Beautiful Wreck

by Larissa Brown

I looked at him blankly. He wanted me to put on skið and go outside?

  He was pulling away from me already, and he looked down at my shift. “And clothes, já?”

  He rummaged in the corner, and I sank down hard on the bench in interrupted bliss. I watched his hips that I’d so lately felt against my body. My lips felt bright, and I placed my fingers on the fullness of the lower one, to press and keep him there. To capture his presence. But I could feel it disappearing like frost flowers in the sun.

  When I came to myself, I found him quickly tying bindings around his ankles.

  We got ready so fast, a steady stream of socks, woolens tucked inside, boots, bindings, hats and gloves. Signé’s gorgeous coat, the melrakki fur silver and sensual against my skin. More cloaks on top, hood pulled tight at my throat.

  Heirik knelt on one knee before me and strapped the ungainly skið to my boots. How could I ski with him? I’d tried only a few times, always flailing. He lifted one of my feet with such restraint and reverence, my foot felt tiny and beloved in his hands. His eyes met mine as if to show my own little foot to me, something shiny he’d discovered. Then he tied it with urgency.

  He drew me up and to the door. So fast and thoroughly bound and ready. I noticed my dress, a red puddle on the bench. I bent awkwardly, balled it up and shoved it underneath. And we took off.

  I followed him, curious and yet not desiring any explanation. I only felt the thrill of skiing, and I realized I was doing it without thought or awkwardness. I didn’t care about slipping or falling or anything. I didn’t care where he was taking me, only that he wasn’t leaving me behind for two or three or ten days. We were fleeing together this time, into the sparkling, knife’s-edge night.

  The thought nagged at me. Something to do with a knife.

  As I sped over the snow, I thought of the dark tunnel. There’d been a knife there on the ground. I pictured Heirik’s cold-wrought skin, his empty belt, and clarity came sneaking into my head. Had he been there? Had he seen Betta and Hár ride off together? And then. Oh, nei. Had he seen me?

  He stood and watched me, I knew it, as I’d once watched him in that bath. He’d heard his name from deep in my throat, seen my ecstatic face, the only thing lit for thousands and thousands of miles.

  I smiled into the night wind. He’d been with me then, after all.

  Freedom coursed through me, like cold and roaring water clearing my head. I flew down a ghostly, snow-bright slope, everything electric blue and violet, a wintry scene so much more savage and real than my naive skating fantasy.

  Perplexed, yes, but I knew Heirik was taking me somewhere. He knew where. I thought, as the wind hit my face and froze my nose and eyelashes, that it was going to be somewhere wonderful. And there, we would be lovers.

  We skiied to the far edge of the woods. Not so far from home, but far enough to be utterly gone, so free in the snow, that my mind felt cleansed of everything pinched and tense. We left everything behind us in the smoky house, and Heirik and I stood alone in our beloved and immense landscape.

  We took off our skið and waded in to the woods, knee deep in untouched snow. It became less deep a few feet in to the tangle of birches, but still as we pushed through, the slush and wet underbrush froze me up to my thighs. My whole legs—calves, knees, everywhere—burned with a searing pain, and then went blessedly numb.

  Nei matter. I was a graceful creature, a beautiful thing, made for this wood, this night. My breath gathered and hung in the air, always a step before me.

  Despite the moon, it was ink dark inside the birches, as if the trees had all burned and now stood as charcoal remains of a great fire. Heirik dissolved into it, and more than once my heart and lungs spasmed with the fear that I’d lost him. But I always found him, a steady, denser shape against the black.

  Long moments of walking passed, and my eyes adjusted. The branches and leaves and shapes of underbrush became clearer. I could see him, then. I watched him inside Hvítmörk, moving through it, and though he was bundled in twenty pounds of animal skins, I remembered his summer body—hot from haying, shirts open at the throat, linen sticking to the curves and hollows of his arms and back. He’d been so exhausted then. Gorgeous, but falling down tired. Tonight he was suffused with a quiet energy. In his place and time. And I in mine.

  Heirik stopped and turned back toward me, drawing aside the low branches of a tree and welcoming me to come to him. I could see his smile now. And just beyond him, I could make out an even blacker place in the dark, an opening. The mouth of a small cave.

  I could see he’d been here many times before. Heirik knelt to strike up a tiny fire on a flat rock at the cave entrance, using dry tinder he had stashed here. I could just make out a great roll of blankets and furs against the cave wall, and the spot where he bent to light the little fire was marked with the soot of flames past.

  He blew gently on the tiny orange light, coaxing it out, and my realization grew with the same soft glow. This was where he disappeared to sometimes. When he was gone for days, he was here.

  This stark and rocky place broke my heart. But I knew the relief of being away from people, especially at my most desolate moments.

  The cave wasn’t quite high enough for him to stand inside, but it was wide, and big enough to call a room. Deep enough that I could just barely make out its contours and limits. And toasty! I thought I was dreaming, hallucinating that the little fire was making more heat than possible, but as I stepped deeper into the cave, the glimmer of heat grew. I wasn’t imagining it.

  He said, “Go all the way in. Get warm.”

  As I moved into the dark, I heard a delicate trickling—not quite strong enough to call a rushing—of water. I squinted to find it, and I knelt beside a tiny, steaming-hot stream. It was no bigger than two hands across. I couldn’t tell if it was boiling.

  “Is it too hot to touch?” My voice echoed strangely in the misshapen room, coming back at me from odd angles, some of it lost in unexpected eddies.

  “Nei, not enough to scald.”

  I touched the water lightly, and it was on the absolute edge of skin-burning temperature. I dipped my fingers in, and they sang with pain as they awoke.

  The stream changed everything about this place, and the notion of loneliness flew. It wasn’t severe here. It was snug, and there was life. It felt blessed and calm. I let my fingers trail in the water, let it move over my skin, unhurried, but with purpose, until I couldn’t stand it anymore and had to draw away.

  I turned back to Heirik and he was unrolling the big clump of sheepskins and furs.

  He took off his bracers and dropped them on the floor of the cave, then stooped over the fire, drying the edges of his sleeves. I dropped my wool cloaks and hat into the pile of furs, deepening the nest. But I kept my coat on. Underneath there was only my shift, and I was still cold.

  I leaned back against the pleasantly warmed cave wall. Taken by a sudden calm, a sense of unhurried freedom, Heirik and I just sat together on a bed of furs. I savored the moment, my fingers brushing through fur, my knee brushing his.

  “This is where you go sometimes,” I said.

  “Já.” He looked around and smiled as though it were a great house. When he continued, though, his smile faded. “I found this place after.”

  After. His sentence complete, his thought remained half hidden. I felt the weight of his mother’s coat. Looking at me wearing it, in this private and wild place, he would surely think of Signé. He didn’t talk about his parents’ death, only what followed. “When I became … this.” He looked at his hands, as if being chieftain were inked there, a physical thing he’d grown into. As if he wished he could wipe it off.

  “It’s so close,” I said, my voice dry and cave-strange. “I always imagined you going far away.”

  He cocked his head, and it looked adorable to see the great chief confused. “You thought of me?”

  I shook my head and drew my brows together. Would he ever understand? What could I tell him that would make him see
?

  “When I first came to Hvítmörk, you and I talked at the ravine.” I rested my hand on my own knee, palm open, a gesture so much like his, it made me smile at myself. “Right after that, you went away for ten and a half days.”

  He stared openly, maybe still disbelieving, or maybe finally getting it. Realizing that I remembered the first time, maybe every time. I knew how many days. “When you go,” I told him, “I miss you.”

  He spread his palm over mine. His fingers moved up inside my fur-lined cuff, grasping my wrist loosely this time, not too hard. He turned to face me, and with his other hand, he traced the arc of bone above my eye. I leaned in to the pressure, coat sleeves slipping off my shoulders, pooling at my elbows, warm air kissing my throat, skin slick with steam.

  “I never thought I would have someone,” he said, and his voice was steady, his thumb a promise on my brow. “That I would know someone.”

  My heart dropped into my gut.

  Know someone.

  The truth came and sat like a sickening weight inside me. I felt the cave too close around me, a small place, not mine. I’d led Heirik to trust me, coaxed him until he was entirely vulnerable, and here I sat in his most intimate world, a liar. He thought I was the impossible, a companion, a heart open to his. He thought he knew me. But I had never let him.

  His thumb stopped moving. He’d felt me stiffen.

  I let the words tumble out before I could think. “I know where I’m from.”

  Heirik’s features were calm and even, but his hand closed tighter on my forearm. His other hand was gone from my face. And then he let my wrist go and withdrew entirely. He drew his knees up, a wall between us. Closed. His eyes gave nothing away, but his body tensed and turned inward, waiting for betrayal. Waiting for more loss, for another thing he couldn’t have.

  There were moments I’d practiced what I might tell him. Now, when it was time, it was so hard to get the words out.

  “Saga sent me,” I said. “From more than a thousand years away.”

  I thought this explanation would sound ridiculous. That he’d laugh at me, or treat me kindly, since I was insane. But hearing it now in this sacred place, it was true. Some goddess or spirit had come for me in my glacial, lonely future, and had drawn me back here. For a purpose I couldn’t fully name, she had done this, and I had come, to take my rightful home, to be his. And here I sat by the same streamside that Saga did, somewhere deeper in these white woods.

  I felt her with me. And yet, I trembled with each breath, waiting while Heirik said nothing. He’d absorbed what I just told him, his face closed in his practiced way.

  Two, three, many more inhalations, and then I felt tears start to sting the corners of my eyes. I was losing him. A great hollow opened in my chest. My hands closed on fur, wanting to grasp instead at his clothes and beg him to accept me anyway. Accept the liar, the stranger, the unnatural thing I had just become. I felt ugly and wrong, a freshly born monster. My heart curled in on itself and wished.

  Then he reached for me.

  With one finger he traced the strap of my shift, lifting it slightly, moving it aside. He eased it down my arm.

  Breath hovering, I reached for him too. I untied the binding at his ankle and began unwrapping it slowly, unwinding up and up his calf to his knee. He knew it all now, everything about me, and yet we were here in this dreamed-of moment. It sank in. He’d accepted—nei, believed—in Saga’s hand in our lives so easily. And now we would make love to each other, truly, nothing unknown between us.

  I took his hand, lifted his wrist to my lips. I skimmed my teeth over the skin there, and he looked at his own arm as though he’d never seen it.

  “Come lie with me,” I said, and we went down into the fur.

  Thought abandoned, and Saga sent back to her water, it was just us. Mouths on throats and cheekbones, arms and legs entwined, his bindings loose, my dress tangling. Our hips and thighs sought one another, wanting to be closer. My shift was too much between us, and I lifted it up my legs, pushed all my clothes away so I could rest my leg on his. He hesitated, and I took his hand and brought it to my thigh. He grasped me too hard, his fingers rough, my breath coming shallow now, together with his, punctuated with a small, animal whimper, a pleading, never stop.

  I placed my hand over the back of his, matching my fingers to his, and I guided him. Showed him how to cup me gently. “Easy,” I exhaled, trembling with the need for him to move his fingers against me, in me. I rested my forehead on his shoulder and breathed. The idea of looking in his eyes was unbearable. I moved our hands together, slipped our fingers—one of his, one of mine—inside me. I moved against him, showing him, and humming now, a needy sound lost in the linen of his clothes. I pressed my head against his shoulder.

  “Hverju?” Heirik’s voice was rough and quiet. Why? Why would I want this, want him?

  It broke my heart open, and a wave of love came, the pleasure and agony of a single moment, lost breath, crying. My voice filled the cave, and I imagined the sound of my pleasure reaching every creature of the forest. Heirik told me, full of wonder, “You are so alive.”

  My hands were inside his shirts, flat against him, sliding down, moving to untie the threads that kept him from me. My hand felt small and cool to me, when I touched him. He made a savage sound. Precious language was gone, ripped away with his clothes, lost in the fur with his linen. He strained against me, strangled a sound in my hair, and gave himself up to that wordless moment, alive and hot in my hand.

  Our pulses matched in the cave-dark, and he found one word. “More.” Something I had once asked of him, and this time the answer was yes.

  “Lie back,” I told him. As in my dream in the bath, just hours ago, I climbed on top of him. He reached for my hair, grabbed it in both fists, and pulled me down to him, hard, to kiss. I imagined the blood red of his fingers moving through the snow of my hair.

  For hours, the steam held us close. It slickened our skin, kept us warm, hid us, and we were alone. A small fire, a rocky bed, in the snow-stricken wilderness. This place had been his, but we made it into ours, blessed it with the work of our bodies.

  A long time later, Heirik’s words startled me out of drowsiness, at the edge of sleep. “Tired One,” he said. I rested on my side, Heirik behind me, and his mouth was against my ear. “You need to rest.”

  “Nei!” I didn’t know what would happen when we left this safe and intimate burrow. I didn’t want to ever know, just wanted to stay and stay and stay. “I don’t want to leave here.” I said it like a child, desperate with the desire to stay up past bedtime, to never give in to night.

  I felt his chest move with a silent laugh. “You don’t have to, Litla,” he said. “Not yet. Just sleep here.” Then, quieter, as though he didn’t want to say it out loud. “I have longed to hold you while you sleep.”

  He fit himself to my back, my bottom, my bent knees. Solid, surrounding me, he matched all my curves.

  He spoke in his most gentle voice, his lips against my hair. Each word was made just for me, and he held it before giving it to my sleepy ear. “Bi, bi, little bird,” he shushed, and began to say the words of the lullaby. He’d heard me, the night I cut his hair.

  The little bird sounds seemed even tinier coming from such a serious, grown man, and I grinned, sleepy.

  He did not sing, like I had, but he spoke the poem, lulling me just as the song was meant to do for babes throughout a thousand years, and I felt it in my bones. I pressed my hips back into him, snuggling into his big body, his arm heavy around me, his hand resting on my breast.

  “Hush your beating wings,” he told me. “Sleepy as the birds go by, awake with half an eye.”

  The words were not exactly the same as the ones I’d learned in the future. At the very edge of sleep, I noted it. “It’s different,” I sighed.

  I woke with my hip pressing painfully into the floor and the black smoke of a dying fire in my nose and eyes. The stones were chilly now, but I didn’t care. I laid in Heiri
k’s arms, and he burned.

  “Are you cold?” He asked me.

  “Nei, you are like a heartstone.” I felt him laugh against my back.

  We stayed there longer, quietly holding, thoughts slow.

  “I am grateful, then,” he said, continuing a conversation long past. “To Saga.” He kissed my ear. “She guided me to find you at the water.”

  “Nei,” I told him. I turned in his arms and buried my head against his shoulder. “Nei. I found you.”

  The trudge home was long and uphill, but I could have climbed a mountain, built a house, I was so brave and strong and full. Where I was going stretched out before me now, instead of where I’d come from. My past—the cold city, lost eyes and hearts of millions of people—was freed like a cut rope. While my body, tired and sore, struggled to get home, my heart was already there.

  Heirik carried me the last part of the way, on his back, as if I weighed nothing. The snow was not quite up to his knees, the sky calm and star-struck. He walked easily, maybe suffused as I was with the great strength of possibility. I held on to him and our four skið. He felt like a horse under me, bone and muscle moving steadily, calmly, untiring.

  I never would have found the house. It was no more than a gentle roll in the land, a nondescript hill, though once we came close I noticed the pale smoke climbing weakly, mixing with the gray dawn, the same color. The light time was beginning for the day, the five or six hours when the sun almost rose, reaching and not quite making it to the horizon.

  I felt born to hold onto Heirik. And yet, gods, I was ready to get down! Relieved when we reached the house, I dropped the skið heavily and slid down off his back. He turned to me, and even as we both shivered, frozen through, we still could not go in.

  He seemed emboldened by the night, and he pressed me up against the stiff, cold grass of the house. He planted a hand against the house and leaned over me, and I waited for his kiss. But he hesitated.