Beautiful Wreck (52 page)

Instead, I was set to helping Avsi and Lotta polish cups. A hoard of lovely pewter cups sat in a basket by our feet, next to the hearth. We wiped until they shone, using pieces of worn linen and handfuls of ash.

The girls were so little, chubby in their smocks, each with a tiny purse at her belt and a few beads draped across her apron dress. Lotta was all golden and round. She paid serious attention to her task, pink tongue sticking out at the corner of her mouth as she worked.

I swirled a cloth inside a cup and watched her. Since the night Heirik and I shared in the cave, I’d prayed to all the gods and goddesses that I would have our child. Or, I wasn’t sure if prayer was the right word for it. More a wish in the gods’ direction, a kiss to my palm, sent into the night. But that possibility was past. Absently swiping at cups, I imagined it anyway. What it would be like to have a little girl Lotta’s age, but with midnight hair. A girl who looked exactly like her beautiful daddy.

The thralls tramped up the long hill on snowshoes and worked to ready our house. Men and women cleared the ground of its waist-high snow, all around the doors and walls and out to the stables. They dug fire pits and filled them with stones, and children scattered the ground with precious hay. Tents were raised, with thick red and white fabric and floors of even deeper dry grass.

In the house, I helped Ranka hang juniper boughs over the sleeping spaces, dark berries still clinging to the sticky wood. I tied the boughs and watched my left hand, healing but still angry red. I thanked the gods no infection had spread and made it dangerous to keep. If I were a thrall myself, what would happen then?

And why wasn’t I a thrall, for that matter? A slave come by cheap, found on the beach like a shell that would make a good spoon. I wondered if it was only my rich clothes—an accident, the result of some play-Viking’s clumsiness in a coffee shop—that led the chief to welcome me as an honored guest. Was it because of my cherry dress? Or was it because I called him Heirik instead of Herra, with a voice full of nascent longing. Was that why I hung lovely boughs and polished cups now with two adorable girls instead of hauling hay and digging pits in the frozen ground?

A day later, the first boys arrived. In the lung-searing cold, they came coughing and shivering at the door, and they had news. The fabled man named Egil—the rich one—and his children were making the trip. They were on their way, skiing three days, camping two nights, to make it to our house for Jul.

Gossip circled, swift and bright. Egil would be the guest of honor, an important man, almost as rich as the chief, whose great house sat further east along the coast of the island. The big meal, the official beginning of a long and raucous festival, would take place tonight if the gods helped his family along in time.

This meant a lot more people. Not just the man himself and his close family, but dozens who would follow in his tracks. Hildur paced the house to check on everything a hundred times, chasing chickens into corners over and over, tugging at tent fabric, testing the hay in the yard with a stick.

In a fit of anticipation, it was decided we should bathe and dress.

I sank into the pool and with a sense of blankness, I listened to women chatter around me—Svana’s, Thora’s, Betta’s voices all swirling with the water churned up by their arms and floating toes. I turned away from the water, rested my chin on my folded arms and watched Ranka mashing something dark and powdery in a small bowl. She saw me staring.

“Cinders, Lady,” she said. “For our eyes!”

She loved to teach me things, but her half-answers often made no sense. I’d given up on asking every one of my questions. I’d wait, and explanations would come some time, and so I forgot the bowl of ashes and floated with an absent mind. Something bitter just at the back of my throat, but I didn’t know what.

I washed myself slowly and stood in the freezing air a moment too long before I put on my red dress. I watched the fabric unfold over my gauzy shift and underdress, and I swished my hips to let it fall. I pressed the cherry and amber wool against my thighs. I’d felt like a princess in this dress when I went into the tank. But it wasn’t as beautiful as Signé’s gown, hers the color of a cold fall sky, a time when blue was still possible.

Slicing my thoughts open, Betta talked in a low and secret voice. “Woman, you know it would not be right to wear his mother’s clothes. Not now.” The rest went unspoken. Not now that it was over between us, that my right to that dress was gone.

“Wear this,” she said. “It will lighten your mood.”

She dipped the tip of her pinky in the dish of cinders and told me to look at the sky. I jumped when her fingernail stung the soft skin under my eye. She smudged the black ash. The stars wobbled in my wet vision. With her finger, she swiped away my tears so they would not show in front of all the women.

We helped each other with belts and jewelry, and Ranka did my hair. She liked to create braids and loops that hid my scar, but today I asked her to pull it back tight on top and just let the rest fall. I was in no mood for prettiness.

In all of time, there’d never been anyone so capable and determined as Viking travelers in winter.

In my old life, winter was a landscape of tunnels and lighted, covered walkways. It wasn’t hard, and was not at all special, to arrive somewhere. To the guests here, it would be an act of sheer will, their own and the gods’. Braving the wind-driven cold, camping some place isolated, maybe a cave in the woods, they would come on skið and snowshoes, unstoppable.

After the boys, who now sat choking down fish and warming themselves, came a group of men, ten maybe, traveling together and no doubt steered the last mile by our smoke.

I approached the front door when I heard Magnus talking to them. The mudroom was dark, and I saw him silhouetted against the snow-bright and moon, standing at his greatest height. He told them they could keep their small knives, but they had to leave their hatchets at the door.

His voice flowed without breaking, solid and deep. “No skull cleavers in the chieftain’s hall.” He stepped deliberately over the threshold and rested his hand on his own ax, which I noticed was allowed to hang by his side. “Drop them, or leave this house.”

The mess of grumbles thrilled me. All new voices! I closed my eyes to savor the sound, and in the darkness, I felt Heirik step up beside me. Eyes closed, I knew him, his weight, the space and air he took up, his scent. We stood together in the doorway, and I opened my eyes to gaze out at the guests, a bedraggled crew, snot dripping from red noses, ice in messy beards.

Every one of them had forgotten Magnus and was on bent knee, gaping up at me and the chief.

I turned to Heirik and saw him in his midnight dark clothes, commanding and beneficent. I imagined the picture of him and me together barring the threshold, our serious eyes of ice and fire, mine rimmed with black ash. Hair pulled tight, scar shining, still red from the inferno. Heirik wore his hair the exact same way as mine, his own scar similarly on show, priceless silver at his throat, clothes the color of death.

“We make quite a pair.” I whispered so the men could not hear me. “Welcome to Hvítmörk, já?”

Heirik laughed out loud. The rich sound I loved filled the air, louder than ever before.

The guests cowered. And for a moment I saw the chief’s eyes and bloodied face as they did, heard his laugh rumbling like savage weather. I saw him through their eyes, and he looked demonic. I wished for once that I hadn’t lightened his mood.

A dozen ax handles thumped against the wall.

Once the men had bowed to him and dropped their weapons, the chief was through with them. They were released into the party like sheared lambs. Heirik turned me away from the door and backed me up into the shadows as all the grumbling men passed into the house. He was so quiet, I almost couldn’t make out his words. “It would be an ill omen for a man to die in my fire.”

My laugh was like a mad bark. “An ill omen, indeed,” I said.

He came even closer, and I felt the whisper of his breath, deep with ale. I backed up against the cool wall. He was a little drunk, and it surprised me. He didn’t do this before toasts and blessings and the first dangerous and tedious hours of a festival were through. He didn’t ever, in fact. But this was one of those nights when his emotions ran high and confused, when adulation and duty and entitlement and fear mixed into a mess.

A drinking horn hung from his hand, half full. He was loose and very, very near.

“There is something wrong tonight.” He could sense my emptiness.

I breathed deep and felt the blood rush through me at his closeness. I didn’t want to talk about my unrequited wish, the lost idea of a little girl of our own. My need to take care of this home, to see to it that his generosity was great. My need for him. I wanted him to hold me and tell me that these things would happen one day. I nodded my head. Já, there was something wrong.

“I am sorry,” he said, swallowing more ale. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then his eyes settled on me. “This was our night.”

Oh.

The memory was quick and brutal. Him pressing me up against the wall outside the back door, talking about Jul. This was the night, tonight. He’d intended to seat me next to him at the head of the table, in front of all these people. Had intended to place his sword on my lap and make me his wife, make this my home. He drank tonight perhaps to forget grief, or at least to get through this party, when his vision of it had been so different.

I reached for his cup and took a mouthful of ale myself, swallowing tears.

Like a breath across my brow, his fingers brushed the place he’d always loved to touch. I gasped with pleasure and surprise, and I took his hand and pressed it to my scar until it hurt.

“I want you,” I told him, resting my face in his palm, so that he could feel the words as they formed. “I would do anything to kiss you right now.”

He dropped his forehead to my shoulder, and his breath caught on his answer. “Until later, Beautiful One,” he said. His tone was vague and unreadable, his hand gone from my face, head lifted from my shoulder before I knew it. I couldn’t tell if he meant he would come find me later, maybe to give me the kiss I craved, or whether he meant goodbye.

Just minutes later, I heard the news.

I’d walked out onto the big cleared space of the yard, with a woolen wrap pulled close around me, a fur trimmed hat on my head. A brief whip of wind came, and my dress blustered like a spray of blood around my ankles. The fur of my hat fluttered against my forehead and eyebrows. I stepped inside an empty tent.