Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, made possible by the Ranger's Apprentice by John Flanagan. I have only borrowed his creation and I make no money. For this story I have used several other Rangers from the books, though I've also added my own. I do this only in the hope to entertain…

Author's Note: No harm shall come to the characters that can't be fixed with enough coffee…

Chapter 7

The three Ranger's stood close together, their voices quiet so they would not carry. A little too the side their horses stood, sensing their master's whish for silence they did not make a sound.

Having followed the bandits trail for days they had now caught up with them. The smell of roasting meat had alerted them that they were close, and they had fallen back. Will felt tense with anticipation. There was no way to determine how close they were, and how many there were, nor if this was a temporary camp or their main hold up without getting closer.

This was the dangerous part, one that could quite easily prove fatal if they were unlucky. One of them had to take the risk of getting close, and there was really only one choice.

"Are you sure they won't spot you?" Harcourt frowned as he watched Gilan remove the sword he had been carrying and fastening it to Blaze's saddle.

"They won't see him," Will offered a smile, though in truth he was worried. Not that he believed they would have a chance to see him, Gilan was the best unseen-mover in the Ranger Corps. He was legendary amongst them, and when he wanted to move undetected, no one could stand a chance of spotting him.

"I have done this sort of thing before," Gilan offered, smiling himself.

"Shouldn't we go inform the Baron so he can bring knights?"

"We will," Gilan stated. "But we want to be able to tell him exactly where they are, and how many men he needs to bring."

"Maybe one of us should go with you," Harcourt hesitated. "In case you need backup."

"I won't need any backup as long as you and Will stay here," Gilan waved it away. "There's much less chance of me being discovered alone."

"How long do you want us to wait?" Will asked. There wasn't much of a chance that they would discover him, but it could happen. If it did, it would be bad luck and pure chance, but it could happen.

"Long," Gilan shrugged. "It's going to take me a while just to get there, and I don't know how long I'll need to observe. Don't worry, I don't exactly plan on sitting down to dinner with them…" grinning he wrapped his cloak around himself, pulling the cowl over his head.

Bending down he picked up a handful of earth that he rubbed over his face, neck and hands, further breaking up the lines of his face and making sure the pale areas wouldn't stand out.

"We'll wait," Will promised. He watched as Gilan started into the woods, after only a few yards he seemed to disappear completely from sight. Even knowing about where he was, Will couldn't see anything. A twig slowly swinging back on a tree, and he saw a few strands of grass straighten, but he could not see Gilan and there was nary a sound to betray his position.

Beside him, Harcourt gave a gasp.

"And that's why he's got a reputation as the beast unseen mover in the corps," Will grinned. "It's going to be a while though, just as he said, so we might as well make ourselves comfortable. He sat down on a fallen log, they could not relax their vigil completely, but as long as they stayed alert they would be okay.

At first he sharpened his saxe knife and throwing knife, but that only took so long, and he did not dare touch Gilan's sword. Sword's could be tricky things, or so he had come to understand from Horace. One might think they were as easy to sharpen as a knife, but the owner did not always seem to feel that way about it. Better then to let it be and find something else.

For lack of something better he took out Gilan's small sketchbook again. His friend wouldn't mind that, and now he had the time to study the sketches in close detail. They really were good, on the maps, instead of just drawing a circle and writing 'village' as Will had been known to do, there was a series of tiny houses that could actually be identified as houses with roofs and doors and even windows.

He tested the silver stylus and found it to be a quite effective tool, though he had no doubt Gilan would find the sketch he made very crude, and possibly a waste of paper, he thought it might still amuse him.

He was however unwilling to waste all of his paper this way, it would be unkind to do so, so he slipped it back into his pack. Wondering not for the first time what other skill Gilan had that he did not know about.

He wondered if there was anything he was good at that Gilan didn't know about, but there was nothing he could think of. Not for the first time he really wished he had known the older Ranger earlier. It would have been amazing to know him when he was growing up, all the things Gilan could have taught him, all the things he could have shared with his friend. There seemed to be so many stories about his apprenticeship, but he had only heard a few of them and he wondered what the others were.

Given when Gilan had had his apprenticeship, he would have been in Redmont while Will was growing up in the yard, but he could not recall him at all. He had barely paid any attention at all to Halt back then. Having thought like most others, that there was something strange and scary about the Ranger. It was very much possible that he had seen Gilan, but never paid him any attention.

After all, they had taken their meals and had their lessons in the ward, so they hadn't had all that many dealings with the rest of the castle on a daily basis. They'd played outside every day, but if he had seen the young Ranger in the mottled cloak, there was every chance he had assumed it was just Halt. He couldn't even say if he had paid attention to his height back then, and Gilan wouldn't have been quiet as tall as he was now back then anyway.

No, he had probably seen him now and again without ever paying any attention to him. It was a little disheartening to know that. So many opportunities to get him to play with him, spend time with him and cajole him into getting him to buy him sweets wasted….

At the same time he could understand why Halt had acted as he had. So many of the other children in the ward and in the village would tease him for not having a name, it would not have been better if the Ranger had taken a known interest in him.

No, as much as he wished it had not been thus, it had been for his good that Halt acted as he did.

Gilan at the same time did not think about Will's youth, his full attention was on slipping through the forest, unseen. This was where he knew he was at his best, and he enjoyed it. There was a certain thrill to slowly gliding through the woods, knowing that no one you happened upon would even know you were there.

It was feeling how the trees moved around you, how the shadows played across the ground and the very breath of the trees around you. His soft leather boots made not a sound on the forest floor, and there were no footprints behind him in the soft moss. Only for a mere few seconds could an indentation be seen before the moss rose and retook its former shape.

He moved between of the bushes, light as the wind, as he pushed through their gnarled branches. They seemed to reach for him with claw like twigs, and he simply brushed them to the side, moving through them like a whisper.

There were some even in the corps who found his skill in this unnerving. After Hackham Heath he had asked questions about the Rangers, and his father had gladly answered at first. A little more hesitant when he realized why it was he asked. Of course, David had come to be good friends with Halt, so Gilan had seen him every now and again. Though he had constantly practiced both his stealthy moving, and even archery, he had not told the Ranger anything about it. Halt had said that if he still wanted to be a Ranger when he was fifteen, to see him and he'd put in a good word for him.

That was all fine and well, but Gilan had spent enough time in Battleschool to know any instructor wasn't necessarily a good instructor. He had no desire to be put away somewhere with some Ranger he did not know, and who might not be a very good Ranger himself.

It was during a sword session when he had been distracted that he had finally voiced his thoughts to MacNeil. MacNeil was the first and foremost swords master in the country. There was none better, and he only accepted the very best as his students. Gilan's father had trained under him, and from eleven, so had Gilan. Not through his father's skill though, oh, it was David who had asked MacNeil to judge Gilan, but he had been accepted on his own skill.

However he had worried that if he asked Halt to take him as an apprentice, the Ranger would think he expected to be trained under the best Ranger, only because he was trained under the best swords master. That he would assume it his right by birth.

MacNeil had simply rapped him over the head and told him not to be an idiot. Halt had made the offer by the skills Gilan had displayed at the time, he would accept him or not based on the skills he had, not on anything else.

Which was why Gilan had spent every moment of his time practicing before he made up his mind to follow Halt.

As he sailed through the air towards the river, only one thought had been in his mind, that he had failed. As he came up, drenched to the skin and shivering cold, he had thought it was all over. Halt, however, had calmly proclaimed that perhaps he would do and simply took him along.

It had taken years before Halt admitted that as he knew known he would follow him, he had not trouble hearing him, but that he had still been impressed with his performance.

After a few months of training with Halt, his skills had grown quickly, and at his first gathering, he had already been better than most of the third year apprentices, and even one or two of the full Rangers. Crowley had been impressed and had proceeded to give him instructions on how to move quiet. A skill in which Crowley was the corps master. The result was that when Gilan graduated, he was the undisputed master of unseen movement, and a close second to Crowley in how to move quietly.

It pretty much made him the sneakiest Ranger in the corps, something he did not mind at all.

Approaching the enemy, now so close that he heard voices he worked even harder on it, it was practicing this that he had accidentally upset a deer with her fawn near Halt's cabin, and had come running back with the angry mother in hot pursuit.

Much to Halt's amusement….

The older Ranger had laughed quite hard and well when Gilan had been forced to climb a tree to escape the vengeance of the slightly aggravated animal.

With his cloak wrapped around him, and his dirt smeared face deep in the shadow from the cowl he knew he could not be seen. Even if they should happen to look right at him, not knowing that there was something there, they would not see him.

Trust the cloak, was one of the first things they drilled into their apprentices, and it was true. As long as he did not move, he was just a part of the forest around the camp. Though now as he observed them he was technically standing in the open.

He stood like that for some time, unmoving, watching, counting and cataloguing the various enemies and what their level of threat mostly were.

Once he was satisfied, like a whisper he slipped back into the forest. He took great care not to leave any tracks behind him. Should one of the bandits walk into the woods, right across his path, they would not see it.

As an extra precaution, just like he had on the way there, he did not go in a straight line.

For some time, he followed a deer-trail going the opposite direction, then doubled back.

He doubted there was anyone in the enemy camp with the skill they would have needed to track him. They would never even know he had been there.

TBC Please review, the caffeine addicted Cricket is hungry…