Beautiful Wreck

by Larissa Brown

  “Uh-huh,” Kit challenged. “And just what was the chief doing, then?”

  “Sleeping.” Ranka sounded as wistful as I had felt in the moment. “Just sleeping.”

  There was a quiet pause, then another undefined sound from Kit, as if to declare the conversation finished. Ranka didn’t say more, and I heard the rustling of blankets as she settled into her warm little den. I kept my own head down, eyes closed, and drew my cloak around me.

  It was morning when I cut myself.

  I sat by the hearth, girls and women all around me, a circle of us working close to the heat.

  Hildur sat right beside me, and once or twice I turned to her and found her watching my sewing work. Perhaps I wasn’t applying myself enough. I didn’t care. I let the fabric lie in my lap and picked up my little shears. Flipping them over, I looked at them with new tenderness. I squeezed them once, twice, watching how the elegant little curve of metal sprung open and shut. Then I drew up the little whetstone that hung at my waist and rasped it against the blade.

  I closed my mind to the individual words around me and let the voices melt. The overall rise and fall of murmurs tuned to the shinking sound of my whetstone, and then the wash of sound fell behind as my mind left the house. I roamed over snowless hills, green and bright as day, down a steep rockside into the pretty ravine. The sun hit the water and shattered the blue like glass, obscuring my bare feet, distorting them. The water was unusually slow, moving peacefully, not racing past my ankles with its shivering violence. It was serenely passing, and I drew arcs in the surface with my toe. I looked to Heirik, building his fort.

  A barked reprimand split the air. Hildur’s voice, snapping at one of the girls. Her elbow shot out with her irritated words, and she bumped me. My shears skipped against the whetstone and buried themselves in the heel of my hand. I shrieked, then swallowed the sound as fast as I could.

  A soft sickness spread in my throat when I looked and saw the little blade sticking out of my body. So wrong. Something turned inside out, in my gut, when I drew the shears from my flesh.

  My instinct was to curl up around the blood and hide it. I didn’t want a fuss. No attention. Most everyone had seen, though, and Kit was immediately at my side, pressing a soft piece of linen to my hand. My teeth ground together, and my eyes shut against the wincing pain.

  Betta came to my other side, took my forearm firmly from Kit, and held my palm up to scrutinize. She peeled the linen back.

  “It is nothing,” I hissed, completely unconvincing. Blood ran down my arm, dark red against my pale skin. It had been a near miss, the tender film of skin over my wrist so near, veins showing greenish blue under the surface.

  “It is something,” she declared, and pressed the bandage back to it, as if pressing a little gift into my palm. “I’ll get water.”

  I held the cloth tight and looked at the shears in my lap. The ones that had cut Heirik’s hair and then, the very next morning, turned to bite me. I shook my head at the bewildering coincidence. Every time I got close to him, it seemed, I ended up hurt.

  It was the beginning of another long winter stretch. When the chief learned of my injury, he shied away from me again. We didn’t even play games.

  The frozen stones that rimmed the bath felt sharp on the nape of my neck. I closed my eyes and felt the wash of polar air and sting of spray that came up from the bath with the wind.

  Betta was humming in a wandering way, not quite a song. The water swished and curled around my shoulders as she made circles with her bare feet. She was bundled in wool and fur, but had taken her boots off to soak. A torch burned next to us, where she’d lodged it between two stones.

  “I need to get my hands on some thread,” she sighed. “I need a cauldron boiling outside, under the sun, so I can watch colors turn. I want to smell the lichens and flowers cooking.”

  A long ago memory of tea came to me, of my kitchen and sleek glass cups steaming like this bathwater. I tried to conjure up the once-familiar flavors of mint and bergamot, herbs almost as precious in the future as they were here.

  “Do you ever drink the dye water?” I asked her.

  She laughed brightly. “My Da says to, for certain kinds of sickness, but many think it’s dimwitted. Not allowed by the gods, or at least not brosti.” Smiled upon. “Water over the bruised root can cure a griping stomach. A concentrate can keep a babe from coming.”

  I raised an eyebrow. I hadn’t known that.

  “Broth is nothing compared to the symbols my Da makes,” she added. “On the bones.”

  I asked her what she meant. “He scratches runes into the bones of animals. They can heal mortal wounds.”

  Written words were powerful here. I pictured Bjarn carefully carving them, thinking they would save a beloved person, draw someone back from death. I wished for a screen and pen so I could form some that would cure our sadness and clear this snow.

  “Já, well, I crave the sun too,” I said, and stretched in the water. “I’d like to run in the grass with a dog at my heels. Ride Drifa fast into the valley.” I concluded with some dry irritation, “I’d like to shoot something.”

  She laughed some more. “Já,” she agreed. “I would love to shoot something right now.”

  She patted at the surface of the water with the bottoms of her feet, then plunged them in.

  “Do you think everyone knows about us?”

  Her voice was steady and calm, not worried. But I fretted every time the subject of her and Hár came up. I saw them look at each other across the heartstone, and I knew she was losing all sense of danger about her relationship with him. All sense of what she could lose if it were found out. Her chances to ever marry, her place—and her father’s place—in this family, her heart and honor and soul? And yet I knew how losing all those things, losing everything, seemed worth it.

  “I don’t think so, nei,” I told her, and my voice was warm and thick in the night. “I think that Heirik and I draw their eyes away from anything else.”

  “Já, you’re right.” Little waves lapped at my throat when Betta stirred the water. “You two are confusing, Woman.”

  “We are?” I laughed. Nei doubt, I thought. I was confused myself.

  “So serious, each of you alone,” Betta mused, “and so light together. If I didn’t see it every day I would not believe the chief could turn so.”

  I let my toes drift up to break the surface.

  She continued, a smile, and a hint of disbelief in her voice. “I like him this way.”

  “Me too.” I had to agree.

  We sat for just a moment more, and then I teased her and myself alike. “You think I’m too serious?”

  “Grave,” she said immediately. “Grave as the chief.” And though we both laughed, I knew it was true, that the gravity—my loneliness and wistfulness, his quiet resolution, sense of duty—those were what people knew of us. The lightness we’d begun to share in the warmth of the winter house was an inconceivable surprise.

  In a second, she was back on the one topic that drove her very breath and owned her mind.

  “Hár says I will want to marry someday, to a man my age. I think it’s because I’m not important enough for him.” She was matter of fact, as always, but her voice wavered. “Gods, why did I fall in love with the foremost among men? So dumb. I should have found a boy.”

  Inside, I had to agree. But it couldn’t be helped, what love demanded.

  Then Hár came. He emerged from the mist like a ghostly raider. Always bigger than I expected, and more tender. He carried four slim skið.

  Betta smiled for him, and she splashed me as she drew her feet out of the water. While she pulled her socks and boots on, I watched the old man, his face eerily lit from below so that sinister hollows and shadows moved across his cheeks. So far above me, so dark and angular, his gray-blond hair loose and almost colorless in the night.

  “Woman,” he addressed me, sighing wearily and crouching to place the skið on the ground.

  H
e raised his eyes to Betta, and something complex came alive in them. A kind of panicked wonder, and resignation. He looked like he’d accidentally caught a sleek white fox and knew it belonged to the forest. It was the face of a man who was watching her go. Hár was the most committed creature I’d ever seen. Holding on as long as he could, but ready to do what he had to. He didn’t think Betta was too young for him, or too low. He thought she was too good.

  They found these ways to cheat on honor. Hár and Heirik. Hiding, holding back, in the name of protecting Betta and me. I shot water through my teeth as I watched him sweep her into the night. As if any mortal man could hide his smoldering eyes from honor itself. As if a man could hide the wildness from his own heart.

  It would not be alright, if Betta and Hár were found out. And the times they stole away were stretching longer and longer with the winter, tempting disaster.

  There was no concept of dating or courting, just marriage or not. There might be love found in that institution, accidentally. And then there was this. They had a word for it, meaning the great passion. The most disorienting and ruthless love. A messy emotion trying to find its way in such a black and white landscape. Here where Hár preserved Betta, where Heirik protected me, by withholding themselves. Withholding the only thing we really wanted. Just them.

  I sunk to my chin and laid my head back, my bare neck bit by cold stones. I let my feet float up gently. Honor itself seemed to rise around me like steam from the bath. I imagined it drifting away, following Hár and Betta. Honor would find him and get inside every chink in his armor.

  Gods, I was bored.

  There was nothing for me in the house, and I lingered in the velvet water. I splayed my toes, and it was a warm surprise between them, between my legs as I spread them. I let it in, let the water explore every sensitive surface. My fingers drifted down to join it. One hand rested lightly on my belly, the other touched the places where I wished for someone else’s imprint. I closed my eyes, and he was there.

  The scent of spice and iron in his hair, his eyes soft amber. In my dream, he sat on his bed, and I straddled him, my skirts magically out of the way, his clothes conveniently gone. I tangled my hands in the blackness of his hair and pulled and tipped his head back so he would give himself to me. He let me touch his marked skin without shying away. Face to face, so close that our kiss was more of a crush. His mouth and tongue were sensations I actually knew, but the rest I imagined. He was so hard, I was so ready, all I had to do was lift my hips to capture him, lower myself onto him, so slow we both groaned into each other’s shoulders. Gorgeous agony rose in me so fast. He thrust up into me and I bore down to meet him, once, twice and I lost count, lost all will and sense, and came, my eyes and voice and mind lost for that one moment. Holding him. And he clung to me, just the same.

  I opened my eyes to the night sky, in the bath alone, my sex throbbing in my own hand.

  Time was vague in the constant winter. Sometimes it dragged like a cloak full of stones, and at other times the force of it would lift away and let me drift. Leaning back on the rocks, I looked for Frigg’s distaff among the stars, seeking the patience of billions of years spinning in place, forming something as great and fleeting as the clouds. Never finishing, always casting what was made into the sky and watching it dissipate. A thousand needles of icy wind came and stung my cheeks, and it felt good to let them do their work, scrubbing and cleansing. The water rippled, and my toes broke the surface, immediately beginning to freeze. Ten little points of blue ice. I drew them back under. I was waterlogged and chilled despite the pool’s heat. I needed to get out.

  My clothes sat in a pile by the tunnel entrance, and I snatched them up fast and wrapped myself tight. Inside the little doorway, I had time to fix myself. My wool dress was a rigid, ineffective towel. I pulled my shift on in a flash and wrapped myself in a big wool cloak instead. Shivering hard, I took my dresses in one hand, my torch in the other, and started out fast through the tunnel.

  I tripped on something, stumbled, and in the stuttering light saw a knife on the tunnel floor. It glinted once, and then disappeared as my torch died. In the pitch black, I knelt to find it, but my scrabbling hands found only dirt. Heavy and close, the tunnel started to choke me. I stood too fast, head swimming, orientation gone. Which way? I ran, my dresses clutched in one hand, useless torch in the other. My shoulder caught on a dirt wall, and crumbles went down the back of my shift. I slewed around, confused, scared now, feeling thousands of pounds of earth pinning me. I told myself to calm down. It was only the bath tunnel. The only way out was home.

  When I saw the faint light of the mudroom I lunged for it.

  I dropped the cold torch on the bench and sank beside it, drawing my cloak tight around myself, muttering shushing sounds along with the beat of my heart. Wool scratched at the moist skin of my throat. I’d made it. Everything was okay.

  Heirik was there, sudden and silent, just a few feet away.

  My eyes swept up from his dark boots to his waist. His belt was bare, and it was strange to see him without the fire kit and clattering of knives that always hung there. His chest where his shirts were open, and his face were flushed, red everywhere, as though he’d been traipsing outside, letting the icy wind scour his face like I had. He was burnished by the snow, smooth and shining with fresh cold. But his boots were dry, his legs unbound. I looked around for his snow shoes or wet cloaks lying where they’d been shed, but everything was in order in the mudroom, put away.

  His eyes were gold with anger.

  “You will not go alone again.” It was a rough, graceless demand.

  To the bath? Me? He spoke as though reprimanding a child. “Take someone,” he told me. He looked toward the tunnel door, then back to me with fresh fury. “Someone who will stay with you.”

  My heart dropped like a stone. He knew about Betta.

  He must have seen me sink, maybe I even I shook my head. He whispered, but not to me, to the wall maybe, the cloaks and furs and snowshoes. “I know what happens in my house.”

  I thought of Betta, happy out there in the snowy landscape, and I wished I could send her a message to never come back. That it was over for her here.

  Of course Heirik knew. He was god here, and every slight stirring of the night, a single animal’s exhalation, a feuding man’s darkest thoughts, were known to him. How had Betta and I—and Hár especially—thought that this insightful, observant man wouldn’t know everything that happened in every corner of his farm and lands, from this mudroom down to the sea? His scrutiny of me, personally, was something I had wished for but hadn’t really understood, and I felt it now. Some part of him watched me, listened for my voice, moved with my movements and breathed with my breath. I felt all of it from the past six months settling on me with an amber gaze.

  I turned from it. The cloaks looked rough and primitive in the lamp light. I focused on them, trying not to shake, trying not to cry. He was behind me, angry at Betta, full of a calm rage. I didn’t know what he would do to her, to both of us, but I wouldn’t flinch, no matter what he said next. For both of our sakes, I would not be scared.

  He grazed my spine with the backs of his fingers. So lightly, I wasn’t sure it was real.

  Oh.

  He touched me lovingly, a whisper of his knuckles against my bone. Full of rage, yes, or something just as powerful.

  I let the layers of cloaks slide off my shoulders and bared myself to him, the wide straps of my shift all that covered my skin. His finger traveled to just where skin met wool, no further. He laid his forehead on my shoulder and grasped my upper arms. I hovered between breaths, closing my eyes as if I might seal this moment, draw it into me and hold it.

  “I want to kiss again,” he said. Such a simple desire. The idea of kissing him rushed into me, everywhere. His words, the pressure of his head on my shoulder, his fingers on my damp skin, formed one tenuous and gorgeous moment.

  Without moving, not wanting to scare him, I asked, “Do you want to kiss agai
n?” I whispered, smiling. “Or do you want to kiss me?”

  “What do you mean, Woman?” He almost snarled into my ear. He’d never called me that before, so tenderly familiar and exasperated, and I felt a wicked smile fully form on my lips. His fingers tightened. He took in my scent, and turned his head to let his deep voice flow into my ear, into the soft skin of my throat. “Kissing and you are all one.”

  Oh. The words went deep into my body, softening me beyond what the pool had done, what my own hands had done. My smile slackened and my lips opened with desire. I fell back into him.

  This couldn’t last, this impossible moment, his body pressing now against my back, a low hum of desire against the place where my raven would have been, a groan of lost resolve. His hands moved, his fingers brushing down both my arms, a million tiny fires sparking in their wakes. The cloak fell, and I stood in my shift, scant fabric between his heavy arousal and the base of my spine. I’d never felt him against me this way, so ready. I tilted my hips and pushed back against him. His fingers found my wrist, and my skin was insufficient, like he might sink into it, into my bloodstream and bones.

  I turned in his arms. He bent to press his mouth to mine, a hard demand that turned to a kiss. And I whispered. “Let go, Sváss.” I called him Love. And he let himself go, poured himself into me, and I took him, his tongue and scent and heat.

  We kissed, and then he drew away, his breath coming hard and fast.

  My voice was hoarse but steady. “Take me somewhere,” I rasped. I glanced at the door to his room just a few feet away.

  “Nei,” he said. “Not there.”

  I didn’t care where. He was impossibly willing, and though it was only a few feet to his bed, I would go where he wanted, would do it anywhere now, anywhere he wanted this to be. I only wanted to know that nothing could stop us this time, no danger, no cries of warning in our hearts. I stood, terrified this moment would crack like newborn ice.

  “Put on skið,” he said.

  Skis.