wait wait wait

[Sebastian]

So I'm trying to figure out what the age difference is between Hal and Will. So Horace is married to Cassandra, but Duncan isn't sick and stuff so its not near the time of "The Royal Ranger." So Will is like in his 30's? 20's? From what i can tell Hal and the others in the Brotherband (besides Thorn) are about in their 20's...
So is Will...older than Hal?
My head hurts

[Matthew]

Sebastian wrote: "So I'm trying to figure out what the age difference is between Hal and Will. So Horace is married to Cassandra, but Duncan isn't sick and stuff so its not near the time of "The Royal Ranger." So ..."

The Herons are around 16-17, maybe 18, depending on how long it took the Herons to get back to Hallasholm, as Brotherband training started in The Outcasts when they were 16, and it's mentioned in Slaves of Socorro that one winter has passed since the Herons returned with the Andomal.

With the Ranger's Apprentice timeline, we are closest to The Lost Stories's The Bridal Dance, roughly a year afterward, as Duncan reveals when describing the issue with assassins targeting his daughter. I'd estimate, going off the time gaps in the other books, that Will and Horace are in their early to mid 20s, as Erak's Ransom takes place five years after Will started his Ranger training at 15, and the gap of a few months between each of the major plot arcs (Arrida [7], Macindaw-Grimsdell [5 & 6], Clonmell-Picta-Northern Araluen [8 & 9] Nijon-Ja [10]), would put them at age 21-22 at the youngest, but it's implied that the stories in Book 11 post Nijon-Ja take another several months.

As Erak is Oberjarl by the time Hal is 6 (second part of Outcasts prologue, when Karina takes Thorn under her wing), it means Hal was very young during the battle with the Temujai, but the first part of the prologue of the Outcasts shows that Hal was alive before the battle, too. That pushes the potential maximum age difference up a bit, and thence my mid-20s upper estimate.

I might remember other points later, but I already stay up at night trying to calibrate the timelines.

[Sebastian]

Matthew wrote: "Sebastian wrote: "So I'm trying to figure out what the age difference is between Hal and Will. So Horace is married to Cassandra, but Duncan isn't sick and stuff so its not near the time of "The R..."

Wow! You know your stuff