Beautiful Wreck (20 page)

Dirty, delicious thoughts of the chief were like dogs at my heels.

It had been almost a week since the day we made soap, the day I first thought about him alone in his longing and wondered if, or what, he did in the solitude of his room. Now the idea kept following me. At first, I forcibly pushed it out of my mind. It was wrong, disrespectful to such a dignified and private man. But the thought would creep up on me, so that sometimes I was consumed and let wicked scenes play out in my mind. Sometimes in the midst of these fantasies, I’d look up to see him, in the flesh, suddenly near me. Disoriented and mortified, I’d look away.

The season was almost upon us when none of it would matter. The fall would be quick, and everyone would be consumed with work.

In this time, all the seasons were warmer than in the future, but the earth tilted and turned just the same. When the light started to change, it would change rapidly, night consuming the light noticeably earlier every day. The girls said we would need to work quickly, bringing in and storing hay, bringing down the animals, shearing them for fall so they could grow their new coats in time for the first storms.

Then, when the house curled up to hibernate, accepting the world’s great and silent weight of snow, there would be nothing but time. The work would come to a rushing close and we would sit and play games and stare at each other most of the time until the light came.

I wished that by then I’d be spending all that time in his bed, no longer caught in this agony of dreaming. The furs would be warm against our bare legs, my breasts warm against his chest. In his arms, I would never be cold.

It was a winter dream, as sweet as the ice skates he’d promised me. I didn’t know if any of it would ever come to be, but I liked to imagine.

One day it was just a little too cold outside. I stood by the poles in the yard, hanging damp skeins of apricot thread. Even though they had cooled in the pot, steam came off them in languid clouds. My skirt lifted and whipped in a sudden wind. A thousand land wights exhaled ice, and it rose around my ankles like a stream.

I was lost in the wool.

The wind had knocked one of the poles over, and I got snagged and bundled up in damp yarn. It’s smell enclosed me, almost smothering, as sleepy and brown as the coming of autumn. I struggled to get free, to put the pole right, but the strands of yarn and lines of string were tangled in my hair and across my face.

“Some help?” The offer was almost lost in the rushing of wind. A man’s voice.

“Já!” I laughed, struggling to stand the pole up, and then I looked out from among the strands and saw it was Heirik himself.

He was there in a second, somehow extracting the pole and yarn. I pulled free and smiled in thanks.

He stared at me for a moment, open and awkward. “You have a space in your smile.”

As always, he seemed surprised he’d spoken to me. As if he didn’t know he was going to do it until just then, when the words left his lips.

I was suddenly conscious of my own mouth, my mind tumbling from there to the thoughts I’d been indulging in just before the wind came. Before he came. I pressed my lips closed, and I looked at his hands, so recently featured in my fantasies. His skin was rough, darker on half of his left hand, and his scratched and beaten bracers were tied with the usual strange knots, not like anyone else’s. I was seized with guilt.

“Nei,” he said. “Do not hide it.”

He was holding the pole upright, already putting it back into the earth, and so I didn’t catch whether he smiled, too.

He looked to the sky. “Evernight will begin soon.”

A particularly Viking phrase that didn’t translate to my own previous language,
becoming night
one elegant verb,
ever-night
another picturesque phrase that built on and within it. He was talking about the winter, when the sun would rise only to graze the horizon and then slide away again, leaving just an hour’s glow on either side of midnight.

Oh.
Right.

A thought so dumb came to me, I stood still, as embarrassed as if Heirik could see everything in my head. The naive and snow-trimmed skating party in my mind always took place in bright sunlight. The fantasy of my cherry dress was brilliant against shimmering drifts and shiny solid water frosted with white breath. A scene that could never be. The winter sun would be subdued, indirect, and no artificial lights would spark against this ice.

“Will we really skate?” I asked him. My voice was hopeful, and I hated how little I sounded. Like a petulant child, I had asked this more than once.

He sank to one knee to make sure the pole was solid in the ground. Quickly satisfied that it was strong, he rested an elbow on his knee and looked up at me. And though he was only kneeling to fix a clothesline, he looked just like a knight from one of the sims. He picked up his ax from beside him on the grass and planted it, blade down, before him.

It was eerie how his words echoed the image. “I swear, you will skate.” And then he laughed, and I laughed too. He stood and brushed himself off.

“We will shear soon or we’ll have no winter wool.” He raised his eyes to the highlands and soon became lost in thoughts, probably of animals and time and seasons. “First we hay,” he added, as if realizing I would be ignorant of the order of things. “We start in a half month, já?”

He told me as though he wanted to confer with me. But it was Hildur he needed to speak with. I had no sense of how to prepare, to set people and tasks in motion. He smiled at me, anyway, before turning to head toward the stable.

“Takk!” I called after him.
Thanks.
And he turned and walked backwards for a step or two, watching me as he left.

The sweet scent of fields spread everywhere around as Betta and I walked the mile or so to the nearest edge of the woods. We would collect lichens and mushrooms. My hand upturned, a basket swung against the softest part of my wrist. A skin of cool water gently bounced against my shoulder blades.

Betta cut into the silence with a force like she’d been holding something back.

“You should shield your eyes, Ginn.” She eyed me sideways. “Don’t let Svana or Hildur see more of your heart.”

An icy trickle suddenly ran down my spine.

“Not anyone but me,” she finished. “Please.”

My answer was sharp. “What’s wrong about wanting him?”

Truly, what was so wrong about desiring an unmarried, unpromised man, a strong man who was gorgeous and kind to me? The concept of wanting wasn’t foreign, I knew. There were so many words for desire in the old language they passed through in my mind as if on a breeze. Words that in the future had come to mean
craving
and
mind
, even
prey
. Savage words for desire, perfect for how I felt.

Betta pressed her lips together for a second, as though considering and discarding several things she might say.

“I can feel it’s dangerous,” she told me.

I swallowed a frustrated breath, anxious words.

She went on. “Because of my gift.”

She dropped this conversationally, as though having a gift was a mere nothing. She had a gift? A gift of perception?

It was a nonsense reason for telling me I should hide my attraction. Frustration drove me, boiled over into exasperation. “What does that mean?” I burst out. “Heirik is not dangerous.”

Betta stopped walking and stared openly at me.

“Já,” she said, even and serious, without any hint of superstition. Just fact. “He is a dangerous man.”

I opened my mouth to blurt something, anything defensive and possessive and mad, but she cut me off.

“—He takes his due easily, Ginn. And he gives elegant justice.”

Then she softened toward me and explained with a kind of sweet sadness. “You see him here in his house, where he is cold enough. You haven’t met the chieftain.” She used the formal word, yfirmaðr, liege lord and god of her known world.

Clouds moved away like slow animals, and in the sun our mood slowly lifted and changed, snappish words forgotten. We gossiped about the few other people we knew. We talked about Kit, pregnant again after losing one sister for Ranka and just birthing a boy in winter. I heard more of the story of Hildur, how she came to be a sort of servant turned housewife—a singular and bizarre solution for a strange family. We talked about the girls needing to be married soon and where they might go. Three of them were fourteen or fifteen. This was their year.

Betta seemed to be sidling up to the subject of herself, talking about marriage, but in the end she didn’t bring up her own situation. She was hopelessly old and probably passed by. Daughter of a second generation thrall, she was a free person. She would live a posh life in the chieftain’s house, dyeing cloth and caring for children, but without her own husband. Without love and affection.

I tried for lightness, for sarcasm. “And who could possibly deserve Svana?”

“No one,” Betta summarized, laughing a little bitterly. Then she changed her mind. “Nei. A man with power and a fine household should be hers. Plus a good body and lovely face. The svakalega.”
Gorgeous ones.

“Where?” I looked around in the trees, as though some different men other than Hár or Arn might be there to admire.

Betta laughed. “We see men at roundup, shearing, you know. We meet the boys from around these lands. Some others.”

The size of Hvítmörk grew in my mind every time I heard about such things. Heard that enough eligible young men would come to roundup that the girls could consider which ones they liked. Did a hundred people follow him? How many houses and huts sat on Heirik’s land, every farmer sharing the highlands and byways and Heirik’s generosity? In return for what? Fear, and a portion of their goods? Gods, my vision had become so happily narrow, my crush so precise and blinding. This new family spread out for miles all around me, but I saw only one man.

“Heirik has no reason to keep Svana. He doesn’t want her for himself. She’ll be a good trade.”

Betta’s bitterness shocked me. And her talk about Svana as a commodity. But more than that, it was hard to hear that Heirik could have chosen Svana if he’d wanted to. Still could, even now. The thought was ugly. Could I live here if one day he came to his senses, gave up superstition and took a wife? Every woman was afraid of him, but many would be tempted by the power and luxury of his house.

Já, he still could choose Svana. I spread a palm over my stomach, a sick feeling there. Even with no promise of his loving me, I didn’t want him to take anyone else.