Bone-Eater, Hungry For Fire

Romance short. A warrior a-viking stumbles upon a burned man in monk’s robes.

Rated M, M/M. A warrior a-viking in England is interrupted in a raid by a mad monk who is even madder than he seems. Some fire-crossed lovers for you!

Early Medieval England. 4.5k. Some fucked-up power dynamics, mentions of period-typical slavery and human trafficking, branding, burns, and fire play.

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The noise that Orm makes is a loud, sharp hiss, and Agmundr turns to look. Orm is a good-sized man, but big enough that Agmundr can barely see the monk behind him, who’s torn Orm’s own dagger from his hip and is holding the point up against the very underside of his throat.

There’s smoke on the air and sweat on Agmundr’s skin, their raid very nearly through with — most of the monks are either dead on the ground or huddled together, roped and tied, to be handed off to the Lorssons and sold as thralls. This one is on the younger side, must be thirty or so, and he’s not unusually skinny, but he has a much smaller frame than Orm’s.

“The fuck do you think you’re going to do here, monk?” Agmundr asks in the best approximation he can of their language, and the monk shifts Orm by the hair with him, keeping Orm’s body between him and Agmundr’s and the rest of them, ensuring that no one can aim an axe at him without hitting their own man instead.

Silently, he takes the knife from Orm’s throat and points at Njal, at the torch in his hand — he’d been about to set the last of the stone outbuildings in the monastery aflame.

“What does he think the point of this shit is?”

“Drop it, Njal,” Agmundr says.

“Why are you so interested in what these Christ-fuckers do? He’s going to — ”

“Come on, for me,” Agmundr says, grinning at him. “Let’s see what he wants out of there.”

Njal drops the torch on the stone bricks beneath him, raises his palms up, and in a moment the monk drops his hold on Orm’s braids, shoves his dagger back into its holster, and runs past him, into the stone building.

“What do you think, Orm?” Njal asks dryly. “You think it’s going to be a book?”

“More likely one of their little relics,” says Orm, rubbing at his neck where the monk had threatened him with the blade. “Some dead cunt’s preserved finger, or a lock of hair.”

The monk stumbles into the light from inside the stone building, a basket balanced on his hip. His hood has fallen back, and Agmundr is surprised to see that he doesn’t wear a tonsure like most of the others do — his dark hair is tied in a tail at the base of his neck, and the strands of it that are free curl in wavy curtains either side of his face. His eyes are hazel, flecked with grey, and there’s a burn visible on his neck, where his robe opens, another burn visible on the backs of one of his hands.

He’s holding a basket on his hip, and Njal steps forward toward him — the monk flinches back, but doesn’t resist as Njal lifts up the lid, and then laughs.

“Okay, priest,” he rumbles, and pats him on the back as he pushes him out from the building. “Good man.”

Agmundr sees the mother cat inside the basket with her kittens, squinting a little at being brought into the light, but not complaining at all at having been moved from her place. Inside the basket, she’s kneading on a piece of cloth, and her kittens, most of them still young and bean-like, barely move at all. Their eyes aren’t even open yet.

“You understand me, monk?” Agmundr asks, and the monk looks up at him, tilting his head slightly to one side. “We wouldn’t kill cats just because. You can pass Orm the basket.”

The monk holds the basket out, and Agmundr laughs softly. “I’m not Orm — he is.”

The monk turns his head, and he holds the basket out to Orm, who takes it cooing softly to the charges inside, making kissing noises and calling Eiva’s name as he goes down the hill, and the monk stands there rooted to the spot, his hands held in front of his body as though he doesn’t know what to do with them. He has a set of leather gloves hanging from the rope of his robe, nice ones, and Agmundr reaches out and takes them.

The monk blinks at him, and holds up his hand toward Agmundr’s, his fingers spread, as though to show how much smaller he is than Agmundr’s.

“They might fit one of the little girls,” Agmundr says, and the monk looks up at his face, as though really studying him, peering at him. “Why do you have these? You have, a, uh… What the fuck? It makes you sick, to touch some of the plants, hm? Makes your skin red?”

The monk shakes his head.

“Why, then? You weren’t hunting with these, you weren’t using a bow.”

The monk steps away, and Agmundr follows after him, looking over his shoulder as he picks up a pot from the ground, tied around with a rope so it can be slung over the arm, and he puts it into Agmundr’s hands — it’s filled with comb and smells sweet, and Agmundr looks up the path from where the monk must have come from. They hadn’t seen the hives — Gods know how far the monk had walked to tend their bees, to not have heard them pillaging, to come back when they were very nearly through.

He’s not looking at Agmundr as Agmundr picks out a piece of comb from the pot and puts it in his mouth, pressing with his tongue on it and feeling it melt a little on the strong heat and wetness of his tongue. The honey bubbles as it’s heated up, and he swallows before the sweetness can burn and turn bitter.

The monk is looking up at the monastery’s outbuildings as they burn, the thatched rooves and wooden posts burning thick and smoky, and heat radiates out from the whole of the hill.

“Are you simple, monk?” Agmundr asks, and the monk glances at him, not seeming to understand the question, nor why it’s being asked — an indicator, perhaps, of the answer. “We have come here a-viking, monk. We have taken the rich things of your monastery to use — your brothers will be sold as labour, thralls. Slaves. You too — if you resist, you will die.”

The monk shrugs his shoulders, as though Agmundr has just told him it might be windy tomorrow.

“Monk,” Agmundr says, and leans in closer, leans over the monk so that he’s looking down into the smaller man’s eyes, looking at him seriously, focusedly. “You are in danger, monk. Do you understand? I might kill you?”

The monk looks at him seriously, and then moves quickly, but not quickly enough — Agmundr grips tight around his wrist as he tries to grab for Agmundr’s axe, then grabs the other that goes for Agmundr’s knife.

The monk headbutts him, and for all he’s a smaller man, it takes Agmundr by such surprise that he staggers back, releasing his grip on the monk’s hands. The monk doesn’t make to run away or anything — he just stands there and laughs, laughs, and Agmundr lunges for him again, grabbing him around the throat and lifting him up on his tiptoes.

The monk chokes, grabbing helplessly at Agmundr’s hand with both of his own, and once he has a grip around Agmundr’s wrist, he manages to kick up and off the floor, tries to steady one foot on his thigh and kick with the other, but Agmundr just concentrates the heat under his skin, and the monk lets out a whining yelp.

He draws back his hands, very nearly burned, and his legs drop down — Agmundr drops him to the floor, and the monk lands on his arse on the flagstones, coughing and staring mystified at his palms, which are red from the heat.

The monk looks up at Agmundr’s face, his lips parted.

In the tousle, his robe has come open, and his gloves have fallen to the floor — Agmundr sees more burns around his neck now, and he leans forward and grabs the front of the monk’s collar, or what amounts to it in the robe he’s wearing.

“What the fuck,” he mutters, and then bodily drags the monk to his feet — he lets out another noise of shock and surprise, but doesn’t struggle as Agmundr pulls the robe over his head and throws it to the side, leaving him in a white shirt and his leggings and sandals. “What the fuck,” Agmundr says again, and he hears one of the boys crowing something about him starting early with this one, but ignores him — when he pulls up the monk’s shirt, gripping him by the scruff of it, he sees more burn marks, brands, layered over his belly and his chest, the same on his thighs, all over his arms. “They fucking do this to you?”

The monk stares up at him silently, and Agmundr feels a sickening, sinking feeling in his belly as he reaches out and grips the sides of the monk’s mouth, pushing on his cheeks. His tongue is not completely burned — a third of it, Agmundr would guess, is missing, the tear down one side of it cauterised.

“You want me to kill you?” Agmundr demands of him, and the monk laughs again, and what the fuck is wrong with him? All these burns, are they some sort of Christian ritual, intended to burn the madness out of him — or have they made him mad? “You are incongruous. You know that, monk?”

The monk laughs some more, and Agmundr grips him by the back of his shirt and drags him with him down the hill, to where Freya and Arne are overlooking the thralls, each of the monks roped and tied.

“You, monk,” Agmundr growls at the oldest of them. “The fuck have you done to this one?”

“Done to him?” the monk repeats, uncomprehending, and he looks between Agmundr and the burned monk in his underclothes, no longer laughing, but not seeming fucking scared, either. “Nothing, we’ve done nothing to him. We haven’t done anything to him.”

“Who burned him?”

“Who? Nicol?” the monk repeats, and lets out a sharp, incredulous sound. “He burns himself!”

Agmundr falters, and he looks down at Nicol, who has turned his head into Agmundr’s hand and is looking up at him curiously, analytically, thoughtfully. He’s loosely holding onto the back of Agmundr’s hand with his own palm, feeling the heat of him, Agmundr supposes.

Liking it.

“Why does he laugh?” Agmundr demands. “Is he simple? Does he know what I am, does he understand death, pain?”

“He understands,” says one of the other monks. “He doesn’t cause pain to others — he doesn’t try to… He isn’t trying to suicide himself. He just… He likes fire. He likes to be burned. That’s why he’s here with us — he’s no monk, it’s just safer to keep him here than elsewhere.”

“So he knows I’m a danger to him?”

“Probably,” the first monk says. “But he doesn’t care.”

Agmundr lets Nicol go, and Nicol stands on his own feet, looking even smaller than before without his robe on.

“Are we taking this one too?” asks Arne.

“No,” Agmundr says. “No, I’m bringing him home with me.” He studies Nicol’s face as he speaks, looking for signs of comprehension there, signs of understanding — he doesn’t see them when he speaks their tongue, doesn’t see them now, speaking his own. “Come. Nicol, yes?”

If he feels anything at all about the burning of the monastery and the village he has been living in, it doesn’t show in the monk’s face — he neither shows the fear some of his fellow monks do nor their resignation to his fate; he shows no excitement, either, no sense of pleasure at the suffering around him.

He trails obediently after Agmundr as he gives orders, arranges supplies. When Agmundr orders him to pack up his honey and comb, Nicol opens up a cellar store under a trap none of them had even noticed, and begins to pile up not just the fruit of the bees’ own labour, but also mead.

“Bring the things with you to brew,” Agmundr tells him. “You’ll make English mead for us, that we can compare to our own. Wait.”

Nicol freezes at Agmundr’s growled order, looking at him owlishly, and Agmundr shoves past him to look in the other basket, opening the cloth bags and containers inside — dried mushrooms, some he recognises, others that he doesn’t; different dried herbs, flowers, leaves, roots.

“What are these? For medicine?” Agmundr asks.

Nicol makes a gesture, bringing his hand up to his mouth, and Agmundr stares at him blankly. “To eat?” he asks. “The mushrooms and vegetables, yes, some of these are herbs, this is garlic, this is carrot, but this — what is this?”

Nicol takes a piece of leaf from the bag Agmundr offers him and demonstratively puts it into his mouth, chewing on it before he offers it back, and Agmundr copies him. He lets out a noise of surprise at the intensity of the flavour in the leaf, slightly hot, strongly aromatic.

“Is this native to these lands?” he asks. “You got this from a trader from the East?”

Nicol shakes his head and gestures up the valley side, and Agmundr looks at him doubtfully before he drops the bag back into its box. “Are any of these things poisonous?”

Nicol shrugs, making a vague gesture with his hand that Agmundr interprets as relating to the quantity, and finally, he nods his head.

“Fine,” he says. “Keep those too.”

Nicol puts the box into the cart, and walks alongside it without being roped or tethered. Agmundr allows him for a while, simply to see how long it will take before he snaps, before he tires or stumbles or even politely asks to be allowed to ride in the cart with Agmundr, but the moment doesn’t come.

“Come up here,” Agmundr orders, and Nicol looks at him slightly blearily, but barely hesitates as he hops up beside him. “You can sleep — it’s another hour or so home. I have no wife, no children. You’ll sleep in the longhouse with me. I’m going to fuck you. You been fucked before?”

Nicol nods his head. This, he seems receptive to — he’s smiling faintly, looking sidelong at Agmundr instead of staring off into the middle distance as he frequently has been doing. His lips are slightly parted, and on the inside of his lower lip, Agmundr can just make out where it’s burned from whenever he last stuck a solder, or some other burning hot implement, against his tongue.

“My name is Agmundr, but they call me a husband of Logi — you know who that is? Logi?”

Nicol shakes his head.

“Logi is a god of fire, is made of fire — married, too, to Glöð, a fire giantess. My hands were hot, yes, when they touched you?”

Nicol nods.

“I was struck by lightning when I was a boy,” says Agmundr. “Didn’t kill me, but it heated my blood. I can melt iron in my hand, just by gripping it.”

Nicol nods.

Agmundr laughs. “You believe that?”

Nicol nods.

Agmundr looks at him thoughtfully — it’s true, granted, but there’s no reason the man should believe it, except that he’s evidently touched by some madness or other, or more madness than one, it seems to him.

“I started to swim often, after the lightning hit me,” Agmundr says. “The sort of thing that can kill you, if you’re in the water for too long, where I come from — the ice is so thick, you could not smash it with your hand, mm? We have to saw through it, if we want to fish in certain places. But I would swim every morning, even in the midst of winter, and would come steaming, naked from the water. You like to swim?”

Nicol shrugs his shoulders.

“But fire, you like.”

Nicol smiles at him, and Agmundr considers that as he grips the reins a little tighter, looking up ahead on the road. He’s taken thralls before, although never here in England — two men he’s taken on for a few years, and each of them made free after a while. Ealder is still in Norway now, has taken a wife, works land.

Agmundr expects to be here another few years before he goes back, and already he feels that this one is going to be the one he keeps, the one he keeps to hand. His nose isn’t broken, but there’s ever so light bruising under one of his eyes from where the not-monk had headbutted him, and from what Agmundr can tell…

Hel, he’s got no idea at all, but he’s pretty sure the little fuck did it just to entertain himself — he didn’t do it to flee, has made no actual attempt at resistance whatsoever.

“You ever kill a man?”

Nicol shakes his head.

“You ever want to?”

Nicol shrugs his shoulders, and then he rolls them, tilting his head from side to side before he leans back in the seat and drops his cheek against Agmundr’s shoulder. Agmundr hasn’t been bothering to keep himself cool, and despite the pleasantly temperate air of the evening, Nicol sighs in pleasure and presses more of his body against Agmundr’s, soaking up the heat of Muspelheim that radiates from him.

* * *

“Why’d the monks have him?” Dagna asks as Nicol builds a fire. When he sparks the flints, he lets out a soft noise of satisfaction at the spatter of the sparks over his wrists, and Agmundr stands behind him, watching one of the few hairs left on the back of his hand singe and as it catches.

He pulls him back from the fire when the kindling catches and flares, stopping him from keeping his hands in it, and he pats Nicol hard on the arse, toward the benches.

“He saved some local lord’s son from a burning building when they were children — he was ten or eleven, the boy had only three summers. Went back in and let the horses out of the stable, too — he thought him a terrific little hero. Which he is, of course, he’s just also perverted.”

Dagna looks at Nicol, who smiles at her, blows a kiss.

“Does he understand Norse?” she asks.

“It’s difficult to tell,” Agmundr says. “But I wouldn’t be surprised.” He looks at Nicol, who looks back at him placidly, then turns and looks around the edges of the longhouse. “You tired?”

Nicol follows Agmundr when he leads the way, and he follows through the curtain into Agmundr’s room, looks at the bed on the ground and the furs laid over it.

Agmundr watches him as he looks with interest around the room, at the notes on the table, at the jaw-harp, at the shelves that contain various minerals and crystals, pieces he picks up here and there, whenever he sees something of interest. He suddenly moves quickly as he sees a seal, and he eagerly picks it up, turning it over and looking at it curiously.

“It’s a symbol of Logi, a flame,” Agmundr tells him as he strokes his thumb over the metal. “We wax seal letters too, sometimes — but I use it to imprint my armour, too, sometimes.”

Nicol holds it out to him, and Agmundr takes it, then feels his eyebrows raise as Nicol eagerly shoves up his sleeve and bares his forearm. There are marks and burns on it, most of them small, and there’s enough space in the middle of the flesh for a brand.

“You fucking serious?” Agmundr demands. “I’m not going to fucking brand you.”

“Please,” says Nicol. His voice is hoarse and ragged, smoky, and the word comes out lisped from the damage to his tongue — his eyes are big and eager, and he’s leaning toward him. “I saw you in the fire, once — this is meant to happen. I’m meant to be yours.”

“You saw me in the fire?” Agmundr repeats, stepping closer, and Nicol leans into him instead of pulling away. He’s long-since dropped his robe aside again, and Nicol smiles at him almost shyly now, his eyes glittering.

His Norse is good, and it’s plain he hasn’t learned it from raiders like them — he’s learned it from Danes, Agmundr thinks, although he hasn’t been raised with them. Some of his inflections don’t match up with the rest of his borrowed accent, and he guesses that some words he’s choosing to say one way over another because it’s easier on his burnt mouth.

“I used to just look,” Nicol says. “I used to just stare, and then when little Hob was in the fire, screaming, I couldn’t find him, couldn’t see him through the smoke, but then I saw the man in the fire, the man who didn’t burn. Tall and strong — a barbarian, an invader. Fine hair and a fine beard, a shining ring around his arm and necklaces, and ink under his skin. I ran toward him and nearly stumbled over Hob, but then he led me from the fire, and I followed him through the black smoke until I was out in the courtyard, and he was gone… I kept searching for him, looking for him…” He laughs faintly, and looks up at Agmundr. “It was you. Brand me — I’m yours.”

“I’m not going to fucking brand you — you have enough burns on your skin.”

“None of them are yours.”

“None of them will be.”

“I want it.”

“If you’re mine, perhaps my wants should take precedence, no?”

Nicol falters, and then pouts out his lips, looking quite put-out, and Agmundr laughs quietly, and setting the brand aside.

“Come,” he says. “Eat with us. Then I’ll fuck you.”

Nicol sighs like a child denied a second sweet cake rather than a mad man denied a branding mark of ownership, and they walk back out into the main part of the long house. He stands close to the fire to breathe in the scent of the smoke, putting out his hands — he steps back by six inches or so when Agmundr barks a warning at him, preventing him from letting the fire kiss his fingers.

This earns him a baleful look, but he keeps his hands retracted nonetheless.

Later that night, Agmundr watches, fascinated, as Nicol bites clean through a chicken bone and swallows it — Eiva shouts at him, tells him that his stomach is not made to eat bones, that these things will cut him from within, and something catches faintly in Agmundr’s head at Nicol’s unimpressed look, at the way he seems so utterly disaffected by her concern.

“You eat bones before?” he asks.

A nod.

“They ever cut you?”

A shake of the head.

“The monks tell you not to, too?”

A nod.

“Why do you eat them?”

That makes Nicol pause, and he looks down at his bowl, at his almost-finished bread soaked in stew. He seems to be thinking hard about the answer, doesn’t seem to know it at all.

“You, slave, are like our Agmundr here,” Arne says, “a child of Logi, hm? He, too, ate his bones as well as his meat — he is a figure of fire, hm, and a wildfire consumes all in its path: tree, tent, man, animal, meat, bone.

“In the hall of the Útgarða-Loki, Loki the trickster proclaimed to the room that he could perform a great mischief, and eat his food faster than any challenger might. Logi faced him, and they were almost alike in speed, Loki perhaps even faster, but where Loki ate only the meat from his bones and drank the stew and his bread, Logi devoured all — the meat, the bones, and the trough in which they were served.”

Nicol looks at the skald with interest, smiling faintly from his place seated cross-legged on the floor, and then he turns his head and looks meaningfully up at Agmundr, his lips parted.

“Wildfire is dangerous, you know, a sudden and silent killer,” Agmundr says. “Is that what you are, Nicol?”

Like a loving hound, Nicol leans in, lays his cheek on Agmundr’s knee and looks up at him with soft eyes, and they all laugh and shake their heads at him, at how obvious this thrall is, at how transparent he is in his attempts at seduction.

Agmundr looks down at him, sees the fire before them reflected in Nicol’s eyes.

“Will you consume me too, child of Logi?” he asks.

Nicol’s gaze flickers down from Agmundr’s face his crotch, and Agmundr laughs quietly.

* * *

Later still that night, Nicol lies on his back in the middle of Agmundr’s bed, staring up at the ceiling as though looking starstruck up at the night sky — his lips are red from the burning heat of Agmundr’s cock, not hot enough to blister him, but hotter than he’s ever let himself run whilst fucking a man before.

“I got lost in a wildfire one summer,” Agmundr tells him. “I was a young man — it burned all the clothes from my body, it burned so hot. Smut and ash were smeared over my body — only my jewellery remained me.”

“Yes,” Nicol says. “But for the… what was it, the jaw of a fox? It was on a leather string instead of a metal chain — you had to put it in your hair to keep it from falling to the ground.”

Agmundr feels a turn in his belly, a sort of sudden lurch, and he looks up from brushing out his hair to stare at Nicol, who’s looking back at him.

“I told you,” he says softly, with a little, giddy laugh. “I saw you in the fire. They were the same night, I wouldn’t wager, that wildfire you got lost in and the fire I pulled young Hob from.”

“Ha,” says Agmundr quietly, and, after a moment’s consideration, and looks to his metal seal, shining in the candlelight.

“Now?” Nicol asks.

“Another night,” Agmundr says. “Why not settle for a brand from my hand, first, hm? On your hip, perhaps, around your waist?”

Nicol’s jaw drops, and Agmundr stands to his feet, walking back toward the bed as Nicol spreads his legs wider in invitation. The jawbone from his desk he carries with him, and he tosses it forward, so that it lands on Nicol’s chest — not the jaw of a fox, but that of a polecat, and Nicol picks it up and examines it, stroking his thumb over one of the teeth.

“You want me to eat it?” Nicol asks.

“Wear it around your neck, for now,” says Agmundr, and lets fire spark from his fingers as he begins to heat his palm.

“Can I suck your cock as you brand me?” Nicol asks as he puts the string about his neck. It looks well, right, charred as it is after all these years, resting against the pale and burn-slicked expanse of Nicol’s chest. “I can lie with my head off the edge of the bed, so you can still reach my hip.”

“My handprint will be upside down,” Agmundr tells him.

“It won’t be the last you give me,” says Nicol confidently, and Agmundr laughs, feeling a burning heat under his skin that is separate to the fire the gods have given him — this spark of heat is one in every man, eager, hungry, full of the need to sink his cock into the nearest hungry hole.

Nicol’s open mouth looks very hungry indeed, and Agmundr nods his head for him to assume the position.

“Can I have one of the kittens I saved today?” he asks as Agmundr stands over him, stroking his cock back to hardness.

Agmundr laughs. “You’re a very difficult man to refuse,” he says, and sinks into Nicol’s waiting hole to disguise the obvious answer, bent as he already is to his new thrall’s every whim — of course he can.

Agmundr will give his enthralled not-monk, bone-eater, hungry for fire in all its forms, he already knows, any and all things that he asks for.