The Royal Ranger

Fifteen years have passed. Will is a senior Ranger now, quiet in a way he didn’t used to be quiet, and Halt has been retired for years. Then Will finds himself assigned — at the King’s order — to take on an apprentice. A young one. One he was not expecting, and one he does not, at first, want.

The Royal Ranger was published as the twelfth and final book of the main Ranger’s Apprentice series in 2013. When Flanagan returned to the world five years later with The Red Fox Clan, the paperback of The Royal Ranger was reissued with the subtitle A New Beginning and retroactively positioned as the first book of the Royal Ranger spinoff series. It’s the same book — only the packaging changed. Read it as book 12 of the main series, or as book 1 of the spinoff, or both.