Beautiful Wreck (19 page)

His birthmark stained his left shoulder and arm, ran down to his waist, followed the curves of his lower back, and further.
Oh.
It was ominous, yes, and inescapable. It ended there, where another kind of scar began, a ragged white gash from a wound. It was not the thin line of a surgically stitched cut. It was thick, healed over in big white twists that disappeared from view below the surface of the water.

My blanket dropped soundlessly to the floor.

I knew I should walk away. I should respect him, should quietly leave him alone. The wall and door felt cold under my palms as I thought about it, about turning around and leaving. I took the barest sips of air, and I watched him.

I saw him in his solitude, and something that had been dozing in me, slowly waking in my gut, now came completely alive. Something far more animal and ferocious than a sweet crush. I imagined standing in the hot water behind him, sliding my palms down to the hollow at the base of his back, reaching around to trace the bones of his pelvis. I touched my own chest, my palm pressing against my breast. I was hungry for him.

And oh gods, I shouldn’t watch him, but I did. I couldn’t go. I wanted to look forever. I felt a wave of love and knew it had been coming since the day we met. Since the moment I’d looked into his golden eyes. Could I fall in love this way, alone, quietly hiding in the dark? Could I fall in love with Heirik without a hint of permission? It was wrong to look on him in secret. Wrong to take in his body when it wasn’t offered. To devour and adore him without his knowing I was even here. But yes, oh yes, I could. And I fell and fell and fell.

I leaned against the tunnel wall, all thought and sense forgotten like the blanket at my feet. Peering around the corner of the window sill, I saw him slick his hair back, wet and long. He smoothed it, pulled it into a tail in his fist, and drew it over one shoulder.

Then he turned my way. And I ran.

I stood in the mudroom panting, my back pressed to the wall. I was barely composed, and had just picked up a bowl to look like I was doing something, when he ducked out of the tunnel, his hair tousled now in blackest waves that clung to his damp linen. I’d never seen his shirts left open at the collar. He wore a pendant, a crude flat silver T. Thor’s hammer. It looked homemade. He wore it tied tight with leather, and the metal rested in the hollow of his throat. Somehow this slight glimpse was more erotic than his whole nude body.

His brows drew together sharply when he saw me, just for a second. I felt lightheaded from adrenalin and the vision of his thighs and a sudden odd desire to lick the silver at his throat. I could tuck myself into him, put my forehead against his damp shoulder.

He said hello, and the sound of his voice made me sway. I reached a hand out as if to touch him and saw gray close around me, my vision narrowing.

Betta slapped at my cheek. I opened my eyes and she and Ranka loomed over me. The little girl’s braids fell, ropy, against my face. “Please wake up, Lady.”

We were on the floor of the mudroom. Betta helped me sit up against the wall and pulled a wool cloak off a hook to throw over me. Ranka had a cup in her hand, and she pushed sour whey at me.

Heirik, a steaming apparition, was gone.

“Pay attention, Woman,” Svana laughed at me. “You’ll stick your pretty fingers in the lye.” It was my turn to stir the pot of ash and melted seal fat. A lazy job, soap could’ve been made by one of us, or more likely by the thralls. Doing this together was a luxury, a break sitting in the sunny grass.

I stirred languidly with a stick, musing about the chief’s body, and experiencing a familiar tightness in my chest every time I recalled the wool blanket I’d left behind. He must’ve had to step right over it. Oh gods, replaying the scene in my mind didn’t ease the embarrassment. It was the opposite. When I thought of him returning from the bath, hot and wet and having surely seen the evidence, I felt my face flare.

The soap was a foul gluish mess, dotted with bits of wood ash, and I watched it intently as it did nothing, changed not at all. I pretended it was fascinating.

No one noticed my mooning, I thought. Svana sat in a puddle of gauzy, peach skirts, utterly occupied with herself. She languidly crushed dried angelica root and a few needles of precious rosemary. The scents bloomed on her fingertips and filled the air, clashing with the stink of the fat. She rubbed her slender wrists together, then pressed them to her temples and made tiny circles there—a small animal cleaning her face.

Betta was lying on her back in the grass, sucking honey off her fingers. She’d been dipping them in the tiny bowl that was meant to get mixed in to our soap. The hunks we bathed with would have a chaotic scent, I thought, ranging from the salt of the sea to honey and fresh-baked rye bread. It’s what Heirik’s hair would smell like, if I got close enough to know.

I heard my name.

“Ginn might be good for Eiðr,” Svana mused. “He is ugly, but smart.”

I sat up straight and eyed her with alarm.

Betta laughed. “Svana, do you think of anything but marrying boys? Ginn needs a man.” With her pinkie she glossed her lips with honey and looked sideways at me. “Like the chief.”

My stick got sucked into the sluggish whirlpool of the soap.

Was Betta testing a theory? Or could everyone tell? She gave me a dark look, and she held her sticky fingers up in front of her lips, facing out, and with a little push she shushed me.

“But … Woman …” Svana sputtered and blanched. “He would …” Her heart-shaped face turned from white to pink, and she blurted it out. “He would turn to Ginn!”

I pinched the tiniest bit of clean stick and eased it out of the sludge. He would turn to me. The phrase was familiar. I rifled my memory of poetic Viking phrases and in a second I had it. I blushed for what felt like the hundredth time this week, probably a bloody crimson. Little Svana was warning me that the chief would demand sex if I became his wife.

I heard his voice suddenly in my mind.
Turn to me.
He’d said it the day I was scared of the birds. He was so embarrassed at his accidental words, and now I realized why. Instead of saying “turn around” he’d told me to come make love. I tried to remember his voice exactly. I imagined how that phrase might sound in the muffled dark of his bed, when he meant it.

“Já, Little Girl,” Betta laughed, bright and plain. She teased Svana, who was just three years younger. “That is the idea.”

I tried for casual, uninterested mirth, and laughed a little along with Betta, but I sounded unconvincing. It didn’t matter. Svana was absorbed in the horror of sex with the chief. She couldn’t even see Betta’s glances, my flush of embarrassment. Even if she did notice, she wouldn’t be able to fathom the real reason why I was dreamy and slow as the sludge circling our bowl.

“Stop it.” I smacked Betta. “We shouldn’t talk about the chief that way.”

Right, yes. We shouldn’t. But I couldn’t help it, then. His wet body came to mind, and a fluttering of questions. How would it be with him? He was so singular, so unknown. What did he want from a woman? What did he like?

Oh.
I tripped on a thought that was so obvious. I’d fantasized about his body entwined with mine, his mouth, his heat against me. I’d lain on my hard bench night after night, watching Betta’s slow breathing, and I’d dreamed of his kiss. But I hadn’t thought about the reality of sex for him. Namely, it didn’t exist. He didn’t know the unutterable softness of a lover’s lips, the pulse of life in a beloved wrist. He hadn’t known a woman’s curves and sweet spots and scents. Had never kissed.

Did he imagine it? I supposed he would, like anyone, think about sex. Then the logical and unspeakable idea came to mind, and I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry. Heirik must touch himself.

I lay down beside Betta and gave my breath up to the navy blue sky, my stick forgotten. Svana made a becoming little squeak as she fished it out, the soap touching her lovely fingertips. She took over stirring.

“He does not, by the way,” Betta broke into my thoughts.

I turned my head to look at her with horror. How could she possibly know my thoughts? Worse, how could she know about Heirik alone and needy? What he did and didn’t do? But it wasn’t what she meant.

“He does not ask a thrall to do it,” she continued. “Many of them would, at his word.”

I turned my face back to the sky and closed my eyes to absorb the waning heat. Betta’s words chilled me. I was so ignorant here, over and over again. I knew about this place and time as in a storybook or an arc on a screen. Far down the hill, a half dozen thralls spun and washed clothes all day so that we could have afternoons like this. In the weeks I’d been here, I’d come to think of them vaguely as servants—people who worked for the chief, who brought up wood and thread for dyeing. Really, Heirik owned them. Of course, he could feel a woman’s touch if he chose to.

I sat up and looked across the yard and the house sat, too, like an animal with haunches and outstretched paws.

It was a dozing wolf of a house. But in the steeply angled, dark orange light, there was something alert and wild just under the surface. With a start, I noticed Heirik was beside it, crouched low to inspect the place where the walls changed from rock to grass. He sat up on his heels and lifted his head to me, as though he’d heard me calling, and his lupine eyes picked up the gold from the wildflowers on the turf.

A cloud passed over and Svana hugged herself.

I sat up and criss-crossed my legs. Betta stirred the soap now. “Who knows?” She smiled. “I think the chief has wolf’s eyes for Ginn.”

“Nei!” Svana gasped. And then a whisper, “Nei. He doesn’t see women that way.”

“Já, well, if that is so …” Betta didn’t bother to finish her thought, she so obviously didn’t believe it.

Svana didn’t answer. She sat breathlessly entranced, no doubt playing out in her mind the horror of a kiss from Heirik, his fearsome face so close, his breath on her. Almost subconsciously she whispered, “Ma says so.”

Betta raised an eyebrow at me.

When Svana spoke again, she sounded just like her mother admonishing me. “Where the wolf’s eyes are, the teeth are near.” It was almost familiar by now—the stab of anger I felt at Hildur when I heard such cruel pronouncements.

Betta must have seen me bunch up with animosity, because she snapped her teeth at me playfully like a dog and made us both laugh. Svana didn’t join us. Her eyes were running over the landscape, searching for something, her mother maybe? Some kind of assurance about the chief? That he would never marry, never have a child, never with her.

Her words stayed with me—
Ma says so
—and the more I repeated them to myself, the less I liked them.