Beautiful Wreck (74 page)

I ran my fingers over a finely honed hatchet. I thought he might like this place, actually. He was so curious, he would be open. Confused by the people of this time, já, but not entirely. He knew about hiding emotion so deep it ceased to exist.

“Come, see this,” Morgan said. She cleared the worktable with the back of her hand and set down a ring.

Plainer and simpler than the original, but still finely detailed. She’d changed the scrolling filigree to just a few strokes embossed in the silver—the firework forms of snowblooms. So subtly wrought, pure emotion came from just a few contours and lines. The dragon heads had become stylized, suggestions of wolves. The mouths searched in savage anger, and yet somehow I felt they teetered on the edge of a snarling, open-mouthed kiss.

The ring was gloriously big and strong. I’d explored Heirik’s hand with mine, and I thought about the size of his ring finger. My heart was laid open, and I was back there on the beach, my fingers on his laces, under his sleeve, his fingers in my mouth.

Morgan had made this for me to give to Heirik. I stood silently and deeply stunned. She would craft something so beautiful for me? I thought of Jeff, too. Jeff would break into the sealed lab to try to send me. I’d spent most of my life in this cold and inhospitable future. Here at the last minute, I was loved?

It wouldn’t make me stay. Nei, I was made for a different world. This time I wouldn’t fall into it. I would dive.

The ring was easy in my palm, with an inner hum.

“You look … pretty,” Jeff said over the sound system, from behind the glass partition that separated us, his voice volleying and landing in the corners of the lab.

His skin flickered with blue and white lines reflected from the screens he watched. He was reading double, data in his palm and in his eyes, and it made his focus strange, his mien like a lost and starving ghost.

He looked up and smiled a lopsided, cute smile.

I lifted my right hand to him, palm out, and waved my fingers.

It was sweet of him to lie, but I knew I didn’t. I’d looked in the mirror one last time. I was the angel of death, in a dress that swept the ground like night. A black fur rose bearlike and formidable around my shoulders and the back of my neck. A tendril of white scar marred my cheek, my pale face and neck wreathed with images of wrecks. The split tail that swept my orbital bone, a great body, hidden, diving down the nape of my neck. Grim determination focused my eyes, which really did look like ice. My mouth looked like Heirik’s, resolute. I would be terrifying to anyone but him.

I would have another, plainer dress when I had settled things. A happy dress. But this was the one I needed to travel. I’d sewn Heirik’s ring inside my sleeve, the stitches tight and protective, made with my needle from home. The leather purse at my waist held three small satsuma oranges, and my needle case rattled with kale seeds. The only things from this time that I wanted to share.

On a chain around my left wrist, I carried a little metal cage, small enough to fit in two hands. It swung, hidden inside my draping, midnight sleeve. A real, tiny rabbit bumped around inside. I’d gotten it from a fanatic realist, the last thing I needed before I could go. I felt its little nose poke through the bars and sniff at my fingertips.

Jeff’s smile was gone, his eyes back on his sets of numbers, or whatever he looked at. I didn’t know what variables such a man considered. Not wind and weather and walls.

While he readied these unknowable factors, I knelt in the lab, ready to welcome the sensation of a pummeling wash, a river, the way the tank always felt. I waited for it, and I said goodbye to many things. To glass windows, to the brilliant splash of blue-green filtered sunlight in my apartment, the humming that passed for silence. I said goodbye forever to coffee and strawberries, to afternoon naps on a cushioned couch, to the brays and croaks of city crows. All the things I felt I had to say goodbye to, even though I would not miss them. They were already absurd. Receding as though some part of me was already a hundred years away, a thousand, almost there.

I reached into my sleeve and set the tiny cage on the floor.

The rabbit fit into my hand, vibrating and silky, and when it sniffed at my palm it tickled. I exhaled on its fur and the little hairs splayed out and caught the lab light. I held the cold of Swimmer in my hand, and I appealed to several gods and goddesses, one by one. To Freyr—the first god I had seen come alive in Heirik’s flesh. And to Saga, who drank from the water of time, who could see the past and the future in its currents. She could send me upstream, I was sure, and so I beseeched her. Let me get there. I would do the rest, whatever needed to be done. Just deliver me. And I appealed to Lofn, who removed all obstacles for lovers. Please, I begged her as I watched the rabbit’s blood seep across the white lab floor.

I immersed my hands.

A house sprang up around me. Mean and plain compared to mine, the heartstone cold at my knees. I brought two soaked fingers to my lips. Let him have waited for me.

SWIMMER

Early Summer

I opened my eyes to the tenth century sea. I was here. The tank had taken me back.

I knelt at the water’s edge, swaying, entranced by the ruffly white edges of waves. The sky was eggshell gray, just becoming light. I struggled to stay upright but my head reeled and echoed with the metal screeching and the calls of real birds, swarming overhead.

My stomach clenched. Was it the right time? The right place?

Splashing came from close by. Someone was here with me, coming toward me through the water. Heirik! It was just like my anesthesia-laced dream. He was here. He had been longing for me, waiting by the water. With great resolve, I lifted the weight of my head to turn to him.

Asmund and Mord waded toward me.

They stopped dead, their mouths falling open. Mine did, too.

Last time through, I’d been barely, intermittently conscious. Right now, even with all my preparation and grim resolve, I was slipping from all thought and sense. My head wanted to thud down on the sand.

In all the plans I’d made, the ones where I braved the disorientation, the frigid sea, the mile to the fishing camp, I was alone. In my mind, I gathered myself up and I walked, graceful and resolved, a hundred pounds of midnight dress dragging a snail’s path in the wet sand. My wake filled up slowly behind me with dark seawater. I would get a horse at the camp, a white one, fast and strong, and I would ride and ride.

Of all those plans and dreams, not one included this. I never thought about returning in the very same moment I left.

We looked at each other from a safe distance. Asmund and Mord had been chasing me for a hundred and one days. Or—I stopped at the sudden disorientation—just one. One full and dangerous day at the Thing.

They’d escaped our booth, no doubt untied by Svana, and followed me all night, putting their lives at risk to capture me. Now, just a house-length away from their goal, they stood stunned. They didn’t come any closer. The last fingers of waves came and wrapped around their ankles.

Oh.

In a flash, I saw myself as they did. I had been gone for months. I’d painted my body, healed my hand, learned to fight in my cold room. I’d spent lonely hours walking the halls of the glacier. To Mord and Asmund, I had just changed in a single breath. My cheerful dress had turned to death in the ocean’s foam. My ghastly scars had transformed into ink. The tail of a beautiful wreck erupted on my face, dark blue fins blooming suddenly on my cheek, encircling my angry eye.

Asmund seemed to make the decision first, that he would carry out his job no matter.

He started toward me. Mord followed a moment later, taking on Asmund’s bravery. They were afraid of me, but they couldn’t stop. They wouldn’t.

I staggered to my feet to fight.

I could still feel the raw ripping in my brain, hear the echoes of the metal shearing with the force of two ships grinding together. Wet from the knees down, my dress was a morbid tangle. My legs caught up in it, and I stumbled and went down. I fell on my cheek and salt water stung my sinuses. I watched wet boots come toward me. They made sucking depressions in the sand. One of the men gripped my shoulder like iron. I felt a rope around my wrists, and I blacked out.

I woke on a moving horse. Unlike my first evening ride in this land, no tender Viking held me up, no flying Byr took me home. This animal was slow and tired, and it flung its head frequently, trying to nip at my legs. Ropes cut into my wrists, and Swimmer was gone. I saw Asmund drop it into the pocket of a leather bag.

He walked several feet away, leading my horse by a rope, careful not to touch me. He had tied my hands in front so I could grip the horse’s dirty mane. Mord rode on another swaybacked animal. We didn’t talk all day.

My thighs, out of practice, became miserably sore. As the hours went by, I secretly worked the rope around my wrists, though it sawed the skin right off. When I got tired, I had to concentrate on staying upright, tangling my fingers in thick horse hair. Finally, I laid down over the animal’s back, my cheek laid against her scratchy hair that smelled of neglect, of carelessness. I whispered to her that she was a good girl.

At this unnatural angle, I watched the ground go by, lichen by lichen. Small shots of adrenalin pulsed through me every time I thought of Hildur’s wrinkled face, Svana’s sharp teeth. For half the day I was stone bored. The other half my heart dripped with rage.

I couldn’t help review it all again and again. I had watched Svana. She trembled when she touched the chief. She had become fascinated, but she didn’t really want him.