Beautiful Wreck (39 page)

The grass lashed all over the house. Heim, I thought, já, and trygg. I struggled for the English words, thinking they were important.
Home. Safe.

I was handed from one man to another. I searched their faces, but they were indistinct, so many. “Heirik?” I tried to call, and it came out weak. I heard a woman’s gasp, Hildur’s voice. “Child, the chief is right here!” It was a warning, not an answer to my question. Maybe his name? I had used his name? I heard him speak, then, and the words didn’t matter because his voice calmed me, even and strong. I clung to that voice, and it followed me.

There was smoke and less light, and the familiar feeling of my bench. Someone lifted my head and put blankets there. Some more were dragged on top of me. The wool welcomed me into sleepy oblivion. I heard a man’s voice—it was Betta’s Da—saying “Child, wake up,” but I didn’t.

I dreamed that I’d been injured and Heirik was caring for me. The chief himself, sitting to tend me. My eyes were closed, but I knew it was him because of his scent, like cinnamon and fur. It was mixed with the metallic smell of blood and the scent of juniper infusing a cool cloth on my forehead. I felt a brush of something silky on my face. I found it was his hair on my cheek. It fell like a curtain around me as he bent to speak.

It was a vivid dream. I’d never seen him in my sleeping place, in this space where no color lit his irises. Never seen his eyes so dark, almost brown. He looked worried. I smiled to let him know I was alright, but it felt wobbly, like I’d had too much ale, and I laughed.

I expected one of his sweet smiles to follow, but it didn’t come. He sat straight up and asked for someone to find Betta’s Da. I missed Heirik’s closeness. I didn’t want this part of the dream to end. I didn’t want to dream about Bjarn instead. I started to feel slumber coming, fast, like a train.

“Stay,” Heirik commanded me. He brought the back of his hand gently to my face and brushed across my cheek. The contact burned like fire, instant and fierce. A good burning, so unbearably good. “Stay.” It was a whisper this time, a plea. I turned my head toward his hand and parted my lips to kiss his knuckles, and his bones were strong and hard against my mouth. He was speaking my sweet name, Litla, in a voice dry like bark. The curtains rustled and Bjarn appeared.

“Oh,” Betta’s father said, an awed exhalation. He might have seen a god or goddess in the flesh, his voice was so incredulous, so full of wonder. He drew away, but Heirik stopped him with an order. The dream dissipated and my lover was the chief again.

“Care for Ginn,” he said. “And speak to no one.” With swift grace, he was gone.

SNOW & STARS

Winter

The next day snow came, fast and deep, and the world moved inside.

In the morning, it was all we talked about, in tones that echoed differently in the snowbound house. It was amazingly fast, everyone said, how in one night it had piled up outside the doors, up past our knees. Nothing compared to what might come. Stories of past winters were murmured like charms against the elements, tales of houses buried, animals gone. The sudden and complete isolation was shocking. It made me panic, and thoughts of Ageirr came again.

Nei. I steeled myself to be brave and live with the memories of the fight. The way Heirik would. And so I sewed together rips and hems with a spinning head, and followed gingerly after little Lotta. The snow was as tall as her, and she confirmed it by opening the front door over and over. We’d forget about her for a while, and then icy fingers would creep up under our dresses, and I would make my way to the mudroom to drag her back.

The snow muffled everything. It wasn’t just my head. I had a concussion I thought, but there was something else hushed about the house, the silent bulk of snow making the voices and gentle echoes different. Besides Lotta’s delight, the rest of the children responded with a confused quiet of their own, broken by small cries here and there. It was the beginning of a long winter.

The pantry was always cool, but today, with the new snow outside, the cold stole the smells of the most pungent cheese and sharp fish, leaving behind a clean wholeness to the air. I could relax here, with the door closed. All day, I’d cycled through intense, mixed up visions. The joy and pleasure of Heirik and me together, strong, seeking hands, smiling into a kiss, a hand severed, bone and blood and cries of aggression and panic, Drifa’s wild nostrils and scared eyes. Ageirr’s grief-stricken hold on me was the clearest of all. And the spear. Even now, I felt it whisper as it passed. So vivid, once I thought my hair actually feathered with the memory.

Here in the pantry, I could blank my mind.

Betta helped me, by opening the door and then returning the keys. No one knew I was in here. Leaning heavily against the wall, I let my eyes soften and my thoughts turn to a flat and open plain, a big blue sky. I let my gaze wander the shelves, and saw the precious box of herbs peeking out from the back of a high shelf. I’d seen Hildur put it away, and now I stretched on my toes and pushed danger aside, along with baskets and containers of lesser foods and sewing supplies.

A wash of fragrance filled the room when I opened the little box. I picked out one tiny spear of rosemary—“ocean’s dew”—just a bit bigger than a grain of rice, and placed it on my tongue.

The door opened, and I shoved the box back deep on the shelf.

The silly guilt, and frustration at having so little time alone, both vanished in a second. It was Heirik ducking low under the door frame. He shut the door behind him without taking his eyes off me. He made that shushing motion everyone here used, palm facing me, fingers pushing sound away. He whispered.

“Are you alright?” His voice sounded simpler here, absorbed by the close, earthen walls, but not flat. Still depthless.

“My head hurts,” I said quietly, around the bit of rosemary. I added a light laugh to try for bravery, or nonchalance, but it sounded more like a whimper, without any reverb to buoy it. Sudden dizziness sloshed in my head and I bent forward, resting my hands on my knees.

He covered the distance between us in one stride and caught me, and I fell into him without a word. His arms came up around me, awkward, unaccustomed, and it was too much—the spear, the pressure and pain in my head, the fact of Heirik’s years of isolation echoed in his too-tight grasp. I cried.

It lasted a long moment, my silent crying, and he held me without a sound. Then I felt the vibrations of words in his chest even before I heard his voice.

“Many times, I have wanted to care for you,” he said. “But in small ways. Not like this.”

I smiled against his chest, warmed by the thought that his desire matched mine so exactly. That he wanted to care for me in daily moments. That his fingertips fit so well into the curve of my spine. With my nose buried in his smoky shirt and his beard tickling my ear, I’d come home.

His hands came to my waist, and he lifted me onto the high bench. He stood between my knees. Swirls of apron and dress between us, no height separated us now. I looked right at him and lay my palm on his cheek. He sucked in air, unused to tenderness.

“Ginn …” My name sounded twisted and wrong, and I didn’t like the sadness in his eyes. I brushed my fingers into his hair, and they snagged there in black tangles. He quickly kissed me, hard. He still had no idea how. It was reckless and new, and I let myself dissolve into it.

Just like yesterday, the force of possession, hands on cheeks, fingers raking skin, his surprised murmur, “Sjordogg,” lost against my lips.
Sea-dew.
A taste of rosemary. I slipped my fingers under Thor’s hammer. They caught in the leather at his throat, pulling him closer, and then Heirik stopped.

He leaned his forehead heavily into my shoulder, and let his breathing settle, and then he stayed there. It lasted a little too long, felt a little too much like resignation.

“I am going away,” he said, and he lifted his head.

“Nei!” I blurted it out, too loud. He would be gone from me? Right now, when this was so new and delicious. Suspicion and fear crept in. Was he going for Ageirr? In a breath, I thought of them fighting, of more blood and bones. A brother’s hand for a brother’s horse. What in exchange for me?

“For two or three days only, Litla.”

Out of all the many warning cries and questions in my head, I blurted out a dumb one. “How?”

“How?” He echoed my question, as if he hadn’t heard me right.

I rested my head on his shoulder now, and mumbled into his shirts. “The snow, it’s as high as Lotta.” So naive. What did I think? That he wouldn’t know how to deal with a couple feet of snow? He’d spend the whole winter in his room?

“Já, well, Lotta is not so high,” he pointed out. He pulled away from me so I would lift my eyes to his. He surely saw worry, wondering.

“Vakr er stor hestur,” he said with a smile. It was like a line from a children’s story.
Vakr is a big horse.
I laughed, a birdlike laugh this time, and I bent to muffle it in his shirts.

“Is Ageirr dead?” I asked into linen.

“Nei,” he said, with a sigh in his voice, full of relief or regret, I couldn’t tell.

When Heirik ducked out, he pulled the door shut behind him, but I could hear Hildur say “Herra!” Her shocked tone traveled like an arrow, right through the heavy wood. Somehow she both submitted to him and chided him at once. “If there is anything you need from the stores, tell me.”

“Walk with me,” he told her, in a tone that certainly had her clutching at beads. I heard them move away.

I pressed my lips together to seal our kiss before I went back out into the house to see the likes of her. Love was not Hildur’s to dole out. And real respect, not the kind born of superstition, was something she would never give.