Beautiful Wreck (45 page)

“Nei,” I called softly. “It’s me …”

I walked in, shut the door and put my back against it. A soft light illuminated a space so small I would scarcely have called it a bedroom, not in my other life. It was more like the size of the pantry, maybe ten or fifteen feet deep, though it stretched out indistinct and shadowed. Dim and deeply private, smelling of birch walls. Closing the door sealed it in an intimacy more complete than I’d expected. For the first time all day, I felt hot.

There was a real chair, its wooden sides curved like cupped hands. He sat in it now, hunched over with his elbows on his knees, hands hanging between his thighs. At his side, a small upturned box held a flickering lamp. At his feet, the smallest hearth sat—just four pieces of slate standing on end to form a box. Steam rose from a few hot rocks and struggled to escape through a window that was no more than a rectangle cut high up in the sod wall. It was partially closed with a leather shade, tied down against the howling wind and clogged with mounting snow.

A cold room, but even through my boots I could feel that the ground underfoot was warm. There was subterranean water.

The place was sprinkled with weapons, two axes leaning in a corner, a knife on the table and a smaller one that sat, forgotten, on the ground between his feet. The offhand presence and handling of danger, of violence. An honest to god sword hung on the wall over the bed.

Oh gods, a bed! The tiny room was dominated by it. Heaped with sheepskins and furs, it looked like a sumptuous nest. The bed had been built, I guessed, by his father’s father. It was long like the men of his family and it had a mattress! Longing flared up, not for Heirik this time but for a cushion under my bones, filled with downy feathers. I imagined what the soft bed and silken fur would feel like against bare skin. His leather gauntlets were tossed there. I’d like to feel those, too, touch them again. Perhaps bite his wrist playfully as he reached for my face.

“No one comes into this room,” he said, but he wasn’t angry. “My brother sometimes, or Hár.”

“I’ll go.” But I didn’t move to do so.

“Nei.” His answer was immediate. “Please,” he added, and I wasn’t sure whether it applied to me staying put, or even to me at all, or whether it was a general plea to any god or goddess that might pertain.

His hair was a wild mess, pieces plastered to his forehead and cheeks, and his eyelashes flashed with ice. Snow melted and ran down his throat. I thought maybe he couldn’t move. When I stepped toward him, he looked up as if to sit straighter, as if to reach for me, but he did not.

Then he told me gently, “I am fine alone.”

“Nei.” I said, with my new bravery, the thrill of telling off Hildur still fresh in my blood. “You are a bad mess. Where’s your comb?”

He seemed to be amused, but also impressed. Resigned to let me stay, to let me help.

“There.” He raised his chin toward the dark corner.

A worn, wooden chest stood there. Just a few feet wide, it seemed mysterious and almost excessive in its privacy. I thought of my measly treasures folded and wedged under my sheepskins, and I felt a pang of jealousy. He had his own things and a place to put them. These walls of his room, this chest in the corner, were luxuries, and I wished I had a place like this to hide and curl up inside myself. I almost felt wrong being here.

Almost.

The chest was nearly full with clothes and furs. His dark blue wool, and the icy dress—his mother’s—that I’d worn just weeks ago. A lifetime, it seemed. A time when we still thought we might be able to have each other. When we still thought we could kiss and touch and hold. I imagined him returning the dress to this trunk in a solitary moment, folding it gently and putting away all notions of loving me.

I moved some things around and within the nest of clothes I found a drinking glass, a small knife with a trailing vine motif engraved in its hilt, safely contained in a leather scabbard. I found his fine bone comb and a soft towel. And underneath the towel, I found a box.

It struck a match in my heart. It was so familiar.

No bigger than two of my hands across, the wooden box had two doors that closed and met with a dragon’s-head clasp in front, a small lock threaded through its teeth. In my mind, I saw the electronic images slip by as if on the surface of my eyes, ghosted contact images. Scans of the decayed wood, rusted hardware just like this. I pictured the images of the book that had lived inside the little case for centuries. Her farm notes. Her words leapt to my mind, bringing back shearing and fleece and blood.
Rinsing his hands, he is sweet to my eye.
Could this actually be it?

Nei, the people here weren’t right. There was no savage chieftain, just Heirik. No shape shifting wife. The box sat buried in this chest, not tucked in among the belongings of a remarkable woman. Even so, it looked exactly the same, and I struggled again to decide where I was on this island. Was I anywhere near the place where the farm diary had been found?

The wood was rough and fresh under my palm, not yet ravaged and transformed by a thousand years’ time. I pressed my hand to it, to try to absorb its truth. But it was just a box. It could contain anything. More knives, probably. Heirik liked knives. Heirik, whose room I was in, who sat behind me right now waiting for me to comb his hair. I let the box go and turned back to him.

He was standing in the middle of the room, lifting his damp linen shirt off over his head.

The comb hung in my half-open palm. My lips parted and I breathed a small sound of surprise.

I’d seen his body in the bath, but it was not at all the same. It looked different to me now, in a dimly-lit chamber, so small that we were breathing each other’s air. His height that seemed so reasonable to me outside—his kiss would just brush my forehead—was overwhelming in here. His body was sturdy, bred for farm work, but not fleshy. A body like none I’d seen in my time.

When he saw me, he mistook my expression. He dropped his shirts absently on the floor. His words were corrosive and yet soft. “Now you see me,” he said. “Now you can forget this.” He looked around at his room, as though “this”—my persistent belief in love?—might be there on the floor with his shirts. As though I could forget it.

His mark was shocking. Dark and ugly, it looked exactly like blood spilled by a divine hand. And he did scare me, after all. But I remembered holding him, too briefly. I’d felt his heart beat against my own chest, fully human. There was nothing about his fearsome mark that could scare me away. It was he who was afraid. And I would never run from his body.

“Do you want to see more?” He reached for his waistband. “Will that do it?”

Oh gods, I wanted to see more, but quickly I said, “Not like this!”

He sat, and he seemed fed up with himself. He folded his arms across his chest and looked down at them. I imagined he was shocked at what he’d done, at finding himself without several layers of wool between us.

“I heard you scold Hildur,” he said, and then he smiled a wicked, charming smile and shook his head. “Beiskaldi.” His chest shook with suppressed laughter. I was still shaking too, with the aftershock of adrenalin, with a creeping fear about facing her again. And with the shock of Heirik baring himself. His amusement melted my heart, and I felt good, then. And even more courageous.

I went to him and knelt at his feet, and the floor was eerily warm under my knees. I took him by the forearms, placed his elbows on his knees and made him sit with his face close to me that way. So close together, I could feel his breath on my forehead. I started to neaten his hair. I pushed the pieces back off his face, and he let me without a word. I worked on the leather tie on one of his braids. It was frozen and intricately bound. While I worked at it, I traced his jawline with my eyes, watched for any reaction, but he was withdrawn.

“Don’t misunderstand me, Heirik,” I told him, as I teased the knot with my fingers. “You are sweet to my eye.”

I was very close to kissing him. If I just moved an inch, just tilted my head. Instead I leaned in to rest my forehead against his and he met me with an answering pressure. “I want to see all of you. I want to touch and take.” I went on, now loosening his other braid. He didn’t move, just breathed ragged breaths. “But only when you want me to. Not when you are trying to scare me.”

“Já,” he said, concisely.

I wanted so much to kiss him, but I didn’t want to rush. I pictured this intimacy disappearing like a white tail in the woods, and so I hovered my hand over his knee, then very softly placed my palm there. I felt his bones and muscles under damp wool, unexpectedly hot. He sucked in air but didn’t pull away. In fact, he leaned in to me, his nose to my ear. He seemed to be catching my scent. As if he were truly bewildered, he asked into my hair, “What will I do with you?”

Ravish me, I thought, take me, love me. Maybe kiss me for a start. But with a curl of a smile on my face, I said “Let me cut your hair?”

He laughed then and sat back. He folded his arms again, but he wasn’t withdrawing, just considering from a distance.

“Some,” he said. He would let me.

It was all I could do to drag myself away from his knees, to stand and brush off my skirt. I walked around to the back of his chair to work on the dark thicket of his hair.

It was as dense and tangled as the birches in the inner forest, and I hardly knew how to begin. I tried to comb my fingers through. At first his hair all felt stiff with ice, but when I warmed it in my palms and ran my fingers through the braids to let them loose, it was dry and silky underneath.

With my thumbs, I smoothed the nape of his neck, under his hair, slipping one thumb under the leather knot that always sat there, and he took in a sharp breath. He’d probably never felt this before. I drew my fingers through his hair like two combs, and my hands were moon-like against the night woods.

I pressed against his scalp with my thumbs, and my fingers curled loosely around his throat. He tipped his head back with a low sound of pleasure, almost a growl. I pressed my hips into the back of his chair in response. I drew my thoughts back to the job.

Truthfully, almost all of his hair needed to be cut off. I briefly pictured his hair like Magnus’s, cut at his chin. He would be even more gorgeous. But he’d said “some,” and I knew he didn’t want to call attention to me grooming him, all eyes noticing the difference and knowing what I’d done. I had no skills to give him a good haircut anyway. Gods knew, I didn’t have any idea how to do it, and the most I could manage was, hopefully, a straight line.

I held a handful of his hair to my cheek first, and smelled his cinnamon scent. It was him—that scent—not his clothes. Now I knew.