Beautiful Wreck (14 page)

“I saw you going …” He waited a moment, I could see him consider his words and decide to stop there. Then he started again. “You remember how.” He nodded to indicate Gerdi.

That seemed right, yes. My body seemed to know something that my head had forgotten, about moving in harmony with a horse.

“I just tried,” I said, “to see if I could do something by myself.”

Then it occurred to me.
Oh.

“I wasn’t leaving you,” I blurted. “Leaving with your horse.”

His face closed. I thought maybe he didn’t believe me. But he smiled, then, and was transformed. “You would get far with her,” he said. “But it would take the rest of your life.”

I smiled, too, and laughed. “This is far enough,” I said. I looked down into the grotto. “I would stay here forever if I could. It’s so beautiful.”

He drew up beside me.

“Good,” he said. “Flotta straumi.” He relaxed with the words, his voice deep and respectful.
Splendid stream.
We watched it go by.

Then he straightened himself again, like I’d seen him do before—a gesture of deliberately waking from a dream. “In winter, we skate it.”

“Skate it!” I was thrilled. This wonderland would be made even finer with a dusting of snow. Images of cold laughter came to mind, of frosty breath and fur coats and freedom.

“Já, have you not skated?”

“No, never.” I said it for sure, knowing I hadn’t, and he watched me with calm interest.

“You will, then,” he told me, and he seemed to accept how sure I was. That even with my complete amnesia, I had no doubt I’d never strapped skates onto my shoes. His horse stepped in place, shaking his hooves out, and the chief looked into the grotto. A moment more, standing in a quiet covered over by the sound of endless, speeding water. Oh, I wanted to skate in this enchanted place! This swift rushing could be stilled after all. Frozen. And we could fly over its surface.

Would I still be here? Or would I be grasped by the tank, taken through time?

I took a deep breath, readying myself to leave the ravine, to return to the house and work. “Next time, I’ll find a way down there.”

The chief turned to me with his brows drawn. “What do you mean?” He asked me as if I was dense. “Come down.” He gave the slightest pull on Vakr’s reins, almost imperceptible, and the horse walked right off the edge of the earth.

“Follow,” the chief called, but he didn’t have to, because Gerdi had understood and was already walking exactly where Vakr did. She took a step off the cliff, and my heart fell free.

Of course, it wasn’t a direct plunge, but it was so steep, it hollowed my stomach and dried my throat. We descended the uneven rock face, the horses stepping down without a care. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, to hold onto Gerdi and let her find her way down those jagged rocks. I held my breath, until I knew I would pass out and fall off her back. Gerdi knew what to do. That I had never done anything like this was irrelevant—and electrifying.

We reached the bottom, my head alight and dizzy. I got off the horse clumsily and turned around, my skirt a bundle of confusion. The chief was composed, not struggling with anything.

He sat on the rocks, already using a stick to trace something in the sludge at the water’s edge. The fearsome Viking, reduced to a curious boy poking at a stream with a piece of birch wood.

I sat down several feet away from him, drawing my skirts away from the water. I touched my fingertips to it. It was frigid and clear, its blue borrowed from the sky, its rushing sound so much louder than I expected. It moved fast, flowing off in the direction of home. This water would become the wider river that ran below the house.

The chief didn’t speak much, and I didn’t either.

I looked at him closer and longer now. His legs weren’t bound, and his fine wool pants hung loose around his ankles, only his short boots underneath. He wore no bracers either, and his wrists showed under long loose sleeves. His black hair was free. So undone. I imagined him waking early as I rummaged and clanked around outside his room, imagined him walking outside to find me stealing his horse. The chief had left in a hurry to come after me.

I untied my boots and set them aside, rolled my woolen pants up and stepped into the water. The cold felt knife-like, and all sensation began to slip from my toes. The water reached above my ankles, rushing hard against me and tugging more than I thought it would. It felt wonderful, and I waded out farther into the current, my skirts lifted in my two fists to stay dry.

I looked back at the chief and he seemed open and relaxed in his silence. He’d brought me down here, and in return I would coax him into the stream. “Follow,” I said with a thrust of my chin, playfully echoing his earlier command.

He didn’t play.

When we had walked along the house, my eyes on the back of his neck, he seemed life sized. But as he rose to stand now, I was overwhelmed. The intensity I’d heard about was directed at me, his gold eyes on me, and I was emptied. The blood rushed out of my hands, fingers tingling, everything gone. I backed away and stumbled on the rocks of the stream bed, the freezing water closing like fingers around my ankles.

He stopped, and turned his head away, rested his palm on the rock wall beside him. And I waited for him to do any of a dozen things, to banish me from his home, to draw a knife from his belt and bury it neatly in my heart, to simply leave me here in the water, rebuffed.

Instead he placed one foot up on a rock and untied and removed his boot. Then the other. He set them aside and walked into the water.

He stepped onto a little island, no more than three feet across, and crouched on the moss. He drew black stones up from the bottom of the stream and piled them. A fort, or tiny cairn. While he built, I let my heart settle. I swirled my foot around, feeling the freezing drift and pull, and watched my hiked-up skirt hover just above the surface.

His voice came, overly easy and light. Sorry he’d scared me? “You love the water,” he said.

I always knew I would. I stopped just a breath away from saying so—just short of admitting that I remembered a time and place where I lived without streams or horses or chieftains.

Here in this lovely place, I felt like I could tell him. I wanted him to know about how I remembered my apartment, the lab, the sounds and unearthly light of screens. Flat pictures of farms. I wanted him to know me. I felt almost like I could say everything, and that he would accept my truth.

“Já,” I said instead. “It feels calm to me. So good and easy.”

This moment felt easy, too, and I was no longer scared of him. No longer scared of birds or steep rocks or anything. Giddy with the rush of relief, I swept my foot in a bigger arc, and I kicked, splashing water on his island.

He pretended not to react, but I could see him hide a smile.

“I am that way with the woods,” he said, and without looking up he sliced his hand into the water and expertly splashed me back. He soaked my pants and the hems of my skirts and my laugh echoed through the rocks and all around us. He told me, “I have the men cut from the far side.”

The far side.
Oh.
Of the white woods, yes. The gorgeous, glowing woods that were being devoured every day to become boats and beds. To become the fires that gagged and sustained me. But the chief was an early settler, and there was still so much forest left, trees twisting and leaves tossing farther than I could see. It made me happy that there was a place like that for him, where he felt easy.

He still worked on his fort. Approached me indirectly with his few words. “You go places alone.”

I laughed. “Maybe I shouldn’t. I might get eaten by birds.”

The chief laughed, too. “It was the elf hollow,” he told me, sitting up on his heels.

The elf hollow? I recalled the glen that held the tiny house as if in a great palm.
Oh.
Yes, it made sense. I’d read about this! The little home I’d seen was not a dollhouse for playing, it was there for the hidden folk.

“You keep the small house ready for them?”

He pressed his lips together, literally holding words back. In a moment he answered. “If not, they will come and tramp on Hildur in her sleep.” He tried to say it without disdain, but a hint of stress on her name came through, and I had to hold back a smile.

“They bring dread dreams,” he finished.

“Did the birds protect the hollow,” I asked, trying for one moment to believe what he might. “Because they thought I’d see the elves?”

“Já, well,” He took a deep breath. “I suspect you would have seen many nests, too.”

Nests, I thought, and a second later I got what he meant.
Oh.
The birds were protecting their eggs! A nesting ground turned legend.

I smiled broadly at that, feeling closer to Heirik knowing that he questioned such things. Besides both of us being isolated, we were odd in this way too. Words tumbled out without my thinking. “It’s less lonely,” I said. “To go out by myself.”

My eyes stung suddenly, and I turned to regard the waterfalls. “I know it doesn’t make sense.”

Level and sure, he answered. “It does.”

I waded back to the shore and he did too. We sat apart from one another, but both of us kept our feet in the stream. I couldn’t feel mine any more, but I didn’t want to break the stillness and pull them out. I knew if I did then we’d leave here. We both watched the water, moving and yet unchangeable. I tried to follow a single bit of it with my eyes, and for a moment the falls seemed suspended.

If I came to this place in the 22nd century, it would look wrong. It might have carved a different path by then. This was now, this small moment sitting with our toes in the water.

I lost track of my little piece of the current and it was consumed. My voice trailed off to a whisper that went with it. “It’s what I came for.” Over the stream’s hard rushing, the words disappeared.

The chief broke into my reverie, but gently. “My grandfather knew poetry,” he said. “He put the house here.”

The house came to mind, a living thing, its walls grown so thick with grass that it melted into the hills. The chief looked up and back in its direction. We couldn’t see it from here, but the word hús itself seemed to pull at him. His mother’s house. The place he remade every year, shoring it up, making it solid and safe. The place he entered every night, into a world where everyone turned away.