Beautiful Wreck (43 page)

She shook herself.

“Gods, Ginn, I can’t tell you anything more.” She sighed away her very bones. “I’ll slip into this water and never come up again.” She did slip under then, and she came up laughing and spitting like a little kid, and when her face was like that she was so pretty.

“Oh no. Look at you, Woman.” She floated up beside me and used her wet thumb to gently wipe under my eye. I hadn’t realized I was crying.

“I’m just happy for you,” I told her. I was, whenever I watched her so free and in love. I wanted her to be able to feel this way forever.

She tucked a few strands of my hair behind my ear, generally putting me together like a mother with a sad, messy little girl. “The chief doesn’t let anyone touch his face, I know.” She misunderstood the reason for my tears.

“Oh,” I told her. “I have.”

And then it was out, like a frozen puff of breath. The fact that I’d touched Heirik in such an intimate way. That we’d been something near to lovers.

“Mostly with my lips,” I said, with a small smile. Betta’s brows drew together. She thought I was joking, and she smacked me, splashing warm water. Then she glared, waiting for me to admit it wasn’t true. I realized there was still time for me to giggle and take it back, to lie and claim I was kidding. But I wouldn’t do that. What Heirik and I had shared was honorable and real, and I wouldn’t deny or demean it.

The fact was, the very few times I’d ever touched him were kisses, on his eyelids, temple, throat. I’d kissed his marked and unmarked skin alike, and neither had singed my tongue. I remembered tasting salt on his cheekbone, the first time. Tears, I thought, just realizing it now.

Betta’s eyes were so wide, she looked a lot like Ranka. “You kissed the chief’s face?”

“Já,” I sniffled. “I did.” She shook her head, awed. She sat back in the water, looking at me differently, making the kind of mental adjustments I’d had to make when I found out her secret love was Hár.

“The chief is happy,” she said incredulously. “But he struggles to stay away from you.” There was something wistful about her tone, and her words seemed to come from a mile away, out of a deep and forgotten place. “He can’t hold out forever.”

Betta brightened, and she took me in her arms. I felt her small breasts press into me, her nose against my ear. She was warm and sleek. “You will hold him again,” she promised. And I wished she had the sure sight of things to come, too.

Finally, Betta let me.

At night, after another sluggish and boring day, there was no reason left not to. She sat before me, facing away, on a bench before the fire. I laid out my tools, a magnificent bone comb, curved and carved, a bone needle and thin thread, strips of leather and a straw circlet Ranka had made. I had gotten my hands on some precious oil that didn’t stink of whale. It was steeped with herbs and used only for special occasions. Ranka attended me like I was a surgeon, grave and ready.

Betta sat taut, probably a little afraid. She didn’t think she was pretty, even had her moments of incredulous doubt about why Hár wanted her. She was gawky and not the most gorgeous, nei. But I tried to tell her what I saw from the outside, a powerful woman emerging completely and gracefully from childhood. She was capable of being free and sensual. Maybe the hair had to do with the family looking, witnesses to some bit of passion that might never be fulfilled or requited. I untied the leather thongs on her braids and separated the strands. I thought her scalp must be on fire every day, she pulled them so tight.

Her hair was long and brown and indecisive. Not exactly straight, not exactly wavy. But freedom was so rare, it tumbled forth like a stunning waterfall, coursing over the prominent bones of her cheeks and shoulders. I combed it over and over. Wasn’t there some traditional or ideal number of strokes?

When it was combed I coated my palms with the slightest sheen of oil and smoothed Betta’s hair down her back. I thought of Hár. How he’d done exactly this with his tough hands, looking out over the valley. Her sharp shoulder blades rose and fell with a giant sigh.

I gathered hair from around her face and made two thin braids, lighter and looser than any she ever wore. Then I shaped the hair around them into soft coils that relaxed, when I let them free of my finger, into ocean waves turning back from the shore. Using thread and needle, I sewed on the straw crown that sat low on her forehead. She turned to let me see.

She was a handmaiden of any fertility goddess. A creature of the woods and flowering underbrush. Her eyes and all the angles of her face seemed to soften in sympathy with her locks. I used my fingers and a bit more oil to shape the ends where they rested on her breasts.

There was a familiar stomping and gusting of wind in the mudroom, the particular sound of wooden snowshoes on dirt, and the sonorous voices of men. In a minute, Hár ducked low to enter the room.

I sometimes saw him as Betta did, a gorgeous man hiding a romantic soul behind his scratchy beard. Just now it was sparked with fresh snow, turning to water on his lips. I wondered if the scattering of scars on his face and hands were from fights, or simply forty years’ accumulation of the common accidents of farm life.

Hár stopped when he saw us, and he changed at the sight of Betta. He gave away nothing to the men who stood behind him, but from where I sat I saw instant heat and sex and love fill up his eyes. A fearsome blue flame. Anger, too. He seemed perplexed and mad at what she could do to him without so much as moving or speaking. Arn and Magnus reacted, too, smiling at us girls playing dress-up, and surprised in a friendly way at Betta’s prettiness. Magnus smiled broadly. “Betta,” he said. “You steal my breath.” Hár failed to completely stifle a growl.

The old man flipped his knife over in his hand, slipped it quietly inside his sleeve, and grumbled that he’d forgotten the blasted, short-witted blade back at the stable. He’d have to go out again. He disappeared back into the mudroom. A few minutes later, I made a moderately conspicuous request of Betta, that she go out and start cleaning up the back room. I’d be there to help in a bit.

Minutes stretched out, the comb hard in my hands, turning over and over in my lap. I was jealous. I imagined what was happening between them in the dark. Maybe sitting on the bench, Betta straddling him, his big hands pulling her close. Gods, what was wrong with me? More likely, they were just enjoying a moment of closeness and intimacy. He was probably touching her cheek so softly with the back of his hand, like a wisp of smoke from a sweet juniper fire.

A long time passed. I started to worry they would be caught talking closely or embracing in the lamplight.

I found them in the mudroom, oblivious to everything but one another. They didn’t even hear me, didn’t notice me at first.

Betta sat across his lap. His hand covered the back of her head, strands of hair caught in his fingers as though he’d dragged them through savagely, past reason and consciousness. His head was bent to her, so loving, his eyes closed, seeing the glory of the world beyond. Her hand was snagged in his hair, too, drawing it back from his face, shaggy and lit with silver in the small flickers of light.

“Are you trying to kill me,” he whispered between kisses. “Elskan mín?”

Oh.
My heart melted. To hear him call her
my beloved
, to speak of his feelings, and to revel in them, so freely. Betta laughed and with her free hand she traced the line where his beard met bare skin.

“Nei, Old Man,” she told him. “You must live long enough to love me. Ten thousand times.”

A free father would have every right to kill Hár where he sat. But Betta’s Da—no more than an exalted thrall, and meek, plainer than she—would never take such payment from the past chieftain, grandfather of his known world. Hár could take whatever he wanted, and no thrall would wreck it. And while I saw the truth—that Hár loved Betta with a tortured desperation—the reality was, he held her very life in his groping hands. I wished I had a charm to touch, wishing safety for Betta’s heart and her honor. I breathed deeply through my nostrils, fiercely protective of my friend, and Hár’s head snapped up. Betta gasped and twisted to see who was there.

Hár considered me from under his brows, annoyed and curious.

“Old Man,” I said, and my voice was not as light as I expected. “If you mean to boast your accomplishments to the whole house, keep at it.”

I tried to say it with affection, but I didn’t quite succeed. He growled at me, just a little, and then set Betta on her feet. He brushed off her skirt for her, such a gentle gesture. Betta reached a hand and grasped his shirts right over his heart, not gently at all. She held his linen in her tight fist, a quick taking before they would part. Before they would spend the next twenty hours, a hundred days, a million weeks, in an impossibly close room around an impossibly public fire.

The calm clarity of this winter was the talk of the house. It was almost warm, people said, and still, as if the wind slumbered. The snow that seemed so high to me, was a subject of great interest, remarked on as so minimal it was like none in known history.

And so tonight’s storm was a thing of giant, swirling terror.

A horde of beasts circled and seemed to provoke the house. Wind moaned, audible even through the thick sod walls. The roof was closed up tight against the pounding, swirling snow, so we huddled around hot stones. I held a warm one in my lap, while Heirik and I played a game of tafl.

A game of strategy, the only game we had. Betta had taught me to play, the first week of winter.

The squat wooden pieces were just a little rounded on the bottom and gathered to gentle points on top. They reminded me of pictures I’d seen of acorns, small enough to fit in the cup of my hand. One of us played a chief who sat hunched in the center of the board, flanked by his men, and one played an invading army trying to capture him.

Heirik was of course a natural, having lived through—nei, orchestrated—more complex strategies in real life than anything we could build on a little soapstone board.

Tonight, I played the invaders, watching the stone chief, waiting for him to accidentally leave some opening for me.

My head and shoulders ached, perhaps with the ridiculous fact of our roles and positions on the board. Or perhaps with the weight of my hair.

Ranka had created a little girl’s braided masterpiece on my head. She’d plaited three long braids down my back, then woven those three into one giant braid. She piled the whole thing up on the back of my head in a mass. By this time of night, spiky ends escaped everywhere, and bone hairpins bore into my scalp.

I envied Heirik his freedom. Two braids framed his face, but the rest of his hair fell loose. In fact, he was utterly unbound, a winter farmer, relaxed and drowsy with nothing to do. He lounged, stretched out on the bench, resting on his elbow and with one knee bent. No gauntlets for working outside, his sleeves loose at his wrists, even his boots were simply tied at his ankles with no bindings.

The contrast fascinated me—his ability to swiftly blunt his speech and close his features into an imperious mask, and yet his natural physical ease. Comfort and efficiency on any horse, with any tool, doing any kind of work. Simply standing, arms folded, he seemed to have sprung from the grass itself, and moved over it like a native animal. The deft turning away, the hiding of his physical scar, was an extension of this easy control. As natural as breathing.

He seemed designed by the gods to torment me.

Now the bench, the game, his clothes were all burnished with lamplight in the living room. I watched his hair absorb bits of firelight and then let them go in flame-like blue.

“You play like a lame fox,” he said, moving another of his men, uncovering an unexpected escape route.

“Hah!” I snorted. “Now you are …”

I wanted to say
talking trash
. The sentiment was pure 21st century boxing, but it came out in Norse. “Bragging with a short blade.”

He threw his head back and laughed, and it was a rare and gorgeous sound that no doubt shocked every ear in the house.

“Such a poet,” he said, and with a charming smile he flicked one of my game pieces off the board and into my lap. I glared and replaced my piece, and he returned to studying the map of the board. He absently tucked a braid behind his ear, a little boy for a second. Unaware of how I watched him in such minute detail.