Outcast Full disclaimer. Outcast is, to my mind, the slave!fic Sutcliff would be writing if she was writing fanfiction today. (I am absolutely convinced that she’d be gleefully writing hurt/comfort knotfic with the rest of us, just better.) It’s the story of – eh, it’s the story of storms; the storm that wrecked a Roman merchantman on the Cornish shoreline and brought Beric to the Clan as a black-haired orphan. As with many of Sutcliff’s waifs and strays, he fights for his place in the warband and wins his warrior’s spear, but this is nowhere near the end of the story – p.26, to be honest, in my own New Oxford Library edition with the stunning Kennedy illustrations (recommended!). Kidnapped, enslaved, set to the oars on a Roman longship, it’s another storm altogether which washes Beric up on Romney Marsh, to encounter again the Roman engineer Justinius. It’s not the last storm, either.
The face above him was growing clearer every moment: a dark, hard face with the brand of Mithras between the eyebrows, out of which eyes that were the cold grey of wintry northern seas looked down at him with an odd intensity.
Staring up into that dark face, Beric burst out desperately: ‘I never turned robber! I only ran away because he said he would sell me into the salt mines! You heard him – you were there - ’
‘So it is you,’ said the Maker of Roads and the Drainer of Marshes.
Outcast
Full disclaimer. Outcast is, to my mind, the slave!fic Sutcliff would be writing if she was writing fanfiction today. (I am absolutely convinced that she’d be gleefully writing hurt/comfort knotfic with the rest of us, just better.) It’s the story of – eh, it’s the story of storms; the storm that wrecked a Roman merchantman on the Cornish shoreline and brought Beric to the Clan as a black-haired orphan. As with many of Sutcliff’s waifs and strays, he fights for his place in the warband and wins his warrior’s spear, but this is nowhere near the end of the story – p.26, to be honest, in my own New Oxford Library edition with the stunning Kennedy illustrations (recommended!). Kidnapped, enslaved, set to the oars on a Roman longship, it’s another storm altogether which washes Beric up on Romney Marsh, to encounter again the Roman engineer Justinius. It’s not the last storm, either.
The face above him was growing clearer every moment: a dark, hard face with the brand of Mithras between the eyebrows, out of which eyes that were the cold grey of wintry northern seas looked down at him with an odd intensity.
Staring up into that dark face, Beric burst out desperately: ‘I never turned robber! I only ran away because he said he would sell me into the salt mines! You heard him – you were there - ’
‘So it is you,’ said the Maker of Roads and the Drainer of Marshes.
Shipping? Justinius/Beric. Gloriously.