A troubled fugitive finds solace in the home of a man with mysterious talents akin to magic.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
Sebbi fell in step with the red-haired man who lived outside the walls, and caught him round the shoulders, pinning his arms to his sides. Though Sebbi wore a crucifix and believed in compassion, he flashed his knife before pressing its cold iron blade against the red-haired man’s pale throat. He was desperate enough to make this threat, and maybe desperate enough to follow it through.
In a moment of unplanned lucidity, Sebbi had escaped his Norse captors, evading the bryti overseers by bolting into the forest while they were busy with the late autumn slaughter, the screaming pigs. The sun was going down on his third day without proper food and the cold left Sebbi’s limbs burning; the temperature was dropping, and the wind had already chapped his skin, split his lips. He did not think he would survive another night in the open.
“To live you desire?” Sebbi demanded in the broken Dǫnsk tongue he had to speak with his captors.
The red-haired man leaned back against him, relaxed and smiling. The man was thin, his shoulders loose-jointed, and he did not try to fight, but Sebbi held him tighter. There was a wrongness in this calm.
Sebbi jerked his head towards the man’s pit-house. “Food. Fire. A place to sleep.”
“You have much to learn about the hospitality of my people. You could have gotten these things without holding a knife to my throat.”
Sebbi let go of him but kept the point of the knife close. “I also need a secret keeper.”
The red-haired man just smiled broadly and gestured Sebbi into the smokey closeness of his home.
“You speak my tongue,” Sebbi said, going to huddle by the fire, afraid the feeling in his toes might be gone forever. Behind him, the red-haired man shucked off his mittens and fur mantle. “How is that?”
“What is your name?”
“Sebbi.”
“I have travelled many places, Sebbi. And in this way, learned many things. I am called Birgir here. It means One Who Helps, in your language.”
“And do you? Help?”
“I try to.” Birgir ladled skause from a simmering cauldron into a wooden bowl and thrust it towards Sebbi, who took it with shaking hands. “Where have you escaped from?”
Sebbi looked at Birgir, sharp and scared.
“A free man would not have his hair cut so short and so badly. You were captured and traded as a thrall, no? Is that not the secret you need kept?”
“You will not run back to the town and call the law down on me?”
Birgir let out a short laugh. “I am not welcome inside the walls, either. Is that where you came from?”
“No.”
“Good. How many days from danger are you?”
“I’ve been walking three days due south, through the forest. I have rested little.”
“Do you not wish to return to your homeland?” Birgir asked him, mild and quiet. “This is not your best route to the sea.”
“It’s not a good season to cross the waters. I will find my way home in the spring.” Sebbi said.
“Rest here for now, then. I will keep your secret.”
After Sebbi had eaten, Birgir insisted on checking his extremities for frostbite, and hissed at Sebbi’s toes, which were an angry, burnt red that Birgir smeared in honey and herbs as they warmed. He put a salve over a windburned split on Sebbi’s cheek, too, and over his chapped lips. Up close, Sebbi saw that Birgir had delicate hands, though he used them roughly, and his serious face was handsome despite an undernourished gauntness. Beneath long and girlish lashes, his blue eyes were sharp. When he caught Sebbi staring, Birgir smiled in a slow lop-sided way. He showed a crooked canine tooth.
When Birgir finished his ministrations and told him to share his bed, exhaustion pulled Sebbi into unconsciousness swiftly. He dreamed, though, of Birgir, sat with a bowl of smoking seeds, hair flashing and glinting in the firelight. In one hand Birgir held a staff of twisted metal that he moved through the smoke, wafting it towards his face as he inhaled, pulling it over the pout of his lower lip. His eyes rolled back in his head, and still, Sebbi felt sure he was being looked at through the white of the vitreous. Then Birgir’s right eye refocused, and it was looking at him, but it was also dark with blood – when it blinked, a red tear tracked down Birgir’s hollow cheek.
The rest of Sebbi’s dreams were darkness.
In the morning, Sebbi ate what Birgir gave him and accepted the gift of a clean tunic. “You’re being very generous,” Sebbi said.
“Considering you held a knife to my throat yesterday?” Birgir asked, a twist in his expression.
“I’m sorry,” Sebbi told him, looking at his hands and running the rough-spun fabric through his palms. “I didn’t think anyone would help me.”
“It is maybe some Norn’s kindness, sending you here,” Birgir said. “I have enough to feed two for the winter, but I struggle with the work of a household. There’s wood to chop and carry, repairs that need to be done. It would help me if you could stay until the spring.”
“I will not be your slave,” Sebbi spat.
Birgir shrugged. “I am asking for help in exchange for a warm fire and a full belly. If that is not to your liking, you may continue your journey with my blessing. You are not a thrall under my roof.”
Sebbi nodded, then. The thought of serving Birgir had prompted a frisson of horror, brought him instantly to the flashpoint of anger, but he could see the logic of it. Sebbi was not prepared to weather the winter alone in the cold Norse lands. He could see, too, that Birgir did look fragile. He was a man who would need help, even if he did not feel entitled to demand it.
While Sebbi calmed himself to consider the offer, Birgir reached for the crudely carved cross Sebbi wore around his neck on a leather thong. “You have promised yourself to a god?” Birgir asked.
“I have prayed for my freedom. I will return home, if He wills it,” Sebbi told him.
Birgir tugged the cross free of its cord. The swift pain of it surprised Sebbi enough he nearly retaliated with a fist before he got control of himself and dropped his hand.
Birgir grinned at Sebbi’s visible restraint, his teeth bared in a feral challenge. Sebbi knew he was shackled, then: by his need for shelter, by the strange handsomeness of Birgir, by his secret, and by his desires.
Birgir dropped the cross into Sebbi’s hand and closed Sebbi’s fist around it. “Better for us both if you keep this hidden. If you decide to stay.”
When he looked up into Birgir’s face, Sebbi saw that a crescent of bright blood had pooled around the rim of Birgir’s right iris during the night. The red stood out plainly against its clear blue.
“Your eye -” Sebbi said.
“It will fade soon,” Birgir told him.
While his strength returned, Sebbi kept out of the way and observed Birgir closely. His was not the life Sebbi was used to, even among the Norse. Birgir collected herbs and dried an assortment of things from the timber beams of his roof. He kept a small garden, newly buried under the winter’s frost, but he had no livestock and did not hunt. Instead, Birgir was brought provisions by the people in the walled village who came to ask him questions and seek his advice. Usually, it was about everyday things – how to remedy blood in a cow’s milk, the banishment of pests, setting a broken bone. Birgir dispensed his learning in solemn consultations, prescribing spells and herbs and patience. The visitors assumed Sebbi belonged to Birgir, who spoke only Dǫnsk tongue when others were present. When he noticed Sebbi’s careful interest, Birgir set him to chopping and grinding his supplies of dried plants. He sometimes even called Sebbi to assist him, instructing with the simple phrases Birgir taught him as they sat together in the long dark evenings. By the next moon, Sebbi could prepare Birgir’s herbs and restrain his patients, even reseat a joint pulled from a socket under Birgir’s direction. Sebbi liked the work, and liked more the companionship of Birgir.
Sometimes, though, Sebbi could not understand what took place in that pit-house. Birgir had once healed a girl brought to him coal hot with fever and mottled from head to toe in a violent rash. He sang over her for most of a night, sunk in a trance that ended when he put a hand to her chest and the rash receded, her fever cooled. Birgir’s hand, though, was marbled red with bruising, the nails dark with blood; he was nauseous and feverish for a week in the aftermath. When Sebbi asked about it, lying next to Birgir’s hot and shaking body in the bed they chastely shared, Birgir just smiled his feral smile and shrugged.
“I am a vitki,” he said, leaving the word untranslated. “I travel and I sing the charms that can change the weave. Sometimes I can pull the threads, or speak to the right spirits. Change, in some small ways, a fate.”
Sebbi did not understand. He decided, still, to stay.
In the darkest part of the year, Birgir called for Sebbi, standing in the door of his house, his voice hushed and hoarse. “Sebbi, I must speak with you,” Birgir said. He stayed in the shadows, a slice of weak sunlight just catching the copper of his eyelashes.
Sebbi was surprised to see Birgir up. As the winter deepened, Birgir had grown more reclusive, exhausted and unwilling to leave the close, warm dark of the house. He slept late into the mornings and had a dry, gasping cough when he spent too long in the cold. Most evenings, he sat in front of the fire, sunk in a trance. Sometimes, Sebbi thought to touch him, to return him to himself and bring him to bed, but he didn’t quite dare. Once, even, Birgir’s nose had started to bleed as he sat, and Sebbi had held a rag under his chin to catch the blood dripping into his lap, too afraid to rouse him.
“So speak,” Sebbi said, still stacking freshly split logs. He did not move from the wood pile.
“Come inside, please. I said I must speak with you, and I will not stand in the cold.”
Birgir disappeared into the dark of the house, then, and Sebbi followed behind, sheepish as a scolded child.
“I have to perform a spae tonight,” Birgir told him, looking into the hearth fire rather than at Sebbi. Sebbi’s eyes, adjusted to the weak midday sun, could only make out Birgir’s silhouette against the flames. “I will walk into the future, follow the threads of Fate, and see faraway things. Bring back prophecies for the people inside the walls. Men will come to hear me speak, including the jarl of this hold. Does this put you in danger?”
Sebbi shook his head. “I do not know anyone here. I reached your door before the walls of the city.”
“Good. I wanted to be sure.”
“Is that all?”
Birgir nodded and sat down at the cooking fire; he stirred a large pot of an evil-smelling liquid he’d begun boiling that morning. “That’s all.”
Sebbi’s eyes had attuned to the dark and he could finally see Birgir clearly. His face was ashen and filmed lightly with sweat.
“Are you alright?” Sebbi asked. “You don’t look well.”
“I am preparing. Nothing to worry about.” Birgir smiled tightly. Sebbi didn’t like the expression at all. Still, he nodded and turned to go.
“Sebbi,” Birgir’s voice, quiet, held him at the door. “After the spae, I may be quite ill. Nothing lasting. I will recover, but I will need to rest. Don’t let it upset you.”
“I understand. Let me know what you need.”
“Sebbi?”
“Yes,” he answered. He felt certain for a moment that Birgir would tell him something important, then. That he would reach for him.
“If there’s anything you need to know, you may ask me tonight.”
“That is kind of you.”
“I trust you will be kind to me.”
When the sun began to set, Birgir instructed Sebbi to prepare the house for the ritual he called a spae. Birgir himself was sweating and glassy-eyed, sinking ever deeper into a restless trance. By the time the jarl and his entourage arrived, he was silent, insensible. Sebbi led the guests inside and accepted their gifts for Birgir. There were many things brought for him: furs, a supply of venison, casks of mead, honey, and a heavy purse. Sebbi acted as cup bearer while they feasted at Birgir’s table, toasting each other while Birgir sat huddled in a hooded cloak, his plate empty except for a stoneware bowl of burning henbane seeds. Sebbi listened to the jarl’s somber words, though he still did not have enough of their language to understand them.
When they had eaten, speeches were made and the cups drained, and then Birgir began to speak. The voice in his throat, though, wasn’t his. The words were in Birgir’s native tongue, but the voice he used was deeper and stranger than his own, too resonant for his slender throat, his narrow chest. When he pushed back the mantle that had hidden his face in shadow, it was not his face that looked out. One of his eyes was full of blood, and the muscles of his jaw, the set of his brow, were strange, heavy with the tension of someone else’s worries. The crooked asymmetry of his smile was gone.
The jarl and his guests asked questions, and whatever was inside Birgir gave answers. The men who came to consult him listened and accepted his words. Late into the night, they spoke, and though they were all crushed together in Birgir’s pit-house, speaking in a language he did not know, Sebbi felt that great things were being discussed. Weighty matters: the concerns of kings, or of gods.
When the talking was done, and the lamps were sputtering out, the distinguished group left, all pale and serious. Sebbi helped them with their cloaks and lit the torches that saw them out into the black of night. Birgir remained in his seat, head down.
“The spell will be broken soon, thrall,” the voice inside Birgir said when the door had shut and they were at last alone. It spoke in Sebbi’s West Saxon dialect, its deep and unaccented voice a shock in the smoky darkness. “Ask your question.”
Sebbi turned to him, then. Birgir’s expression was still strange and stoic, but he was crying blood from his right eye, his skin an icy white under the seething waves of his red hair, lips blueing. The sight of it unmoored something in Sebbi and he went to Birgir and held his hands in his. The fingers were limp and cold and Sebbi massaged them as he spoke.
“Will I ever be able to return to my home? To Wessex?” he asked quietly.
Birgir’s head snapped back, his eyes rolling up to the ceiling. Sebbi, frightened, dropped his hands.
The face that eventually turned to Sebbi was different again. Bloody bruises were blossoming around his lips in bright pinpricks, and his mouth was pulled up in a broad smile. “Oh, Sebbi,” some new thing speaking through Birgir said in a clear ringing tenor, “The Fates have cleared the path for you to kiss the dirt of your precious Wessex. You have the power in your hands, though, to defy their weave and return home.”
“But Wessex is my home,” Sebbi whispered. “I don’t understand.” His heart was slamming in his chest. He was afraid, and afraid for Birgir. The bruises were spreading under the skin of Birgir’s lips. The muscles in his face twitched under the strain of his strange expression.
Whatever was inside Birgir reached out and ran a hand along Sebbi’s face, fingers light and probing along his jaw. “No,” he said. “You do not.” It leaned in towards Sebbi, then, as if hungry for physical contact, even to kiss Sebbi. Its probing tongue flicked over Birgir’s bruised lips.
But then Birgir went limp and fell forward. Sebbi caught him, felt him shiver and gasp in his arms, quivering back to consciousness.
“Birgir?” Sebbi cried, desperate for some confirmation that Birgir was there inside the husk of his body, that there would be no more riddles and wrongness, no more blood and prophecy. “Birgir, please.”
“I’m back. Hush now, I’m back,” Birgir whispered. “Help me to bed. I’m so tired.”
Sebbi started to pull him up, but Birgir doubled over when he tried to stand, his hands grasping at a pain in his guts. Sebbi carried him to bed and lifted up his tunic. There was a bruise flowering across his abdomen, so fresh and red Sebbi thought at first Birgir had been stabbed. When he unpinned Birgir’s cloak he found his neck, too, ringed in vivid bruises.
“What should I do?” Sebbi asked Birgir, who was still conscious and stealing short, shallow breaths around his pain.
“Wait,” Birgir managed to say, before dropping back into sleep.
Sebbi slept for only an hour, waking again in the dark. When he checked on Birgir, there was blood on the floor by the bed and dried over his lips, but his breathing was deep and even. Sebbi only went out to bring in firewood; he didn’t want to leave Birgir alone.
For three days and three nights, Birgir slept. A fever took hold of him; he was hot to the touch, his skin clammy. Sebbi did what he could, coaxing water and broth down his throat, preparing the tea Birgir himself prescribed for fevers, but nothing seemed to help. Birgir shook and sweat, swimming up to consciousness to vomit blood that grew darker and thicker every day before collapsing again into sleep.
Outside, winter descended with a violence Sebbi had never seen before, and inside, Sebbi was mad with worry. He paced and pulled at his hair, screamed, even, in frustration at Birgir’s unresponsive body. Panicky in the close heat of the house, Sebbi threw open the door, thinking of going beyond the walls to the town, thinking of hands to carry Birgir, medicine to give him. Someone who would know what to do. The snow and the cold, though, quickly put those thoughts to rest.
Sebbi was alone. He could not even see the walls. He would not be able to reach the gate, not with the burden of Birgir in his arms, not in the darkness.
“Help,” Sebbi shouted into the black. “Help, please.”
The freezing winds captured his voice. His tears froze on his face, and the pain of the cold – the unimaginable northern cold – drove him back inside.
The sun had smudged its grey light over the horizon on the fourth day when Birgir finally woke. He sat up, then moaned and leaned off the bed to spit up a last mouthful of clotted blood. He mumbled something that sounded like a curse.
“Birgir?” Sebbi asked, going to him and checking his fever again. It was finally lowering. Birgir leaned into his touch.
“Sebbi,” he croaked.
“Will you be alright a little longer?” Sebbi asked. “I’ll take you to the town as soon as I can. As soon as the snow stops.”
“No,” Birgir’s eyes opened wide. He looked awake, at least, finally fully conscious. “No, I cannot go there. And you. A thrall. You have some protection under my roof, but you could be captured inside the walls.”
Sebbi shook his head. The worry he felt for his strange host was a surprise even to him. It had only been two moons since he’d held a knife to Birgir’s throat, thinking he would kill him for the warmth of a fire and a meal in his belly. Now, he could not watch Birgir waste away in his bed, even if it cost him his freedom. “You need help. Do you mean to die like this?”
“The danger has passed. I’ll be myself soon,” Birgir said. He reached out his hand to Sebbi, who took it firmly in his own. Birgir had lost weight and his fingers felt fragile in Sebbi’s grip. “I know how I will die. It is not like this. Whatever I desire.”
“How long have you been sick, Birgir?” Sebbi asked. He closed his eyes against the thought of Birgir’s pain and brought his bony knuckles up to his forehead like a blessing.
Birgir huffed a weak laugh. The ghost of his crooked smile turned up one corner of his mouth. “Do you think I am sick?”
Sebbi nodded.
“A long time, then,” Birgir answered.
The next day, Birgir was able to sit up in bed and make conversation. He was hungry after his long sleep and cheery despite his weakness. Sebbi, though, was irritable and restless. Birgir told him to prepare an ointment to go over his bruising, as much to give Sebbi a distraction as to ease his pain. Birgir sniffed it and gave Sebbi corrections until he was satisfied with the work, then swung his feet over the side of the bed and pulled off his tunic.
Though they lived in close quarters, Sebbi was shy about his own body and, perhaps out of a sense of reciprocity, he had always averted his eyes from Birgir’s, too. Sebbi fixed his gaze on the bowl of ointment in his hands.
“Am I so hard to look at?” Birgir asked.
“No,” Sebbi stammered. He looked up and saw Birgir watching him over his shoulder, smiling again. Though his cheeks were sunken, his lips bruise-mottled, and his right eye was still bloodied, Birgir remained handsome. His skin was smooth and pale except for a scattering of dark freckles across his shoulders, and his hair shone red and gold in the firelight. Birgir’s body was so lean and spare that Sebbi could see every muscle and sinew shot through with the blue marbling of his veins. Ribs shadowed his chest and a pulse jumped in his throat.
“Give me the ointment,” Birgir said, reaching a hand out for the bowl. When he took it, it wobbled briefly in his weak-wristed grip.
“Why do you live outside the walls?” Sebbi asked, watching Birgir start to work the ointment into the tense muscle of his stomach. The bruise there had faded from red to a dark purple and mottled black. “It is dangerous for you to be alone if you’re ill.”
“But I am not alone,” Birgir grinned.
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
The counter sobered Birgir. He wiped his expression clean. “It is a long story, Sebbi. And I do not think you will like it.”
“I wish to know. You have been kind to me, but you keep secrets from me also.”
“When you came here, you were looking for a secret keeper.”
“Yes. And I will not fight you for your stories, but I would know them. If you trust me.”
Birgir didn’t reply immediately. He pushed his hair back to look at Sebbi with his good eye while his hands rubbed circles over his bruised neck. “You have not spent much time with my people, and I do not know all the right words to tell you this. Do you know what ergi is? What it means to be argr?”
“No. I did not learn those words.”
“Well, they are best not repeated. If you are known to accuse a man of this falsely, you may be challenged and killed. But if you are argr – that is, you commit acts of what is called ergi – you must also be punished with exile. You cannot live in the community. Most of us outcasts become wanderers, but that life would not suit me, and because I am a vitki, a seer and healer, I am needed by those who have turned me out. So I stay close, but I am not allowed beyond the walls.”
“Because you are argr?”
“Yes.”
“Does that mean – what? You committed a crime?”
“It means that I am, to put it weakly and imprecisely, unmanly. This is common for vitki; seeing is often a woman’s magic, done with women’s tools. You leave yourself open to be penetrated by the spirit world, and you are left vulnerable afterward, as I am now. Sometimes this crossing is accepted. But it means too, and particularly in my case, that I have been used as a woman in sexual congress.”
“Ah. I see.”
Birgir shrugged. “That is the truth of it.”
“That is a sin to your people?”
“A sin?” Birgir laughed. “Well, perhaps. But you’ve lost something in the translation. To be argr is to be unworthy of the society inside the walls. It is an unfitness. An unfitness for your duty as a man.”
“You said it was common for vitki.”
“Yes, but vitki are themselves an aberration. Most seers like me are völva. That is, they are women,” Birgir sighed. “In any case, the accusation was brought against me. I would not fight to clear my name. I did not think I could earn back the trust I had lost. And if you break the trust, if you show that you are not worthy of the protection of your community, you will be outcast.”
“It is not like that among my people,” Sebbi said.
“It is like that everywhere, whether it is written in law or not. If your community rejects you, then you have no help when you need it. No one is so independent that they need no help – even if help is only the knowledge that harming you will be punished. You have been a thrall and a free man, so you must understand. Your fate is decided by how others see you, and you cannot so easily change that.”
“I have never met a man who seemed so needed as you are,” Sebbi told him. It was a kindness, but his voice was dark with anger. Though Birgir did not seem sad about his exile, the thought of it had enraged Sebbi. Birgir, after all, was a man who cared for others, a man who helped. He was clearly not only fit to live in the settlement, but necessary to its inhabitants. He sacrificed for it. “Why force you out?”
Birgir smiled at that, or bared his teeth. It was a grim expression. His eyes were hard and dark in the low light. “In truth? I was also accused of poisoning someone. Which is itself a type of ergi. A real man would fight. A real man would use a knife. And if it was his fate to die, he would accept that, too. I did not.” Birgir shrugged. “They are afraid of me, and they do not respect me. Until they need me, of course. So they have not forced me to go far.”
Sebbi swallowed, his anger ebbing in the wake of Birgir’s confession. Though he considered asking Birgir if it was true – if Birgir had taken a life in this way – he did not. The answer was not worth the offence. He had always known Birgir could kill him with poisons or with words. “It is a serious accusation. But it must have been difficult. To leave, and to be unwelcome still.”
Birgir looked at Sebbi with a strange tenderness, but then simply handed him the ointment. “Have I missed any of my bruises?”
Sebbi took the bowl from him, and seeing that the bruise on Birgir’s stomach was paired with a bruise low on his back, Sebbi worked the salve into the taut muscle over his hip. “Do you want any for your lips?” Sebbi asked.
“My lips?” Birgir repeated, his fingers going to his mouth, probing. “What has happened to my lips?”
“At the end of the spae, when the others had left, I asked you a question. And when you answered, you changed. You spoke with a new voice. And your lips, you have these small bruises all around them. Like -“
“Like someone had sewn my mouth shut.”
“Yes,” Sebbi whispered, afraid, again, for Birgir or perhaps of Birgir. “Do you not remember?”
Birgir only smiled. “Not to worry,” he said. “It will heal.” He dipped two fingers in the salve Sebbi held and smoothed it over his mouth. The motion was perfunctory and quick, but Sebbi watched with a sensual interest: the softness under his fingers, the way his lips shone.
In the frozen deep of winter, Sebbi found himself alone with his thoughts often. There was less work to do, fewer visitors and fewer chores. Birgir’s bruising faded, but he still slept late into the day and was exhausted long before Sebbi. In the quiet hours he spent huddled at the fire, listening to Birgir’s breath whistling through his chest, Sebbi thought of the cryptic answer Birgir had given him at the spae. He turned it over and over in his mind, but couldn’t unpick its riddle.
Not long after his bruises had gone, Birgir sat close to Sebbi at the hearth. “I didn’t think it was possible, but you have been more reticent than usual,” Birgir said. “Do you find the long darkness difficult?”
“No,” Sebbi answered. “It is not that.”
“Then what has made you so quiet?” Birgir asked.
“Do you remember what I asked you? During the spae?”
Birgir shook his head. “The voice who answered you is a voice that has not guided me for some time,” he said. “His is not a thread I would choose to follow.”
“What do you mean?” Sebbi asked.
“I speak the words of spirits and of my gods, the Aesir, if I can follow the thread to them. Often I draw on the wisdom of Oðin, one-eyed and all-seeing. But the other, is – he lives in the home of the gods, but he is something older, even, than Aesir, and less bound by law and oath.”
“A devil?” Sebbi whispered, stunned.
Birgir tried to soothe him, to explain. “Not a devil,” he promised. “But still dangerous. He is the Mind-Tester. The Unquiet Thought. Like you, though, he is far from his home. He is allowed to live with the gods because he is clever, and he has his own power. He has done them great services. And he loves them, too. But he is granted his place because he is useful, and the ways he is used have poisoned him.”
“Then the voice meant me harm?”
Birgir shrugged. “That I do not know. Perhaps he is looking after those who can’t go home.”
“I do not know what his words meant.”
Birgir surprised Sebbi by resting his head against Sebbi’s arm, and moving a hand to rest on Sebbi’s knee. “I cannot explain it, either. But you are welcome here.”
“You have been kind to me,” Sebbi answered.
Birgir turned to him, then. “I mean you would be welcome to stay with me. You are welcome to make this your home. Past the spring. If you wanted it. Instead of going back to Wessex.”
Sebbi leaned forward and kissed Birgir. He caught his lips between his teeth, felt Birgir moan against his mouth.
“Stay,” Birgir said. “Stay with me.”
Sebbi did not make a promise, then, but he felt the foundations of an oath laid down, the beginnings of a new knot to tie him. With his words and with his tongue, Birgir worked this spell. Sebbi did not resist, again at his mercy.
In the quiet of the night, as they lay together in the bed they shared, Sebbi turned to Birgir, and felt Birgir turn to him, too. In the dim of the hearth-light, he could see very little. Birgir’s eyes were a deeper darkness, only, than the white of his skin.
“You should know. It is true that I poisoned someone,” Birgir said.
There was a silence then. Sebbi wanted Birgir to say something more, to reassure him that he wasn’t a man prone to violence. To say he had made a mistake. Sebbi thought Birgir was a kind man, usually, but there was a meanness to him, too, an inflexibility. Maybe Sebbi shouldn’t have been surprised. Maybe he should have been more afraid.
“He disrespected me,” Birgir said. “When I was weak and sick and could not stop him.”
“Ergi,” Sebbi spoke the word Birgir had taught him, the clustered consonants strange in his mouth.
“Yes,” Birgir whispered. “But would it not have been argr to leave him unpunished? I am not a man who will accept what scraps the Fates dole out. I will not be broken for their pleasure.”
Sebbi dared, then, to reach a hand out, to run it over Birgir’s arm. He was prepared for Birgir to pull away, but instead he folded towards Sebbi, resting the crown of his head against his chest.
“I listened to the voice who spoke to you at the spae. The Unquiet Thought,” Birgir admitted. “He taught me many things. To follow the weave. To chase sickness from the suffering. The hour of my death. The revenge I would take. But it was dangerous knowledge. The gods were right to have his mouth sewn closed. Again and again, his words have stung me.”
The spring thaw came, the snow melting under the golden slant of the sun that arced, still low, through the sky. Every hour of sunlight was perfect and gilded, so that Sebbi often found himself struck into stillness by the beauty of the trees, the carved support beams of Birgir’s house, or the bloody red of Birgir’s hair.
At dawn, though, and at twilight, when the fog would lower in a grey haze ahead of the enveloping darkness, he thought of Wessex. Kept close to Birgir’s pit-house still, by cold and by fear, he thought of freedom.
Sebbi woke early to watch the sunrise and to think. Though he tried not to wake Birgir, he did not always succeed. Usually, Birgir made a complaining noise and rolled himself up in the blankets Sebbi had abandoned. If he had slept well, though, and was in good spirits, Birgir would prepare some bread and honey, and bring it out to Sebbi, watching outside his door.
“You are thinking of home?” Birgir asked him on one of these mornings. “You’re restless again. Now spring is here.”
“Yes,” Sebbi admitted.
“Then you have decided where you will go?”
Sebbi shook his head. “I do not know what I should do.”
“You are not happy here?”
“I am happy with you,” Sebbi soothed, “But here I am not a man. I am not free. There I have land and history. I am more than my labour.”
Birgir nodded. “You know you are more than that to me.”
“Yes. But I feel shackled in this place in a way I don’t understand.”
Birgir chewed through the coarse barley slowly. Eventually, his crooked smile crept up his face. “We can ask the gods. If you need guidance.”
Sebbi shook his head sharply. “I won’t see you sick like that again.”
“Just a peek into the future,” Birgir said. “Not like the spae. Just one question.”
Sebbi frowned at the idea, but he followed when Birgir tugged at his hand and followed him inside. He did not stop Birgir from preparing the bowl of seed pods and lighting them with a splinter from the fire.
“Sit down, Sebbi,” Birgir said, taking a wand of twisted metal from where it hung on the wall. “I will help you decide.”
They sat together, then, while Birger pulled the smoke from the burning henbane deep into his lungs. His eyes turned glassy, his expression distant. He breathed in again, and kissed Sebbi with his mouth full of smoke. Sebbi saw the line of bruises appear over Birgir’s lips.
“Where should I go?” Sebbi asked. With the question given voice, he wished it was Birgir who would answer him. Wise and good Birgir. But instead, there was the tenor of a god in his throat.
“Why would you stay in a land where you are not even counted among men?” The voice asked.
“Because I love him,” Sebbi whispered.
The thing that wasn’t Birgir spat on the ground, the saliva marbled red. “What need does he have of your love? He is a broken vessel.”
Sebbi shook his head. “No. No, he is more than that.”
Birgir closed his eyes, and when he opened them the glassy shine of the god was gone. Two tears, crystalline and clear, not blood but water, ran over his face.
“You could come with me,” Sebbi said. “I will give you a home. You will not be outcast. You will not have to do this anymore.”
Birgir nodded. He slid his hand into Sebbi’s and leaned forward, letting his head rest against Sebbi’s chest. Sebbi hesitated for a moment, but then he put his arms around Birgir, ran a hand through his flaming hair. He tilted his face up and kissed him again, though Birgir’s lips were dark with bruising and it must have hurt.
“You are not a man here, either,” Sebbi said.
Birgir packed what he needed, though he could not carry much. When Sebbi offered to take some of his things, Birgir shrugged. “I will not need more. The rest is just weight for our shoulders.”
Sebbi frowned at that. He worried that Birgir was not fit for the journey, and worried, too, that Birgir would not accept his help.
“You’ve been across the sea before?” he asked. “Are you sure?”
“I have travelled. How else do you think I could speak your tongue?” Birgir answered. “I know what I have agreed to, Sebbi. This journey was set down for me. Don’t fret on my account.”
“If you’re certain. I will get you what you need. I will make a home for us, when we reach Wessex,” Sebbi promised him.
“If your god is willing,” Birgir whispered. “Isn’t that what you said, once? If the Fates are willing, too, perhaps.”
“It has not been my god guiding me back to my shores,” Sebbi answered. “And you have always twisted the threads of fate.”
“All the worse, Sebbi.” There was no sharpness in the reply, no slant in his smile. Sebbi hoped Birgir’s softening was a good sign. A sign of love, at least, if not hope.
“Whatever you desire, Birgir. I promise. When we find our home.”
“I only want to help you,” Birgir said. “I have never wanted to bind you.”
Whatever he desired, Birgir knew, he would be feverish when they reached the sea, exhausted. He would die, he knew, on the waves, in the dark, the water lapping at the sides of the long boat, and Sebbi’s tears falling into his copper hair.
It was the only way Sebbi would reach home.
Whatever he desired.
