There's a lot of POV changes in here, not to first person, but it switches people a lot. That's why there's so many line break thingies.

Finally! The chapter I've been looking forward to since I started this fic!

Disclaimer: Don't own it.

Halt had finally caught and packed away those infuriating bandits. Now he could finally go home—several days late. He ground his teeth. He would usually already be on his horse and determinedly homeward bound, but he suspected there might be a second group of bandits. He'd seen a few signs, though they weren't exactly concrete evidence. They might be there or they might not. He couldn't be certain.

He growled in frustration. He wanted to get back to Redmont castle, but he wouldn't leave a job half done. Pauline would no doubt be worrying, Will might be too, but they would just have to stick it out. He'd be home soon enough, after this whole darn bandit business was done.

He examined the track once more, blurred by a rainstorm two days ago. It was bad enough knowing that he was still that far away, but it was worse not knowing whether they were bandits or family on a picnic wandering through the woods. The water blotted out too much.

He growled again, then snarled for good measure. He'd follow the trail until he knew enough to discern who they were, then he'd decide his path from there. He'd better find them soon. This mission, so elementary at the start, was seriously beginning to wear on his nerves.

At least it wouldn't get any more complicated. What could interfere?

Barely two days later, Kietleen watched carefully as some bandits slipped past where she'd hidden herself in the small village. The small town was south of the one where the bandits were supposed to have their lair, but she felt in her gut that Halt would come back this way. And after years of living off her instincts alone, she trusted them implicitly. These bandits were proving her instincts right; she was sure these were the same ones Halt had been following.

She climbed carefully down from the roof she'd perched herself on, dropping when there was only two meters left and landing lightly on her feet. She slipped nearer to a building, hiding behind a corner of the brickwork were she could once again see where the bandits were going. At the moment they seemed chaotic, but she knew they were searching the city, presumably for something they hadn't already plundered before they went to the next town.

She heard light footsteps behind her. Spinning around, she saw a man who she recognized as the leader of bandits. He was grinning. Never a good sign on a bandit's face.

"Well, well, looks like we forgot to pickpocket someone in this pretty little town. Would you mind just handing it over? This doesn't need to get ugly." The grin turned into a sneer as he tugged a dagger free of its sheath with a shing.

Kietleen stumbled quickly backwards. She had no intention of repeating the events of a night more than a week and a half ago. Her feet didn't seem to share her aims, however. She tripped almost immediately over an uneven cobblestone in the road. She fell to the ground and heard two somethings clang out of her rucksack, one rather large and noisy but the other smaller, if not too much quieter. With a sinking heart, she realized that the side pouch in her rucksack had opened. Of course, the one pouch with contents she'd rather not have found was the one that's clasp broke. Her and her rotten luck.

With narrowed eyes, the bandit leaned down and picked up the two metal objects. One, the smaller one, appeared to be a seal. He didn't recognize it, but he automatically assumed that it had been copied. A woman like this wouldn't have her own seal. The second object he was more familiar with. It was a medallion, about five inches across, connected to a ribbon that had once been fine, but now was rather ragged. The face of the medallion he recognized from an escapade to Hibernia. It belonged to Clonmel's royal family.

Will was finally catching up. This Kietleen woman he was chasing had quite the horse. It was keeping her still ahead of him. But then, he hadn't wanted to push Tug very hard. He'd had to for the past day, though, and was gratified to find that she couldn't be more than an hour or two ahead of him.

When he found her in the town, near a bandit, he hoped she wasn't working with them—for her own sake. With in a few moments, however, it was obvious that the truth was anything but. The man unsheathed a dagger and Will nearly took hand, remembering, as Kietleen was at the moment, how she had gotten stabbed in the alley near Redmont. When the two objects fell out of her rucksack, though, he was admittedly as interested as the bandit was. He nocked an arrow to his bowstring but neglected to draw it. He was curious as to how this would pan out.

He didn't know that his former mentor was thinking nearly the exact same thing on the other side of the alley, having followed the bandits tracks and finding them leading here. Will didn't know that Halt was there at all.

And Halt didn't know that Kietleen was the one sprawled on the cobblestones.

The bandit stared at the medallion, surprise on his face.

"That's the medallion of Clonmel's royal family," he said in a perplexed tone, unaware of the two Rangers' reactions, which were startled but small—they weren't amateurs, after all. "Where did you come across this, miss?" the bandit asked suspiciously.

Kietleen glared him full in the face. "It's a copy, you idiot. And not the greatest I've seen, either. The faces are completely inaccurate if you compare them to the actual people."

The bandit sneered. "Ah, yes, and I suppose a little Gallican traveler like you would know of something such as this?" Kietleen thanked her lucky stars that her Gallican accent still protected her from the truth.

"How do you think I got the copy?" she shot back brazenly. "Of course I spent a little time over there."

She began to get up, but the bandit brandished his dagger at her. She stayed, reluctantly but sensibly, where she was.

Neither Kietleen nor the bandit expected the black-shafted, gray-feathered arrow to come whistling through the air and bury itself in the bandit's wrist.

Halt strode forward after sending his arrow in, unaware that he had nearly made his former apprentice jump clean out of his skin. Will hadn't been expecting Halt to suddenly appear.

The older Ranger stepped forward and, with a striker in hand, thumped the bandit solidly on the side of the head, knocking him out. He grabbed the medallion from his limp grasp and examined it briefly. He snorted.

"Copy, my foot. Where did you get this? This is the real one," he said, turning toward the rising woman. "You're a lying—" It's debatable what he would have said next, for he stopped abruptly when he saw Kietleen's face as she looked up and gave him a small smile.

No, he thought. It's not…It can't be…

For one of the few times in his life, Halt was speechless, due to the woman standing before him.

Will didn't understand how Halt had gotten there, though he supposed that it had a reasonable explanation. These must be the bandits he'd been chasing, which is why he'd come and why he was late coming home. Apparently they'd avoided him somehow. He could expect a great amount of teasing from Will on that account.

What was not so easily explainable was why he had suddenly stopped speaking when he saw Kietleen's face. Not many people could make Halt stop in the middle of a sentence, and a majority of them were people that he wanted dead so thoroughly that he couldn't be bothered to finish his sentence until they had been dealt with. The other portion were those who had succeeded in convincing him he had to shut up in a moment or there would be consequences. The only people he'd heard of managing that last task were Pauline, who accomplished it nearly daily, and Crowley on occasion. He and Gilan had been able to pull it off once together, but that was the running total.

It didn't seem to be either. He couldn't find a plausible reason for the sudden speech standstill, or for the expression of shock on Halt's face, or the expression of delight on Kietleen's.

But the most unexplainable thing was the fact that she hugged him. A random Gallican woman simply walked up and hugged the un-huggable Halt. And he hugged her back in a tight embrace. Halt's eyes were closed and he murmured something into her ear.

It was all completely and utterly unexplainable by Will's standards.

Halt couldn't believe it. How had she gotten here? He didn't really care for the answer to that question at the moment, however. She was here, and that was the end of it, as far as he was concerned.

Not to mention the fact that he was expending most of his energy and thought process trying to not reduce himself back to that sobbing young boy he'd been when he'd seen her last. He couldn't spare the extra thought.

He held her a little closer and buried his face in her hair, inhaling the scent he'd almost forgotten.

"Caitlyn," he murmured softly into her ear.

I'll let you think about that last part…

All I ask is that you review! Please! The little whatever-colored button right below is just begging you to click it!

Thanks for reading, don't worry, this isn't quite done yet. There's still another chapter or two… Maybe three, it depends.

-Rydd Rider