Beautiful Wreck

by Larissa Brown

  Heirik led her in with a nod, and if he were willing, he would have taken her by the elbow, an honored lady. As they walked past the fire, he turned and caught my eye and a small, drunk smile touched the corner of his mouth. It was mean and humiliating, and I left the house.

  It was serene and cold outside, just me and the stars and tents. And a single dog, who sniffed at the house. His head lifted for a moment, but he found me uninteresting and followed a smell away toward the stable. I went inside a tent to get warm.

  Soon Haukur came out of the house and headed in the same direction. And moments later, he came back drawing a small horse by a rope, taking it right into the back door of the house. For the blót. The Jul sacrifice. Heirik would be with Freyr again tonight, and already full of drink, sitting near such a woman as Brynhild, his emotions running wild. I feared going back inside to see what he would become, and so I stayed in my tent and sat alone in the hay.

  It was on a day like this, when Freyr was in him, that we almost kissed for the first time. We talked about these animals that now lived in the stable right outside. How many could live, how many we would eat. The horse selected for just this night. Heirik’s hand had rested close to mine in the scratchy grass, and it was a moment of turning, a singular bit of time when he and I could still happen.

  Ageirr had interrupted us. The thought of him made me shiver. I hadn’t seen him tonight, and it worried me at the back of my mind.

  I mumbled my thanks and wishes alone in a cold tent. “Freyr, we are mindful of your power and blessings. Please let us have a good year,” I said under my breath.

  He would have touched the horse’s blood to his lips by now. Would have sprinkled it on his honored guests, perhaps climbed the high seat and now heard thanks and petitions from men on bent knees who came forward to speak. Our weaving room, where we sat and played together, transformed into the chieftain’s hall.

  “God-Maker …” I heard a drunk voice pass by. Brynhild had called him that. What did it mean?

  The dog came nosing at the door of the tent, pushed the fabric away and came inside. He checked first, dug with his snout to see if he could get inside my locked arms.

  “Nei,” I told him. “I have no snack for you.”

  Instead, he sat close beside me. He leaned his weight into me, wanting warmth.

  Was it a new name for Heirik, to take the place of Rakknason Longhair? A name that didn’t sound at all demeaning. Much the opposite. It was a name a bold girl would say to his face.

  My teeth chattered, and soon I had no choice but to head into the house. I could lurk at the door. It would be alright.

  That was my plan, which was soon shattered by Hár’s strong hand pulling me along.

  “Woman,” he said. “I won’t have you hide in this house.”

  He lifted me from the ground and I laughed, but the sound was harsh. I thought he might throw me over his shoulder, but instead he carried me like a bride, past the heartstone and through the sparkling room I’d decorated. The boughs passed by me in a blur. He brought me across the threshold into the weaving room, where the long tables were drawn together. Dozens of people were digging into heaps of food and dipping cups and horns into cauldrons of ale. My eyes found Heirik instantly, but he was talking to Egil, his head bowed in conversation.

  Hár set me down, and then took a place by my side.

  I needed more ale, a lot more, and Hár supplied it to me over and over, drinking with me until my head felt pleasantly glossy and disconnected. The old man himself drank three cups for every one of mine, becoming more and more bizarre and rambunctious. His emotions and actions swooped from glumness to a kind of frantic jollity that made people duck and sent cups crashing. He snarled and ate pieces of meat with his hands. A small part of me wondered if he would keep this up for two weeks. And I wondered where Betta hid, what she thought about her love right now, ripping into animal flesh and drinking himself raw. Another minor part of my mind, far behind all immediate thought, wondered how the house would smell for a month after this. About cleaning up all these cups and bones.

  What if I just walked away? The voice in my head was bitter. What if I just left it all for Brynhild to deal with?

  I was about to say this to Hár, when my thoughts were interrupted by a crash and bellow. It was Egil. He got up from the table with a pound of his fist and shouted to conjure up dancing.

  Somehow, at his bidding, drumming and song sprang up out of nothing and tables were drawn back just enough to make a small space.

  Before I could speak or even think, Hár picked me up and literally handed me over the table, my skirts knocking over cups and dragging in meat. Egil’s arms went around my waist, he set me gently on the floor beside him, and then we danced. I didn’t know how and didn’t care. People clapped around us, faces blurring as we turned in circles, ale sloshing in my belly, my mind free and slack. Others danced too, impossibly crowded, we bumped into each other with great force and laughed. No space for bumbling embarrassment, just incomprehensible motion, faces blurring as Egil and I spun.

  Then I was flying. He lifted me by my waist, high off the ground, and whipped me in a dizzying circle. The scene of my house, my hall, sprawled out below me, Egil so alive, his hands, the music, his grinning face. I let something go from under my tight ribcage. It felt like a bird that had been struggling in there. It now flew swiftly from me, over the heads of the dancing, drinking, happy people and out over tents and stables and into the polar night.

  The music ended, and Egil set me down, robbed of all breath and sense. And right in front of me, I saw Eiðr—Ageirr’s brother.

  He was the one Svana had called smart but ugly. Not good looking, it was true, he talked to two little girls about the ages of Lotta and Ranka. He dropped a kiss on one of their silky heads then drew them into a hug, and I was struck in my gut by the sight of his arm with no hand.

  I sought out Hár, my drinking partner, and dropped down breathlessly beside him. I had the notion that Heirik’s new byname had something to do with Eiðr. Hár would know.

  “He is called God-Maker now,” I said, my voice weak and wobbly.

  “Nei matter,” Hár sighed. “The hand price will be nothing.”

  “The hand price?”

  My mind swayed drunkenly, but I found the memory, words from an arc that lay long buried in the recesses of my mind. Oh. The chief would pay, literally, for taking Eiðr’s hand. A sum that Hár said meant very little to Heirik, considering the value of his exact and strategic revenge.

  The old man gave me the story.

  Heirik had cut Eiðr at his wolf’s joint—his wrist—so called because the god Tyr had sacrificed his hand to bind the great wolf Fenrir. It was a physical blow, certainly. But it was also a subtle metaphor. To render the man a god, while making him impotent as a farmer. A swipe of ax that demonstrated mastery and yet mercy. He would let Eiðr live, promising to feed and protect him for the rest of his life with no promise of work in return. He’d let him live, in shame.

  “Já,” Hár murmured, watching Eiðr, as though he could read my thoughts. “Já …” What more was there to say about such inhuman cunning?

  Hár gave a sigh so big it made the bench dip and sway. “They call him God-Maker now. As if he needed more fear.”

  Rakknason God-Maker. It was beautiful and terrible.

  I tried the name on my lips, whispered it, and shivered at the depth and elegance of Heirik’s cruelty. With impossible speed, he’d calculated this poetic horror and carried it out on a moving horse in a hand to hand clash. It was more than his mark, and his position of power, that scared people. They should be afraid. A part of him was twisted and ruthless.

  The bench was hard under my tensed thighs, and I shifted and wondered how it was possible that I could love such a man. Heirik was a creature beyond anything I understood, brilliant and fierce in a way that curdled my blood. As frightening as the raven Hildur imagined him to be. I saw him that way, the blue of his hair like the h
eart of a flame. And knowing that I did love him anyway, I trembled. Knowing that I could rise to be like him, to stand next to him, terrified me.

  I looked to my hands in my lap. Could I still tap out? I hadn’t wanted to try. But what if I went to the water? I could get there on Drifa, and I could try. Somehow I knew that at the ocean Saga would find me and take me.

  My fingers looked unfamiliar, separate from me, as they tapped speculatively on the red and twisted skin of my wrist. I could get away from everything here, the cold and the endless night and the dark person that was Heirik, get away before he consumed me and I became nothing. Or became like him.

  Something powerful drew my eyes his way. I saw the chieftain, sitting casually back in his seat of furs, drunk, watching me and Hár with a half smile. He’d been observing me, with eyes so pale I could hardly make out their color.

  Now I really knew him, his smile seemed to say. Now what did I think?

  Could he actually see the moment I learned to fear him? My thighs rigid on this bench, fingers tapping anxiously at my wrist. He knew what that meant now, that it was my way back. His knifelike vision made me swallow with a dry and useless throat.

  I glanced over at Brynhild, and she was unafraid. Confident and beaming like her Da, all clean and copper. She noticed me and did not draw away. On the contrary, she cocked her head and seemed to savor looking at me. I felt my own eyes acutely now, rimmed with ashes that felt juvenile under scrutiny. I wished I hadn’t blackened them. Pale and small, I tried to smile back.

  I took a cloak from the back mudroom and pulled on someone’s big boots. I needed a place to think.

  This time I did not want to be alone, but I didn’t want these people, either. I wanted the wordless company of a creature who wouldn’t challenge or scare me.

  The clean air off the North Pole sliced my lungs, and I squinted against the moonlight on the deep snow. A dirty path was already trodden between house and stable, and I followed it to find Drifa.

  In the shadows of the stalls, I heard murmurs of human voices, the tense spitting of an argument, laughter too, and in one dark room the speechless pants and sighs of lovemaking. I moved on until I came to a quiet stall, and I called softly to see who was in there.

  After announcing myself, I held my torch up and looked around the corner of the wall. It was Vakr, towering in the dark. He snorted, narrowed his eyes in warning, and then stopped and seemed to reconsider. His snout reached out, nose trembling and questing, and he found something in me that calmed him. I’d been close to Heirik. He’d been touching me earlier. Maybe the horse smelled him on me and wondered where his master was.

  I secured the torch into a space in the earth wall, then turned my palm up and pulled back my furry sleeve. I buried my own nose in my wrist and tried to find Heirik, and I did smell the scent of spice underneath the wool and smoke, like a voice down a long hall.

  A bristly, warm face came up against mine, cheek to cheek, and I gasped. Vakr, the terrible beast, dipped his heavy head and rested it on my shoulder. He leaned into me, and I pet his side in big, soothing circles.

  “Maybe there is somewhere I can go, Awake One,” I called him the plain English words for his name. He muttered in return, in a language so far beyond me, I’d never know. I rested my face against him and felt his great eyelashes flutter. I wouldn’t live here anymore, I thought with serene clarity. I would go to the ocean and tap out. It could work. At the same time as I began to hatch a clumsy plan, my heart clenched with the awful idea of leaving this world. This time and place that I fit into like I never could in the future. I could go to the assembly—the Thing—in a few months, meet people, and find another home large enough to take me in. Maybe even Egil’s house.

  “A trade,” I told Vakr. “Me for Brynhild.”

  “I don’t think my cousin would allow that.”

  I started at the sound of Magnus’s voice. I had to raise my lamp to see him, he sounded so different, so deep and grown up.

  “What are you doing here, Woman? You will freeze.” He came all the way into the stable and then saw me with the horse. His eyes went wide and he broke into a broad smile. “Gods, the old beast is kissing you.”

  “He is!” I laughed, and Vakr made a whuffling sound in my hair.

  “So,” Magnus persisted. “What are you doing so far from the table?”

  What could I say? I couldn’t stand the joy I felt dancing with a stranger? Or that grief tore at me when I looked at the empty seat at Heirik’s side? Or perhaps that the God-Maker scared me to death.

  What I did say was, “Brynhild will make a good wife.”

  There it was, in the open, hanging in the frozen air between me and Magnus for a second. Just a split second before he answered. “Já!” He said with joy. “I am a lucky man.”

  I drew my brows together. “What do you mean?”

  Taken aback, he actually stepped away from me. “She will be my wife at midsummer.” He said this as though it were impossible I could not know.

  My head filled first with humiliation at how stupid I’d been. Then my chest expanded, my whole body relaxed and I breathed for the first time all night. All desperate ideas and plans to run away dissolved. My love was not marrying. Magnus was! How had I misunderstood so much?

  Maybe because Magnus was a child, and not someone who could possibly get married. In the torchlight, I realized that was no longer true. He looked so much like his father, his hard features carved like stone in this light, but his mouth ready to laugh or grin at any moment. His silky blond hair was like silver in the night, falling around his big shoulders. He was no longer gawky. Before my eyes stood the proof of how long I’d been here in this time and place.

  “It was arranged in fall,” he said. “But the chief only told me today, when Egil’s messenger arrived and said that they would come. I was stunned.” He was excited, and though he tried not to show it, his words became as fast and wide-ranging as Ranka’s. “She’s beautiful,” he said. “So strong and smart. She skiied here, through days and nights. Her father is also in need of a wife, himself. They’ll stay two weeks, and I will get to know her.”

  I couldn’t stand his happiness. I wanted it for him, but I couldn’t take hearing about it.

  “I saw that man, Eiðr, again tonight,” I said. “With his children.”

  Magnus stopped and slowed his exuberance. Vakr’s hair was rough where I pet him, his nose heavy on my shoulder.

  “His nieces,” Magnus said, and then nothing more.

  “Your Da told me what it meant, what Heirik did.” It was quiet, only the three of us breathing, and I knew I could tell Magnus what I felt here in the dark.

  “I’m scared.”

  He nodded. “My cousin is a fearsome person.” It was a plain fact.

  “You’re not helping, Fool.” We both laughed easily, casually, but when he spoke again the tension rose like a sudden wall.

  “You sit close to his fire, Ginn. You don’t know what he can bring himself to do.”

  Heirik’s fire. An ironic and witless way to say it, given the scar that I could feel whenever my fingers checked the side of my face. And yet, it was perfect. I did think of Heirik that way—as a flame, his spirit and body both hot, something leaping up between us when we were near.

  Magnus meant something else, too. He was speaking of the chief’s intensity, his capacity for cruelty, the way poetic and violent plans leapt to his mind in an instant. The ability to kill curled like a dozing wolf behind his eyes.

  My boots squished in the snow, and I reflected Magnus’s words back at him. “What he could bring himself to do?”

  “To protect you.”

  What Heirik might do to protect me had, I thought, included things like burying a spear in Ageirr’s shoulder. I knew he would throw himself in the way of any weapon meant for me. But when he drew his hands and body away from me, for my own good, it was more painful than any wound.

  Heirik looked at me with such fury sometimes, and I knew it
was anger at himself for stumbling, for failing at his vow. How might he keep from failing again?

  His words came to mind, those he’d said more than once. What will I do with you? Could he have meant literally?

  Oh. Oh gods, the logical answer came to me.

  He could do something to separate us. He had the power to set us so far apart that temptation would be irrelevant and desire would become a distant ache. He could send me away. What had Magnus just told me about Egil? He was in need of a wife, too. Would Heirik really do such a thing to me, to us?

  “Já,” Magnus said softly, as though he could see my thoughts forming. But he didn’t really know what I’d been asking myself. He was just gathering up the many threads, and deep fears and questions we’d talked about, into that one lovely expression. Perhaps as an explanation for everything—the way the seasons turned, and the stars around Frigg’s distaff—he added, “Well, the chief suffers the ástarœði.” The fury of love.

  Magnus tossed this to me like a hand tool, as though it were as casual and obvious as a length of rope or small blade. Heirik loved me. With a desperate heat.

  Cold swirled in to the stable and around us, everywhere, and I saw the truth. In a beat of my heart, it didn’t matter how cruel or dangerous he was. Heirik and I shared something I had wanted forever. He knew me, and he loved me.

  I brought my hand up to the side of my face, pressing my fingers to the slick scar there.

  I sat too close, já. Far too close to his fire. Every time I thought of him, the hem of my dress seemed to catch in it, and the flames leapt to life and traveled over and through me. Heirik’s fire devoured everything, my clothes and hands, my braids, my eyes and spirit, with a delicious light that didn’t hurt at all.

  He wouldn’t give me to Egil. He wouldn’t. He loved me.

  “Woman,” Magnus said. “My feet are cold. Come into the house.”

  The house spilled over with a growing reek of bodies and old ale. And the smell of two sour-milky babes I took into our bed, so they wouldn’t have to join their parents and sleep next to cows. Women crammed into sleeping alcoves and men slumbered propped against walls, whole families living with our sheep, just to be here for this celebration. This joyous time, so close to the gods that Odin, Freya, Freyr seemed separated from us only by a thin veil of wool, gauzy as my shift. And yet entirely absent in my heart.