Beautiful Wreck (46 page)

His hair made a shushing sound as I cut it, spilling from the comb and my little pair of shears to form black pools on the floor. Concentrating, I murmured, “I’ve never cut anyone’s hair.”

The muscles in his back flexed just for a second.

“It’s okay,” I assured him. “I’m not going to make you look like a sheep!”

He laughed, but then more seriously he said, “You just seem so sure you haven’t done this.”

Sure of my past. I’d let my guard down and forgotten to be vague. Not to lie, really, more like bluff, I told myself. But every time it hurt more, to love him and not let him know where I was from. He noticed the slips, the awkwardness sometimes. But right now he wasn’t really waiting for any kind of answer.

He sighed.

“Já well, no woman has ever cut my hair,” he said. “So you are the best.”

I cut a straight line, just fine.

Once his hair was a little shorter and a bit less tangled, I pulled it all into a thick ponytail. I held it in one hand and stroked it. I placed it over his shoulder, out of the way so I could press my palms to his shoulder blades, one pale, one tinged with deep red. My thumbs followed his upper spine and found the back of his neck. He made a small sound in his chest, speechless contentment.

I was happy. Dizzy with satisfaction and craving, both. And a wicked sense of pride. I’d made the chief sit and be petted.

My touch lulled him into a kind of abandon he needed so much. I could feel it happen. His breathing became slow, regular, and his head fell to one shoulder. He was starting to fall asleep. Exhausted from the storm, from the adrenalin rush of finding the sheep and the impossible job of bringing them home. And perhaps from desires denied and buried deep in the furs of the bed that sat here beside us. Did he lie here and think of me sometimes?

Unsure what to do, I just luxuriated in watching him sleep. The light sputtering from the flame made him look burnished and brown and gold.

I removed one hand so slowly, so carefully. He was motionless, slumbering like a stone. I picked up his gauntlets from the bed, retrieved a half-carved tiny boat from the floor, and placed them both on the table. And then I gently pressed his shoulder, whispered for him to wake up, just a little. He drowsily opened his eyes.

“Stay sleepy,” I coaxed. “Just move to your bed.” And like a little boy, he did.

I drew a wool blanket over him, then sat in his chair beside the bed and brushed my fingers along his cheekbone. I sang to him, an ancient lullaby, though he was already asleep.
Bye bye. Hushabye. Can you see the swans fly?
I made small circles against the taut muscles of his jaw, and I sang first in Old Norse, then in English.
Half asleep in bed I lie. Awake with half an eye.

The sound of the door opening made me freeze in place, and my eyes darted to find Ranka there. She gave a guilty gasp and shut the door tight, disappearing behind it.

I stood abruptly and looked around the room in hesitation, not sure what to do, hoping an answer would appear among the axes and knives, the shirts and dark hair that littered the floor. For the first time, I thought about the facts. I’d told off Hildur, the head of the household. Then I’d spent the last hour in the chief’s room, my hands in his hair, his clothes on the floor, a sensual mess.

Inside this room, nothing mattered but the two of us. But he was in his bed now, asleep where he belonged, and I would have to return alone to stares and retribution. I pictured myself shunned by every eye. Worse, I pictured myself in the bitter blizzard, thrown out of the house. I’d be dead before he woke.

There was no way around it. I would just go. I kissed my fingers, lay them briefly against his cheek, and went out through the weaving room to the main house.

Most of the family had gone to sleep. A few were awake around the heartstone, drinking and rehashing the story of the lost sheep, and likely committing to memory the inconceivable tale of Ginn calling Hildur a bitter cold bitch. A couple of them looked up when I entered, but quickly drew their eyes away. Even Betta did not rush to me. I slipped into my alcove wishing I were a spirit, swift and unseen.

Alone, I drew a blanket up and leaned into the wood-scented corner, where the heaviness of restrained passion and fatigue found me. I should have been sorry, perhaps, but I wasn’t. I should have been desperately scared for my place here. All I could think of was Heirik’s forehead against mine, his beard close enough to brush my cheek. With a smile on my lips, I let sleep draw me down and hold me close.

The sound of my name woke me.

“I saw Ginn.” It was Ranka, in her family’s sleeping place, next to mine. I struggled up from the bench where I’d sunk. “She was with the chief, in his room.”

I came alive, the hair standing up all along my body. I hoped she was speaking only to Kit, and that what I had done with Heirik would remain private. I tensed with listening.

“Child! Lower your voice.” It was her mother, thank goodness. And she was admonishing. “Have you lost your mind? What were you doing looking in there?”

“I heard the singing,” Ranka argued in a whisper, heeding the warning to lower her volume.

“Singing.” Kit inflected the word in that special way of mothers who were skeptical of their child’s wild stories.

“It was Ginn. She was brushing his hair like this.” There was a short pause. “And singing him strange words.”

Kit made a sound I couldn’t interpret without seeing her face. A combination of já, and huh, and right, next thing swine will fly. “You were dreaming, Ranka. You were in your blankets.”

“Nei!” she almost shouted, in the voice of a child who’d been disbelieved. Then she lowered her voice again. “I wasn’t.”

“Uh-huh,” Kit challenged. “And just what was the chief doing, then?”

“Sleeping.” Ranka sounded as wistful as I had felt in the moment. “Just sleeping.”

There was a quiet pause, then another undefined sound from Kit, as if to declare the conversation finished. Ranka didn’t say more, and I heard the rustling of blankets as she settled into her warm little den. I kept my own head down, eyes closed, and drew my cloak around me.

It was morning when I cut myself.

I sat by the hearth, girls and women all around me, a circle of us working close to the heat.

Hildur sat right beside me, and once or twice I turned to her and found her watching my sewing work. Perhaps I wasn’t applying myself enough. I didn’t care. I let the fabric lie in my lap and picked up my little shears. Flipping them over, I looked at them with new tenderness. I squeezed them once, twice, watching how the elegant little curve of metal sprung open and shut. Then I drew up the little whetstone that hung at my waist and rasped it against the blade.

I closed my mind to the individual words around me and let the voices melt. The overall rise and fall of murmurs tuned to the shinking sound of my whetstone, and then the wash of sound fell behind as my mind left the house. I roamed over snowless hills, green and bright as day, down a steep rockside into the pretty ravine. The sun hit the water and shattered the blue like glass, obscuring my bare feet, distorting them. The water was unusually slow, moving peacefully, not racing past my ankles with its shivering violence. It was serenely passing, and I drew arcs in the surface with my toe. I looked to Heirik, building his fort.

A barked reprimand split the air. Hildur’s voice, snapping at one of the girls. Her elbow shot out with her irritated words, and she bumped me. My shears skipped against the whetstone and buried themselves in the heel of my hand. I shrieked, then swallowed the sound as fast as I could.

A soft sickness spread in my throat when I looked and saw the little blade sticking out of my body. So wrong. Something turned inside out, in my gut, when I drew the shears from my flesh.

My instinct was to curl up around the blood and hide it. I didn’t want a fuss. No attention. Most everyone had seen, though, and Kit was immediately at my side, pressing a soft piece of linen to my hand. My teeth ground together, and my eyes shut against the wincing pain.

Betta came to my other side, took my forearm firmly from Kit, and held my palm up to scrutinize. She peeled the linen back.

“It is nothing,” I hissed, completely unconvincing. Blood ran down my arm, dark red against my pale skin. It had been a near miss, the tender film of skin over my wrist so near, veins showing greenish blue under the surface.

“It is something,” she declared, and pressed the bandage back to it, as if pressing a little gift into my palm. “I’ll get water.”

I held the cloth tight and looked at the shears in my lap. The ones that had cut Heirik’s hair and then, the very next morning, turned to bite me. I shook my head at the bewildering coincidence. Every time I got close to him, it seemed, I ended up hurt.

It was the beginning of another long winter stretch. When the chief learned of my injury, he shied away from me again. We didn’t even play games.

The frozen stones that rimmed the bath felt sharp on the nape of my neck. I closed my eyes and felt the wash of polar air and sting of spray that came up from the bath with the wind.

Betta was humming in a wandering way, not quite a song. The water swished and curled around my shoulders as she made circles with her bare feet. She was bundled in wool and fur, but had taken her boots off to soak. A torch burned next to us, where she’d lodged it between two stones.

“I need to get my hands on some thread,” she sighed. “I need a cauldron boiling outside, under the sun, so I can watch colors turn. I want to smell the lichens and flowers cooking.”

A long ago memory of tea came to me, of my kitchen and sleek glass cups steaming like this bathwater. I tried to conjure up the once-familiar flavors of mint and bergamot, herbs almost as precious in the future as they were here.

“Do you ever drink the dye water?” I asked her.

She laughed brightly. “My Da says to, for certain kinds of sickness, but many think it’s dimwitted. Not allowed by the gods, or at least not brosti.”
Smiled upon.
“Water over the bruised root can cure a griping stomach. A concentrate can keep a babe from coming.”

I raised an eyebrow. I hadn’t known that.

“Broth is nothing compared to the symbols my Da makes,” she added. “On the bones.”

I asked her what she meant. “He scratches runes into the bones of animals. They can heal mortal wounds.”

Written words were powerful here. I pictured Bjarn carefully carving them, thinking they would save a beloved person, draw someone back from death. I wished for a screen and pen so I could form some that would cure our sadness and clear this snow.

“Já, well, I crave the sun too,” I said, and stretched in the water. “I’d like to run in the grass with a dog at my heels. Ride Drifa fast into the valley.” I concluded with some dry irritation, “I’d like to shoot something.”

She laughed some more. “Já,” she agreed. “I would love to shoot something right now.”

She patted at the surface of the water with the bottoms of her feet, then plunged them in.

“Do you think everyone knows about us?”

Her voice was steady and calm, not worried. But I fretted every time the subject of her and Hár came up. I saw them look at each other across the heartstone, and I knew she was losing all sense of danger about her relationship with him. All sense of what she could lose if it were found out. Her chances to ever marry, her place—and her father’s place—in this family, her heart and honor and soul? And yet I knew how losing all those things, losing everything, seemed worth it.