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araluen-arrows · 4 years

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The Eleventh Heron

me and @rangerpippin co-wrote this oneshot about Gilan and the crew of the Heron! (read it here on ao3)

After a long day of sailing, sharing a landing site was never a welcome prospect. Especially, Hal thought, if your beachmates turned out to be ruthless smugglers intent on robbery and murder. They outnumbered the Herons two to one, swiftly turning Hal's plan of “make camp” into “fight for our lives”.

He fought next to Jesper as the two of them crossed swords with a vicious pair of pirates. Behind them, Hal heard the timeless battlecry: “Let’s get ‘em!” followed by Thorn and Stig scattering the raiders like bowling pins. That brought a smile to his face even as his opponent drove him back, towards where Gilan and Ingvar fought together, Lydia taking the rear with her darts.

“Need some help there?” Gilan shouted, dispatching two of the smugglers with ease.

“I’m okay!” Hal yelled back, his voice strained. He deflected an overhand stroke, swaying to the side. Then he stamped out with his right foot, lunging forwards, and caught his enemy in the chest with the point of his blade. As he did so, Hal felt himself overextend, and he slipped in the loose sand. He fell awkwardly on the ground, then scrambled to his feet, his chest heaving from the exertion of battle.

“You all right, Hal?” Gilan turned, an expression of concern on his face.

Hal opened his mouth to reply.

Later, he would replay this moment over and over in his mind, wondering what he could have done differently. Wondering if he could save his crew a world of stress and heartache.

In the present moment, all he could do was watch helplessly as Ingvar’s opponent, seeing Gilan distracted, darted forward and slammed his club against the Ranger’s head.

Gilan collapsed like a sack of ballast.

Hal heard Lydia’s scream of rage, and faster than thought, a dart slammed into the bandit’s throat before he could finish the Ranger off, sending him staggering back five meters before he collapsed on the ground. He moved no more.

Jesper and Stig darted towards Gilan’s prone form, intent on defending him. Hal saw at once from the look on Stig’s face that his berserker blood had been aroused. But Ingvar beat them to it, an inarticulate roar of rage coming from his massive chest. His voulge rose and fell twice, and two smugglers went down instantly. One was bodily lifted into the air, his shirt caught on the end of the weapon, and flung ten meters down the beach.

Kloof bounded past with a club in her massive jaws. A smuggler followed, yelling for his weapon, with Ulf and Wulf in hot pursuit, wielding axes like twin demigods of terror.

Stefan was fighting two pirates at once, one of his eyes bloodied and bruised. Hal drew his sword and charged at the leftmost smuggler when the pirate staggered back, a dart transfixed in his upper leg. Hal twisted his sword just in time, not wanting to kill a disabled enemy, and slammed the flat of his blade into the man’s skull.

“STIG!” The roar made his blood run cold. He froze in place, looking frantically for his friend. What else had happened? Hal couldn’t stand the thought of anything else happening to one of the crew.

“That was the last one: the last one, you hear? It’s over! It’s done!” Thorn wrapped Stig in a bear hug, bodily lifting him in the air. He saw even from this distance that his friend’s eyes were rimmed with red, and his face was overtaken with blind battle rage. Stig’s axe was buried nearly up to the hilt in the chest of a smuggler.

Hal shuddered at the sight but darted forward, cautiously laying a hand on Stig’s shoulder. “We have to take care of Gilan,” he said. Stig stopped struggling, the fight drained out of him.

He hung limply in Thorn’s iron grip. “I should have watched him,” he said bitterly. “You guys had it covered. I should have been looking out for him.”

Hal gripped his shoulder tighter. “It was my responsibility. I’m the skirl, and—” And he had been the one to distract Gilan, if only he hadn’t fallen...

Thorn set Stig down in the sand. “We all should have,” he muttered. “We all should have.”

“Hal!” Edvin called. He and the rest of the crew knelt by Gilan’s side, and Hal realized with a guilty start he had been so preoccupied with Stig that he had neglected to see to Gilan first.

“How is he?” he asked.

Edvin shook his head. “There’s a pulse, and he’s breathing. It was only a glancing blow, but with head wounds, it’s hard to tell what’ll happen.”

“He is going to wake up, right?” Ulf asked.

“Don’t be daft. Of course he will,” his brother snapped.

But the Ranger’s pale face in the flickering light of the campfire stole the certainty from his words.

Time dragged onwards - thirty minutes, then an hour, with no change from Gilan. As the Herons began preparations to bed down for the night, Edvin's face looked drawn. "He should have woken up by now," he said, his voice strained. "Usually getting knocked unconscious should only last a few minutes."

An uneasy silence followed his words, which was finally broken by Stefan. “Who do we tell, if—if… you know?”

“Shut up!” Jesper said. “Gilan’s going to wake up. We’re not going to think about that!”

Hal nodded agreement, but he was suddenly overcome by a wave of doubt. Who would they tell? He realized that Gilan had spoken very little of his life back in Araluen. Did he have close friends? Family? A wife and children? He met Thorn’s eyes and could tell the old sea wolf was thinking the exact same thing.

“He—he has a girlfriend, back in Araluen,” Ulf said falteringly. “He told me once.”

“What are you talking about?” hissed Wulf. “I don’t remember that.”

“That’s because you weren’t there,” Ulf retorted. “We were gathering firewood together, and he was singing that song again, about the cabin in the trees. And there was a girl in the song, so... I asked him about it.”

“And?”

“He said he had a girlfriend back in Araluen. Her name’s Jenny. I asked him if he’d found a girl to match him—tall, skinny, and ugly, and he just laughed. He says she’s the best chef in all of Araluen, and he’s never met a better one outside of it. No offense, Edvin.”

Edvin shook his head. “None taken.”

“Did he say anything else?” asked Ingvar. But Ulf had suddenly gone pale.

“What is it?” asked Wulf.

“He—nothing, it’s just—he said that, once he got back to Araluen, he was going to ask her to marry him.”

A sudden silence fell over the circle around the campfire. Lydia blinked several times, and Jesper‘s hands, usually in constant motion, had gone very still in his lap.

Hal cleared his throat, which had gone strangely dry. “Gilan’s going to be fine,” he said decisively. “He just got a knock on the head. He’ll wake up soon, and before we know it, he’ll be back to normal.”

The other Herons nodded, but Hal’s eyes met Thorn’s over the light of the fire. His gaze flickered to Gilan, lying prone on his bedroll, where Ingvar had set him in the aftermath of the battle. It felt wrong to give up hope—as if even considering the possibility that Gilan wouldn’t be all right might make it reality. It felt like a betrayal.

But Hal’s thoughts were running ahead without him. Sick with horror, he imagined having to explain to this Jenny, or the Ranger Crowley, or—heaven forbid—to Gilan’s parents, that Gilan had died on his watch. That Gilan had died trying to protect him.

His mouth went dry with fear at the thought, and to his surprise, the sickening fear inside him was familiar. It took him a moment to realize why. It was the same fear that he carried for all of the other Herons.

All at once, Hal realized how he phrased that in his mind—the other Herons. The thought startled him—first, because it was unfamiliar, and then because it was true. Gilan may not have gone through the Brotherband training with them, but neither had Lydia. And he may not have been with them for long, but somehow, it had happened.

Whether they had realized it or not, Gilan had become one of the Herons, in his own way. Again, he glanced at Thorn, and he could tell that the old sea wolf had come to the same realization.

“Maybe we could make coffee?”

The voice startled Hal out of his thoughts, and it took him a moment to realize it was Stefan who had spoken.

“What do you mean, Stef?”

Stefan shrugged, uncertain. “I don’t know. It’s just that he always seems to perk up whenever someone makes coffee. And it always wakes him up in the mornings, even when I had the last watch and made it when everyone was still asleep. Maybe… maybe that would wake him up?”

All eyes turned to Edvin—the healer as well as the cook. But he was shaking his head. “I don’t know if it would work or not,” he was saying, “but it doesn’t matter. I used the last of the coffee yesterday.”

Silence fell as the small hope that had arisen was dashed. After a moment, Jesper spoke.

“What about Gilan’s secret stash?”

“Gilan has a secret stash?” Ulf burst out. “I didn’t know about it!”

“That’s because you’re an idiot,” Wulf said. “Everyone knows about the secret stash.”

“I thought it was supposed to be secret! ” Ulf retorted.

“Please. With Hal and Thorn around? No coffee is secret.”

“Hey!” Hal protested. “I don’t drink nearly as much coffee as Thorn does—and I don’t steal from Gilan!”

“That’s right,” Edvin broke in. “We can’t steal from him when he’s not here to stop it.”

“Have you ever tried stealing from him when he is here to stop it?” Jesper asked. “It’s almost impossible!”

“And it’s not stealing if we give him some,” said Stig, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “It is to wake him up.”

“How did all of you know about this secret stash except me?” said Ulf.

“How did all of you know about this without me knowing?” asked Gilan, opening his eyes.

Hal felt a cold wave of relief wash over him, and for a moment he couldn’t find words. “Thank Thor,” he said at last. “You had us scared for a while, Gilan.”

“Oh, I had you scared?” Gilan complained. “Imagine waking up to a crew of Skandians talking about stealing your coffee.”

Jesper jumped a foot into the air, ready to deny everything. “I—was talking about a different stash,” he said lamely.

“Shut up,” Stig told him. “Before you dig yourself a deeper hole.”

“It’s good to have you back, lad,” Thorn said as Gilan sat up. “Now—where’s that coffee? It’s bad manners to hide supplies from your shipmates.”

“Where I’m from, it’s bad manners to ask a Ranger for coffee, but clearly that doesn’t apply here,” Gilan groaned. “You know, I think I preferred being unconscious to having to deal with you lot.”

“Har, har,” said Thorn. “We love you too.”

“You know, I’m just glad we didn’t lose you there,” said Hal.

“After all, we’ve gotten used to having you around.”

#rangers apprentice #ranger's apprentice #gilan davidson #the brotherband chronicles #hal mikkelson #stig olafson #brotherband chronicles #ra fanfic #ra fanfiction

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