Ranger's Apprentice 12: The Royal Ranger (6 page)

‘Perhaps it’s none of our business, Halt . . .’ she began.

‘No. It’s all right,’ Cassandra said.

‘What does she do in the forest?’ Halt asked her.

‘She tracks animals. And she hunts.’

‘Is she any good?’

Cassandra shrugged uncertainly. Horace answered before he could stop to think.

‘Apparently yes. She never comes back empty-handed. But she gives the game to the castle guards.’

Cassandra looked at him. ‘How do you know that?’ she demanded.

Horace looked confused. He dropped his gaze from hers. ‘I . . . err . . . I may have heard some of the guards discussing it.’

‘And you didn’t choose to share this with me?’

‘I didn’t think there was any point. I knew you’d just get angry about it.’

‘And you were right! If you’d seen your way to –’

Pauline clapped her hands sharply. It was a measure of her personality and self-confidence that she would call the Princess Regent to order in such a peremptory fashion. And a measure of Cassandra’s regard for the tall, blonde Courier that she would accept such brusqueness.

‘Horace! Cassandra! That’s enough!’ They both stopped and looked at Pauline and she continued in a milder tone. ‘You’re not the first parents to be driven crazy by a teenage daughter. And you won’t be the last. It’s difficult, I know. But don’t let it become too big a thing. Keep
it in perspective. You need to maintain a united front, not bicker among yourselves.’

The two looked meekly down at their shoes. Halt smiled to himself again. They looked like naughty children rebuked by a stern parent.

‘And it seems to me,’ he said, ‘she’s not the first princess to go off in the woods at night looking for adventure.’

Cassandra screwed up her lip. ‘Oh, don’t you start.’

‘Basically Maddie’s a good kid,’ he continued. ‘She’s smart and brave and resourceful. Because that’s the way you’ve raised her.’

‘Well,’ said Gilan, a little impatiently, ‘if that’s settled for the moment, perhaps we could discuss the reason I asked to see you all.’

They turned to face him, wondering what he was going to say. They didn’t have long to wait.

‘It’s Will,’ he said. ‘I’m very worried about him.’

‘
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 heart-breaking. 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 been overseeing the renewal of the defence agreement between Araluen and
Celtica. It was a routine trip and a routine mission. But on the way home, she had 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 neighbouring 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 had organised 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 had escaped from the burning building. But as she stood in the saddling yard outside, the blonde Courier had 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 towards 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 towards 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 had all cast their minds back to the terrible day when they had 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 had been so intense that Alyss’s body had never been 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 long-time 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 had known 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 had 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, grey-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.