One Who Helps

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.

An escaped thrall shelters from a cruel Norse winter in the home of an outcast healer. There, he confronts what it means for him to be a free man.

“One Who Helps” is free to read at Fiction on the Web.

category: fiction
year: 2025
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