Beautiful Wreck (78 page)

Then I simply touched his face, trailed my fingers along the black of his beard where it covered his jawline. He turned toward the touch and opened his eyes. Gods, he opened them, and they were as intense as the first time I’d seen them. I got lost in them now, again, as every time.

“Lofn came to me, Ginn.”

“Shhh, Heirik. We can talk later.”

Bjarn cut in forcefully. “This was an ax, Chief?”

“Já,” he whispered. “Cut my arm.” Já, I thought, it did. “The down stroke bit me.” He sucked in sharply as Bjarn inspected the gash.

Betta’s Da spoke quietly to me, as if Heirik weren’t there. “A very lucky miss, Lady. An ax will remove an arm, a leg even, with a single blow.” I had a vivid memory of Heirik swinging his own ax through the sunshine and bringing it down to cut the hand clean off Eiðr.

“I know,” I whispered, my fingers hesitant on Heirik’s pale face. He couldn’t look at me for very long. His eyelids kept closing, lashes fluttering erratically. It wasn’t like sometimes when he broke my gaze out of emotion or shyness. This was uncontrolled. He was morbidly unfocused.

“Chief,” Bjarn tried to rouse him. “I’m going to clean and seal your wounds.”

I turned to him in shock. “There is more than one?”

“Já,” he said as though I were dim. “He is not dying from a cut to his arm.” He showed me a ragged hole in Heirik’s side that was darker red, ugly and slick. A gaping hole in his body as big as my hand. I turned from it with a hiss, forcefully denied it. It looked mortal.

Bjarn didn’t seem to necessarily think so. He probed the edges with his fingers, and Heirik became even paler. He rose up from out of his stupor.

“This one was a spear, Chief?”

“Já,” he admitted. “I suppose so.”

“A bad fight,” said Bjarn, conversationally. I wondered if he’d ever seen Heirik in the heat of battle. It would have taken a truly soul-crushing fight to leave my husband like this. Every man who had faced him must be dead.

And Brosa? Had he made it home?

“They stuck him and then wrenched,” Bjarn said, instructively. “That is why it’s so big a rip, see?” I fought not to vomit. I didn’t flinch. I looked and learned.

“Hold him well,” Bjarn said, and he picked up big iron tweezers, a palm’s-length long. “While I look.”

I pressed against Heirik’s shoulders, pinning him to the wall. His scent was lovely spice, and I buried my nose in his hair and whispered, “Undra min.” I called him what he had called me, my most unexpected love. I could smell just him, through the soggy heaviness and iron of blood.

I turned my head toward Bjarn and Svana. Even as I rested the weight of my forehead on Heirik’s shoulder, I watched both of them. Bjarn bent his head to work, and dug into Heirik’s wound.

Heirik trembled but made no sound, no struggle. He took even breaths, breathing into my hair, my ear. “Wife,” he murmured, and I was pleased he knew I was here, knew exactly who I was. What I was to him.

Bjarn drew the tool out and dropped a small shard of something that thunked on the floor. I pulled away to assess Heirik’s face again, and it was white like a snowbank, with a sheen of sweat. Bjarn dug again, just to be sure, to be thorough.

“I won’t need to look for pieces in the arm,” he told me. “An ax bite won’t leave shards.”

He was ready to clean Heirik’s wounds. He turned a plain and sorry gaze on me, like a warning. This would be bad.

I took Heirik’s hand. “Don’t let go of me,” I told him, and I felt a slight pressure returned by his fingers, saw a small thread of a smile on his lips. That was good.

Bjarn looked at me sidelong. “Have you never sealed a wound, Lady?”

I shook my head no. “I can’t …” I almost said can’t remember, but then caught myself. I was done with those lies. “Nei,” I said. This was the sort of thing done in shiny hospitals, by better trained people than me.

He sized me up. “You’re too small,” he said. “I can get Hár.”

“Nei,” Heirik said with cold clarity. He was the chief for a single lucid second, brooking no complaints. It would be me. “Ginn will do.”

Bjarn took Heirik’s hand from mine and placed it on my thigh. “Hold her here, Chief.” He looked at me with grave doubt. “You will want your wrist for weaving.”

Heirik idly stroked the soft inside of my thigh, though he didn’t know what he did. Even through my thick dress, the heat of his thumb sent a rush of useless, misplaced arousal.

“Remember the cave?” I murmured into Heirik’s ear, taking his attention off what Bjarn was going to do. “I did this.” I moved his hand an inch up my leg. He smiled a bit, ready then, and held his other hand out to Bjarn. Bjarn placed a stick in it, an inch or more thick, and I wondered what it was for. Heirik put it between his teeth.

Oh. Já, he had done this before. I’d forgotten about the big scar on his leg, and the many smaller ones scattered on his arms and hands, just like his uncle. I’d never asked him, in all this time, where they’d come from. He turned to the wall.

Bjarn was quick and ruthless. He cleaned the wound on Heirik’s side first, with steaming water, and let it run out into a big bowl. Heirik made no sound, and he didn’t fight against the pressure I put on his shoulders. He clamped his teeth tight and squeezed my thigh just a little, a gentler grip than I’d expected, almost loving.

Then Bjarn bathed him with soap and everything changed. The lye burned like hellfire and Heirik groaned from behind the stick in his mouth, sudden and raw, arching his back. His hand closed hard on my thigh. I froze and stared.

“Still him, Woman,” Bjarn chastised me, and I applied myself again, trying to calm two-hundred-fifty pounds of bloody Viking.

Heirik spit the stick out with a growl and batted Bjarn away.

My husband wanted to say something to me. He looked up and mouthed the words without sound. “I am sorry.” Dread stole into me, quick and foul. He thought he was dying now. Right now.

“Nei.” I was forceful. “You look here Heirik. In my eyes.”

He seemed to swim through thick liquid in order to see me, but he obeyed my order. And then he smiled. A most rueful smile lit the corner of his mouth.

“Lofn came.” With his uninjured arm, he grabbed me. I looked at his hand and hardly knew what it was. I remembered Hár’s story about Lofn, the goddess in the glowing house that charmed Hundr Blacktooth. “A song in my mind,” he muttered. He was having trouble stringing thoughts together.

He closed his eyes. “I regretted I would not live to tell you.”

He’d meant to stay conscious just long enough to get home and tell me this, this thing I didn’t understand, and he was slipping away and hadn’t explained. But the little he said seemed to lift a terrible weight from him, as though his job was done. It scared me. He looked like having told me this much, he’d fulfilled his last task and was free to go. To seek that welcoming door in the dark, the incandescent, seductive hall where warriors drank, raucously calling him.

Instead, he swam up again to consciousness. He sucked in air and placed the stick back between his teeth so Bjarn could rinse his wound once with more hot water. The cleansing made him bleed again, and the bowl filled with a festive pink froth.

He shook his head, and I removed the stick for him. “That made me mad, já?” He continued, as though he hadn’t stopped talking about Lofn and regret. “Though my blood poured, I fought them all to come home to you.”

“Let’s finish, Chief.” Bjarn cut in, dryly.

He reached for a small iron knife that Svana had heated over a rush flame. I hadn’t noticed her doing this, hadn’t noticed him instructing her. The knife wasn’t glowing red, but it was hot enough that they used a cloth to handle it. Bjarn told the chief it would be now, and he pressed the iron to Heirik’s open flesh. Heirik’s eyes opened wide, and he jerked up off the bed twice, three times. A big wound, Bjarn said. There was nothing I could do in those moments, just press myself to Heirik’s body and let him feel my presence, if he could. Then it was done.

Heirik breathed raggedly against my throat, and my hair stuck to his face as I pulled back and let him go. Svana, when I glanced at her, was a wan blue, a complexion of skim milk and terror. But she’d done a helpful job, had cut a number of strips and small squares from his ruined shirt, and when she handed them over, I caught her eye. She was watching Heirik and me, and she was solemn, looked humbled by us. I imagined her little girl mind, watching how a man and woman love one another. I raised an eyebrow, unamused. She would soon find out what I’d done with her mother.

Bjarn covered one of the linen squares with honey and placed it face down on the fresh burn. He layered linen and dried peat moss over that. I wrapped Heirik’s waist with strips to hold the whole thing tight. I sat back and watched the muscles of his abdomen working as he breathed. Too fast, too hard, but he was breathing. It was wonderful.

We had to repeat everything, of course, with the gash in his arm—including the soap and hot iron. His eyes looked determined one second, and the next the eyes of a trapped dog, wild and unseeing, fingers crushing my leg so that I knew I would stumble when I stood.

It would be okay. Hár had gone through something like this with his finger, and he’d even done it himself, sticking his own hand into the fire. Hár had done it, and probably Brosa, too.

Brosa.

Even as I held Heirik and pressed him down with all my weight, part of me thought of his little brother and willed him to be alive. I wanted him to be alive for Heirik. I wanted him here for me, too. I could tell him how sorry I was, even though he had no idea how very far, and how long, I’d left him.

As if conjured by my thoughts, Brosa burst into the room.

Brosa pushed Bjarn away, gently but in a rush. He went down on his knees at Heirik’s bedside, much as he had knelt before him at the coast, in loyalty and love. He touched his forehead to Heirik’s hand.

“I thought you were dead.” He drew heavy breaths between words. “I brought your blood to my lips, on the field,” he said, and then his voice twisted with tears. “It tasted of a mortal wound.”

“It was Ageirr’s blood,” Heirik said.

Brosa turned and spit on the floor, and Svana flinched and pulled her skirts aside as though Ageirr’s life force was splattered there.

“I thought your body had been taken entire by the disir,” Brosa continued. “I wandered, grieving you. I didn’t want to come home.”

“Shhh, nei,” Heirik said, and he reached across with his healthy arm, at painful cost. He touched his little brother. He brushed his fingers through Brosa’s golden hair and laid his palm on his head. “You see I’m still here, já?”