The Angel
Chapter 3
By: Trep092
Disclaimer: Own Ranger's Apprentice, I do not. (Yoda anyone?)
A/N: Everyone who has read/alerted/favourited/reviewed is awesome!
Reviewers:
Lady Bec of Imagineland: I'm glad you liked it! Yeah sadly for this story the chapters won't be that long. But, just for you, I'll try my best to post longer chapters!
Luvergirlof books: I most certainly am! Your welcome. I hope you like this chapter!
SupernaturalFlames: Hehehe I know I'm evil. I hope you like this one.
Scarhead8: Hehehe yes poor Horace!
*RA*RA*RA*RA*RA*RA*RA*RA*RA*RA*RA*RA*
Halt sighed. Abelard's ears flicked back at that unexpected noise from his master.
"Easy boy," he murmured to his horse as he patted his neck.
The shaggy little Ranger horse snorted softly as if saying, "how am I to be 'easy' when tension is rolling off you in waves?"
"Good point," Halt said softly and made a monumental effort to relax. He breathed deeply in through his nose, and then out through his mouth. It didn't help.
He wasn't new at his job. He'd been at it for years. He'd fought battles, hunted down crooks and thieves, and seen terrible things. There was still one thing that still got to him though. One thing that made him more taut with tension than his bowstring. Children. More specifically, missing, kidnapped, injured, or murdered children. And in this case he could be dealing with all three.
Earlier that day his archery practice had been rudely interrupted by an out-of-breath messenger bearing a urgent missive from Crowley, the Ranger Corps Commandant.
The message had been brief and to the point. There was a well-organized band of bandits terrorizing small farming communities in neighbouring fiefs, and by the looks of it, their next point of attack would be Serwood, a small farming community located in the extreme North East point of Redmont Fief.
The bandits were well organized and disciplined. They had waited until the fall harvest and were burglarizing homes while the occupants were busy gathering in crops. They were evidently on horseback as they moved from community to community with relative ease. They also appeared to be picking farms to hit at random, but were always moving in a westward direction.
The Ranger from the neighbouring Fief had been injured in the pursuit of the bandits, and Crowley wanted Halt to round them up as soon as possible so that they couldn't cause anymore damage.
He had quickly saddled Abelard and headed North as quickly as possible. The bandits struck during the day and he wanted to be there in time to prevent them from doing it again.
Despite Abelard's tireless speed, when he reached the small group of farms which made up Serwood, he found the inhabitants running about in utter chaos.
The residents of this sleepy little hamlet were rather isolated from the rest of the fief, and thus were more suspicious of Rangers than most people. Thus it took him a while to figure out what was going on. He found a large farmer who, amongst his frantic gestures to ward off evil, managed to tell Halt what had happened.
Most of the inhabitants of the community—including the women and older children—had been out in the fields gathering in crops. A couple of hours before, a tearful girl had run out to the field to tell the parents of the child she was supposed to be minding, that their son was missing and she couldn't find him anywhere.
The parents had abandoned their work and had gone back to their house to start a search. The child was known to be very adventurous and needed to be closely supervised because he had the tendency to wander off.
They had entered the house—and from what the members of the community figured—had interrupted a robbery in progress.
After a good chunk of time, when the parents hadn't returned to the fields, several women left to help them in their search for their son. They had entered the house only to find three bodies-the mother, the father, and the young girl that had been looking after the son.
The women had at once called for the men, and a haphazard pursuit was organized. This was when Halt had arrived on the scene.
He had immediately bade everyone to stop their actions. The people had instantly raised an uproar—angry that an outsider, that was claiming to be a ranger, and thus probably had evil magical powers, was ordering them around. It took quite a while for Halt to convince the locals that he was trying to help hinder. In many situations the over exaggerated fear of Rangers was useful, but today Halt cursed it. He was only trying to aid these people by finding the murderers and the now orphaned, little boy, but instead of compliance he was about to be driven away by a mob with pitchforks.
"I'm here to help you all," Halt shouted, while narrowing his eyes into the fierce expression that tended to make the most belligerent fool listen up. "Your town his experienced a terrible thing. A little boy is missing, three people are dead, and their murderers have bolted. I know you seek revenge, and are desperate to find the boy, but these tasks would be accomplished more expediently by a trained Ranger, and standing here arguing over the point is just wasting precious time the boy may not have." His bluntness was perhaps a bit callous, but there was no doubt it was effective.
There was some angry muttering as the restless crowd parted and let him pass, but his progress was not hindered. He approached the house in which the terrible events of the day had occurred and carefully pushed the front door open.
The small farmhouse was testament to the hard life of common farmers. The rooms were small and sparsely furnished, though they were meticulously clean. The three bodies laying in a heap on the floor wrecked the quaint atmosphere of the home though. Halt felt his stomach knot in revulsion as he stared down on the gruesome site.
The unfortunate owners of the house had definitely stumbled completely unaware into a burglary in progress. While most of the house was clean, the cupboards, trunks, and shelves that had contained the families valuables were open, overturned, and swept clean. Such things that were valuable to a family, but not to a thief, were scattered over the floor.
Halt's eyes swept quickly over the bodies. They were covered in blood from several erratic dagger wounds that looked as though they had been inflicted timidly. Unprofessional and sloppy as they were, there was no doubt they had been effective. The people who had committed this heinous crime—there had been at least three to have subdued all three victims without more of a struggle—hadn't wanted to kill the three people that had stumbled upon their robbery, but they had. That made them even more dangerous now. They had set up a scheme that would allow them to steal without conflict, but now that they had actually killed people, they would be scared and much more willing to lash out violently.
Tearing his eyes away from the horrible site before him, he turned around and quietly left the dead in peace. Outside the little house stood a couple, wrapped in each other's arms with silent tears trickling down their faces.
Halt felt his heart constrict with sympathy for the family, but his face remained stoically blank as he moved to step around the grieving couple. He wasn't any good at comforting people.
"Wait," the crying man said softly. Halt stopped in his tracks. "Please find the monsters who killed our daughter. Find them, and k-kill them. She deserved to live."
Halt felt his carefully constructed mask of indifference slipping. He looked straight into the red-rimmed, tortured eyes of the grieving father and promised, "I will find them."
With that proclamation, he walked away towards Abelard. As he walked, he couldn't help but notice that there was no single group of people frantic with worry for the missing boy. He stopped a passing farmer and asked him whether the boy, whose name he had learned was Horace, had any family remaining. The farmer shook his head in the negative and hurried off throwing cautious, unfriendly looks over his shoulder at the Ranger.
Halt swiftly mounted Abelard. Sensing his tension and impatience, the little horse's ears flicked up and he came to full attention. Halt, with a touch of the reigns, sent Abelard heading out of the village. The people he passed were still levelling angry stares on him, but at least they had listened to his instructions and weren't pursuing the murderers.
The road out of town was hard packed from the countless hooves and wagons that passed over it each day. There was no way to identify the hoof prints of the fleeing murderer's horses, but, the untamed grass on either side of the road was brittle—near its death in the late autumn—and it would be easily noticeable if the band of thieves had left the road to cut across country. So he bade Abelard to quicken his pace, and he kept his sharp eyes probing the landscape.
He hadn't been in pursuit long, when he saw what he was looking for. Off to the right, cutting across a fallow field, were hoof prints. He nodded to himself. The tracks were leading due west. That was the direction Crowley had said that the thieves were always heading. It made sense that after fleeing the town they would eventually start heading in the direction they were always heading.
He directed Abelard to the right, and set off at the ground-eating lope that Ranger horses were famous for. He would catch the brigands and find the missing boy, not just because it was his job, but because it was the right thing to do.
Unbeknownst to Halt, his search that led him across the field, took him within fifty metres of a small, scared, badly injured boy who was laying unconscious at the bottom of an old, neglected well.
*RA*RA*RA*RA*RA*RA*RA*RA*RA*RA*RA*RA*
Tbc
Wow! I can't believe how long I've made you wait for this. I'm sorry. I've been insanely busy with moving, and finishing up work and dealing with arguing, divorced parents. I've got more time now, so expect a new chapter very, very soon.
Question Of The Chapter!
I just finished reading the ninth Alex Rider book by Anthony Horowitz. I was wondering if any of you have read those books, and if so what you thought of the final one?