Between cross and raven Chapter 1. Monastrium Sancta Mariae ad Rhenum
In a convent near Dorestad, a young healer named Magdalena is taught that sin is inherited and mercy is her only redemption. When a wounded Viking raider is delivered to her infirmary with orders that he must live, she takes his survival as a test of skill; not knowing she is binding her fate to his.
Chapter 1. Monastrium Sancta Mariae ad Rhenum
.-.-.
Magdalena’s dark eyes flew open at once; wide, alert, too used to interruption. For a heartbeat she stared at the low, lime-washed ceiling above her pallet, then pressed her face into her pillow and growled softly into the linen.
“That darn rooster…”
The sound of the bird came again, indignant and victorious.
She allowed herself three slow breaths more beneath the wool blanket. Just three. Then discipline, drilled into bone and breath alike, pulled her upright.
Cold air kissed her bare arms.
Her chamber was small enough that she could touch both walls if she stretched. A narrow straw pallet stood against the stone, the mattress thin but carefully beaten and turned. A wool blanket lay folded with precision at its foot; she had folded it that way last night and would again tonight.
Order mattered.
Beside the pallet rested a small wooden chest. Inside: two shifts, neatly rolled, and her rosary coiled like a sleeping serpent of worn wooden beads. A rough stool held a single beeswax candle, half-burned and precious. The faint scent of lavender drifted from beneath her bedding where she had tucked dried sprigs months ago.
High in the wall, a slit of a window overlooked the outer palisade and the marsh beyond. Morning mist clung low and silver there. The world beyond the convent always looked uncertain at dawn, as though it had not yet chosen whether to be gentle or cruel.
Behind her plank door came the reminder that cruelty did not wait for decisions.
Coughing.
Not one voice; several. A wet rasp from old Willem in the far bed. The thin, wheezing pull of breath from the boy brought in with fever two nights ago. A muted groan. The creak of rope bed frames shifting under restless weight. Somewhere, a clay bowl clinked faintly against wood.
Brother Amandus called her chamber practical. Necessary for late night summons. Not a privilege.
But she knew better.
It was a gift to sleep alone. The other sisters shared breath and whispers in the main house. Magdalena cherished this narrow wedge of privacy. Here she could simply be without watchful eyes. Here she could exhale.
She slipped from the pallet and drew on her linen shift, cool against skin still warm from sleep. Over it she fastened her woolen kirtle, undyed and coarse but serviceable. The fabric scratched faintly at her wrists. She tied the cord at her waist, fingers swift and practiced.
Then the veil.
She smoothed her dark hair back first; thick, nearly black, stubbornly glossy despite convent austerity. It had once drawn comment in the village. Here, it was kept hidden. She secured the coif close to her scalp, tucking every strand into obedience before drawing the black veil over it. The linen framed her face starkly, sharpening her cheekbones, deepening the solemn intensity of her dark eyes.
At sixteen, her features still held youth; soft mouth, unlined brow. But her gaze did not. There was steadiness there.
She lifted her rosary from the chest, kissed the small wooden cross briefly, and hung the wooden beads around her neck.There would be time for prayer. There was always prayer.
The coughing intensified as she unlatched her door.
The infirmary greeted her with its familiar breath.
It sat close to the outer wall for a reason. The sick and wounded did not walk deep into cloistered life. They were tended near the edge. Near the world. Near whatever had harmed them.
The building was low and practical; half stone at its base, timber rising above, roofed in dark thatch. A single heavy door faced the yard. The narrow window, covered in oiled parchment, allowed only a reluctant wash of pale light.
Inside, the packed dirt floor had been swept smooth the evening before. She would sweep it again before Prime. Three narrow wooden beds stood against the wall, each layered with straw mattresses wrapped in coarse linen. The linens bore stains that even boiling water could not fully conquer.
Shelves lined one wall, crowded with clay jars and corked bottles. Bundles of dried herbs hung from ceiling beams; sage, thyme, yarrow, brushing faintly against one another when wind slipped through unseen cracks.
She knew where everything lay, all in order, all with purpose.
The bone-handled knife rested on the third shelf from the left. The iron probe hung on its peg near the basin. The needle was wrapped carefully in linen beside strips soaking in boiled water that had cooled overnight.
She moved automatically; checking the boy’s forehead first. Still warm, but not worse. She adjusted his blanket. Willem’s cough rattled again; she reached for the thyme mixture without looking.
This was where she felt most herself.
Most necessary.
In the chapel she was mostly shunned. Here, she had helpful hands. Hands that stitched. Hands that steadied. Hands that did not tremble at blood.
Magdalena drew in the sharp scent of vinegar, squared her shoulders beneath the plain wool of her habit, and began her work.
.-.-.
The stone bit into her knees long after the prayer had ended.
Magdalena remained where Abbess Gerhild had left her; before the altar, palms flat against her thighs, spine straight, head bowed. Repentance was never brief for her. Not when Gerhild presided.
Her knees throbbed beneath the coarse wool of her habit. The floor was unforgiving this time of year; winter’s chill clung to it even in spring. The other sisters had been dismissed quietly. Their soft steps had faded. The chapel now held only candle smoke and silence.
“Sin is inherited,” Gerhild had told her the first week she arrived. A small girl then, thin from travel, clutching the hem of a dress too short at the wrists. “Like disease. You will spend your life resisting what you were born to.”
She had not understood.
She had only known her mother was gone, and the convent doors were closing behind her.
She’d been oblivious that her mother’s scandal had stained the walls long before she ever stepped inside them.
Abbess Gerhild had never allowed her to forget it.
Magdalena shifted slightly, wincing. The ache in her knees spread upward now, dull and steady. A fitting penance, perhaps. The abbess would say the body must remember what the soul tries to deny.
Yet even Gerhild, though she would sooner swallow hot ash than admit it, envied her skills.
Magdalena had seen it; in the tightening of pale lips when Brother Amandus praised her steady stitching. In the cold narrowing of her eyes when soldiers asked for the young sister with the sure hands. In the clipped way Gerhild would reassign her to the heaviest scrubbing after a successful procedure.
Capability was dangerous in a girl like her.
Especially when it drew favor.
She closed her eyes and another memory surfaced; the one she was not meant to have.
She had been eight. Small still. Curious.
She had hidden in the narrow crawlspace above the infirmary rafters; a dusty strip of beams used to store dried lavender and old linen sacks. She liked it there, it was the perfect place to hide. From that narrow gap she could see down into the workroom through a knothole in the timber, hear everything, unseen.
That was where she had heard Abbess Gerhild confront Brother Amandus.
“She cannot be allowed to grow proud. You teach her too much.”
The words had struck harder than any discipline.
A long silence.
“She is already tainted,” Brother Amadus had said quietly. “What harm is there in letting her be useful?”
She had not waited to hear more. She had crawled backward too fast, snagged her sleeve on a splinter, nearly fallen through the beams. The dust had filled her nose, but she had not dared sneeze.
Later that night Brother Amadus had found her behind the herb garden wall, red-eyed, stubbornly silent.
He had not denied it.
“It was the only way,” he had said gently. “If I argued with her too fiercely, she would forbid it entirely. Sometimes one must bend words to preserve what matters. I am deeply sorry my child that you had to hear it.”
He had apologized.
No one else ever had.
For a girl who never knew her real father; never knew even his name, Brother Amandus became the shape of one in everything but blood. He taught her letters in secret at first, tracing them with charcoal on scrap parchment after Compline. He placed a psalter in her hands and said, “read.” When she stumbled, he did not scold. When she succeeded, he did not praise too loudly.
“Do not judge,” he would say as she cleaned a wound or drained an abscess. “We are not here to measure sin. We are here to lessen pain.”
That lesson she held closer than any sermon.
Blood had never unsettled her. Not the dark gush of an artery cut too deep. Not the pale fat beneath skin. She had assisted in amputations before her fourteenth year; holding limbs steady while Amandus sawed through bone, murmuring prayers not for forgiveness but for survival. She learned the Latin names for herbs as other girls learned hymns.
Salvia. Urtica. Artemisia.
She stitched torn flesh with hands that did not tremble.
As the years passed and arteritis crept into Brother Amandus’ joints, swelling his knuckles and stiffening his wrists, she became his extension. She ground the poultices. She steadied the blade. She threaded the needle when his fingers would not obey.
She became his hands.
Perhaps that was another reason Gerhild watched her as one watches a crack in a wall, small, but widening.
The chapel door creaked.
Magdalena lifted her head.
Abbess Gerhild stood there, tall and narrow as a shadow cast by the candles. Pale eyes assessed her a moment longer than necessary.
“You may rise,” the abbess said calmly.
Magdalena pushed herself to her feet. Her knees protested, but she did not show it.
Repentance, after all, was expected to hurt.
And she had grown very good at enduring pain.
.-.-.
Monastrium Sancta Mariae ad Rhenum or - St. Mary by the Rhine- answered to the bishopric in Utrecht.
Which meant obedience. Even when obedience tasted bitter.
The Benedictine walls were not built to question the will of the Church, and when orders came, they were carried out; even when those orders arrived bleeding and foreign and wrapped in iron.
Today, they brought in a raider.
The heavy infirmary door slammed inward under the push of mailed shoulders. Mud, leather, and the sharp metallic scent of blood rushed in with them.
Magdalena did not look at banners. She did not look at braids or insignias or the style of axe strapped across a man’s back. To her, it was simpler.
Just another body.
Bleeding on her floor.
Two soldiers hoisted the raider onto the wooden treatment table as though setting down a sack of grain. His body landed with a dull thud, breath leaving him in a ragged groan.
Magdalena stepped forward before she felt the flutter in her stomach.
Assess first. Feel later.
Her dark eyes tracked the damage quickly.
An arrow lodged high through the upper arm; not a clean pass-through. The shaft had been snapped short, likely to make transport easier, but the iron head remained buried deep. The flesh around it was swollen, stretched tight and glossy. Red streaks crawled up toward the shoulder. The skin radiated heat.
Days untreated.
She leaned closer.
There it was, faint but unmistakable. The sickly sweet scent of rot beginning beneath the skin.
Her stomach tightened.
This was days away from amputation.
The man himself drifted between worlds. He was young; younger than she expected. His tunic clung to him, darkened with sweat, the coarse wool plastered against the hard lines of his chest and shoulders. Damp fabric rose and fell with shallow breaths. The neckline had been torn to access the wound in his arm. Through the gap she glimpsed ink along his collarbone and shoulder; dark lines, disappearing beneath fabric.
His hair had been braided tight against his scalp; narrow rows drawn back from his brow in deliberate order before falling into a thicker braid at the back. Even now, half-undone by sweat and struggle, the braids spoke of habit. Of care. Of someone who did not leave his appearance to chance.
But it was his face that caught her for a breath too long.
Not handsome in any gentle way. Hard. Angular. Built for command. Even unconscious, his brow remained faintly drawn, as if arguing with the air.
One of the soldiers stepped closer, voice firm.
“He must live. Whatever it takes.”
Magdalena’s head tilted slightly.
Not a common raider then.
But one of value.
Brother Amandus moved beside her, slower now than he once had been, fingers stiff at his sides. His voice held no drama.
“If the rot spreads,” he said evenly, examining the arm without flinching, “we cut.”
The word had barely left his mouth when the raider’s eyes snapped open.
Blue. Not clouded blue. Not soft. Sharp, fever-bright, and furious.
He sucked in a breath as though surfacing from deep water. Sweat ran down his temples.
“Kill me,” he rasped in broken Franconian, voice shredded raw. “I’m nothing… without my arm.”
The effort cost him. His body trembled with it.
Magdalena felt the plea like a blow to the ribs.
Then she saw his legs.
They lay twisted beneath him, thinner than the rest of his powerful frame, muscles poorly formed, braced with crude leather supports beneath travel-worn wrappings. One foot angled unnaturally inward. The other did not respond at all when he tried to shift.
He was already fighting the world with half the weapons other men were given.
Without an arm…He would not merely be weakened. He would be nothing.
Brother Amandus observed her observing him. He saw the calculation in her eyes. The tightening of her jaw.
Practical as ever, he turned the raider’s dread into instruction.
“Well,” he said calmly, glancing at her rather than the soldiers, “let us see if you can keep his arm.”
The words settled heavily between them.
Her throat tightened, but she did not look away from the wound. She always wanted his approval, not the abbess’s. Not the soldiers, but his.
In that instant, the raider became her trial. On her table she did not see an enemy. She saw fever, tissue, infection and a chance to prevent amputation.
“We boil water,” she said quietly. “I need vinegar, clean linen strips, strong ale.”
The raider’s gaze found hers.
Defiant.
As if daring her to fail.
Magdalena met that look without blinking while her mind was summing up all key supplies for the removal of the arrow.
“I will try everything to save your arm,” she promised him, although she wasn’t sure he understood or believed her. Her voice did not tremble. Inside, the butterflies still beat against her ribs. But her hands were steady.
.-.-.
A/N: So, this idea has been living rent free in my head for quite a while. I’ve been writing about Ivar for 2020 on one saga and I felt ready to make a little d-tour with a bunch of other OC’s. I’ve been writing on this fic for a few months I think and I just reached 60 pages so I felt confident enough to post it online.
Mind: this story will be graphic, in the sense of blood and gore, violence. And I am known to put Ivar through ordeals, both mentally and physically. I am also a sucker for slow-burns. And I love to get as historically correct as I can. If this is your cup of tea, then let’s have a party.
I strive best when receiving comments on my work and love to chat about our little psychopath we adore with all our hearts. If you like to be tagged, please let me know
Xoxox Nukyster
