Erik heard him before he saw him careful steps, a caution he recognized: the kind a man learns fast in a warrior’s household, once he understands that sudden movement draws eyes.
Erik didn’t look up.
Kept turning the timber in his hands, though there was nothing left worth fixing in it grain too knotted for structural work, good for nothing but the fire he wasn’t ready to give it yet.
Two weeks under the same roof, and Athelstan still looked at him like a puzzle a priest hadn’t been trained to solve.
Erik let him close the distance.
Let the monk make the first move.
“May I sit?”
Erik gestured at the bench.
The timber stayed in his hands.
Athelstan sat.
Folded his hands in his lap the way monks did the ghost of prayer without the words.
For a long moment neither spoke.
Across the longhouse, Ragnar laughed at something Floki said.
The sound carried weight.
Ragnar’s laughter always did.
“You speak my language,” Athelstan said finally.
“Not well. But you understand me.”
“Some.”
“More than some.” The monk’s eyes were steady.
Brown.
Clear.
The kind of eyes that had spent years reading scripture by candlelight.
“You knew what I was saying on the ship. When the others were… deciding. You understood every word.”
Erik shaved a splinter from the timber.
Let the silence stretch.
“Why did you bring me water?” Athelstan asked.
Quieter now.
The question he’d been carrying for two weeks.
“On the ship. Before the others took me. You were the only one who” He stopped.
Started again.
“Why?”
“Thirsty men should drink.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Erik looked up.
Met the monk’s eyes.
Saw the desperation there not for water this time, but for something harder to name.
A map.
A reason.
Proof that the world still made sense after thirty-seven brothers had bled out on monastery stone while a pagan stranger offered kindness.
“It’s the only answer I have.”
Athelstan leaned forward.
Hands still folded.
Voice dropping to the register monks used for confession.
“What do you believe?”
Erik’s hands stopped moving.
The timber grain blurred.
Came back into focus.
He could feel Ragnar’s attention from across the longhouse the kind of silence that meant the earl had stopped pretending not to listen.
“Buildings,” Erik said.
The word came out flat.
Final.
“I believe buildings should not fall down.”
Athelstan blinked.
Processed.
The monk’s training showed in the stillness that followed the way he sat with the answer instead of rejecting it, turning it over like a coin that might be currency in a language he hadn’t learned yet.
“That is not a religion.”
“No.”
“It is not paganism. It is not Christianity. It is…” Athelstan’s hands unfolded.
Refolded.
“What are you?”
Erik had no answer.
The truth sat in his throat like a stone I am a 21st-century construction worker chosen by a dying god to be a recording device for Ragnarokand every word of it was both true and impossible.
The scaffold had killed him.
Odin had filled the corpse.
The cup had been poured before it reached this shore.
But Athelstan didn’t need that truth.
Couldn’t survive it.
The monk’s faith was already cracking Erik could see it in his restless fingers, in the stillness of a man who’d started asking questions his monastery had taught him never to ask.
One more crack and the whole structure would collapse.
“I don’t know,” Erik said.
It was the most honest thing he’d said since waking in Kattegat’s tide.
Athelstan nodded slowly.
Not satisfaction.
“You are not a pagan,” he said.
Statement, not question.
“You do not pray to their gods. I have watched. Two weeks. You do not sacrifice. You do not speak their prayers. You build. You work. You…” He stopped.
Eyes narrowing.
“You grieve.”
Erik’s throat tightened.
The hanging two days ago.
The tears he hadn’t been able to stop.
Athelstan had seen.
“You wept at the execution,” the monk continued.
Softer now.
“Not for justice. Not in satisfaction. You wept as if you knew the man. As if his death…” Athelstan’s voice trailed off.
When he spoke again it was barely above a whisper.
“What do you see that I cannot?”
Across the longhouse, Ragnar’s cup clinked against wood.
Deliberate.
A sound that said: I am still listening.
Choose your words.
Erik looked at the timber in his hands.
Knotted grain.
Wrong for building.
Right for burning.
“Everyone is connected,” he said.
The words felt like splinters coming up.
“When someone dies, the threads that held them… they don’t disappear. They fray. The people left behind carry the weight.”
Athelstan’s breath caught.
“You see this? Truly?”
“I don’t want to.”
“But you do.”
Erik said nothing.
Didn’t need to.
The monk sat back.
Hands unfolding completely now, coming to rest on his knees.
The gesture of a man who’d just heard something that changed the shape of the problem.
“The Psalms speak of the righteous man,” Athelstan said slowly.
“A man who sees the world as God sees it. Who bears witness to suffering. Who carries” He stopped.
Shook his head.
“But you are not Christian.”
“No.”
“And you are not pagan.”
“No.”
“Then what god has done this to you?”
Erik looked up.
Met Ragnar’s eyes through the hearth-smoke.
The earl raised his cup slow, deliberate.
I heard.
I am thinking about what I heard.
We will talk later.
Erik tipped his chin.
Enough.
Turned to Athelstan.
“I don’t know if it was a god,” he said.
Careful now.
Every word a brick in a wall that had to hold.
“Or something else. But it happened. And I can’t undo it.”
Athelstan was quiet for a long time.
The longhouse sounds filled the space between them laughter, conversation, the crack of wood in the hearth.
Finally the monk spoke.
“My brothers died,” he said.
Voice steady.
Hands steady.
Eyes not.
“Thirty-seven men. I prayed. God did not answer. Or He answered in a way I cannot understand. You brought me water. A stranger. A man who does not pray to any god I know. And I am alive.”
He looked at Erik.
Really looked the Seer’s same blind stare, seeing past the body to the thing underneath.
“I do not know what you are,” Athelstan said.
“But I do not think you are evil.”
Erik’s hands tightened on the timber.
“You don’t know that.”
“No. But I believe it.” The monk stood.
Brushed dust from his robes automatic, muscle memory from years in the same cloth.
“Thank you. For the water. For the honesty. For not lying when a lie would have been easier.”
He walked away.
Erik watched him go.
The timber was still in his hands.
Still wrong for building.
Still useful for nothing but fire.
Ragnar crossed the longhouse.
Sat where Athelstan had sat.
Cup in hand.
Eyes measuring.
“Buildings,” Ragnar said.
Not a question.
A repetition.
Testing the weight of the word.
“Yes.”
“You believe buildings should not fall down.”
“Yes.”
Ragnar drank.
Set the cup on the bench between them.
“The Seer said you were full. A cup that does not drink. I am beginning to understand what he meant.”
Erik said nothing.
No answer existed that wouldn’t be a trap.
“The priest trusts you,” Ragnar continued.
“I do not know why. You saved his life with a cup of water and now he looks at you as if you are a puzzle God set before him to solve.” He leaned forward.
Blue eyes holding Erik’s.
“What did you tell him?”
“The truth.”
“Which truth?”
Erik met Ragnar’s gaze.
Held it.
“The one that wouldn’t break him.”
Ragnar smiled.
Small.
Sharp.
“Good.” He stood.
Picked up his cup.
Paused.
“We sail west again in three weeks. The priest will be useful. You will translate. He trusts you. I will use that.”
He walked away.
Erik sat alone.
The timber in his hands was dead weight now.
He set it on the bench.
Looked at his palms.
Scarred.
Calloused.
The same hands that had carried water to a dying monk.
The same hands that had built braces to keep Kattegat’s roofs from collapsing.
The same hands that had been pinned under a scaffold twelve seconds before a god reached through the dark and filled an empty cup.
Athelstan believed buildings were a philosophy.
Ragnar believed buildings were a metaphor.
Neither understood that buildings were the only true thing Erik had left.
The one piece of the 21st century that still made sense in a world of gods and ravens and threads of light that showed him every connection a dying man left behind.
He stood.
Walked toward the door.
Outside, the sky was grey.
No gold.
No threads.
Just clouds and the promise of rain.
But when he closed his eyes, he could still see them.
Permanent.
Indelible.
The thief’s widow.
The child.
The old woman at the loom.
Thirty-seven deaths at Lindisfarne.
One death at the gallows.
And now, a monk who thought Erik might be good.
Erik opened his eyes.
The rain was starting.
Cold.
Clean.
He let it wash the smoke from his clothes and walked toward the boat-shed.
Hands needing work.
Mind needing silence.
Behind him, the longhouse door closed.
Ragnar’s laughter carried through the walls.
And somewhere in the corner where monks slept, Athelstan knelt and prayed to a god who had not answered asking, perhaps, if the stranger who believed in buildings might be an answer after all.