Beautiful Wreck (42 page)

But the hawks wouldn’t find much. While the chief and I longed for each other, there were no revolting trysts, no electric lust allowed to flow between us and fill the shadowy spaces of our house with demons. He kept his promise, and I kept mine.

During the long days, I occupied myself however I could. Magnus tried to teach me to ski, and I bumbled around outside, sinking in the snow and lurching for the house.

Inside, I played with the little girls. Ranka and Avsi would comb and braid and pile up my hair, involving circlets, crowns of straw, white kerches borrowed from Dalla and Kit. Since my hair was so long and so straight, and I was so willing, I became their primary subject. I most liked when Ranka made two thin braids around my face and left them hanging free as she gathered all the rest of my hair in a low ponytail. A leather strip set around my forehead and tied in back made me feel becomingly Viking.

Hár’s daughters let the girls play with them, too, but most often let their long hair hang, a dark blond gift from their Da. Svana swirled her flaxen curls up in buns on either side of her face, with a few tendrils falling to perfectly frame her creamy cheeks.

Betta, plainest and most straightforward, still braided her hair tight every day. She watched me get my hair done sometimes, from across the room, and her big green eyes were lonesome and clear. I had a feeling I could get her to let her hair down.

Grinding winter boredom would abet me, and Ranka would be my excuse, but really I wanted to transform Betta. I wanted to reveal the flowing vision beneath her restraint. I wanted to see her glow like a painting of Freya, palms upturned, fingers combing sensually through her own long hair. I wanted to see Hár’s brain fall out. It was a project that might lift the boredom, slowly working on her to get her to let go. I felt like everyone I cared about needed so much coaxing, Heirik and Betta like little animals sniffing at my feet.

Dalla’s baby found its voice, and it began to practice, “Da da da da da da da.” Her husband smiled as though he’d won a contest, and I didn’t, couldn’t, break it to him that “da” is one of the earliest sounds any voice can make. Miraculous and meaningless.

I had to get out of here. Outside. Somewhere.

I found relief by taking a lot of baths. Betta went with me, and we’d soak under the tremendous sky.

I’d told her, of course, about most of what had passed between me and Heirik. About Ageirr taking me hostage, and Heirik saving me with the swift and gut-curdling throw of a spear. And later—the night when he’d spoken to me out under the stars—I’d gone to my sleeping alcove and burrowed into a nest of blankets, and she was there, and we whispered and I cried. I told her about Heirik’s awful promise to protect me by refusing to touch.

Even so, I always kept our kissing a secret. Those moments at the sea’s edge were ours alone, mine and Heirik’s, a private memory still alive on my lips. An intimate pressure still echoing on my wrists and arms and forehead.

I listened to Betta tell her stories, of learning to dye as a very little girl, a skill passed down from her mother. Of coming to Hvítmörk at age eight, full of grief and dreams.

We were out here now, under the press of a billion stars.

She dropped her dress onto the stones. Her underdress, too, and shift. The water was silver skittering over black, reflecting the moon and stars and Betta’s torch. I sank gratefully into its warmth and she stepped in and sank down beside me. The water made unbearably soft sounds as it moved. I lay back against the stones, deeply warm. Betta rolled over like an otter, on her back, then again to fold her arms on the edge, her chin on top of them.

“It’s already hard,” she said, her words muffled by the pressure of chin against arm against rock. “To find times to walk away from the hearth.” She was thinking of Hár. She moved a finger against the stones, tracing nothing. “I miss him.”

It had been only a couple weeks, and I wondered how long this winter would grow to seem. I pictured an endless polar landscape.

“In good weather, it was easy,” she said. “Everyone is out. Sometimes we even left the house together.” She laughed a bit bitterly. “We are so unimaginable, we’re invisible.”

Images came to me, no matter that I didn’t want them. They flew into my mind’s eye. In the space of a sigh I saw Betta and Hár in the woods in molten sunset light, him sitting against a tree, pulling her up to straddle him, his rough hands on her skirts and her ass, pulling her close. Her long fingers in his messy hair. In this vision, Betta was smiling.

Here next to me in the wintry bath, she was sullen. She sat up as though something stirred on a horizon we couldn’t even make out. She looked down at her hands, then, and ran a finger across her knuckles. “Sometimes I want people to see.”

I wanted to give her something, an assurance that someday they would marry and everyone would know about them. He’d let everyone see how he loved her. I wanted to tell her that one day she’d have his babies, and he would place his hand on her belly when anyone was looking, and for a moment I wished I was the one with the sight of things to come. But these dreams were certainly ones she had pictured herself, and they were as impossible as summer snow.

In my silence, I must have been radiating stray lust from my image of her and Hár. She told me, “It is not like you think, by the way.”

Exactly what I did think was still my mind’s own secret. Even with her gift, she couldn’t get at it exactly. But she could usually sense not only the wash of emotion in a room or in one mind and heart, but also its direction, like a tide. It was uncanny, a detection of the slightest rise in pulse or wave of hormones.

“Já? And what do I think?” I teased. My fingers rippled the water and light danced.

Betta settled like a kitten in a bed to tell me.

“We still just sit together and kiss,” she said with a smile. “He asks no more. He puts his arms around me, whispers to me.” It was so basic and dear. A very different image came, of them side by side in the grass watching the sun fall, his crude fingers brushing her slim ones, yellow with dye.

Over weeks of getting used to this staggering truth, that Hár and Betta did these things, I hadn’t asked her how it started. I’d been absorbed in my own twisted romance, spending tender time with my non-lover, or acting as accomplice for my friend and the old man. Now with the endlessness of a winter night stretching before us, I asked.

“My love didn’t grow like a flower,” she stated first, to get any notion of silly romance out of the way. “I’d seen him a thousand times, of course, since I was a girl. A big man, a grown up. By the gods, he made toys for me!” She shook her head, as if just now remembering this, probably recalling his younger hands giving her a boat or small arrow.

A memory struck me like a blade, sharp and quick, of the vision I’d had. A beaming blond man handing Betta a wooden doll. An eerie cold spread through my spine and hips and stomach even though the bath was hot.

“What?” she asked, accusingly.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m just imagining you and Hár so much younger.”

“He was the chief’s father by the time I moved here” she went on. “I watched him become strong and gray. I saw him every day of my life.” The rest was inexplicable. “Then one time I looked at him and I saw a man. And he was my man, and I was stricken with it.” I remembered my own heart-struck moment, when I knew that I loved Heirik.

“I looked at him so many times then,” she confessed. “Over a whole month at least. I’d see him doing the smallest thing, strapping his boots, tying his hair. Pieces of it fall out right away, you know? All around his face.”

I did know. Perhaps not about Hár, but I knew the rapid beat of the heart that could come from something so small and unexpected, a man’s hair escaping from its ties.

“My eyes would go soft,” she said. “I was constantly looking out from under my lashes, a stupid hen.”

“And so he noticed,” I finished for her. I was surprised. Hár seemed particularly unsuited to detect such things, but he had.

“The first few times he smiled,” she said. “Like someone’s Da, like he didn’t mind I was having a crush.” Hár’s expression typically hovered somewhere between snarling and bursting into uproarious laughter. His smiles, shared among men usually, were wicked. I tried to picture how those smiles looked just for her, gentler. A single raised eyebrow of disbelief. A nod or two. One night she was handing out bowls of food. “He was sitting back from the fire, alone. I handed him his bowl, and he hooked his finger around mine and whispered.” A tough charred whisper, delivered with a wink. “’Shield your eyes, Maid. You’ll have every hawk here looking down its beak.’”

Betta and I laughed.

At the time, she’d been mortified. She dropped something, knelt to pick it up and found herself at Hár’s knee. He looked down, an amused god, and his face softened for a second. He told her to meet him just before sunset, down at the woods. Then he put the steel back in his eyes and turned away to eat.

“I met him right where we go,” Betta told me. “Where we gathered lichens, when I first told you.” It was a mile’s walk from the house, and on the way to being alone with him, she had time to realize she was scared. It was the first time she would be anywhere with a man, let alone such an unfathomable and fearsome one. What would he do to her? Her heart raced the last third of the way. She wrapped her shawl tight and, thinking a hundred times that she would turn back, she stumbled through clods of dirt and long grass. And then she saw him.

Betta seemed to look inward as she told me, toward the past, toward her first sight of Hár waiting for her. His back was turned, eyes to the sky. “Freya painted it with amber streaks that night. She lit him in gold. A companion fit for her, not me.” I watched Betta become infused with the goddess now, as she sat next to me in the bath, and I could imagine her flushed, beautiful and bold, when she met Hár. She didn’t care what he would do with her, what he or anyone might think, she simply wanted him.

“He didn’t say anything. He touched my cheek, and his fingers were rough. I knew they would be.” She touched her own lips, remembering him. “I raised my hand to touch his face, too, but he caught it. He closed his fingers around my whole hand and he asked me, ‘What are you about, Woman?’”

Betta sounded just like him, and we laughed more. Of course, she hadn’t known what she was about. She was acting on instinct, a seventeen-year-old’s yearning, inexplicable and true. She’d never even spoken more than a few words to older men, outside her Da. Much of her knowledge about sex came from Hár’s own teenaged daughters. And what she was feeling seemed less about sex than some all-consuming need for body and spirit and everything that made the man himself. She wanted to possess it all and know what he was.

Hár told her to walk with him, and they talked, as much as either of them was capable, about mundane things. A broken ax, animals taking to the highlands, a luscious ochre dye sprung from lichens, the changing hours and colors of the sky. The evening sun was finest, he said, from a place overlooking the valley. He asked if she would ride with him another night. He would take her out on Byr.

“And you know about that, then,” she told me, meaning her first horseback ride with Hár. “We’ve gone many times now, já?” I didn’t know a Viking word for wistful, but her voice was the essence of it.

“He did finally let me touch his face,” she gave as an afterthought. It was all scratchy beard and ridges and ruts of scars, and Betta had leaned over him where he laid in the grass and she traced and luxuriated in every one. “His lips are the only soft spot. I like to place my fingers there.”