And oh gods, I shouldn’t watch him, but I did. I couldn’t go. I wanted to look forever. I felt a wave of love and knew it had been coming since the day we met. Since the moment I’d looked into his golden eyes. Could I fall in love this way, alone, quietly hiding in the dark? Could I fall in love with Heirik without a hint of permission? It was wrong to look on him in secret. Wrong to take in his body when it wasn’t offered. To devour and adore him without his knowing I was even here. But yes, oh yes, I could. And I fell and fell and fell.
I leaned against the tunnel wall, all thought and sense forgotten like the blanket at my feet. Peering around the corner of the window sill, I saw him slick his hair back, wet and long. He smoothed it, pulled it into a tail in his fist, and drew it over one shoulder.
Then he turned my way. And I ran.
I stood in the mudroom panting, my back pressed to the wall. I was barely composed, and had just picked up a bowl to look like I was doing something, when he ducked out of the tunnel, his hair tousled now in blackest waves that clung to his damp linen. I’d never seen his shirts left open at the collar. He wore a pendant, a crude flat silver T. Thor’s hammer. It looked homemade. He wore it tied tight with leather, and the metal rested in the hollow of his throat. Somehow this slight glimpse was more erotic than his whole nude body.
His brows drew together sharply when he saw me, just for a second. I felt lightheaded from adrenalin and the vision of his thighs and a sudden odd desire to lick the silver at his throat. I could tuck myself into him, put my forehead against his damp shoulder.
He said hello, and the sound of his voice made me sway. I reached a hand out as if to touch him and saw gray close around me, my vision narrowing.
Betta slapped at my cheek. I opened my eyes and she and Ranka loomed over me. The little girl’s braids fell, ropy, against my face. “Please wake up, Lady.”
We were on the floor of the mudroom. Betta helped me sit up against the wall and pulled a wool cloak off a hook to throw over me. Ranka had a cup in her hand, and she pushed sour whey at me.
Heirik, a steaming apparition, was gone.
“Pay attention, Woman,” Svana laughed at me. “You’ll stick your pretty fingers in the lye.” It was my turn to stir the pot of ash and melted seal fat. A lazy job, soap could’ve been made by one of us, or more likely by the thralls. Doing this together was a luxury, a break sitting in the sunny grass.
I stirred languidly with a stick, musing about the chief’s body, and experiencing a familiar tightness in my chest every time I recalled the wool blanket I’d left behind. He must’ve had to step right over it. Oh gods, replaying the scene in my mind didn’t ease the embarrassment. It was the opposite. When I thought of him returning from the bath, hot and wet and having surely seen the evidence, I felt my face flare.
The soap was a foul gluish mess, dotted with bits of wood ash, and I watched it intently as it did nothing, changed not at all. I pretended it was fascinating.
No one noticed my mooning, I thought. Svana sat in a puddle of gauzy, peach skirts, utterly occupied with herself. She languidly crushed dried angelica root and a few needles of precious rosemary. The scents bloomed on her fingertips and filled the air, clashing with the stink of the fat. She rubbed her slender wrists together, then pressed them to her temples and made tiny circles there—a small animal cleaning her face.
Betta was lying on her back in the grass, sucking honey off her fingers. She’d been dipping them in the tiny bowl that was meant to get mixed in to our soap. The hunks we bathed with would have a chaotic scent, I thought, ranging from the salt of the sea to honey and fresh-baked rye bread. It’s what Heirik’s hair would smell like, if I got close enough to know.
I heard my name.
“Ginn might be good for Eiðr,” Svana mused. “He is ugly, but smart.”
I sat up straight and eyed her with alarm.
Betta laughed. “Svana, do you think of anything but marrying boys? Ginn needs a man.” With her pinkie she glossed her lips with honey and looked sideways at me. “Like the chief.”
My stick got sucked into the sluggish whirlpool of the soap.
Was Betta testing a theory? Or could everyone tell? She gave me a dark look, and she held her sticky fingers up in front of her lips, facing out, and with a little push she shushed me.
“But … Woman …” Svana sputtered and blanched. “He would …” Her heart-shaped face turned from white to pink, and she blurted it out. “He would turn to Ginn!”
I pinched the tiniest bit of clean stick and eased it out of the sludge. He would turn to me. The phrase was familiar. I rifled my memory of poetic Viking phrases and in a second I had it. I blushed for what felt like the hundredth time this week, probably a bloody crimson. Little Svana was warning me that the chief would demand sex if I became his wife.
I heard his voice suddenly in my mind. Turn to me. He’d said it the day I was scared of the birds. He was so embarrassed at his accidental words, and now I realized why. Instead of saying “turn around” he’d told me to come make love. I tried to remember his voice exactly. I imagined how that phrase might sound in the muffled dark of his bed, when he meant it.
“Já, Little Girl,” Betta laughed, bright and plain. She teased Svana, who was just three years younger. “That is the idea.”
I tried for casual, uninterested mirth, and laughed a little along with Betta, but I sounded unconvincing. It didn’t matter. Svana was absorbed in the horror of sex with the chief. She couldn’t even see Betta’s glances, my flush of embarrassment. Even if she did notice, she wouldn’t be able to fathom the real reason why I was dreamy and slow as the sludge circling our bowl.
“Stop it.” I smacked Betta. “We shouldn’t talk about the chief that way.”
Right, yes. We shouldn’t. But I couldn’t help it, then. His wet body came to mind, and a fluttering of questions. How would it be with him? He was so singular, so unknown. What did he want from a woman? What did he like?
Oh. I tripped on a thought that was so obvious. I’d fantasized about his body entwined with mine, his mouth, his heat against me. I’d lain on my hard bench night after night, watching Betta’s slow breathing, and I’d dreamed of his kiss. But I hadn’t thought about the reality of sex for him. Namely, it didn’t exist. He didn’t know the unutterable softness of a lover’s lips, the pulse of life in a beloved wrist. He hadn’t known a woman’s curves and sweet spots and scents. Had never kissed.
Did he imagine it? I supposed he would, like anyone, think about sex. Then the logical and unspeakable idea came to mind, and I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry. Heirik must touch himself.
I lay down beside Betta and gave my breath up to the navy blue sky, my stick forgotten. Svana made a becoming little squeak as she fished it out, the soap touching her lovely fingertips. She took over stirring.
“He does not, by the way,” Betta broke into my thoughts.
I turned my head to look at her with horror. How could she possibly know my thoughts? Worse, how could she know about Heirik alone and needy? What he did and didn’t do? But it wasn’t what she meant.
“He does not ask a thrall to do it,” she continued. “Many of them would, at his word.”
I turned my face back to the sky and closed my eyes to absorb the waning heat. Betta’s words chilled me. I was so ignorant here, over and over again. I knew about this place and time as in a storybook or an arc on a screen. Far down the hill, a half dozen thralls spun and washed clothes all day so that we could have afternoons like this. In the weeks I’d been here, I’d come to think of them vaguely as servants—people who worked for the chief, who brought up wood and thread for dyeing. Really, Heirik owned them. Of course, he could feel a woman’s touch if he chose to.
I sat up and looked across the yard and the house sat, too, like an animal with haunches and outstretched paws.
It was a dozing wolf of a house. But in the steeply angled, dark orange light, there was something alert and wild just under the surface. With a start
, I noticed Heirik was beside it, crouched low to inspect the place where the walls changed from rock to grass. He sat up on his heels and lifted his head to me, as though he’d heard me calling, and his lupine eyes picked up the gold from the wildflowers on the turf.
A cloud passed over and Svana hugged herself.
I sat up and criss-crossed my legs. Betta stirred the soap now. “Who knows?” She smiled. “I think the chief has wolf’s eyes for Ginn.”
“Nei!” Svana gasped. And then a whisper, “Nei. He doesn’t see women that way.”
“Já, well, if that is so …” Betta didn’t bother to finish her thought, she so obviously didn’t believe it.
Svana didn’t answer. She sat breathlessly entranced, no doubt playing out in her mind the horror of a kiss from Heirik, his fearsome face so close, his breath on her. Almost subconsciously she whispered, “Ma says so.”
Betta raised an eyebrow at me.
When Svana spoke again, she sounded just like her mother admonishing me. “Where the wolf’s eyes are, the teeth are near.” It was almost familiar by now—the stab of anger I felt at Hildur when I heard such cruel pronouncements.
Betta must have seen me bunch up with animosity, because she snapped her teeth at me playfully like a dog and made us both laugh. Svana didn’t join us. Her eyes were running over the landscape, searching for something, her mother maybe? Some kind of assurance about the chief? That he would never marry, never have a child, never with her.
Her words stayed with me—Ma says so—and the more I repeated them to myself, the less I liked them.
Dirty, delicious thoughts of the chief were like dogs at my heels.
It had been almost a week since the day we made soap, the day I first thought about him alone in his longing and wondered if, or what, he did in the solitude of his room. Now the idea kept following me. At first, I forcibly pushed it out of my mind. It was wrong, disrespectful to such a dignified and private man. But the thought would creep up on me, so that sometimes I was consumed and let wicked scenes play out in my mind. Sometimes in the midst of these fantasies, I’d look up to see him, in the flesh, suddenly near me. Disoriented and mortified, I’d look away.
The season was almost upon us when none of it would matter. The fall would be quick, and everyone would be consumed with work.
In this time, all the seasons were warmer than in the future, but the earth tilted and turned just the same. When the light started to change, it would change rapidly, night consuming the light noticeably earlier every day. The girls said we would need to work quickly, bringing in and storing hay, bringing down the animals, shearing them for fall so they could grow their new coats in time for the first storms.
Then, when the house curled up to hibernate, accepting the world’s great and silent weight of snow, there would be nothing but time. The work would come to a rushing close and we would sit and play games and stare at each other most of the time until the light came.
I wished that by then I’d be spending all that time in his bed, no longer caught in this agony of dreaming. The furs would be warm against our bare legs, my breasts warm against his chest. In his arms, I would never be cold.
It was a winter dream, as sweet as the ice skates he’d promised me. I didn’t know if any of it would ever come to be, but I liked to imagine.
One day it was just a little too cold outside. I stood by the poles in the yard, hanging damp skeins of apricot thread. Even though they had cooled in the pot, steam came off them in languid clouds. My skirt lifted and whipped in a sudden wind. A thousand land wights exhaled ice, and it rose around my ankles like a stream.
I was lost in the wool.
The wind had knocked one of the poles over, and I got snagged and bundled up in damp yarn. It’s smell enclosed me, almost smothering, as sleepy and brown as the coming of autumn. I struggled to get free, to put the pole right, but the strands of yarn and lines of string were tangled in my hair and across my face.
“Some help?” The offer was almost lost in the rushing of wind. A man’s voice.
“Já!” I laughed, struggling to stand the pole up, and then I looked out from among the strands and saw it was Heirik himself.
He was there in a second, somehow extracting the pole and yarn. I pulled free and smiled in thanks.
He stared at me for a moment, open and awkward. “You have a space in your smile.”
As always, he seemed surprised he’d spoken to me. As if he didn’t know he was going to do it until just then, when the words left his lips.
I was suddenly conscious of my own mouth, my mind tumbling from there to the thoughts I’d been indulging in just before the wind came. Before he came. I pressed my lips closed, and I looked at his hands, so recently featured in my fantasies. His skin was rough, darker on half of his left hand, and his scratched and beaten bracers were tied with the usual strange knots, not like anyone else’s. I was seized with guilt.
“Nei,” he said. “Do not hide it.”
He was holding the pole upright, already putting it back into the earth, and so I didn’t catch whether he smiled, too.
He looked to the sky. “Evernight will begin soon.”
A particularly Viking phrase that didn’t translate to my own previous language, becoming night one elegant verb, ever-night another picturesque phrase that built on and within it. He was talking about the winter, when the sun would rise only to graze the horizon and then slide away again, leaving just an hour’s glow on either side of midnight.
Oh. Right.
A thought so dumb came to me, I stood still, as embarrassed as if Heirik could see everything in my head. The naive and snow-trimmed skating party in my mind always took place in bright sunlight. The fantasy of my cherry dress was brilliant against shimmering drifts and shiny solid water frosted with white breath. A scene that could never be. The winter sun would be subdued, indirect, and no artificial lights would spark against this ice.
“Will we really skate?” I asked him. My voice was hopeful, and I hated how little I sounded. Like a petulant child, I had asked this more than once.
He sank to one knee to make sure the pole was solid in the ground. Quickly satisfied that it was strong, he rested an elbow on his knee and looked up at me. And though he was only kneeling to fix a clothesline, he looked just like a knight from one of the sims. He picked up his ax from beside him on the grass and planted it, blade down, before him.
It was eerie how his words echoed the image. “I swear, you will skate.” And then he laughed, and I laughed too. He stood and brushed himself off.
“We will shear soon or we’ll have no winter wool.” He raised his eyes to the highlands and soon became lost in thoughts, probably of animals and time and seasons. “First we hay,” he added, as if realizing I would be ignorant of the order of things. “We start in a half month, já?”
He told me as though he wanted to confer with me. But it was Hildur he needed to speak with. I had no sense of how to prepare, to set people and tasks in motion. He smiled at me, anyway, before turning to head toward the stable.
“Takk!” I called after him. Thanks. And he turned and walked backwards for a step or two, watching me as he left.
The sweet scent of fields spread everywhere around as Betta and I walked the mile or so to the nearest edge of the woods. We would collect lichens and mushrooms. My hand upturned, a basket swung against the softest part of my wrist. A skin of cool water gently bounced against my shoulder blades.
Betta cut into the silence with a force like she’d been holding something back.
“You should shield your eyes, Ginn.” She eyed me sideways. “Don’t let Svana or Hildur see more of your heart.”
An icy trickle suddenly ran down my spine.
“Not anyone but me,” she finished. “Please.”
My answer was sharp. “What’s wrong about wanting him?”
Truly, what was so wrong about desiring an unmarried, unpromised man, a strong man who was gorgeous and kind to me? The conce
pt of wanting wasn’t foreign, I knew. There were so many words for desire in the old language they passed through in my mind as if on a breeze. Words that in the future had come to mean craving and mind, even prey. Savage words for desire, perfect for how I felt.
Betta pressed her lips together for a second, as though considering and discarding several things she might say.
“I can feel it’s dangerous,” she told me.
I swallowed a frustrated breath, anxious words.
She went on. “Because of my gift.”
She dropped this conversationally, as though having a gift was a mere nothing. She had a gift? A gift of perception?
It was a nonsense reason for telling me I should hide my attraction. Frustration drove me, boiled over into exasperation. “What does that mean?” I burst out. “Heirik is not dangerous.”
Betta stopped walking and stared openly at me.
“Já,” she said, even and serious, without any hint of superstition. Just fact. “He is a dangerous man.”
I opened my mouth to blurt something, anything defensive and possessive and mad, but she cut me off.
“—He takes his due easily, Ginn. And he gives elegant justice.”
Then she softened toward me and explained with a kind of sweet sadness. “You see him here in his house, where he is cold enough. You haven’t met the chieftain.” She used the formal word, yfirmaðr, liege lord and god of her known world.
Clouds moved away like slow animals, and in the sun our mood slowly lifted and changed, snappish words forgotten. We gossiped about the few other people we knew. We talked about Kit, pregnant again after losing one sister for Ranka and just birthing a boy in winter. I heard more of the story of Hildur, how she came to be a sort of servant turned housewife—a singular and bizarre solution for a strange family. We talked about the girls needing to be married soon and where they might go. Three of them were fourteen or fifteen. This was their year.
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