Chapter Text
Faye startled awake, bolting upright and staring into the dark, breathing hard. She held up her hand, and the Levithan axe twisted off its hook and flew to her palm. She scanned the cabin in its icy light, searching for whatever could have set off the twinge of panic in her chest.
A moment passed, at then another, and the panic subsided into a tug. Faye shivered. Someone had crossed her stave. Her stave, constructed so that no one she didn’t wish to enter would be able to. Maybe a god would be able to force their way through, but she’d taken precautions against any of the Aesir or Vanir she could call to mind.
Shivering, Faye cast her awareness outward and forward, then shivered harder at what she saw.
***
Faye armed herself before she left the cabin the next morning, strapping her axe and shield to her back, covering her forearms and chest with what she had left of her old armor. She stitched metal into the lining of her gloves, repaired the sheath for her knife, and braided mistletoe into her hair.
On her belt, beside her knife, she carried what she could gather for medical supplies; a bundle of herbs, a flask of alcohol, cloth bandages. A powder that the woman who lived far deeper in the woods had given her, that claimed to soothe beasts and men alike. She didn’t know how seriously the god she could sense somewhere in her woods was injured, but she knew that they were. Their aura burned with the panicked energy of an injured animal.
Faye twirled an errant lock of hair around a twig and stuck the twig behind her ear, keeping it out of her face. She closed and locked the door behind her, made sure there was ample firewood in the pile outside, and set out.
The path would have clear to her, even if she couldn’t feel the tug of energy pulling her toward them. The god burned , aura flaring with power and emotion. Wounded, definitely . And far from home.
Faye was interrupted often; she knew the Draugr and Reavers that wandered outside her stave well enough to defend herself without missing a beat. She’d fought a troll, once. And then another troll, right after, because trolls were pack creatures, and she hadn’t remembered or realized that until too late.
A brief, dizzying vision struck her, doubled her over. A boy, twelve at the oldest, holding Faye’s knife, flailing it at the shoulder of a fallen troll, shrieking hysterically. A pair of pale hands take hold of the boy’s arms, but before their owner’s face can come into view…
Faye straightened up, biting her lip. She walked forward with purpose, and the dead did not trouble her.
The feeling led her to the edge of the river, and she backtracked upstream, to where she’d left her boat. The first of the autumn leaves crunched under her feet as she untied the boat from the dock and climbed in, pushing off the side with the oar.
A little further on, impulsively, Faye tossed the rope she used to tie her boat up into a tree branch, leaping onto the bank and moving diagonally away from the river. The sun was warm on the back of her neck, and her pace picked up.
Through the trees, Faye could see movement. Slow, struggling. Upright, but hunched over. Pale, with swathes of red.
Faye walked forward and then knelt, picking up a tree branch and breaking it over her knee. The pale figure twisted, then made a guttural noise, doubling over even more. Faye straightened, moving the rest of the distance toward the figure.
The man was bleeding, that’s the first thing Faye noticed, crossing toward him. A ragged bandage was wrapped around his stomach, slowly soaking through with crimson. There was blood on his lips, too, and torn scabs on his forearms, as if he’d been scratching at the half-healed wounds there. The red of his blood was mirrored by the scarlet tattoos across his face and chest, stark against his strangely pale skin.
His eyes were wild when they met hers, burning with such fierce emotion that she flinched. He seemed to be trying for rage, scowling bitterly, but what seemed to encompass him instead was despair , some soul-deep agony that would kill him faster than the weeping wound.
He was clutching a pair of blades as long as his forearms, curved and ornate and blazing with fire, chains hanging from the handles and wrapped loosely around his wrists. As she watched, he stumbled, pointing the blades shakily at her.
Faye darted forward, grabbing his wrists. He was stronger than her, taller and bigger, but weakened by blood loss and startled by her advance. He tried to fight anyway, limbs trembling with the effort.
“Let go,” she told him, and felt the muscles of his wrists tense even further. “Just stop fighting, and let go, it’s alright.”
The man swayed, even more color draining from his unnaturally pale cheeks. “Not…” he slurred, grip finally going slack. The blades extinguished and dropped into the dirt, and the man caught them by the chains, though he made no move to use them. “Not al...right...”
But maybe it will be , Faye pondered, pressing one hand to the man’s chest to hold him up. With her free hand, she reached into the pouch at her waist and drew out the bundle of herbs wrapped in cloth. The stranger turned his head away when she offered them, but she shook him, meeting his eyes. “Do you want to live?”
The man took a long time to answer, long enough that a dark realization caught in Faye’s chest. But eventually, starting straight at her, he nodded.
Faye nodded back, firm, and held up the herbs again. “Chew these.”
“What will they do?” His Norse was clumsy, accented, but intelligible.
“Some are numbing, some are healing. Some are to calm the mind.” Faye kept her voice steady, holding the stranger upright as he nodded tersely and fumbled the bundle from her hand, tipping it into his mouth with a shaky hand. He scowled.
“Bitter.”
Faye laughed softly, resting one hand on his back and one on his chest and tugging him into motion. “Yes, yes. I would think so.”
***
Faye made her way back to the cabin, half guiding and half carrying the pale man with her. He responded to her quiet questions with guttural noises or silence, except when she asked his name.
“Kratos,” he rumbled. Not a Norse name. Roman, maybe. Or Greek. It explained the accent, at least, and the distinctly foreign tattoos.
He was just short of a deadweight, stumbling and leaning on her, but he was at least attempting to hold himself up, stubborn. He was still bleeding, and he burned with fever. Faye murmured curses as she walked, senses firing in all directions from the proximity of the god.
Finally, finally , after too long and too much blood and Faye’s heart beating faster and faster as the Kratos’ heart beat slower and slower, finally they made it back to the cabin.
Faye laid him out on the cabin floor, rolled up her sleeves, and unwrapped the bandage.
The wound wasn’t new, the bruising, clumsy attempt at stitches, and scabs proved that. He had overexerted himself and torn it open, she guessed.
The good news was that it wasn’t infected. The bad was that it was deep, all the way through his body, and massive.
Faye gritted her teeth and unraveled the old stitches, fetching her supplies.
It was simple, technically, to fix. Clean the wound, then start with the needle and thread. One stitch at a time, entry and exit wounds. Block out the quiet cries of pain.
By the time she finished, Kratos was unconscious, breathing labored and shaky, but deep, and his heart was beating steadily.
Faye cleaned and bandaged the wounds on his arms, which were far simpler. They seemed far older than the more horrible one in his stomach, already scarred beneath the new scabs, and there was no clue as to why they’d reopened. She glanced at the blades that Kratos had let fall on the floor of the cabin. Their chains matched the pattern of raised scars on his arms.
Kratos, older, bearded, stands beside a fallen tree, a bandage around his forearm beginning to unravel. His whole body seems to wince in some long-ago pain, and he breathes for a moment before wrapping the bandage tight again.
A word jumped into Faye’s mind. Seared.
Gritting her teeth, she fetched a cloth and cleaned the blood from his skin almost without thinking, and dragged the man to her bed, draping him in furs.
Sitting against the wall beside the bed, close enough to feel the feverish heat Kratos burned with, Faye matched her breaths to his, deep and slow.
A boy just shy of manhood leaps from a ledge of rock, transforming on the way down, skin becoming fur, hands and feet shrinking and changing shape, claws and fangs replacing nails and teeth. The wolf races after a pale, armored man, who lifts a tattooed arm to hurl what is unmistakably the Leviathan axe at some unseen foe…
Faye woke in the darkness again, staring at the man on her bed, at the one pale arm tattooed with red that hung from beneath the blankets.
“I suppose I’m keeping you, then,” she told the empty air.