The Jarl's Son, Chapter 11-2
Rain in the Night, Part 2
Certainty in the Gods was never something Gaiur held close. She believed they existed, but when it came to the idea that they cared about the doings of mortals, she simply couldn’t see why they would. Man was hardly a speck in the face of divinity, and to her mind the Gods always seemed withdrawn and inscrutable. Little surprise, then, that she struggled to accept the word of those who claimed to know of their wants, whims, and wills.
Nevertheless, she closed her eyes and listened.
Blustery winds groaned through bowing trees.
Percussive thunder pealed in rumbling rolls.
Fat drops of rain pattered and thrummed against their tent.
Nowhere did she hear anger, nor displeasure. Only the song of the storm was played, conducted in a powerful but peaceful rhythm.
Opening her eyes, Gaiur shook her head. “He’s not angry,” she said.
“You don’t think so? Hm, then what do you hear?” Marten asked.
She shuffled her position as she listened and thought, settling herself more snugly against Marten’s chest. After a moment taking it all in - the wind, the rain, the crackle of the fire, the rustle of the trees, the reposeful sound of their breathing and the occasional grumble from his mare - she answered.
“Peace,” she said. “Contentedness.”
“Contentedness? With how his thunder booms and his winds howl?” Marten said this with an amused scoff, though his manner wasn’t mean-spirited.
“I think so. Listen to it again. The wind howls, but it doesn’t whip or threaten to pull our tent free. The thunder booms not with the violent hurling of lightning, but at a drummer’s pace. The rain falls fat and heavy, but not hard enough to flood us out or douse our fire. He sings of content.”
This time Marten’s reply came with a jolly chortle. “I’d never taken Luthmor as one for singing,” he said. Then he paused for a long moment, letting their silence settle in again as he held her close to him and rested his coppery-bearded chin on her shoulder. “And you? Is my Wolfmother contented?”
Gazing out into that rainy night, illuminated by nothing more than their campfire and the occasional flash of white lightning, Gaiur gave no answer. What a question to be asked so soon after all that had happened. She hadn’t stopped to consider it before. Only two days had passed since the purging of the shadow adder from Erik’s body, and less than that since she’d given herself to Marten and shared his bed. Now they’d ridden off together in pursuit of some vagrant warband of butcherous marauders, had their leader reveal himself to her only to vanish without so much as a trace, and now sat snuggling within a rain battered tent enjoying the warmth of a fire and each other’s company while discussing the ways of the Gods. A strange day indeed.
“You’re worried about the Red Bear,” Marten said.
He was right. The Red Bear had only been part of Gaiur’s silent considerations, but he was the most prominent part. She couldn’t shake the feeling of wrongness about him; of the strange way he vanished without even the slightest trace left behind. That alone told her she was facing a more dangerous foe than even her nightmare had led her to believe, and it led her to wonder just what kind of foe the reaver was.
“You should sleep,” she replied.
“Oh no, you’re not avoiding me that easy.”
“I’m serious.” Gaiur’s tone was low, but firm, and she looked over her shoulder at Marten with eyes that sternly pleaded for him to agree. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover and we don’t know what the weather will be like come morning, so you sleep and I’ll keep watch then wake you around midnight.”
Marten tried to scrutinize her with those sharp blue eyes of his. They twitched and flitted in tiny motions as he examined her features. Beneath his beard, his jaw set and his lips pressed into a thin line. “You’re sure about this?” he soon asked.
Gaiur nodded. “I’ve got too much on my mind to sleep now anyway,” she admitted.
“That’s what concerns me.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, and when his scrutinizing gaze remained unchanged she gave the back of his hand a reassuring pet and squeezed. “Marten, I’ll be alright.”
He was reluctant, but Marten did acquiesce in the end. After moving so that he could lie down, Gaiur fully draped herself in her new cloak and settled in just inside the tent. She was far enough back that she wouldn’t get pelted by the rain, but close enough to have an easy view of the surrounding woods just by pushing the canvas flaps aside or peeking her head outside. This also left her close to the fire, making it easy for her to maintain and stave off the wet, windy chill.
As she anticipated, sleep didn’t come easily for Gaiur that night. Here and there she’d start to nod off, but the concerns that weighed on her always managed to pull her back. Sitting just inside the entrance of Marten’s tent, she looked out into the rain soaked night and watched the swaying, churning shadows. Lightning continued to streak the sky throughout the night, illuminating the surrounding woods in momentary flashes of brilliant white. These flashes revealed the vague forms of the surrounding rocks, trees, and other foliage, and the still-heavy rains made them blurry and nondescript.
The rain intensified after a couple hours. It fell hard and fast with thick, heavy drops that beat against the tent and soil like pebbles being dropped from on high. These fell straight down, though, because the winds had largely died by then. The same was true of the lightning. On occasion a gusty breeze would push its way through the branches or a stray bolt would make itself known with a flash and a thoom, but by and large the hours leading into midnight had become the darkest and quietest in that wet pre-autumn night.
It was in those hours that Gaiur began to see things in the rain blurred shadows. Shapes. Ripples of movement. The flash of eyes reflecting the fire. She tried to discern what they were, if anything at all. Darkness, shadows, and rain alike all had ways of playing tricks on the human eye. They could fool people into thinking things were really there when they weren’t, and in doing so these tricks might distract them from genuine dangers lurking in these impenetrable veils. Over the years Gaiur had, rather fortunately, developed the means to suss out the genuine threats from the illusions. Varro was chief among these. Thanks to his acute lupine senses, she usually had early warning when it came to the physical threats they’d encountered across their travels.
It was the metaphysical ones that proved especially troublesome, though. While considerably rarer to encounter, Varro couldn’t always sense these, and before she became aware of the draw, neither could Gaiur. Though a great rarity when considering how long she’d been wandering, this had led her to being ambushed by creatures of supernatural malice before. That issue was far less prevalent now that she’d been gifted that sixth sense of hers, but that’s what made her all the more concerned about tonight. Somewhere in this rain soaked night the Red Bear was waiting, and her brief encounter with him taught her that she had no true means of knowing just how near or far he really was. For all she could feel, he might be leagues away, camped as far afield as the Red Marshes. Or he could be watching her now, hidden from sight by the rain and shadows and trees. Or it could be something else entirely. Regardless, she couldn’t know either way.
This understanding brought with it a thought which genuinely scared her. Before the events of Jötungatt, Gaiur had managed to make her way just fine without the presence of the draw. She’d had close brushes with death in those years, but whether through cleverness or strength of arms she’d always battled her way out of its grasp. However, tonight’s distant encounter with the reaver brought with it the realization of just how dependent she’d become on this new sense. The draw was the key that allowed her to track down and destroy the vile entities which the destiny she’d been foisted with demanded she kill. Through it she could sense and see things that almost nobody else could, and she’d been counting on that to help her in her quest to hunt the Red Bear. Now that she was faced with the knowledge that, outside the call of her nightmares, she might not be able to sense him with it at all, she found herself suddenly afraid in a way that she hadn’t been for a very long time.
Midnight came and went, and Gaiur never bothered to wake Marten. As that earliest hour of morning crept past she could hear the rumble of distant thunder resuming. The heavy rains weakened in time with its percussive approach, lessening from a torrent, to a fall, to a mere patter. Lightning flashes began illuminating the woods again before long. Huddled in her cloak next to the middling fire, Gaiur took in as much as she could in as the lightning rolled in.
Flickering bolts criss-crossed the sky. They lit the forest in strobing flashes that made the swaying motions of the rain damp trees look like snapshots. To Gaiur’s mind, it was as if each flash allowed her to witness a moment in time made still. The fire and the rain gave lie to the notion. Even when faced with the storm’s constant flashing and flickering they maintained their constant motion.
The fire in particular became a point of comforting control for the restless Gaiur, a place for her eyes and mind to turn when the illusions of light and dark started playing their tricks again. As she scanned the trees throughout the storm’s scintillant display, she could swear she saw flashes of motion again. This wasn’t the same as the misty, undulating nature of the rainy darkness, either. These shapes and blurs appeared more clear. Some were the trees and bushes, momentarily depicted in their breezy sway. Other times it was the rain, or the lightning flashes reflecting off the wet surface of a stone happening to catch her eye. Yet she swore some of them appeared as the horse and rider darting betwixt the trees in a manner that neither drew closer nor hinted at a sense of reason or discernible pattern.
Tricks of an uneasy mind, she decided. If the Red Bear were truly dashing on horseback from tree to tree, then surely she’d have heard the beat of his steed’s hooves between the crashes of thunder. Yet she didn’t, and neither did Varro stir, even though he’d smelled and spotted the rider earlier. If he’d truly been there, then Varro would certainly have awakened. The savage had proven to have tricks at his disposal, that was true, but the sound of his horse’s hoofbeats and Varro being able to smell him were truths that, in Gaiur’s mind, were fundamental.
Yet restlessness and a lack of sleep can have an adverse effect on even an expert’s considerations. So it was that Gaiur failed to notice the pattern that was there, until it became too late. Come the dawn, the storm would all but be ended. The wind would be still. The rain, reduced to little more than a cool morning drizzle. The thunder would be silenced, the lightning which bore it nowhere to be seen. And when Marten and Varro awoke, they would find that Gaiur had disappeared as well.
Thank you for reading.
The Jarl’s Son sees Gaiur the Valdunite return to embark on a new adventure and acts as the follow-up to my dark fantasy mystery tale, In the Giant’s Shadow. The previous story isn’t required reading to understand and enjoy this tale, but doing so will enhance the experience.
My first novella, In the Giant’s Shadow, is available for purchase! Lured to the sleepy farming community of Jötungatt by a mysterious white raven, Gaiur the Valdunite soon finds herself caught in a strange conspiracy of ritual murder and very real nightmares.
Purchase it in hardback, paperback, or digital on Amazon now:
