Ranger's Apprentice 12: The Royal Ranger (38 page)

‘I need information,’ Will said. ‘First of all, have any children disappeared from the village recently?’

Fernald frowned, not grasping the question. ‘Disappeared? What do you mean?’

‘Gone missing. Run off. Haven’t been seen around.’

‘Oh . . .’ Fernald thought about that for several seconds, then he shook his head. ‘No. Can’t say I’ve heard of anything like that,’ he said finally. Will felt a quick surge of satisfaction. They had arrived in time. Unless . . . He hesitated before he asked the next question. It was crucial.

‘Can you think of any child who might run off – given the opportunity? Someone whose parents tend to mistreat them?’

Before he had finished, Fernald was nodded eagerly.

‘Oh, aye. Young Violet Carter. Nice young thing. Only thirteen years old. But her parents are always fighting and they take it out on Violet. Poor girl can’t seem to do a thing right sometimes. I’ve even let her stay here some nights, it gets so bad.’

Right, thought Will. It was all falling into place.

‘Where does she live?’ he asked.

Fernald made a vague gesture towards the high street outside. ‘Third-last house from the far end of the street. House with a blue door – although that could use a lick of paint. The yard behind is piled with old broken bits of carts – wheels, shafts and harness. Can’t miss it.’

‘You’re doing well, Fernald,’ Will told him.

How did he know my name, the innkeeper wondered, forgetting that it was painted on the sign hanging outside his front door.

‘Now I’ve got one more question. Has there been a travelling spinner through Willow Vale in the last few days?’

‘You mean the Storyman?’ Fernald said, and Will’s own heart rate accelerated. ‘Rum cove in a blue cloak and red shoes? Yes, he was here. Left two days ago. Why? What has he done?’

Will ignored the question. He had a deep feeling of satisfaction that his hunch had paid off. Willow Vale was on the list. The Storyman had been here. But the Stealer was yet to come. And there was a likely candidate for abduction in the person of Violet Carter.

He’d taken a risk revealing his true identity and asking these questions so directly. But time was short and direct action was called for. Now he had to ensure that Fernald remained silent about this meeting for the next few days. He couldn’t hope for much beyond that. But by then, the Stealer may well have been and gone.

‘Fernald,’ he said, ‘you’ve told me what I need to know. But nobody else can know that I’ve been here. And
nobody else needs to know what we’ve been discussing. Is that clear?’

Fernald nodded eagerly, sensing that this grim figure was about to leave him to his cleaning. What a tale this would make in the bar, he thought. Then the Ranger’s next words dispelled that thought.

‘I mean it. You will tell nobody that I have been here. You will tell nobody what we’ve talked about. Understand?’

‘Eh? Oh yes. Of course! Goes without saying!’

Will stepped a pace closer, holding Fernald’s eyes with his. Fernald instantly dropped his gaze away.

‘Don’t do that!’ Will snapped and Fernald jerked as if he had been stung. ‘Look at me. Look at my eyes.’

Fernald did. He didn’t like what he saw there. The brown eyes were dark, almost black. And they were boring into his without any sign of pity or compassion. They were dark, threatening holes.

‘If I find that you have breathed a word of this to anyone – even a hint to anyone at all – I will arrest you and put you in the deepest, wettest, worst-smelling dungeon in Castle Trelleth. Understand?’

Fernald mouthed the word ‘yes’. But no sound came. Rangers, he thought. You should never mess with Rangers.

‘What’s more,’ Will continued, ‘I will keep you there for the next five years, and in the meantime, I’ll have your licence as an innkeeper revoked.’ He saw a flicker of doubt in Fernald’s eyes. The innkeeper wasn’t sure what the word meant. ‘Cancelled,’ Will clarified. ‘Taken away.’

Understanding and fear dawned in Fernald’s eyes, as he envisioned a future where he was penniless, unable to earn
a living. Running an inn was all he knew. Without The Tubby Duck, what would he do? Will’s next words made the possible future even bleaker.

‘Then I will come back here and have this building torn down, brick by brick, plank by plank, and ploughed under. So when you do finally get out of prison, there will be nothing here for you. Do you doubt I have the authority to do all that?’

Fernald shook his head. Rangers could do anything they wanted to, he knew. It would be nothing to a Ranger to have him thrown into a dungeon and his inn, his lovely inn, razed to the ground.

‘No, sir,’ he managed, in a small voice.

‘Then remember what I’ve said.’

Fernald didn’t trust himself to speak. He could feel tears welling up at the thought that his beautiful inn might be destroyed at the whim of this implacable, pitiless figure.

Will glared at him for several seconds. In fact, he hated to bully the man like this. But it was essential that there should be no word of Will’s presence, or of his questions, being bandied around the village. Even now, the Stealer might have men watching Willow Vale, listening for the slightest hint of danger. After all, somehow they had known that Maddie had been asking questions. If he could maintain secrecy for a few days by frightening Fernald, then he was willing to do so.

For a moment, he wondered if he would be willing to carry out his threat if the innkeeper talked about his visit. He decided that, all things considered, he would.

It was past midnight. Will sat comfortably in the long grass behind the Carter house. As Fernald had told him, the rear yard was littered with broken carts and their fittings. They made weird shapes in the light of a low sickle moon.

Maddie was across the high street, watching the front of the house. Will expected that if the Stealer made an appearance, he would do so from the fields behind the village, where the surrounding trees would give him a convenient, concealed approach and escape route. He was hardly likely to come down the main street itself. But it was as well to make sure, and Maddie was positioned where she could see the part of the street that was hidden from Will’s view.

He leaned his back against a tree stump. His cowl was up so that his face was in shadow, and his cloak was gathered around him. He remained motionless, knowing that the cloak and absolute stillness were his sureties against being seen. From anything further than three metres away, he was totally invisible. Even close to, he blended into the tree stump itself, appearing like a pile of fallen branches, or a large, irregular bush.

This was the second night they had kept a vigil over the Carter house. By day, they had stayed back in the trees, hidden from sight. After the first night, Maddie had been impatient, fretting at the long hours of inactivity.

‘He’s not coming,’ she said. ‘We’ve missed him.’

Will shook his head. ‘This is a large part of what we do,’ he told her. ‘Watching and waiting. Be patient. It’s only been one night. He could come tomorrow. Or the next night. But he’s coming.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ Maddie asked.

He considered the question in silence for a few moments, then gave her an unblinking look.

‘I don’t know. I just am. It’s a hunter’s instinct, I suppose.’

Now as he sat here waiting, that instinct was telling him that tonight would be the night.

HE HEARD THEM
before he saw them.

There was a faint sound of movement through the long grass and low-lying bushes behind him. Instantly, he froze. He lowered his breathing rate so that no movement or sound was perceptible.

He resisted the almost overpowering temptation to turn and look. Instead, he strained his ears, listening to the faint rustling and swishing of clothes through the grass. Two of them, he thought. He couldn’t say how he knew that. It was just the result of years of experience, years of stalking and waiting for prey.

The men, assuming they were men, were only a few metres behind him now, and several metres off to one side. Their attention would be focused on the Carter house, he knew. The odds were well against their seeing him, sitting huddled in the cloak. The wind was sending clouds scudding across the sky, alternately concealing then revealing the moon.

The men paused for a few seconds, presumably studying the house and the village itself.

‘No one around,’ said a voice. It was startlingly close to Will, and only his discipline and training stopped him from starting in surprise. The voice couldn’t be more than two metres away.

They were on the move again and they slid past him, almost close enough to reach out and touch. There were two of them, as he had guessed. One was wearing a dark cloak. The other was all in black. As he moved, Will saw that there were long, uneven strips of diaphanous black cloth trailing from his arms and shoulders. They swirled and stirred in the wind, giving him the appearance of a tattered, unearthly being – a creature from the graveyard.

As the cloaked man crouched, the tattered figure produced a tight-fitting hood and pulled it over his head. He glanced sidelong at his companion and Will could see that the mask covered his face and was marked with lines of white paint, delineating what looked like a skull. Finally, he donned a wide-brimmed, floppy black hat, looking for all the world like some tattered, ghostly scarecrow. He bent low and began moving through the long grass towards the house. He would be a terrifying sight to any child who woke and saw him. Will imagined the throat-closing fear that would assail young Violet in the next few minutes. He was tempted to stop this abduction, and save her the horror of it all. But he knew that if he caught these two, the rest of the gang would fade away – with the children they had already abducted. Much as he hated the idea, he had to let poor Violet endure the next few hours. The slaving gang must have a hideout somewhere. If he
could track them to it, he and Maddie could release all the captives and destroy the gang once and for all.

The black figure was by the house now, almost lost in the shadows. Will wondered if Maddie had seen the two men and hoped that if she had, she wouldn’t try to signal him. They had devised a simple signalling method, but it could only be used when the kidnappers were not placed where they could see Will or Maddie. The evil-looking intruder was standing at the side window of the house. Mentally, Will nodded, although there was no actual movement of his head. He had reconnoitred the house the previous evening, looking for possible points of entry. The side window was the most suitable. Its lock was weak and primitive and the window itself was shielded from the sight of any passer-by in the village high street.

The cloaked man, crouched only five metres away from Will, moved nervously, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Obviously, he was keyed up, watching and waiting for something to go wrong.

The black tattered figure eased the window open. He put one leg over the sill and slipped inside the house. Again, his companion shifted nervously, waiting for a shout, a scream of fright, an uproar from the darkened house. But there was nothing.

Minutes passed. Will focused on the open window – now a dark square hole in the side of the house. Then he saw movement. A small figure in a white nightshirt clambered over the sill, followed by the black, predatory scarecrow. He held her by one arm, never letting her loose. As they made their way across the field to where Will and the Stealer’s companion waited, Will saw her stumble. Her
abductor heaved her to her feet and Will could see she had a sack over her head.

The cloaked man stood to greet them. He uttered a low laugh as he saw the frightened girl stumbling awkwardly in the grip of the tattered figure.

‘Get that sack off her head,’ the Stealer told him. ‘We’ll move faster if she can see where she’s going.’

‘How did it go?’ his friend asked.

The black figure shrugged. ‘She had a brother who woke up as I went into the room. But once he saw who I was, he shut up quick smart and pretended to go back to sleep. I told him if he raised the alarm, or told anyone what he’d seen tonight, I’d come back for him and cut out his eyes. Scared the living daylights out of him.’