But it wasn’t Will’s doing. He tried to attack Will and fell on his own knife.”

Halt heaved a silent sigh of relief. “And the other two?” he asked.

“He captured them both and brought them in for trial and sentencing.

Although he said to me that he was hoping they’d try to escape. I got the feeling that he even gave them several opportunities to do so. But they weren’t stupid enough to take them.”

There was a brief silence as they thought about their old friend.

“What about Ruhl?” Horace asked.

“Will nearly caught him on one occasion,” Gilan replied.

Halt looked up quickly. “I didn’t know that.”

Gilan nodded. “It wasn’t long after he started hunting them down. He got within five meters of him. Ruhl was on a punt, crossing a river. Will arrived just too late, after the punt left the bank. They were face-to-face for a few seconds. But by the time Will unslung his bow, Ruhl took cover behind some wool bales. Will tried to follow by climbing along the overhead cable that held the punt against the current. But when Ruhl reached the far bank, he cut through the cable and dropped Will in the river. He came close to drowning.”

“So close,” Halt muttered. “I imagine that makes it even worse for him.”

Gilan nodded agreement.

“So, Gil,” Pauline said, ever the one for practical action, “what do you suggest we do—other than simply talking about it and wringing our hands?”

Gilan hesitated. He was moving onto uncertain ground here, but his instinct told him the key to Will’s salvation lay with the people in this room

—the ones closest to him.

“Look,” he said slowly, “we’re the ones he loves above all others. And the ones who love him. Maybe if we all talked to him together. If we got him into a room and told him how we’re worried for him, how we can see the harm this quest for revenge is doing to him, well, maybe the fact that we’re

all saying it will get through to him. Maybe he’ll . . . I don’t know . . . snap out of it?”

He finished the rambling sentence on a questioning note, as if looking for one of the others to supply the answer. To tell the truth, he wasn’t sure what they could achieve. But he sensed that this group of people were the key to solving Will’s problem. Perhaps the combined force of their love for him could break through the dark fog that was swirling in his mind, pull aside the black curtain that had separated him from all but one thought—revenge for Alyss’s death.

“I don’t think just talking will do it—” Horace said thoughtfully.

Cassandra interrupted. “But surely if we all talked to him, all of us at once, we could get through to him?”

Horace pursed his lips. “I don’t know. You know how Will is. He’s stubborn. Always has been.” He glanced to Halt for confirmation, and the old Ranger nodded.

“Odds are,” Horace continued, “if we just talk at him, he’ll nod his head and pretend to agree with us. Then, when we’re done, he’ll simply continue on as he has been.”

He paused, his face set in a thoughtful frown. He sensed he was close to an idea but couldn’t quite grasp it.

“We need a new focus for him. Something that will break his obsession with Jory Ruhl and his surviving accomplice. Something that will occupy his mind so fully that it will leave no room for thoughts of revenge.”

Gilan spread his hands in a defeated gesture. “Well, as I said, I tried to send him on two missions and he—”

“It needs to be something more compelling, more personally involving than just a mission,” Pauline said, grasping what Horace was getting at. Like him, she felt there was an idea floating just out of reach. It was Halt who stated it.

“He needs to take on an apprentice,” he said.

They all turned to look at him. The idea, once stated, seemed so obvious.

Both Horace and Pauline nodded. This was what they had been getting at, without realizing it.

Gilan looked hopeful for a few seconds, then shook his head in frustration.

“Problem is,” he said, “we have no suitable candidates at the moment.

And we can’t offer him someone substandard. He’ll simply refuse to take on

someone who’s not up to scratch and he’ll be right. I won’t be able to blame him for that.”

“I wasn’t thinking just any apprentice,” Halt said. “It needs to be someone he already has a personal connection with. Someone he cares about, so that he can’t refuse. It needs to be a person who will involve him emotionally—as well as physically and intellectually.” He looked at his wife. “Remember years ago, when I sent Will off to Celtica with Gilan and I started behaving a little . . . erratically?”

“You started throwing noblemen out castle windows, as I recall,” she said, her lips twisting to contain a smile. Halt made a gesture that indicated he didn’t want to get into detail about that time in his life.

“Whatever. You sensed that I needed a new influence in my life to take my mind off the things that were troubling me.”

“As I recall, you were assigned to accompany Alyss on a mission,” she said.

“And it did the trick. Her youth and cheerfulness snapped me right out of my brown mood.”

Lady Pauline arched an eyebrow. “It didn’t stop you throwing people into moats.”

“Maybe not. But he deserved it,” Halt said, showing a rare grin. Then he became serious again. “Anyway, what I’m thinking is, if we put Will in charge of someone like I described, it might get his mind off this quest for revenge. And if we can do that, we’ll be well on the way to helping him accept and live with Alyss’s loss.”

“Of course, you never get over the loss of a loved one,” Cassandra mused.

Halt nodded to her. “No. But you can learn to live with it and accept it.

And gradually, the hurt becomes more bearable. It doesn’t go away, but it becomes bearable.”

Gilan had been watching his former mentor carefully while he put his case. The young Commandant knew Halt, probably better than anyone else in the room.

“I take it you have someone specific in mind to be Will’s apprentice?” he asked.

Halt looked at him. “I was thinking Madelyn.”