“Heirik, Broðr, Herra,” Brosa began in a strong voice. My brother, my chief. There was not another sound, not a breath, in the whole crowd.
“I ask with deep respect, and with our family as witness, that I may have a contract to marry Ginn.”
A puddle of skirts and blankets whuffled about me where I sank into the sand. Betta and Kit knelt quickly beside me, and Betta grasped my hand.
If possible, the entire family—probably two dozen adults and assorted children gathered around the high seat—became even quieter. Not even a toddler wriggled or cried. For a second, a silent current passed between Heirik and his brother—a complex and intimate conversation, wordless and quick.
“Brother,” Heirik said. “It is a good night for making such a request.” He gave Brosa a half smile, but it turned sour. “A union born of this wreck will be a good one.”
A fist tightened in my chest. What?
He paused, and then leaned in, elbows on his knees, as if to speak only to Brosa. “You are a good man, Brother,” he spoke intimately, as if none of us were there. “We go to the althing. If no family of hers is found, then be well with your bride. The marriage can take place in summer.”
I listened to Heirik’s dark and beloved voice give me away.
My next breath didn’t come, then another failed to come. I couldn’t get air.
Betta turned me toward her and shook me. And I woke up suddenly like breaking the surface of the sea and gasped. I collapsed into Betta’s arms, air finally moving through my throat.
I cried into her. Thoughts tumbling, lurching, coming back. I thought of shining Brosa, his great will to live despite tragedy, his sensual touch and hearty flirtation. I cried for him, for his asking, for his wanting me. Then I remembered Heirik’s luscious, complex, private smiles. His body, hot arms around me, his breath in my hair, taking him inside me. A love not allowed, the anguish of a thousand moments, so close, so very close. I wept harder again.
With one arm Betta held and rocked me. With her other hand she soothed my hair over and over, rhythmic and calming. Finally, I laid limp in her lap, my face turned toward the sea watching my betrothed with dead eyes.
Brosa didn’t seem to mind—or even notice—that I was not present at the fire. I suppose I was secured, as far as he was concerned. After he’d bowed to Heirik again, he stood, half a head above almost everyone, and a dozen men tried to clap him on the back at once. He talked and toasted with them, and smiled like a teenage boy. The boy he should have been, after all, but was not. A nineteen year old man who’d lost one wife already, lost a baby son, fought for his life and earned wounds and scars. A man who made honorable promises and strong friendships, who gave himself fully to everything he set his mind to. And now that would include me. I felt ungrateful for this magnificent gift.
I shuddered in Betta’s lap, my breaths hitching and jumping as they sought a normal rhythm. And then it hit me. I struggled up in a sudden panic. “I have to go to Heirik.”
I scrabbled to get out of Betta’s grasp, and she let go of me, but Kit grabbed my arm and held me back. “You will not, Woman.”
I felt wild when I turned to her, like I could strike her. “Let me go!”
She held me tight. “You will not do that now.” She took my face in her cold hands. “Calm yourself. You’ve cried.”
I looked for any sympathy, even a hint of understanding in her face, and found none.
“Now,” she said matter-of-factly. “Wipe your eyes and go greet your beautiful husband.”
Betta hadn’t said a word. With the silent confirmation of my best friend, I knew it was real. This was happening. I was to marry Brosa.
The brush was thick around my knees, and wet. I slogged across the slope above the beach, trying to go unnoticed in the dark.
At Heirik’s tent, I stopped and breathed and calmed myself. I looked up at the stars and silently asked them why they didn’t come forward, witnesses. They had seen us together, in love, in the snow and wind. They’d shone above me as I walked in his footsteps, hearing my solemn promise to stay by his side. Now they stood, unmoved.
I called softly to him and then peeked inside the tent.
He sat on the big piece of driftwood in the center of the tent, his forearms resting on his thighs and his eyes to the ground, he hung pondering or in dull misery. He looked up at me, and fear shone as clear as daylight in his eyes. Fear of facing me. It broke my heart to see him look that way because of me.
“Take it back, Heirik.” I told him, in a voice much like his, the way he’d told me what to do so many times.
His brows drew together, fear turning to the first glimmers of anger.
“Don’t challenge me.”
He spoke coldly, and so did I. “Don’t give me away, like a sack of grain.”
And then everything good and strong in me started to falter, and my voice wavered with one more word, all I could get out. “Why?” I sucked in a deep breath to steady myself.
He hung his head again, and it was quiet for a long while, so long that I was afraid I’d been dismissed. And then he broke the silence.
“Just hours ago,” he told me, without looking at me. “You came down that hill with Betta. Your lips were stained.” We’d been painting ourselves with the berries. “I could see the space in your smile.”
He looked up then, eyes focused on my mouth, the gap between my front teeth. My lips opened to his gaze.
Then he continued. “You need someone who will kiss that mouth.”
Brosa had comforted me two nights ago, and had kissed my mouth, yes. Kissed it so thoroughly my lips might still glow like the pink ember he’d nursed before sparks and fire took hold. His kiss was good, so easy and lush. But what was that kind of kiss worth, if Heirik was here, so close to me, for the rest of my life? Did he intend to stand by while Brosa shared every tender thing that came from my heart? Taking my hair down, placing a berry between his lips, cutting a shirt for him and tying back his hair. Making love. Lying entwined with his brother, so close that I might feel I could reach out and touch Heirik instead.
“It should be you,” I told him.
“Ginn.” He shook his head. “You are so good.”
“The mark on your skin,” I started to say, and my hand unclenched as if he’d let me trace it. But his eyes glowed with instant fury, a terrible force, and I backed up against the tent wall.
I spoke anyway. “I don’t think it’s a curse. I think it’s just …”
I had no idea what caused such an extensive mark, and the sudden realization was strange, as though the gods were just as good an explanation as any. As though it could have been an ancestral spirit in diaphanous clothing who swept over Signé as she slept, Heirik growing fierce and strong in her womb. What force made a child grow into this man?
“A coloring in your skin,” I settled on. “Nothing more.”
His voice was carefully neutral. “I’ve promised to protect you any way I can. Do not push me to break a vow.”
His eyes weren’t sad. His gaze wasn’t lust-sick or yearning. It was caring. And that devastated me.
“Leave me my honor,” he said, ducking his head and speaking so quietly I could barely hear it. It was a request as tender as any marriage proposal. His honor was that important to him, and that delicate. The most important thing in a man’s life, more vital than any one element of love or family, a bound up whole that could not be reckoned or parsed, that defined everything he was in this life and the one to come. I couldn’t bear to take it from him, to break him like that.
And so I closed myself. Like a shutter, like a fan, all at once and quiet. Just as he so often closed his features and emotions, now I closed my heart, and he became no more than the chief to me.
“Já, Herra,” I told him. I ducked my head and backed out of the tent.
I left him, honorable, and headed out toward the sea.
I waded down the beach from everyone, near the rocks. A dark and misty place made to be haunted
by the ghosts of traders and warriors, the unchosen. I stood with my feet in the freezing water, and it seeped into my boots.
Reki. The word rose in my mind, and I spoke it out loud. A thing drifted ashore. In my tear-muffled voice it sounded like another word, rekingr. Outcast. The tenth century was a wilderness, and I was alone in it, sent out among animals with teeth like Svana’s and sneers like Hildur’s. Without Heirik’s constant presence, his unstated devotion beside me. He thought he was protecting me, but tonight he’d pushed me outside his circle of light, into the bewildering dark.
My mind stumbled back to the sleeping alcove during my first day here. And it came, fear like acid in my throat, as vividly as though I’d been plunged again into the water of time. Immersed in the same confusion and terror, the cold closed on me, around my ankles. I shivered and reached my hands out in front of me and fell ungracefully to my knees. I knelt in the freezing sea, and my shift and skirts soaked up black water. Salt stung inside my nose, behind my eyes.
Tiny, cold pebbles lodged under my fingernails, and my hands began to numb. Heirik had taken honor too far, and he’d become a frozen thing. I could do that, too. Crawl into the water I came from, until a numb freeze took my breath.
Or I could go home.
The thought struck me like a blow to the head.
I’d always thought that water would be the way back. That was why I’d feared and skirted it. I hadn’t wanted to go into the dark sea and hope not for frigid death, but for the cool refuge of the lab.
I looked at my hands in the water, lit in the moonlight like little fish swimming in place, never moving forward. I lifted one hand to my other wrist. I tapped out.
A ripping opened in my brain.
A howling of metal, it felt like a blade through soft, pink flesh. I saw my own hands flicker in the water, disappear and reappear like a glitch on a screen. I would go, right now. Splitting my brain, savage sounds, yes, I was going. And suddenly I didn’t want to. A mistake! I threw all my weight against the pull. I struggled to my feet, ripping my hands up out of the sea, stumbling backward over heavy, wet skirts. Oh gods, I was going. It wouldn’t stop.
“Ginn!” His shout came from the darkness.
He ran to me, called to me, and I stood in a blurred panic, found him. I went to him. I burrowed into Brosa’s chest.
“Woman, shhh, what is wrong?”
He shushed me until I could answer. The truth, I thought. “I was so scared, alone here.”
One truth, anyway.
“Oh nei, elskan mín, nei.” His arms crushed me, sorry he’d failed to protect me already, and not even betrothed an hour. My darling. He held me tight. He was suffocatingly large and ardent and it felt good. “I won’t leave your side now.” He kissed the top of my head, kissed my hair, a promise.
I turned my head to rest on his chest, and looked up the beach. I saw Heirik there, and my heart sank. I felt the pressure of twelve hundred years of rightness and desire. I had traversed time to find him and no other. These strong arms, Brosa’s, wouldn’t work. I would always mourn Heirik.
He stood outside his tent, arms folded across his chest, looking to the sea. He appeared much as I felt. Miserable. Contemplating a numb death. Then into his solitude walked Svana.
As scared as she was of Heirik, she came to appeal to him anyway. She wanted his brother for herself. She would ask the chief to overturn this crazy decision, just as I had. I couldn’t imagine she’d sway Heirik in some way that I could not. But it was worth a hope, that she’d wheedle and try.
Instead, something odd happened. I couldn’t make out the words, just the song of her voice, and it was not beseeching or fearful. Her voice was lilting, happy, a little bird chirping. In his typical manner, Heirik looked away while he listened to her. He looked down the beach, and I wondered if he could see me. Me, in his brother’s arms.
Then Svana brushed Heirik’s wrist, as anyone might when sharing laughter, casual conversation. I could just make it out from here. Svana touched him.
Heirik didn’t pull away or even stiffen with shock. He simply turned and walked beside her to the big fire.
Brosa felt me shiver and murmured “shhhh” and stroked my back. I was so lost.
“Sit with me, Litla.”
I recoiled at the familiar name. Gods, it was strange how he chose that. “Please,” I asked into his chest. “Please don’t call me that.”
He pulled back to look at my face, and then I saw comprehension and surprise grow in his eyes. I thought maybe he hadn’t really understood it until just now, or believed it. That Heirik and I didn’t just feel attracted to each other. We had a relationship. We were in love. Heirik had a sweet, intimate name for me.
“I will not again,” he promised, and he picked me up like a child and carried me back to where it was dry. He settled me beside him. His hand was warm and confident on my chin. Sea colored eyes found mine, and he smiled his big-hearted smile. And I melted. Exhausted, distressed, needy. Soaked. I sat under the weight of his arm on my shoulders.
“Brosa” I struggled feebly. His comforting, darling nature surrounded me. I had to hurt him now, not wait until it was worse. “I love your brother, not you,” I told him. “He is my heart and blood.”
“I know.” He was calm and unsurprised. “I have seen it.”
He surprised me with his honesty in answer to mine, and with an easy pragmatism. “I don’t love you, either. But my brother will not have you. And I will.” He touched a finger right between my eyebrows and slowly traced the slope of my nose. Somehow it wasn’t patronizing, it was slow and charming and seductive. “You and I will grow.”
Gods, how far I had come. Lost in a wide universe that this man didn’t even comprehend. Somewhere so different that love didn’t matter to a good marriage. True love was something to give up if one had to, and new love could grow as casually and inexorably as a wildflower on a roof.
The fact that I was attracted to him was a bonus, já? That I had found and secured such a beauty as Brosa, such a profoundly happy and honorable man, was the dumbest, incredible luck.
“We will figure this out later,” he said. It was a statement, not a question.
“I will hurt you,” I told him.
“Já, well, let’s enjoy ourselves tonight before you get started on that.”
I actually smiled. In the heart of this miserable night, he made me laugh.
The morning came brisk and clear, with a fine, friendly spray off the ocean, as if it had never been a roiling beast trying to steal the chief and Áki. Trying to steal me. I walked along its edge, skirting the foam and feeling sorrier than ever in all my life. Pressure and dull pain tried to fight their way out of my skull, and I held my wrap tight around my shoulders. I’d pulled my hair together tight, but bits of it splayed and stuck to my face.
Betta bounded up behind me, loud and fast, and she threw her arm around my shoulder. “Too many horns at night, and a woman is thirsty all morning.” She laughed at my expense, and surely to mask my dark mood in front of Hár’s daughters.
“Too true,” Thora added, looking peaked herself.
In fact, Dalla, Kit and Betta all looked drained and wan, wrung out by drink from last night’s party. Svana was conspicuously absent.
They wanted to talk about me and Brosa. They wanted to say how very lucky I was, how gorgeous a husband, young and rich and strong as a boat. He would have his own ship made, they said, a rumor that floated on the morning breeze.
Everyone knew I had a strange relationship with the chief, a kind of intimacy and passion that no one wanted to imagine or examine. My betrothal to Brosa took care of that once and for all. No more swiping at charms or whispering in corners. Their sails filled with relief, they bore down on me with excited plans and questions.
My mind skimmed over the tops of their words, dipping down once in a while, listening just enough to say “hmmm” or “já, I know.” I tried not to hear phrases, just looked at the sand and pictured my lover sitting
on his horse by this water, his shoulders strong. I raised my eyes to the row of little caves worn into the rockface and remembered the first time we came here together, how his hand looked when I touched it for the first time, we sat right in that spot, right over there.
“My Da will marry, too.”
Thora’s words made me snap to attention. Hár would marry?
“I heard him myself, talking to the chief last night. He said he would not comment on Brosa, but he had the matter of his own need of a wife.” Heirik and Hár had then moved too far away for her to hear more.
“To think of my old Da,” Thora laughed. “And thirteen babes already. Is it not enough for his balls’ pride?” She and Dalla laughed hard.
I waited a moment to be safe before glancing at Betta. Her face was a mask. She turned away and stooped to pick up a shell, while the girls chattered about who the impending wife could possibly be, from what house, and would she come to live with us, and when, until they soon ran the subject out and turned to my betrothal again.
When Betta and I had a chance, we stole off high up the slope above the beach. The moment we were far enough away, she fell to the ground in a heap of skirts. She looked up at me, and her heart was laid open.
I sat down beside her and put my arms around her, and she shook without a sound, for long moments. She drew a few deeper breaths, one more harsh inhalation, and then she spoke against my shoulder. “I knew, já?” She said. “That he was important, that he would be needed someday, for the family.”
She drew back and looked down into her own lap, seeming to be fascinated with her own white fingers, how they gripped one another. “But now that it is happening, it hurts so much.” Tears broke on the last few words.
I knew that stunned feeling. I knew how it felt to sit where Betta was, staring into a future without someone.
She looked around herself, behind her, as though she’d lost something, and then she lay back in the brush, her wide green eyes seeking the sky. I laid down beside her, and the heavens sat there, indifferent, a blue-steel gray above us.
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