#aaaaand we're back with the essays in the author's notes on ao3

[whyisaravenlike-awritingdesk]

Hold Me Like A Knife (i) (ao3)

In the words of our lord and saviour Taylor Swift, it's been a long time coming but... presenting, for @nessianweek day 4, viking!Cassian 🖤

After a decisive battle forges a peace treaty between the king of the West Saxons and the leader of the viking horde, Anglo-Saxon Nesta Archeron is brought north for the first time in her life when the king’s court travels to Jorvik to settle the terms and draw up boundary lines. After centuries of bloody raids, she should be terrified of the invaders from across the sea— after all, tales abound of their violence and their brutality. And yet quickly she discovers that there are some things about the heathens that she can’t help but be drawn to… especially when a chance encounter brings her face to face with one viking in particular. 

Jorvik, 884 AD

In nomine patris, et filli et spiritus sancti.

With each step of the horses’ hooves beyond the borderlands of Wessex, the priest muttered those same words; a prayer offered at every turn, the sign of the cross made with stiff hands and a darkened brow as mile after mile gave way beneath their feet. Through the countryside and long grass, beneath the grey sky that loomed heavy above, the king’s court made its way north— and all the while, Osbert the Holy Man whispered. 

In nomine patris, et filli et spiritus sancti.

Like the ground itself was cursed, and only his prayers could save them. 

It was maddening.

With a scowl, Nesta Archeron cast her eyes to the sky, rolling her eyes as Osbert began another rotation of prayers, his fingers tripping over the rosary at his neck. 

She hadn’t ever wished to head north.

It was full of wild-men, her father used to say. Wild-men with bloodied swords and even bloodier hands, invaders who set fire to the coast and laughed as it burned. Men from across the sea, who spoke in strange tongues and worshipped strange gods, who murdered priests and monks and nuns only to revel in the violence. From the places civilisation had forgotten to reach, he said, they made their home beneath grim skies on stolen Saxon land.

Nobody wanted to head north these days.

Even the horses had slowed their pace, like after days of traveling they were reluctant, now, to reach their destination. Nesta scanned the landscape with narrowed eyes as her grey mare shook her head, the reins she’d held so loosely for the past hour becoming taut, and though Nesta hadn’t spoken to her father in two whole summers, his words came back to her now, as if carried by the wind that blew cold towards the south. Aedwulf had said many things over the years that Nesta had stopped believing in, but he had gotten one thing right. The skies were grim up here, overcast and heavy, the clouds like a swathe of slate rolling in from across the sea. The April sun was well hidden, and as the bite of the wind numbed her cheeks, it made her think of the depths of winter rather than the first breaths of spring. With another scowl aimed at the sky, Nesta pulled her fur-edged cloak more closely about her shoulders, the tips of her fingers aching as she clung to the fabric.

For what must have been the hundredth time, she cursed the day they’d left Wessex.

Ahead of her, as the sun made a rare appearance from behind the clouds, the gold of the king’s crown glinted weakly, like a spark attempting flame. She wondered if anybody else had noticed that the garnets studding the band about his temples gleamed dark like pools of fresh blood; reminiscent of the battles that had brought them here.

Their side will be known as the Danelaw, the king had announced after the last pitched battle; the one that had ended with weapons on both sides laid down, a tentative peace agreed as the Norse leader had the sign of the cross traced on his brow with holy water. They will have their own laws and customs, but their leader will be baptised a Christian.

With that hammered diadem about his brow, King Alfred led his court north now, chasing peace as they neared the city of Jorvik, where the pagan lands were to be ratified; the boundaries between their peoples hammered out like a sword fresh from the forge. The women, Alfred had insisted, were to be present too - to add ‘an air of civility’ to the proceedings, like he thought the Danes might stay their hand and sheathe their blades in the presence of ladies. 

Nesta had barely been able to suppress her snort at that.

They’d all heard the stories— gruesome ones, of the pagans and their rituals. Tomas had even taken great pleasure, once, in describing to her, in detail, the horrifying blood eagle. The way the Danes delighted in breaking a man apart, in snapping bone and twisting ribs until they spread apart like wings.

If the treaty between them wasn’t enough to ensure peace and prevent violence, Nesta doubted the presence of a handful of noblewomen would be enough to convince the Danes to behave.

And yet as the wife of the king’s right hand, Nesta had no refusal she could offer, and no reason good enough to keep her in Wessex when the king insisted that his court accompany him north— to that lawless place, where even the soil was saturated with Saxon blood.

Or so it was said, anyway. 

“We used to call it Eoforwic, you know,” Tomas muttered from the space beside her.

Her husband’s voice was a scathing rasp barely even audible above the sound of a hundred horses’ hooves. He looked ahead at the horizon, nodding to the city walls before them now, piercing the sky in a great wooden structure, stark against the grey of the countryside. Even from a distance Nesta could see that the ramparts were topped with wooden spikes, sharpened to a point that, she suspected, would be lethal if climbed. And yet, riding at her husband’s side, Nesta Archeron said nothing.

“And then the heathens took over,” he finished through gritted teeth. 

The heathens.

The word was almost enough to drive fear into the heart of any proper Saxon woman, but as they approached the gates in the long train behind the king, Nesta didn’t feel so much as an ember of it stirring in her breast. After all, for almost two full decades now the heathens had occupied the city that had been Eoforwic, and yet by all accounts the city behind those walls wasn’t lying in ashes like the monasteries scattered along the coastline.  No— it was flourishing. The men from across the sea that had raided these shores for so many years, to murder and pillage and burn, had settled. Renamed the place Jorvik, set down roots. And as the gates before them opened with the sound of creaking wooden beams, Nesta waited for all the signs of such infamous brutality to hit her— the smoke and dead silence, the smell of rotting flesh. The empty eyes of the people living behind those walls, the cruel smiles of the men from across the sea.

Without pause her horse crossed the threshold. She looked up— saw the symbols carved into the gate posts, the sharp lines of an alphabet she didn’t recognise. 

And still, she waited.

There were no screams, no rivers of blood pooling in the streets.

Instead, Jorvik stretched ahead of them, the roads wide enough for carts to pass two abreast.

Wattle and daub houses lined the roads, old Roman tiles decorating the walls of a select few— as well as old bricks and white stone, repurposed and used again, like the Danes hadn’t destroyed the city at all, merely… expanded on what they had already found. Woven fences separated buildings, clothes hung on lines strung in the narrow alleys between houses, and all around them the air was filled with languages that landed strangely on the ear, tongues both harsh and soft that Nesta had never heard before. Not the Saxon she was used to nor the Latin she heard in church, but something else, something that felt richer, somehow. And as she watched with a slackened jaw and widened eyes, her attention followed the sound of those voices, her focus dragged towards the river where the ships came in, laden with goods imported from all over the continent and beyond. 

Nesta had only ever seen her corner of Wessex before, but here— here it seemed like the entire world opened up before her. 

And though she knew she shouldn’t…

She wanted to see more of it.

With her eyes fixed on that river, on the horizon that seemed to hold so much in the way of promise, a kind of longing rose within her, and suddenly Nesta thought she understood just a little of why the Danes chased their home on the seas. 

Beneath it all, in the distance, there was the tell-tale sound of a forge at work too, the clatter of a hammer against an anvil. As it rang through the winding streets, she couldn’t help but wonder what kind of blade the smithy was beating into shape. Would it be great and heavy when it was done— as grand as the king’s own sword, kept in its sheath until battle called? Or would it be practical and small, light enough for even her own hands to wield—

“Nesta,” Tomas hissed at her side, little more than a scold as he leaned over and took the reins of her horse in his gloved hand. The horse whinnied, like even the mare couldn’t stand his closeness. “Did you hear a word I just said?”

“No,” Nesta shrugged, her eyes drifting back to the river, to the lines of ships gathered there. Ships that sat low in the water, heavy with stock. Ships that were wide and flat-bottomed, so unusual she couldn’t look away.

“I said, the pagans are too brazen. This was a Christian city.” 

He pulled away, shoving the reins back into her hands as he sat back in his saddle, his lip curling in disgust. His features twisted into a grimace; a sneer that held as his eyes roved over Jorvik’s streets. 

“Barbarous,” Osbert muttered, scowling as he rubbed a thumb over the cross he wore at his neck. “A violent and brutish people.”

Tomas hummed his agreement. The priests’s white robes fluttered in the wind, and Nesta glanced at the mud-spattered hem as the priest ran a thin hand over his tonsured head. His face was stark, all bloodless cheeks and dark eyes, and though she hadn’t ever been able to put a finger on it, there was something about the holy man that unnerved her, made her shudder whenever she found herself too close to him.

And she had been too close to him for days now.

Osbert had been by the king’s side almost as long as Tomas, and had struck up a companionship with her husband that meant the priest was frequently lingering in their rooms at court, never too far from the side of either the king or her husband. Both men rode directly behind King Alfred now, in a position of prominence that spoke to their influence, and as the streets of Jorvik grew even wider, leading them easily to an open courtyard close to the centre of the city, Nesta wondered how easy it might be to slip from her horse and disappear through those streets, never to see either of those men again.

Before she could let the thought take root, the king stopped his horse.

Ahead of them a great hall loomed; a towering wooden structure with two floors, its thatched roof a meeting of two large, carved wooden beams at the front— two serpents twining at the apex where they crossed.

The lord’s hall.

They could get no closer— the door was closed, the windows of the ground floor shuttered. Nesta frowned, taking in the crowd that had gathered before that closed door, assembled in a circle to leave a great space empty in the centre of the courtyard. At least fifty Danes she counted, all of them waiting, she thought, for the arrival of the King of Wessex.

But then there was the sound of steel ringing out upon steel, and as the crowd before them parted to let the horses through, Alfred’s trail of Saxons caught their first glimpse of the spectacle taking place just a stone’s throw from the lord’s hall and it’s resolutely closed door. As the spectators closed the circle behind them, she realised that the Danes weren’t there for Alfred at all. 

At the centre of that circle, two Danes prowled around one another like wolves. Nesta felt her eyes widen— her knuckles tighten on her horse’s reins. 

The nearest Dane towered above the rest, his skin like burnished bronze even in the dim grey light. In one hand he held a great steel sword— in the other, a short-handled axe. A seax. He wore a thin tunic, already clinging to his skin, and his hair curled haphazardly to his shoulders. Around his neck a silver pendant hung in the shape of a hammer, and when he lunged it danced, catching the thin light as much as his sword. The second Dane was similarly built, yet lighter on his feet and a touch more lithe, and as a manic grin split across the face of the first, a whisper rippling along the gathered crowd as coins exchanged hands, Nesta realised that the crowd had gathered to place their bets— to watch the fight like one might listen to a minstrel. 

The second Dane tilted his head, his raven hair cut short, and when he turned Nesta saw the smile that pulled at his mouth, like the fight… excited him.

Like there was no malice in it.

Like it was… fun.

The first was handsome in a rugged kind of way, a single scar splitting through his eyebrow and a hundred more littering the arms laid bare by his rolled-up sleeves. Tattoos snaked their way across his skin, shifting with each flex of muscle, and it was an effort to tear her eyes away from him, like somehow she needed to discover just how he’d earned each and every one of those scars. 

As the second Dane moved into her line of vision, she noticed that he had scars too— far more brutal ones that consumed both his hands, like he’d been caught in a fire. Like perhaps he’d started the kind of fire his people were so infamous for, burning down monasteries up and down the eastern coast. 

Nesta blinked once. Twice.

The first Dane dropped his sword to the ground, letting it clatter against the packed earth. He flipped his axe, clever fingers wrapping around the hilt as he crooked the fingers of his other hand in invitation. He murmured something in his native tongue, and Nesta tilted her head as he grinned again, shifting his weight and readying himself to make the next strike. The second smiled grimly, and even though both were already marred with blood - and a thin cut left a trail of blood weeping along the arm of the first - neither seemed particularly concerned. Like a little bloodshed was nothing.

The first wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and grinned as that, too, came away smeared with blood. 

“Barbarous,” the priest muttered again.

“Brutish,” Tomas agreed, an echo. 

The sun broke from behind the clouds, briefly illuminating the fighters in gold. They wore no armour, and Nesta’s mouth felt dry as she watched the first one fight, his arms corded with muscle that she suspected could break a man’s neck with ease. And he did make it lookeasy, the way he lifted his axe. The way he swept forward, dipping low enough to the ground to pluck up his discarded sword. 

The second warrior held his own, just as adept, but when the first landed a kick to his thigh that sent him stumbling—

Within a breath, the first Dane had his blade levelled at the neck of the second.

For a moment, Nesta’s heart was in her throat.

Here was the bloodshed— the easy violence that made the Danes so fearsome.

Would the first one cut the second’s throat with that smile still plastered on his face? Would he make that look easy too, when he opened his fellow countryman’s neck? 

Nesta held her breath.

Waited.

But after a moment, the first tossed his head back and laughed, grinning at his victory as his curls spilled across his shoulders. Then he extended a hand, helping the second to his feet even as the latter muttered something under his breath that Nesta couldn’t understand— something she suspected might have been good-natured grumbling after a fight lost between friends. 

Their hands clasped; all blood-stained skin and scars. 

“Next time,” she heard the second warrior say darkly, his chest rising and falling rapidly after the exertion of the fight. “Next time, It’ll be you on the floor.”

The first grinned, his victory lining his face with mirth. He opened his mouth, his dark eyes shining, but before he could speak, the doors to the hall behind them opened. Silence fell as a figure filled the doorway, dressed in deep black that almost made him one with the shadows of the hall behind, and as the warriors sheathed their blades, Nesta noted how the smile on the mouth of the first refused to fade, even in the presence of what was surely his lord.

“King Alfred.” The figure in the doorway stepped further into the grey light, his voice smooth and lilting beneath his accent, and as the weak sunlight glanced off the sharp planes of his face and illuminated the angular cut of his jaw, he looked like a man entirely content with command. His hair was smooth and black, kept short, and the deep black of his tunic was interrupted only by the silver rings on each of his fingers and the silver torc about his wrist.

“Lord Rhysand,” Alfred answered, his voice tight even as they met under the banner of peace. Tension wove through them like a breeze; the treaty between them hardly stronger than a reed in the river. Animosity was buried too deep, mistrust a currency of its own between their peoples. No matter what peace their leaders had agreed, Nesta hardly thought any of them were fooled.

Peace was a powder keg, just waiting for a spark.

Still, the leader of the Danes made a show of flashing a smile towards the Saxons. 

“Ignore my brothers,” he said, flicking a hand towards the two warriors they had witnessed sparring. “As Danes, the fight is embedded in our blood. We train for hours against one another,” he continued as he moved with purpose down the three steps that led up to the hall’s imposing door. His eyes glinted with something like arrogance as he canted his head, slowly, to the side. “To achieve the kind of prowess that wins our battles.”

Unease whispered through the gathered crowd, the smile on the first warrior’s face dropping to a darkened smirk as he looked up at the assembled Saxons from beneath his eyelashes. His hand shifted— fingers twitching towards the handle of his seax.

There was a threat there, Nesta thought, left so thinly veiled by Rhysand’s words. 

Alfred said nothing, only nodded sagely before glancing back, briefly, at his priest. Osbert’s scowl had deepened, his lips pressed so thin they were almost entirely invisible, and yet with a nod, both men’s horses stepped forwards anyway. The King of Wessex slid to his feet when his horse stopped in the centre of the courtyard, opening his arms in a show of perfect companionship as he walked towards the Danish lord.

It was a display Rhysand echoed, clasping Alfred’s hand as they embraced. The silver of his rings contrasted the gold of Alfred’s, and though no crown encircled Rhysand’s brow, authority rippled from him in waves. The warriors he had called his brothers took up a position on either side of their lord, like dark shadows that threatened violence, and as the rest of the crowd dispersed and serving men stepped forward to take their horses, they watched.

Smoothly, Nesta dismounted and handed her reins to a waiting groom. Beside her, Tomas still scowled, like just breathing the same air as the northmen was an affront to him. But then again, Nesta thought silently, most things proved an affront to Tomas Mandray. Even being one of the king’s right-hand men wasn’t enough for him. That scowl was permanently etched across his brow, like nothing and nobody was ever truly good enough.

Lifting her chin, Nesta straightened the silver rings that wound around her fingers. A sure sign of wealth— as sure as the belt at her waist decorated with gold, and the gold and garnet-inlaid brooches that held her cloak together at her collarbone. Tomas’ proximity to the king might not have given him land or a real title, but at least it had given him some wealth, and if gold and garnets were the only thing Nesta was to get out of this godforsaken marriage… well. 

She smoothed a hand down her cloak. 

So be it.

He left her standing alone as he drifted towards the king, a Saxon in a Norse stronghold. His gait was heavy as he stormed forwards, his hand on the hilt of the sword at his hip, and as their leaders spoke together with heads bowed, voices too low for Nesta to hear, all she could do was clasp her hands and wait for somebody - anybody - to show her to their lodgings. It took effort, sometimes, to keep her tongue behind her teeth. To keep from screaming as the rest of the king’s court moved to make way for the men, whilst the women lingered in the dust. 

She looked forward, cast her eyes over the Danes that remained standing before the lord’s hall. The warrior with the curling hair and scar-split brow glanced up, a soft breeze shifting those loose curls back to reveal both the high cut of his cheekbones and the curve of his ear, studded at several points with silver rings. His arms were folded over his broad chest, and when his eyes flicked to hers, Nesta felt his attention as sharply as the blade of the seax he had tucked into his belt. 

He was from another world— one so foreign to her that she didn’t know what to do when their eyes met, and yet there was something warm in it when he smirked again, a base heat that gathered at the bottom of her spine, constricting her lungs as she kept her head high. With a jolt that sent lightning forking down her spine, that mouth of his split into a grin as he inclined his head towards her in greeting.

“Come,” Rhysand announced, his voice echoing through the courtyard as he drew away from Alfred. With a sweep of one arm, he motioned broadly to the open door of the hall. “Let us get the business over with. The sooner it is done, the sooner we can drink.”

Several of the Danes let out a low cheer at that, more than one of them lifting an arm into the air as if to appease their gods. Skol, one of them proclaimed loudly, hammering a fist against his chest. 

Nesta didn’t pretend to understand, but as Rhysand led Alfred through that door, Osbert and Tomas in tow, she lingered in that courtyard, even as the cold air nipped at her skin. And as Tomas looked back over his shoulder and called her name with irritation lining each syllable, she looked back to the Dane that had snared her attention and watched as his lips kicked up at one corner, his head tilted as he looked at her with the full force of that determined gaze.

And as she watched, the Dane winked.

“Skol,” he echoed. 

Taglist: @asnowfern @podemechamardek @c-e-d-dreamer @lady-winter-sunrise @starryblueskies7 @melphss @sv0430 @that-little-red-head @misswonderflower @fwiggle @tanishab @xstarlightsupremex @burningsnowleopard @hiimheresworld @wannawriteyouabook @hereforthenessian @valkyriesupremacy @kale-theteaqueen @moodymelanist @talkfantasytome @pyxxie