Beautiful Wreck

by Larissa Brown

  Children played at fighting with adorable shields and axes, and the girls put imaginary babies to their breasts and then to bed in soft furs. Still Heirik didn’t come home.

  On the third day, I switched to binding socks, and immersed myself in memories of kisses, my eyes going soft, entranced. I mused about why he’d gone away, wishing and hoping that it wasn’t for Ageirr. That it was something else, anything, that would not lead him into danger and bloodshed. I imagined what it would be like when he came back. I wanted to rush to him and greet and hold him, but I knew I would not.

  When he did come home, I heard him first, talking with his uncle in the back of the house. My heart sped up, but I made myself appear unfazed. He would come to me, and I could wait until then.

  But he didn’t. He never came to see me, not even after he’d been home for what felt like a thousand hours. Not even after the evening meal, when the house was settling into night and there was no more chance for him to casually walk into the main room and say hello.

  My throat tight and full of questions, I went to straighten up the back mudroom.

  Wooden snowshoes stood against the wall, and though the men and kids had taken care to hang up everything they wore outside, most of it was weighted with dripping snow and had slumped and fallen. Cloaks and blankets and boots gathered on the benches and stone floor like knots of birds around crumbs. The ones still on the hooks hung lifeless as though brought home by a hunter.

  The room was scented pleasantly with mud and snowmelt. The cloaks themselves smelled of wet wool, a sheepy smell, but processed by carding and spinning and felting, not like the spiky reek of the animal itself. I folded and stacked them, satisfying myself with mindless hand work, trying to trick myself into believing I wasn’t watching his door. Nei, I didn’t care if he was in there. I didn’t long to knock.

  I’d always liked to smooth blankets and hang them over the back of my couch, one on top of another until there were more than enough for any dark and frigid day—as if my apartment could ever approach a cold like this. A bone-blasting, deep cold I could never have imagined, much less believed I could live with.

  I heard the crunch of footsteps, and in a breathless moment Heirik was filling up the room, stamping his snowshoes and boots, and taking off furs and wool. I took a sharp breath, always stunned by him. He turned, and for an unguarded second, he saw me. He said my name, in that way that turned his voice and eyes to honey. My name was the most subtle and lovely thing he ever said.

  “You were outside,” I said dumbly.

  He sat on the bench to undo the leather laces of his snowshoes. “Já, everyone settled.” He pulled off his hat, and his hair fell loose with no braids or ties. Just him. It was more stirring than if he’d taken off his clothes, that untamed hair was so naked. He saw me looking and ducked his head.

  “Saying goodnight to the farm, my mother called it,” he huffed as he pulled off the big, unwieldy snowshoes. “We would walk all around the outside of the house and stables, counting animals and people. And then go to bed and directly to sleep, I suppose was the idea, já?” His half smile was luscious.

  I smiled too, at the thought of little Heirik, this fierce and commanding man a four year old child. But I couldn’t conjure a steady image. Without a photo it was hard to pin down. Hard to really understand how this towering person with rough beard and serious eyebrows used to be a little boy with tousled black hair, saying goodnight to the sheep and grass and horsies. How could I ask him, what did you look like? It struck me that he didn’t know what he himself looked like now, let alone then. There were no mirrors here. There were various surfaces of water, reflecting indistinct and riffled images. Mostly everyone depended on others to know how they looked. Men depended on women to trim their beards, cut and comb their hair, react with longing and flirtation, or not. In Heirik’s case, most often with fear or revulsion. No wonder he thought he was a monster. He couldn’t see his own divine face.

  He sat with his elbows resting on his knees, his capable hands hanging between his thighs. It was too much to look at it. I turned to study the cloaks on the wall, stroking them aimlessly. I drew my shoulders forward ever so slightly, offering my back to the steady, hot pressure of his gaze.

  “Do you remember the names of the stars?”

  I thought of the five I could see in my original time, and the press of the multitude I could see now. I had a feeling he didn’t mean NGC 3576. Flustered, questioning whether I should pretend to know or not, I turned to him and nothing mattered. There he was, and I knew him well. He was unsettled.

  He stood. “Come look.” As always, confident his word would be followed.

  I looked down at my dress and glanced back at the house where my own cloak and blankets lay neatly folded and stacked in my alcove.

  “Not through the house.” He told me to wait where I stood, and he ducked low into the door to his room. He brought out an armful of silvery fur, and unfolded it for me. Oh gods, it was a breathtaking coat. Made of blue-fox and wool, thick and heavy, but small, a woman’s coat. Despite its bulk, it was almost fitted through the waist, and I tied it tight with its leather sash. Straight out of a fairy tale, it had a pointed hood rimmed with fur. Its giant bell sleeves were chased with fur, too, the whole thing falling down past my waist. The coat of a princess.

  “My mother’s,” he explained.

  Oh. Heirik was loaning me another beloved heirloom, something that had belonged to the only other woman who loved him. I turned from side to side to show him.

  “Put on these blankets, too.” His voice was hoarse. He liked me in the coat. “As many as you can.”

  It was the sleepy time of night when I let my hair hang freely, like his, the long white-blond strands fell all about my shoulders. I felt like he and I were two horses, covering our manes with fur-trimmed warmth. Flaxen eyes watched me, and I couldn’t tell if it was fire or tension I saw there. He was taking me outside, alone. There weren’t that many reasons why he might. I burned with the possibility.

  He took a couple more blankets under one arm, and we pushed out into the knife-like air. My head fell back and I watched the steam of my breath rise to the stars. My head spun and breath stopped in my throat, and I put a hand out to steady myself on Heirik. He closed his eyes, just for a moment.

  “Walk in my footprints,” he offered. They were big enough to easily contain mine.

  Even without a moon, starlight glinted off two or more feet of snow. A blue skim-milk glow, enough to see Heirik ahead of me, a dark warm giant. It was a short distance to the stables and through the ring of sod wall that surrounded the building. As we tromped there, he told me, “My brother is not the only one who can follow the stars, já? Someone here has to know what time it is.” I followed his footsteps, holding my skirts and stepping up high over the snow to land down in the next crater and the next one.

  The animal stalls were open to the outside, like little caves in a snowy rock face. He led me to one of the openings. The stink overwhelmed my lungs, then mellowed into a constant and familiar smell. A faint echo of sunshine in fleece. Heirik built up a little snow bank just outside the sheep stall and lined it with blankets, so we could sit with our feet inside, but still see the stars. He sat and rested himself against the snow, his feet extended into the warm stable.

  When he looked up at me in welcome, my heart skipped. I sat beside him to share the little snow bank. I leaned back like he did, into the frosty cradle, our bodies near but not yet touching. Why not touching? Up close to him, the sheep aroma was replaced by his leather and the cinnamon of fur. Or perhaps that was the natural scent of his skin. I wanted to press my lips to his throat and breathe in, to memorize what he himself smelled like, without fire or tools or clothes.

  He settled in, an arm behind his head, as though this little snow bank was a mess of down pillows in a vast wintry bed. “The snow will warm us soon.”

  It was clear at once that his room in the house was not his real private space. This wor
ld was his place. Not a bed made of polished wood, but of snow or grass or field, with a ceiling of sky. He could stretch out here, the full length of him.

  Knee-high boots wrapped tight in leather laces hugged the shape and contours of his calves. I stretched my legs out beside him, crossing my ankle-length boots. Leather touching, bodies meeting in this one small, hot place. I almost forgot to look at the stars.

  When I did, they pressed in on me as they had before. The immensity made me feel tiny and pinned to the earth, snowbound underneath a million far-off fires, each bigger than all our world. To Heirik it was likely a dome, lit with sparks and flares from a god’s firestriker. I liked that. It did look that way.

  “Look at the brightest only. Three in a line.” He drew the line in the sky, a child’s lesson. I wanted to take his fingers in mine.

  It was a shape in the stars, and an arc came to mind, about a hunter drawn with imaginary lines. It was barely perceptible to me, among the crush of fainter stars within and around it. If I hadn’t already known it was there, I would have struggled to find it in the sprinkling of that god’s sparks and flying embers.

  “Frigg’s distaff,” he told me. “Beside it, her spindle.”

  I liked the hunter with his bow drawn tight, but a woman spinning was potent and lovely. I watched through Heirik’s eyes, imagining the great goddess generating the clouds that sometimes floated on the breeze or chased each other through nasty storms. Not always, though. Did she rest her spindle on clear nights like tonight?

  We watched the slow changes of the sky. Each star turned watery if I stared at it for long. After the initial bite of cold had passed, I’d begun to feel the warmth Heirik had talked about—our snow bank gathering and giving back our body heat. The warmth of sheep at our feet. Use every part of the animal, I thought, even its breath.

  In the long quiet, Heirik shifted and turned toward me, resting his calf against mine. It was a gentle turning, a tentative suggestion through layers of leather, but it burned through me so thoroughly, it might as well have been a fiery tumble, the crush of hips and tongue. I shifted my own calves ever so slightly in response. The whole vastness of the sky gave way, and I could think of nothing else but the small point where we touched.

  I tried to drift into the world of clouds and giant distaffs, but I felt his eyes acutely, watching me watch the sky. I glanced down at our bodies, side by side, such hunger between us. When would he kiss me?

  I rubbed my leg along his, gradually increasing pressure, contact. I reached under his furs and found his hip, followed the slope to his waist, so warm and hidden. Spoke a breathless word, against his chest. “More.” Knives and belt were in my way, and I slipped my fingers under.

  Heirik made a sound of longing under his breath. He murmured something I couldn’t understand, spoke a choked word into my hair. He was touching my shoulder. But he wasn’t embracing me. He wasn’t pressing his mouth to mine like he had at the coast and in the pantry. I wanted to get my hand around enough of his waist to really hold him, to bind him, but I was too small. He went rigid with restraint.

  “Ginn.” It was apologetic.

  The cold rushed in. Something was wrong. Miserable snow was inside everywhere, between us, in our clothes.

  I felt the pressure of his chin through the fur on my forehead. My hand still rested on his waist, fingers trapped under his belt, frozen. In the brittle silence, I extracted them, and curled my hand up inside my coat instead. I pulled away to see his face, and his dark lashes swept the soft skin under his eyes.

  He gripped the snow between us, crunched it in his fist. “I want to take you, crush you.” His words started a brush fire, his voice as violent as his hands had been the first time we touched. I held my breath and waited for the rest. The wrong part. There was something wrong. “I can’t.”

  When he opened his eyes again, they were piercing like ice. I could hardly make out their color in the night.

  “I’m marked by the gods. This blood—”

  He was worried about his mark? But it was meaningless to me. He must see that.

  “Heirik—“ I tried to stop him, to tell him. Better than meaningless, it was part of him and his beauty.

  “—Nei.” With a word, he commanded me to listen. “Many close to me have died. My parents, my brother’s wife. His son.”

  I opened my mouth, but he cut me off again.

  “The day we rode to the sea, I watched you on your horse, thought I could someday hold you. You kissed me.” His words were choked with disbelief. “Minutes later, you were at life’s end. In Ageirr’s grip.” His words dripped pain and rage.

  “What Ageirr does is his own fault, Heirik, not yours.”

  He wasn’t listening. “—After … I came to you. I brushed your face.” His fist loosened, eyes misted, his mind gone back to that moment, with me in the sleeping alcove. “Your lips opened and searched for my hand like a small bird.” Whole parts of his speech went missing. “Desire for your mouth, any way you would give it.” I pressed my forehead to his chin, and he pressed a kiss there, despite himself.

  Composed again, he pulled away. “Ginn,” he said with an air of formality. “I promise you.” Though we were lying in the snow, he looked at me with such intent, such submission and resolution, it was as if he knelt before me with Slitasongr to swear on. “I will not invite danger again.”

  What did he mean, that he wouldn’t invite it? I saw it in my mind, danger like a mist coming in under the mudroom door, or a giant black bird crashing into the house, fanning the hearth-flame with its wings. How did you ask danger to come to your home, to the woman in your arms?

  Oh.

  Salty, freezing sea water seemed to trickle into my gut. Oh, nei. He wasn’t holding me, because he thought he was dangerous. We were dangerous.

  I was alive, though. Here I was. “Look,” I whispered, “I am fine.” I exhaled gently on the back of his hand where it rested between us. He groaned and turned away, lay his head back, and his throat was exposed to me. The thrust of his chin, his parted lips, tortured me.

  “Heirik, I am not afraid.”

  He shook his head. He watched the stars, but was seeing something beyond them, or deep inside.

  “I am,” he finally said. “I will not.”

  The force of his curse was powerful. Powerful enough by far to overwhelm the fragile thing growing between us.

  I struggled with tears, trying not to make a sound, but he must have felt me shaking, where we still touched, his leg resting against mine, his hand on my hip despite his vow. I didn’t dare move.

  Moments later, he spoke again. “You have a family somewhere.”

  Another cold stone dropped into my gut.

  “A husband,” he told me with dead determination. “You are so beautiful. Someone is searching for you.”

  “Nei.” I wanted to tell him, I have you. Always you. “Nei.”

  “I will help you find him.”

  Terror was quick in my throat and gut. I grasped onto him without thinking. And I begged.

  I begged Heirik not to look for anyone. Not to make me look. If he made me go, if I had to leave Hvítmörk, oh gods, I couldn’t wrap myself around him enough, make him know that he had to keep me. He was huge with furs and cloaks. My arms were insufficient. His hand came up behind me and pulled me close and shushed me. He opened up the fur around him to take me inside, and he rocked me like a child, as much as he could in the snow. He held me, and even as I struggled with hitching breath and terrible fear, I sank gratefully into his arms. I belonged right here. Couldn’t he see that?

  He deliberately pulled us apart. “It is hard, Litla.” He disentangled our arms. “The hardest thing I will ever do. To be so close, and stay away from you.”

  I knew it in my bones and skin. Já, I knew exactly what that was like. One hand clutched at him, wishing him back.

  “Would it be okay?” My voice was wobbly in the endlessness of snow and stars, my fingers like talons in his clothes. “If I
wanted to stay?”

  He looked right into my eyes. “I want you to.” His voice sounded thick. And he seemed surprised at what he’d revealed, as if the truth had snuck out into the air between us.

  Nothing made sense. He wouldn’t touch me, but he couldn’t let me go. Even as he admitted his desire, he took it away. His body against mine would bring violence into my life, disfigurement, loss and death. Blood would spill on our union, and a murder of crows would follow us when we rose from our bed. He wanted me, and would never do this to me.

  As long as we wanted one another, I would stay. Though the gods themselves tried to keep us apart, I would not leave his side. I unclenched my hand and let his clothes go.

  “I will not leave here.”

  He rested his head in the snow and stretched out, his gaze once more on the sky.

  “Já,” he said in the faintest voice. He looked at the stars, not at me. “Good.”

  I wanted to nestle into his chest and press my body against the length of his. I could lay my head near Thor’s hammer and feel his pulse.

  That moment wouldn’t happen, though. I felt him shifting, as if we’d get up and go back soon. And all the polar air and snow I’d been denying came rushing in and my teeth started to chatter. I trembled and then began to shiver more forcefully. So cold without him, though he was inches away.

  “Inside.” He said it like a command, but softly, with a lover’s voice. It broke my heart.

  Another man would have given me his hand and helped me to stand. Heirik turned away and surveyed the grayish valley, taking in the snow-bright farm. When I stood, my limbs were heavy and stiff.

  He turned to retrace his deep footsteps, and I lifted my skirts high to follow.

  He’d just made a vow to protect me. And I made a vow of my own, right then, to the gods and the night and his big form ahead of me. As long as I could be near him every day, I would slowly soften his heart and ease his mind. I would coax him like a wary animal. And one day he would have me. I would be his.