A/N: Hello everyone! I hope you are doing well and are having a great start to the new year (if you follow the Gregorian calendar) and a good day regardless!

BellatrixTheStar: Thank you so much! I'm so glad you think so: I'm always worried about getting characters and their voices right, so that's a relief to know. Yes, Gilan is on the mend and Halt is doing better too. Sir David will make his appearance this chapter and the quest to give Sir Jerky-McJerk face (that is now his permanent name XD) his well deserved comeuppance will be soon. Thanks again!

Guest: Thank you, I really appreciate the review! David's appearance and his reaction to what happened will be in this chapter so you won't have to wait too long.

CoffeeAndOakLeaves: Thank you! That was one of my favorite parts to write. I've always loved Halt and Gilan's dynamic. I'm happy the formatting worked out too. I'm glad/relieved you think his openness fits in this context. Poor Halt has a lot on his mind. Best wishes to you as well!

ExclusivelyRangersApprentice: Thanks so much! I'm glad you enjoyed that part and the character. Usually, I only get to invent villain ocs so it was refreshing to write a good guy for a change. I'm glad you don't think Halt was being too open last chapter (considering his more closed-off, private nature). David is going to be in this chapter, so not too long a wait to find out what he does. Thanks again!

Chapter 4

Halt knew that it was too soon for the letters Pauline had posted for him to have reached Sir David. Which meant that the Battlemaster had come of his own volition, he thought as he watched the man approach the cabin. Halt's mouth pressed itself into a thin line at the sight. When Abelard and Blaze had warned of someone coming, Sir David had honestly been the last person he had expected, and one of the last people he would have welcomed.

Halt glanced back once to reassure himself that his student was safe in his room. Now that a full week had passed, and Gilan's condition had continued to steadily improve, he had grown restless at being confined to bed. For the past couple of days Halt had grudgingly allowed him to rest on the cushioned settle in the main living area of the cabin to help break up the monotony. But, needless to say, he was glad his student wouldn't be anywhere nearby for this confrontation. Because confrontation it would be. What had happened to his apprentice was not something he could ever let stand, let alone forgive.

Halt opened the front door before David drew near enough to knock. He stood just inside the frame, fully armed and effectively barring entrance. The slow simmering anger he felt at the sight of the knight only hardened his ready stance. It felt all the more painful because David was a friend… had been a friend. Halt expected little from most people, but for the few he had extended his trust to. And this provided a sharp reminder why he was so slow to offer such regard—it hurt less.

"Halt," said Sir David in greeting. "Is Gilan around? I think there's been a terrible mistake and I need to speak with him."

"Mistake might be too kind a word."

Halt crossed his arms, dark brows lowered over narrowed eyes. Sir David's posture stiffened as he read Halt's obvious anger.

"It's… a complicated situation," he began, words soft and uncharacteristically uncertain.

"Complicated?" Halt snorted. "Looks fairly simple to me. Tell me, is beating children some new part of the knight's code I wasn't aware of?" he challenged, words dark.

Sir David actually flinched at that.

"I didn't beat my son," he enunciated carefully, defensive anger starting to flash in his own eyes.

"No, you just let someone else do it for you, and refused to intervene when it was done." His words had come more sharply, caustic, than he had intended, but he found he couldn't temper them. "After all, he had to learn to obey orders and speak respectfully. It was just facing the natural consequences of his behavior."

Sir David looked genuinely ill. "I didn't know the truth about what had happened. When Gilan came to me he didn't get the chance to explain—we were interrupted by an emergency before he could finish. I never would have told him those things if I had known the whole story."

Halt made a rough gesture for him to continue, to explain.

"I have known Sir Baldwin for many years. He and I both trained together under MacNeil when we were squires. I trusted him, and trusted him with Gilan. So, when he came to me that day and told me what Gilan had done, I took his word. He said that he had challenged Gilan to a duel as a consequence of his behavior. And he said he'd gone a little hard on him to prove that he still did have a lot to learn. He'd said Gilan suffered a minor injury to his ribs from a sword strike during the duel and that he had taken him to the healer to get it tended. He told me that Gilan might complain to me about it on the grounds that he shouldn't have been disciplined at all because he was the son of a Battlemaster and technically outranked Sir Baldwin."

As Sir David was speaking, Halt felt the beginnings of a vague sense of a presence growing behind him, despite not hearing much of a sound. He ignored it for the moment, focusing all his attention on the Knight in front of him.

"When Gilan came to me, I was operating under that information. Even so, the longer we talked, the more I realized that there was something wrong. Gilan seemed far too upset for Sir Baldwin's story to be the whole truth. But I was called away before I could get to the bottom of things. My knights and I had to deal with Scotti raiders that had breached the border for several days. But as soon as I returned, I tried to find out what really happened. I went straight to the healer to ask about Gilan's injury, and when the healer told me he had not treated my son, I realized I had been lied to. Sir Baldwin had already left to go back to his own fief, so I couldn't confront him about it. But I managed to track down one of the other students who told me what happened. He said that Sir Baldwin had used the duel as an excuse to beat, demoralize, and humiliate my son.

"I came here as soon as I knew the truth of things. I'm to be deployed immediately to the northern border for several months because of the Scotti incursions. I was supposed to leave today, but I couldn't go without making sure my son was alright and trying to mend this first."

Halt found himself searching the knight's eyes for honesty and finding it. David had never lied to him before and he didn't think he would start now.

"I don't think you understand," Halt said then, realizing he no longer had the energy needed to keep hold of the anger. Without it, he found there was only a deep weariness left in its wake as the days caught up with him. "He's spent the past week bedridden from the injuries. It was bad enough that he had internal bleeding."

If Halt had struck him, he doubted Sir David would have been more aggrieved than he was at that news. He stumbled back a pace, horrified. He turned anguished eyes on Halt.

"Is he alright?" the question slipped past his lips in a broken whisper.

"It was a near thing, but he's on the mend now."

Although he had a way to go yet to make a full recovery, was still in pain, and still too nauseous to eat properly—something which concerned Halt—he was improving noticeably each day. So far, there had not been any of the delayed bleeding or blood flow changes the healer had cautioned him to keep an eye out for.

Sir David took a shaky breath. "Please let me speak to him and try to make things right."

"I think, given everything, that should be Gilan's decision."

"Is it true you really didn't know what Sir Baldwin did?" A small hopeful voice sounded from behind Halt.

The grizzled Ranger turned to see his young apprentice standing near the doorway behind him, blanket wrapped around his body like a cloak. It made him look smaller and more frail than Halt thought he had any right to look.

"Gilan," David turned towards him, already reaching out, his face an agony of concern. "I am so sorry."

~x~X~x~

Halt glanced out the window to see Sir David and Gilan talking quietly with each other from where they sat side by side on the verandah steps. Halt had given them some privacy to sort through everything, and could not keep the barest ghost of a smile from his face as he saw the two of them embrace. He nodded once, glad that things were not beyond mending, and that he had not lost a friend. That it had come down to an unfortunate culmination of bad timing, Sir Baldwin's lies, and misunderstanding rather than deliberate cruelty was weight from his chest.

As Halt watched, the two of them rose to their feet, one of David's arms still around Gilan's shoulders. Halt, knowing that David couldn't put off his deployment any more than he had already, recognized that it was likely time for the Battlemaster to leave. He didn't envy the hard riding he would have to do to get back on schedule.

He made his way back outside to the verandah just as Sir David was saying his last farewells to Gilan. The Battlemaster looked up at Halt's approach.

"Halt," he said. "I feel that I should apologize to you as well… and thank you for looking after my son when I was unable to. It means more to me than words can say."

The force of the earnestness in his friend's eyes was almost staggering. Halt didn't know what to say to that. So, instead, he inclined his head once sincerely back and took the knight's outstretched arm in a firm grip by way of saying farewell.

Gilan embraced his father one last time before Sir David mounted his horse.

"Try to stay out of trouble," he told Gilan with a farewell wave.

"Will try, but won't promise," Gilan called back with a smile and wave of his own, the familiar cadence of the words rolling off his tongue in a way that suggested an old mantra between the two.

Halt and his apprentice stood still then, watching until the Battlemaster was swallowed up by the trees outside their little clearing.

"Halt?" Gilan asked as the older Ranger held the door open so they could head back inside. "Do you think I could maybe have something to eat?"

For some reason, the simple request had the effect of draining away the last vestiges of tension that had gripped his shoulders since the day Gilan had returned injured. He had the sense then that things were finally, fully on the mend. The relief in that was welcome, and seemed almost warming.

~x~X~x~

Halt returned to the little cabin just as the sun had set. He'd been out for the past two days helping one of the outlying farmers stop a predator from threatening their livestock. As Gilan still had a few days left on the healer's sentence of two weeks without physical exertion, Halt had not taken his apprentice with him, instead asking Lady Pauline to come and look in on him occasionally. He knew Gilan had chafed at being left behind, but Halt wasn't about to risk his healing by allowing him back into the field before the healer cleared it. They hadn't done any physical or weapons training either for the same reason. Halt was still handling all the chores that required lifting.

As stepped inside, he could not help but raise his eyebrows at the sight that greeted him. Gilan was sitting at the table in the main room, note papers strewn nearly across the table's entire length. A great heavy tome sat directly in front of him which he was thumbing through, absently chewing on his thumbnail as he read. Halt narrowed his eyes at the sight. Gilan had already turned in the paper Halt had assigned him and he hadn't yet given him another that would require that level of research. Which meant that this project, whatever it was, was being done all on his student's own volition.

"Halt!" Gilan greeted him brightly, not bothering to conceal how happy he was to see him. "How did it go?"

Halt chose not to answer him, instead folding his arms, giving the boy nothing but a stern and measured look.

"Care to explain what exactly you are doing?"

"Plotting mostly," Gilan replied easily with a head-tilt and a smile that Halt was instantly leery of. He never appreciated the mischief that often followed in its wake.

"Coming clean about it so soon?" He asked, one eyebrow raised scathingly, a warning. "I suppose you've forgotten how your last attempt turned out, did you?"

"I'm not plotting against you," Gilan protested hastily. Then the corners of his mouth twitched up at the corners. "Not this time, anyway."

"Try again." Halt glared at his apprentice.

Gilan held up his hands innocently in surrender. "Believe me, I've no intention of repeating last time. My ribs are still too sore to sleep in a tree."

"Then who exactly?" Halt asked, ignoring proper grammar.

"Sir Baldwin," Gilan admitted. "Lady Pauline has been helping me. She even got Scribemaster Nigel to loan me this law codex." He tapped the heavy tome before looking up at Halt. "I just want to make sure that he doesn't hurt anybody else. And besides, I have a bit of a score to settle."

Halt met his apprentice's imploring gaze before huffing out a small grunt of acquiescence. "Alright. What have you got?"

Halt, after all, had no intention of letting Sir Baldwin get away with what he'd done. He'd be lying if he said he hadn't been considering something similar himself, and for quite some time. But he hadn't yet had the chance to look into things as deeply as his apprentice clearly had. He leaned forward to look at the array of papers. Gilan beamed at him. He pulled his notes to the side so Halt could see them better before growing more serious as he explained.

"What I've learned so far is that it's going to be hard to go after Sir Baldwin legally."

"How so?" Halt reached out to pull a few of the papers closer into view.

"Although, since King Duncan took the throne, corporal punishment has been frowned upon within the army, it hasn't been officially made illegal yet." He opened the codex to a page he had marked with loose parchment and pointed to a paragraph near the bottom. "I did find a provision against punishments causing severe bodily harm to apprentices, but it won't help me."

"Why not?" Halt asked, leaning in to look at the section he'd indicated, genuinely curious. He was still fairly new to Araluen and so was not wholly familiar with the ins and outs of the more obscure laws. "It'd be easy to prove he caused severe bodily harm."

"According to Lady Pauline, Sir Baldwin found a loophole. Because my injuries were caused under the protections afforded during formal duel, he can't be held legally responsible for them."

Halt frowned. "I'll bet that was something he was well aware of before he challenged you."

"Probably," Gilan agreed unhappily. His expression clouded over as he added more softly. "And I walked right into it."

Which, though true, wasn't exactly fair. Halt understood how easy it was for a child to trust their mentors and guardians—and by all rights, and in a fair world, they should be able to. It was a snare that was all too easy for Gilan to have stepped in. But beating himself up about it wouldn't help him. Halt placed a reassuring hand on his apprentice's shoulder.

"What happened, happened. There's no changing it now whether either of us likes it or not. The question is what we will do now?"

"Learn from it and not let it happen again," Gilan said quietly, repeating Halt's lecture on mistakes. "I know I'll be more ready next time…. It's just… I don't want it to happen to anyone else either. And I don't want him to get away with it."

"I don't care that he, and the law, seem to think he's untouchable. We will find a way to stop him." Halt promised and he meant it.

"I think I might have," Gilan said then, looking up at Halt, "found a way, I mean. The law won't stop him on its own, but I think I can try to get justice the same way he thinks he's safe from it. I could challenge him to single combat over the harm he caused me and for disregarding the knight's code of honor. That's enough cause to challenge him. And if I win…" he trailed off uncertainly, making an ineffectual gesture. He looked up at Halt then, a question in his gaze, as if waiting for him to point out some flaw that he had missed.

Halt, however, didn't immediately shoot his idea down. It was clear that Gilan had considered everything carefully with input from both Lady Pauline and Scribmaster Nigel, two people that Halt respected and trusted. Considering the circumstances and legal limitations—Halt curled his lip inwardly at the thought—a challenge to single combat might well be the only way to settle this. There was, however, an aspect that Halt was not enthused with.

"Why does it have to be you that challenges him?"

Gilan shrugged helplessly. "I suppose my father could be the one to do it, but I don't know how long he'll be deployed for. And most Rangers aren't from the nobility and haven't been knighted. But I am from it, and I've been in Battleschool since I was nine. I can make the challenge and he won't be able to refuse me because of my station. I suppose he could try to refuse because of my age, but since he's already dueled me once before, I don't think he'd have grounds to back down that way either." He took a breath. "It has to be me, Halt. What if the next person he hurts doesn't have nobility or knighthood to fall back on?"

Halt considered for a moment, narrowing his eyes thoughtfully. "If we go to the fief he is stationed in and make the challenge before the Baron's court, it could gain enough traction to be a spectacle. It would give him less chance to try and worm out of things. And so many official witnesses will help keep him from playing as loosely as he did with you before."

Halt didn't like the idea of letting his apprentice anywhere near Sir Baldwin again. But, at the same time, he knew that letting Gilan have the chance to confront his tormentor might well be the best way to help him build back the confidence that might have been broken by what had happened. Besides that, his student wouldn't be fighting alone this time. Halt would be there, and the moment Sir Baldwin made any move he didn't like, Halt would be more than happy to put an arrow through him.

"I don't suppose you know where Sir Baldwin is stationed when he's not taking over for MacNeil?"

"He's stationed in Greenfield Fief, in the service of Baron Caramorn," Gilan said immediately. "He told us when he made his introductions last month."

"I'll go speak with Baron Arald, Lady Pauline, and Scribmaster Nigel—see if the legalities of this will work out for us, and see if they know anything about Baron Caramorn and his court. If we're going to do this, we're going to do it right."

~x~X~x~

The starlight and light from the half-moon was bright enough to illuminate the clearing in a silvery glow. It glistened off the metal of Gilan's sword in quick flashes as he swung the blade in precise controlled movements so that it seemed an extension of himself. It was timed perfectly with his footwork as he pivoted around an invisible enemy.

He stopped abruptly mid-swing, breath coming a little harder than the exertion normally would have warranted. The cost of too many weeks of disuse. Gilan uttered a soft curse, face openly showing his displeasure with his own performance. He took a ready stance and began the set again.

Halt stepped out of the shadows that had hidden him so that he stood only a few meters from his apprentice's back.

"It's the middle of the night."

The hardened words and the fact that his apprentice did not seem to have heard his approach caused the boy to jolt. He whirled to face his mentor. He was quick to compose himself however. He lowered his sword.

"So it is," he said with an easy smile, as if noticing the late hour for the first time.

Halt wasn't amused. But then again getting dragged out of bed in the middle of the night because he'd heard his apprentice attempt to sneak out tended to do that.

"You know the rules about lights-out."

The barest trace of a flinch and the unobtrusive tightening of his fingers on the hilt of his sword confirmed that his student was indeed well aware of the rules and of the fact he had deliberately broken them.

"It's not that I didn't go to bed at the right time; it's just that I decided to get up a little earlier than usual," he tried.

"If by a little you mean several hours," Halt raised an eyebrow. "And then you decided that it was the perfect time to practice your weapon's skills, I suppose." Halt's glower darked though it did not seem to deter his apprentice as sufficiently as intended.

"Exactly."

"And you're convinced that that's the best way to care for your injuries, are you?"

"Not really," Gilan admitted after a small hesitation, tone ringing far more lightly than it should considering the circumstances.

Halt's eyebrows drew downwards as he felt a flash of irritation at the boy's heedless nonchalance. He knew as well as Halt did that, although he had been cleared to return to mostly regular activity, the healer had recommended a couple more weeks without engaging in any heavy contact sports or activities that would cause extreme strain on his body. Which meant no sparring, fighting, intensive workouts or training exercises. Tracking, woodcraft, and gentle exercises had been the only outdoor lessons they had been able to manage.

"So you just don't care, is that it?" Halt demanded, a dangerous note creeping into his words that again his apprentice ignored in lieu of offering an innocent smile.

"Then we have a problem because I do care and I'm not having it," Halt said then.

Gilan's uncaring expression broke at that; distress, hurt, anger, and something palpably lost showing on his face for a moment before he was able to slam that impassive mask into place once more. A normal person might not have noticed, but Halt knew Gilan. Halt noticed. And that fleeting expression seemed, somehow, to tear at his heart.

"Please, Halt," he said quietly, the discernible trace of rawness roughening his voice. "I can't—" he cleared his throat, making a small uncertain gesture with his hand in place of speech. "I can't lose to him again. I haven't trained for weeks and I already wasn't good enough..."

"What's brought this on?" Halt asked more gently, as he took note of his student's shaky breaths. He watched as his student looked down.

"I… had a nightmare…"

"About Sir Baldwin?" Halt asked when his student didn't elaborate.

A silent affirmation.

Halt felt the irritation and indignation soften against his will with understanding.

"And after, I just couldn't sleep. I thought going outside might clear my head. But I couldn't stop thinking…. What if he defeats me again? What if another student gets hurt because it's taking me too long to be ready to face him?"

"You're forgetting one thing. Deliberately injuring yourself again because you pushed too hard before your body was ready will only make it take longer."

Gilan hung his head, shoulders drooping.

Halt sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Basic weapons exercises only. Nothing intensive and no contact."

The hope and relief in Gilan's expression was plain.

"Tomorrow though. You're not training in the middle of the night. Especially not if I'm going to be the one to spot you. And Gilan," he added, only continuing when his apprentice's eyes were on him.

"Yes, Halt?"

"I won't be pleased if I catch you out after lights out again."

"But it's alright so long as I'm not caught?" Gilan asked innocently, eyes crinkling at the corners with amusement.

Halt folded his arms, turning the full withering strength of his glare onto his young student.

"Are you ribs and back feeling any better?"

"For the most part," Gilan said, slightly thrown off by the abrupt subject change and looking a question at his mentor.

"Good," Halt said. "Because I've noticed that you are either overly eager to visit a tree for the rest of the evening, or looking to have extra chores in the morning, and I am seconds away from allowing it."

A/N: Thanks so much for reading! Feedback is always valued if you have the time on inclination to leave any. Constructive criticism is valued too. I love to improve. I think there might be one to two more chapters after this one to tie up the loose threads.

I wish you all the very best until next time!