“Nei,” I said. “Are you crazy, Woman?” I hastily added, “And don’t ask, because I won’t tell you where.”
She laid her head back on the ground and stared up through the birch fingers, letting a long breath out through pursed lips. In the silence, I considered what she must be imagining, his body heavy over mine, what she thought he looked like without clothes. How she believed sex was accomplished at all, for that matter. She’d seen rams to ewes, and other animals, but she needed to know so much more. I was waiting for her wedding day to tell her about loving a man. Now I wondered if in her mind she saw any small bit of what had passed between me and Heirik that night.
“Things are changing,” she said, moonlight sparkling in her eyes.
I could almost feel her thoughts turn, away from Heirik’s body and mouth and hands all over mine. She was drawn back to the Thing, to her raging excitement about this trip, and she began talking again about how Hár told Magnus the meeting might soon split into many smaller Things across the island. “This might be the last time, Ginn!”
Through the murk of a variety of hopeless dreams, she’d struggled to get here. Past her mother’s death, her move to Hvítmörk, the mean girls, her low status, the whole ordeal of her and Hár. I pictured her slogging through muck, her mud-clogged skirts bunched in her fists, to get to this bed beneath the giant sky. On her way to the assembly! Elated to have made it, her teeth lit up brilliant in the moonlight.
Snoring rose on all sides of us, and the sussurations of dozens of whispers, punctuated with snickers and laughter. Farther off, the thread of a song. The kind of anonymous talk that gathered and dissolved and became, somehow, quieter than silence.
Betta reached for me under the covers and laid her hand low on my belly. The heat of her touch stole into my clothes.
“He has been here?” It was both a question and a statement. She still struggled to believe me.
“Já,” I said. “He has been everywhere.” I laughed and elbowed her, and at first her eyes went wide with shock, but then she laughed too.
I sat up and crossed my legs, not really sleepy.
“I still can’t believe you,” she said. “Your hands have touched … him.” She picked one up and looked at my fingers. Then she dropped it, giggling, and she twisted and settled against the hard ground as if to fall asleep.
“Ageirr is not with us,” I observed, drawing her awake, and letting slip one more thing that had been on my mind. I’d wondered about him this week, but I didn’t have the heart to bring it up with Brosa.
“Horses would need to drag him here,” Betta said, her voice muffled by wool and fur.
A cold stone bit into my thigh and I shifted. “Why?”
“Because at the law rock, they would settle their feud,” she explained, patient after months of learning that there were many simple things I didn’t understand. “He’s not yet goaded the chief enough to raise the stakes.”
She summed it up plainly. “If they settle, he can’t kill Heirik.”
Hearing his name in her dusky voice was a shock. I thought maybe it was the first time I’d ever heard her say it. It came easily to her, as though she’d said it herself before, but this was the first time I heard it out loud. She thought of him as human, and the warmth that stirred in me was almost enough to blot out the chill of her statement.
Ageirr could never kill Heirik, anway. Not the way Heirik fought with such calm determination, skill, controlled passion, Slitasongr loose in his grasp. I smiled, the moon no doubt lighting up my teeth too, leaving a dark absence between the front two.
“Oh, Ginn,” Betta said, and she struggled to sit up facing me. “Please don’t find anyone.”
I caught her eyes, and her hands. I looked deeply and directly into her soul. I didn’t know when I would tell her who I really was. Always scared of losing her, always telling myself that she was more accepting than that, I put it off until someday. And when these moments came, where it seemed right, I thought of Morgan’s empty eyes, thought of the pain during the Jul festival when Betta turned away from me. And I just couldn’t do it.
“Betta, hear this,” I told her slowly. “I will know no one at the Thing. And not one of those people will know me.”
I squeezed her hands, and I loved her more than ever for her immediate nod. She took our clasped hands to her mouth, and kissed our fists like she was turning a key.
As we got closer to the assembly, the chief and immediate family started to hang back instead of riding ahead. Brosa pulled Drifa up close to him, and we slowed our pace. We would get there last, and everything would be prepared for us. And so after days of traveling, we sauntered the last hour, my body rocking, eyes drifting closed.
We climbed a hill of dark brown boulders, the horses never wavering. We crested the top, and my eyes opened wide to see Thingvellir—this sacred place in the land.
The gods had ripped a great gash in the earth, and it dominated everything. A place where tectonic plates clashed and carved a canyon perfect for speaking. Throughout time, those plates would always diverge, break off and move away from one another until more massive cracks would open all around. Now, the small canyon’s floor lay green with moss and grass. The law rock—where men would come together to make appeals and hear cases of theft and mortal insult—jutted up like the tail of a great, dry beast.
I wondered who had first discovered the acoustics here. The way sound was amplified at the law rock had changed by the time I studied voices. The land displaced, ground together and torn apart every few hundred years. The crack had deepened, and on both sides towers of shops, restaurants and apartments climbed into the sky, teetering close to the edges. A glass elevator plunged to the bottom of the rift, where, eyes twitching with information, people walked its shadowy length. In 1789, Thingvellir was struck by a wave of earthquakes lasting ten days.
Today, the rent was just deep enough to echo songs and laws, shallow enough to walk down into and lay among sun-touched grasses. Around it, the land spanned the horizon, a crash of black earth and deep emerald, with yellow greens flaring up throughout. The vast landscape was threaded with sparkling blue streams and rivers of all sizes, separating and joining in a twining mess, and the big lake, standing open and free under the sun. I smiled into its warmth, thrilled with the possibility of hearing people speak here.
Brosa left me to walk with Betta, and our horses waded into a stream of people. Hundreds of them, a thousand maybe. Their faces were sun and wind burnt, tough, scarred. Full of life, unlike the blank faces of the future. But the volume of them, the crush, reminded me of the city. Of sleek trains stuffed with people in the clothes of dozens of places and times. The clean usherings of subterranean transit, taking thousands of us across all of the City of Iceland. Impossible, now that I knew this place from the inside. I’d taken four days to cross a thumb’s width on a map, the country around me bigger than the gods.
The only distances that mattered now were the immediate ones. To the booth where we would sleep. Here to home, in another two weeks. The distance between my hand and Betta’s. She rode exactly beside me, and I closed my fingers around hers. Even with her at my side, the press of bodies made me nervous. People pushed too hard, too many of them, with their frank smells and ugly teeth. Far too many of them, like in the future.
“Heirik.” I called his name softly, listening for his reassurance.
“It’s okay, Ginn,” Betta soothed me. She sat tall on her horse, smiling, in the midst of more people than she’d seen in her lifetime.
We reached our booth.
It sat apart at the head of a long line of living spaces. Like spacious cow byres, they sat in a neat row, built with minimal materials, a few crossed logs, dirt floors. The chief’s booth spanned the space of three of them. It sprawled in luxury, as big as the house, with canvas curtains drawn back to reveal wooden cots heaped with sheepskins. A red and white cloth tarp was pulled tight to form a roof and logs were set up as benches around a cheerful fire. We
set foot into our little home, our best horses following right in beside us.
Heirik nodded to the men who’d come before us and set this all up, and they bowed their heads. He handed Vakr over to one of them and then the chief disappeared into a curtained-off room in the darker depths of the booth.
The smell of meat cooking made me swoon with hunger, and the sight of the beds made my bones yearn and ache. I found my place, where a few of us women would sleep, and let the curtain drop around me. I smiled, thinking of Drifa in her place in this same house.
Brosa, Hár and Magnus talked outside the curtains, about making their beds near the entry, in case of revelers or other fools sneaking in with sticks and knives. They laughed, recalling one especially hapless drunk last year, who stumbled into Hár’s cot and almost lost an arm. Instead, the man had been given more ale and propped in a corner. When he woke the next day, Hár and Heirik were sitting right before him, sharpening knives. “The dumb goat pissed himself.” Hár’s laugh rumbled through the booth, mixing with horses’ whinnies and people calling and singing outside.
Secure at the heart of this bustling, voice-laden world, I closed my eyes.
The market sat inside the mouth of the rift. Rock faces enclosed us all around, and we pushed and scurried within. Betta and I, in our dark green and red dresses, got carried on the current of people.
She was unafraid. And not just because Magnus walked ten feet behind us. Betta lived with thirty people around, saw maybe twice that many at haying and Jul. She closed her eyes at night thinking of just one. Here there were more than a thousand, and instead of overwhelming her, they fed her energy and joy.
Naturally fearless and curious, Betta had been growing even stronger now that the one vision that terrified her—the day she would have to give up Hár—had vanished. He would be there when we returned to the booth, as solid and alive as a wall, and so she was free.
I tried to emulate her. To open my eyes and see everything. A chaos.
People, a hundred or more at a glance, sprawled outside of tents. They sold everything I could imagine wanting, and their voices rolled and pitched like the sea. They spoke of bowls and ale horns, of furs piled higher than my head. They talked about fabric in a thousand shades of ochre and brown and gray. They laughed and shouted, voices lifting up above all our heads, swirling in a great gyre.
Within them all, a single voice caught my attention. “Rakknason,” someone said. “God-Maker now.” My head snapped around, but I couldn’t see who it was. Who was talking about him? No one had the right to speak about Heirik like that, to utter that terrible name.
I ducked under a curtain of dead birds and fish that swung on strings, past a family’s cooking fire, an iron pot hanging above it. My skirts swept the ground and snagged peoples’ feet. They were laughing all around me, talking about griddles, spoons, etchings in leather, discussing belts and bracers. Ale slopped everywhere, in buckets, in peoples’ drinking horns, down their chins and chests. The tang of drink filled my nostrils and sat at the back of my throat. I would never find the person who’d dared to speak of him.
I raised my eyes above the throng, and saw the climb to the law rock, so patient above this seething mass.
Heirik would not go there to pay for Eiðr’s hand. He would leave that be for now. Justice took time.
Betta and I had silver, more than we needed or knew what to do with. We searched for food and drink to bring back to the booth, but the market overflowed with so many things, we wandered and explored. Magnus walked protectively behind us, letting us roam and talk to every merchant.
At first, I’d resisted the idea of spending Heirik’s money, any of it. I hadn’t imagined there would be so many things I wanted here. Sharp spices for cooking, dried herbs for perfume and sweet bedding, and honey enough to last for years. Bins of nuts and dried fruit. Rows of tiny leather boots. One man sold knives with carved handles in the shapes of boats and animals with shining eyes.
I thought of all of Heirik’s knives, gleaming at his waist, balanced in his hand and slipping through his fingers. I wanted one that fit my own palm.
“Deer antler,” the man pointed at one. “And this one is hvalrif.” Rib of a whale.
I ran my finger over the delicate twining designs carved into the bone. The blade was slim, the whole thing not much longer than my hand.
Even though Heirik hadn’t handed the silver to me personally, I knew he wanted me to have it. I bought myself that knife, and a leather sheath for it, and I made room on my belt.
Minutes later, Betta and I came to a jeweler’s tent. His workbench was surrounded with a dozen women cooing and pecking at beads and needle cases.
I didn’t really intend to spend any money, no significant amount anyway, but the smith liked Betta and me especially. He seemed to have an inkling that we were worth more—perhaps a sense like Betta’s, an ability to read the most subtle gestures or clues. And so he showed us sparkling beauty.
Hundreds of glass beads blown with the care of a skilled fire-breather, spun with color and capped with silver. Men’s bracelets, thick silver curves and coils that slipped and turned around and around on our small wrists.
The smith winked a bloodshot eye at us and slipped something unimaginably beautiful from under his bench. A man’s torc, a twisted bronze neck ring. It was lit with the glory of a farm sunset, all amber inlays and orange sky. Translucent lavender stones were fixed as eyes within the hissing faces of two stylized cats that met at the throat. Freya’s cats, I thought, and then I heard Betta’s voice in my memory. Like he was watching Freya paint amber streaks in the sky.
Betta made a small sound of awe when she heard the price, and then moved on to look at more delicate things, but I saw her tracking the torc out of the corner of her eye. She seemed resigned, melancholy about it at first, and looked back only to moon. But I watched a realization creep over her like light up the wall of the house—that she was someone different now, someone whose betrothed could wear such a thing. She was someone who could buy it for him. I watched her watch the necklace.
When we had looked at everything, I drew the man aside. “I need to buy safely,” I told him. “I will return with my escort for the cats’ eyes.” I nodded toward the bench, where he’d slipped the torc away.
His brows rose eloquently, and I imagined he wondered many things, whether I was serious, and also sane, whether I had the money, how much was on me, how far away my escort might be. His knob nose flushed red, and he actually bowed to me. Then he hissed an instruction to his wife, waved a hand anxiously for his brawny son to step forward and watch over the inventory, and brought me into his tent.
While my eyes struggled to adjust, my skin drank in the coolness and dampness of the tent. The interior air was like water, quick and soothing, and the place smelled of metal and canvas. When I could see, I noticed a dark and intensely bored boy—another son, probably—half slumped in the corner, examining a knife’s edge. He looked up with faint interest.
I thought the jeweler might stutter, he was so nervous as he asked me for assurance. He needed to know I wasn’t teasing. The fact that he’d even gotten his hands on the material to make that necklace was a miracle, and the piece probably represented a year’s gamble to him and these big boys, to their mother.
Physical money felt strange in my hands. I dug through the clunky pieces of silver, and I gave the man a sizable down payment. He nodded and swallowed, looking like he might cry.
“Might I show you one more item, Lady?” He inclined his head and waited for my name.
“Ginn,” I said. It would have to be enough. In this world, I had no more name than my own small one. My money sparkled and clinked more than anyone else’s, and he was satisfied.
Clearly, I was shopping for a man, an important one, and the smith wanted to sound the depths of my love and purse. And so in the privacy of the tent, he brought out a ring.
It flared like white fire against the rough brown cloth he laid it on. I gasped
and reached a finger to touch it, but couldn’t, it was that stunning. I got down close to it and exhaled, my breath misting its silver surface.
I had no other name for it, but ring didn’t suffice. It was more like armor. A marauder’s shield of a ring. A very thick band, it wrapped once around the finger. The ends curved back to almost meet, two dragon’s heads biting at each other with open mouths and searching tongues. It would span from the base of a man’s finger up to his knuckle. And yet it was somehow graceful, without bulk. The band was filigreed with lines like frost flowers. A delicate, simple, deadly weapon of a ring. I pictured it on Heirik.
More than that, I wanted it for him. I wanted to cover him with this solid, gorgeous thing. I had a fugitive vision of giving it to him, pressing it onto his finger, wedding him.
But he was not mine to cover, not with my own body, not even with a fur or blanket on a cold night, and certainly not with such an intimate and possessive gift. A woman would give this ring as a symbol of raw and proud ownership over a man. I wished I had the right.
It would be bought with his own money anyway, I thought, and laughed, a bitter sound inside the hush of the tent. The dark boy rose, sudden and wary. I told him it was only a passing thought, my outburst. His ring was in no danger from me, and it was not comical at all. It was grave and precious.
The chaos of people had thinned into a steady, sluggish stream. Children ran around our legs, chickens too, and an occasional horse pushed past us, disturbing the flow.
Betta and I strolled, with no need to return to our camp for the night. I asked her to come with me to the law rock, just to listen to the voices echoing as people sang and talked inside the rift.
The angle of the sun’s light was becoming sharp. Everyone’s features looked tired and carved, as if from golden stone. A horse’s yellow tail, hit with a ray of falling sun, became like starkly detailed straw, dry and coarse.
Into this sleepy, ambling crowd came the man. He called me.
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