Erak's Ransom

Following Araluen's tense ceasefire with the marauding Skandians, news breaks that the Skandian chief has been taken prisoner by a hostile tribe in the desert. Will and the Rangers are sent to liberate him. However, these soldiers had never seen anything like this desert. They are brutalized by sandstorms, battered by the relentless heat, misled by a tribe that follows its own customs, and shockingly made friends with another tribe. They are strangers in a foreign place. Nothing is as it appears, like a mirage in the desert. One thing, nevertheless, never changes: the Rangers' valor.