The Jarl's Son, Chapter 17-1
The Twin Pendants, Part 1
Before we begin, if you’ve been enjoying my work and would like to further support my fiction, essays, and book reviews, the following are the best ways to do so:
Purchase my book, In the Giant’s Shadow. You can find it on Amazon in hardcover ($19.49), paperback ($11.99), and digital ($3.99) formats. This is the method I most recommend as it gets you something tangible in return for your financial support.
You can subscribe to Tales of Calamity and Triumph for either $5 per month or $50 per year. Doing so automatically unlocks digital versions of any and all of my current and future published fiction.
Restacking and sharing work of mine which resonates with you is the easiest (and arguably most effective) way to help.
As always, please don’t feel pressured to do any of these things. Your readership is more than enough for me. Thank you kindly for giving my words your time.
Looking to start from the beginning? Read Chapter 1-1 here.
“They do look remarkably similar,” Renald murmured, his sapphire eyes shifting back and forth between the pair of runic pendants.
Marten and Renald were back in the glade. The silvery winter fox had taken a seat on one of the large stones that bordered the brigand camp. Marten stood on the ground beside him and laid out the two pendants for him to look over. On the left was the one he’d taken from the tent of Halvar the Foe-Breaker. Slightly smaller than his palm, the bronze pendant warped and had a tarnished green patina on some of its surface. Small dents dotted its surface, and chips along its edge damaged the ring of runes inscribed on the outside.
On the right was the one Marten’s father gave him before he left Halvfjord to resume his search for Gaiur. Originally wrapped in a jute cloth, the Jarl gave the pendant to his son in the hopes it would protect him the way his mother once believed it protected her. Seeing how it paired with a similar amulet kept by one of the Red Bear’s reavers, he didn’t quite believe it to be the protective charm his mother apparently had.
The amulets weren’t an exact match, though. His mothers was far better preserved, absent all the dents and nicks in the Foe-Breaker’s. It was of higher quality as well, a polished brass versus the tarnished bronze of the one he’d found. A gemstone was also set in its center, a moonstone that shone with pale blue pearlescence. Both pendants were the same size, though, and the runes carved around their outer edge were an identical match.
“Where was it you said you found this one?” Renald asked, patting the tarnished amulet with his paw.
Marten pointed behind himself by throwing a thumb over his shoulder. “In there, inside their leader’s tent,” he said.
“Do you remember how it looked inside?” Renald asked
Marten nodded in reply.
“Well enough to recreate it?” the fox asked.
“I think so,” Marten said.
“Good. I should like to see the inside, then. There may be a detail that was missed or overlooked on your first search.”
Facing the tent, Marten took a deep breath and concentrated. Like the rest of the glade its interior would be recreated through his memories, both those he could recall consciously, and those he couldn’t. He pictured where and how everything was laid out. The weapon racks along the tent’s rear panel. The chests and sacks of loot scattered about. The large bed in the center, and the long table not far away, covered in empty plates and bowls, with the pendant tucked behind one of them.
After searching the camp, Marten had brought clothes to the kidnapped girl and tried to ease her fears. That proved difficult given all she’d witnessed, including his battle against the Foe-Breaker and his brigands. They’d treated her roughly, he saw that much when the cur drove her out of the tent he was so focused on now. Looking over her after the battle, he saw numerous cuts and lacerations across her back, thighs, calves, and forearms. Signs she’d been switched by a juniper branch, like they’d been doing to her horse. Most of the cuts were shallow and wouldn’t bleed much on their own, but she’d been switched so many times that some of the welts had been struck three or four times over, plenty enough to fully open the wounds.
Marten recounted all of this to Renald after meeting the chatty fox in his dream that night. He took some time to clean and dress the girl’s wounds and once she realized he wasn’t going to hurt her, he helped her dress and brought her straight to Tårnkryss. They’d arrived just before sunset, and Marten transferred her to the custody of the local guard. Quickly, they sent a courier to Halvfjord to retrieve the læknir, Hlín, and took the girl to the common house so she could eat and rest.
For his part, Marten checked on her one last time before he retired to a private quarters that had been prepared for him. He’d flushed a little at the girl’s embarrassed surprise upon her learning who he was. She hadn’t expected a rescue to come for her, much less to be saved by the firstborn son of Jarl Ostock himself. She was a pretty young thing, blonde of hair with dark brown eyes and round, gentle features. It was little wonder those contemptible dastards targeted her the way they had. It was fortunate that he’d arrived before they could do worse than switch and strike her.
Sweat beaded on Marten’s brow. He didn’t know that was possible in a dream. He knew that dreams could cause a man to sweat, such as nightmares causing cold sweats or that which came from fevered dreams, but he’d never experienced it caused by an exertion of effort in a dream before. A first time for all things, he supposed. Before today, he hadn’t known that he could construct dreams like this, either.
Renald had been the one to suggest they try it. Originally the space they met in matched his private quarters, a small and sparsely furnished room at the back of the common house. However, as Marten described the events of the day to Renald, building up to his discovery of the twin pendants, the environment around them started changing to match the glade. Renald, excitable creature that he was, found this thoroughly remarkable. Enough that it took a stern rebuke from Marten for him to focus again, though he did allow the silvery fox an opportunity to explain.
According to Renald, Marten displayed an ability he called ‘lucid dreaming,’ a rare magic of the mind that allowed him some control over his dreams. Most people who had this skill developed it over years, possibly even decades of difficult practice. Many sorcerers, arcanists, hypnotists, and mystics sought to gain some amount of leverage over their dreams, believing they may hold the keys to long hidden secrets or potent lost magics.
Usually this training resulted in these types being able to freely move through and interact with their dreams. The same was often true of those who demonstrated a natural affinity for this magic, they could move and interact as they wished, but they couldn’t change the shape of the dream itself, nor its nature. Rare indeed were the few who could do this. There were spell weavers out there who spent a lifetime of study to learn this skill for themselves and never achieved it, such was its difficulty.
Marten could understand why they failed. The effort needed just to recreate the interior of the Foe-Breaker’s tent was immense. That he could change the landscape through his conversation with Renald was itself something of a miracle. Learning now that he could shape his own dreams willingly? That was nothing short of a blessing. Surely, Beshabba’s scrutinizing gaze must have long been upon him for him to develop such an ability.
“I think I’m done,” he finally said after many long moments of intense concentration.
Upon entering the tent, Marten was momentarily taken aback. Down to the last detail, the accuracy of his recreation was uncanny. Every dish and utensil on the table, all the weapons upon the racks, even the loose sacks of hacksilver were all placed exactly as he remembered them. It made him curious to know how well his unconscious memory lined up with the real thing, and as such, a small part of him wished he was still in the camp so he could compare the details.
Renald padded past him, bushy tail brushing up against Marten’s hand as he entered the large tent and began to sniff and search around. Marten sought to join him at first, beginning with the table where he found the amulet. He thought that he might be able to pick out a detail or two that he’d overlooked on his search of the place in the waking world. Alas, he was soon disabused of this idea. Try though he might, everything in the tent appeared precisely as it had when he’d searched it the first time; a function of it being recreated via his memories, Renald explained.
So Marten stood and waited as Renald searched. And then he wandered and waited. And then, paced and waited, until anxious boredom at the dream fox’s sluggish investigations finally ate away at him.
“What exactly are you searching for?” he asked.
“Anything,” Renald replied as he crept under the Foe-Hammer’s bed to sniff around. “Anything out of the ordinary that might be of use.”
Scoffing, Marten crossed his arms and leaned against one of the bed’s corner posts. “You’ve quite the gift, Renald, did you know that?” Marten quipped. “I don’t think I’ve met anyone who’s as good at giving frustratingly vague answers as you are. Except for Gaiur, perhaps.”
“Ha! You should’ve seen how she reacted when I tried explaining these sorts of things back when we first met!” Renald replied, poking his head out from under the bed to grin up at Marten. His grin quickly faded when he saw the unamused look on the warrior’s face.
“Yes, well,” the fox continued after clearing his throat, “it’s a bit difficult to explain, but in simplest terms, I’m trying to find that which doesn’t belong.”
“What does that mean?” Marten asked.
“Anything, as I said earlier,” Renald answered as he crawled out from under the bed. “That’s what makes it so difficult to explain; what doesn’t belong could truly be just about anything. All I can say for certain is if such an oddity exists here, I’ll know it when I find it.”
Until now, Marten hadn’t had too much difficulty grasping the concepts Renald told him about. He lacked anything resembling clarity of these esoteric ideas and arcane, otherworldly functions, but he at least had a basic understanding of them. This time, he was completely out of his depth. Renald wasn’t just speaking in vagaries, his words lacked any clear meaning that Marten could glean. Something that doesn’t belong, which could be anything, but also might not even be here? He felt as a child does when told a riddle beyond his comprehending.
On and on the search drew, spanning minutes which felt as hours. Marten’s pacing slowed, and soon turned into absent wandering through the large tent. The tiredness of recreating the tent’s interior within his dreamspace still clung to him. His limbs were heavy, his movements sluggish, and his breaths came sharp and deep. A fine sheen of sweat still coated his skin, but he felt no chill from it. Just as it was in Gaiur’s nightmare of the razed village, Marten couldn’t feel heat or cold upon his skin. The same was true of scent and sound. There were no standout smells in his recreation of the glade and camp, and other than himself and Renald, his dream was a silent one.
Marten was stood back by the weapon racks when Renald finished his search. He was inspecting one of the few swords hanging there. A shoddy thing, poorly kept, with a blade spotted in rust. It was a wonder those curs were able to accomplish so much with such poor equipment and coordination, though he supposed they likely wouldn’t have had the city been sending out regular patrols as usual. Once again, the decision to close off Halvfjord extracted a steep price from those who didn’t deserve such suffering.
He placed the sword back upon the rack when Renald came around. “Did you find something?” he asked.
Renald sighed and shook his head, scrunching up his vulpine muzzle in a manner that imitated lips pursed in frustration. “Nothing out of the ordinary,” he huffed. “I was certain that if we were to find some tie to this Red Bear fiend, it would’ve been here, where his man made his quarters.”
Arms crossed, Marten’s brow knit into a deeply furrowed frown. All that time spent for nothing, his discovery of the pendants leading to more questions than answers. Surely that couldn’t be the end of it, though. There must be something more they could do. Perhaps returning to the camp would yield better results? He posed the question to Renald, but the fox assured him that was unlikely.
“Then we’re stuck again, forced to rely on the nightmare that rejected me,” Marten said. “Unless you’ve any other ideas?”
The fox shook his head. “If another path to finding Gaiur does indeed exist, I cannot see it.”
“Plagues upon them! Upon the Red Bear and all his savages!” Marten spat, and he tossed both pendants against the tent wall. They hit with dull thumps, and his mother’s fell to the ground, while the jagged edges of the Foe-Breaker’s caught in the fabric.
His anger softened as his mother’s pendant struck the canvas floor. It bounced once, wobbled slightly as it landed on its side, then tipped over onto its back. The white moonstone in its center, ribboned with sparkling sky blue, glittered as it gently swayed back and forth, propped on a rock or lump of grass beneath the canvas. It was beautiful, and it made him wonder about the woman who brought him into this world. What did she look like, sound like? How did she carry herself when she lived?
He had ideas, pieced together from brief descriptions he managed to draw out of his father over the years. A complete picture always eluded him, though it wasn’t for lack of trying. In his adolescence, Marten made many attempts to get answers from his father. Details would come, but piecemeal, always brief.
It was never long until brevity became stoic silence, and the Jarl’s mein darkened. Then, as Marten grew into manhood and his father drew closer to old age, he found himself trying less. By that time his father had remarried to Betilde Ivarsdottr, eldest daughter of Jarl Ivar of Eldlundr, the neighboring hold to the north. Erik was born within their first year of marriage, and Betilde died from illness days before her son’s fifth birthday.
Renald must have noticed the distant look in Marten’s eyes. As Marten stared at the pendant, the little fox padded into view, crossing the tent over to where his mother’s trinket lay. Opening his mouth slightly, the gray-furred fox leaned down to delicately pick the pendant up, doubtless to bring it back to Marten. However, as he neared it, he suddenly began to sniff at it.
“Renald you bloody fool,” the fox said. “To think that I missed this! Why, were it a snake, t’would certainly have bit me!”
“What is it?” Marten asked.
“That which doesn’t belong,” Renald replied. “Your mother’s amulet carries the same scent as Gaiur’s nightmare.”
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:
