Beautiful Wreck (15 page)

I thought Heirik himself knew poetry. He spoke so sparely and bluntly. Statements so evocative with three or four words.

“Haying is soon,” he said. “We’ll have enough wood stored.” He looked at his own unmarked palm as if the echo of his ax lay there, then turned his hand over to rest on his knee. He raised his eyes, so pale in the morning light.

“We’ll go,” he told me, and he drew his boots on.

I didn’t want to, but I knew it was time. We weren’t truly suspended here. The day would begin and I would cook and sew, and he would tell men what to do. He’d cut wood and sharpen axes blunted by constant chopping. And roundup and haying would come soon, time passing as it should. I liked that idea.

Gerdi fell in exactly behind Vakr, nose to tail, and once again I found myself watching Heirik’s back. His glossy hair stirred with a breeze, and I felt like I’d observed him this way not only once or twice, but always, for twelve hundred years. The farm was beginning to feel that natural to me.

We didn’t talk anymore, and at first it was easy. By the time we reached the house, he was different. Working. Roughly calling to the foster boy to bring another horse up. I was completely forgotten, and the ease of building a fort and splashing were displaced by the demands of the day.

Hildur stood framed in the mudroom door. “There you are, Child!” She sounded relieved, as though she’d been worried about me. She watched Heirik ride off, and once he was gone, her voice turned unkind. “You have work to do.” I nodded and slid off Gerdi’s back.

Bye, I thought after the chief.

Hildur waited, the palm of her hand pressed against her waist, her charm.

Hvítmörk was a low, dense forest.

The trees were maybe twice my height. Just tall enough to get forever lost.

I was alone here, as I was many nights after a late evening meal. The women didn’t wonder or worry about me. Betta did sometimes, but not always. Some nights she was gone, walking with someone else, and I would go alone to the ravine and listen to the rapid water. Or come here, to the edge of the woods.

I ducked in under the trees, a few feet in, just to see how it felt inside. It was cool and creepy and smelled alive, like wet dirt. Gerdi would know where we were. She’d find our way back. Holding her reins, I drew her into the enchanted woods.

At first, everything looked white—the bark of the trees, the tops of the angelica flowers, even the horse by my side. The light itself was blasted out and white. But as my eyes adjusted, I saw a subtle chaos of color. Underneath the peeling white bark were copper and fire and pale apricot. The snowbloom stalks were electric lime, set against a forest floor of black dirt, creeping with low evergreens and their navy blue berries.

The trees did not stand majestic and straight. They were elaborately twisted, each with three or four trunks growing from a single root. Some spindly, some strong and intertwined with others. Each tree seemed a complex mess, but when seen together they all slanted in unison for the same light. An eerie reaching, as though the forest had a million skeletal hands all desiring the same thing.

I ducked under branches and picked my way through the underbrush, looking for something myself, I didn’t know what. It was too dense for Gerdi now, and I let her go, knowing she would be content with so many blossoms at our feet. She would stand eating until I returned.

The woods got thicker and closer, and when I stopped and peered through the branches, the tangle of trunks went on forever. They pressed in from all directions. This time I wasn’t afraid to be alone, though, out here in real nature with no companion but a horse. Twelve hundred years in the future, I would be born. I’d come so far. There was something negligible about the dangers of wandering in the woods.

I ducked low, branches snagging in my hair and creeping juniper grabbing at my hems. The trees peeled white, revealing a coppery red so dense it was hard to look at. Brushing leaves out of my eyes, I stumbled into a little stream bed.

The dirt and stones that lined it were almost completely dry, but a waterway still trickled, so tiny I could step across it with ease and not get my boots wet. I knelt and washed my hands, then dipped water into my palms and drank. It tasted cold and honey-kissed, and I knelt and dipped my head low to smell its dirty, vivid scent. I stood too quickly, snared my dress on a branch, and fell into the open palm of a tree.

Five gnarled trunks grew from its base, and I had fallen in a cherry red heap right in its center. I leaned back and saw the sky, peaceful through the leaves. I ran my finger along the glossy side of a leaf and it was tough like old leather, like the chief’s bracers would be, worn slick and strong. I lay my head against a scratchy trunk and drew my body in, curling up inside the tree like a fort. Colors changed and my eyes grew heavy. The sun was sinking and dimness coming on, and the branches were turning from snow and blood and peach to the simple darks and lights of night.

I felt the cage-tree holding me, and yet I wasn’t there at all. I was in my apartment, shocked at the cold, unyielding tile under my toes. The farm on the wall screen lay ridiculously flat, and I laughed at myself, the self who used to know anything. I muttered at the apartment to turn up the heat, and then I had a thought—I asked the apartment to let me go. And with a rush, I was outside, looking back at my building against the night sky. I saw myself. My body was still there. In the windows all around me were people, above my head, right under my feet, laughing, watching screens, feeding each other. A couple making love.

I stood out against a flat pasture, a single hand against the glass.

On the real farm, then, I saw a girl playing bride. An imperfect crown of twigs and flowers sat on top of her tight braids. She laughed and threw her bouquet of grass up in the air and it fell all over a dog who sat panting in the sun. She looked up and almost seemed to see me. She smiled, and her teeth were enormous.

I tried to look around behind little Betta. The chief was there somewhere, in that yard, his thirteen-year-old self. I wanted to see him.

But all I could see was his face the way it looked now, in his twenties.
Now that I’m grown,
he’d said. That smile, it was devious and charming and too brief. His eyes were dark amber. “Stay,” he said, as if I might ever go. He reached for my face, and I lay my cheek in his hand and thought Gods, he’s touching me. I turned to kiss his fingers, and his palm was warm and dry against my lips, mine to touch, to own, all mine. I woke. My sweaty cheek stuck to my own hand, my whole body curled in the palm of a tree. Newly born and glowing.

I must have been attracted to Heirik all along, but I sat in the cup of that tree and felt the weight of realization. Oh, yes. I saw it now. How I’d assumed my interest in his voice was academic. How I felt defensive of him, but it was no more than I would feel for any outcast. The way my heart was peaceful and open around him, the way I looked for him coming from the fields at night, listened for him first thing in the morning. Those meant nothing.

Except that I’d fallen for him.

He’d given me a stream, after all. He’d given me his woods and animals. He talked to me, like he did with no one else. He told me to put my hand on his house and call it my own, and I wanted to. I wanted to hold him in the heart of that house and have it be ours. I would be the one, the only one, to touch him.

I floated home, a blissful idiot on Gerdi’s back. The world was navy blue, with white lichens glowing like starbursts in the dark. The horse stopped to sniff and chew things, or sometimes just stood and looked around, as if moving had no appeal. I didn’t care. I was reliving every moment I’d been with Heirik, every word he’d said since the day we met. They were few, and it was easy to recall them all.
Turn to me,
he’d said.
I only wanted to see your face.

His eyes frightened me the first time I saw him, at the coast, and again at the ravine. Now I wanted to look into them for long hours, to spend days learning the shades they went through with the changing of the light, sun-bleached wheat in morning to amber at night. I wanted to touch his dark brows, explore his mouth and bearded chin, my fingers small against his jaw. I wanted to see his fleeting smile, and maybe ask him if he’d let it linger a moment more.

Gerdi ate a flower and I thought languidly about his hair, how bits of it stuck to his forehead. I wanted to brush them away.

The old mare eventually steered us around to home. My heart picked up when we passed the bath, almost to the top of the hill and the stables. I dreaded the moment I would see him, and yet I desired it. I needed to look at him. Maybe I would be able to tell whether he felt some unutterably tender thing for me, too. Gods, could I hope he might be moved by the sight of my straw-like hair sticking to my sweaty forehead?

And then I saw the house waiting. His mother had shown him how to pace the walls.
When I’m alone
… Since Heirik was young, he’d known he would never have a companion. It was probable he wouldn’t even recognize desire in my eyes.

I brought Gerdi into the stable yard, removed her reins and saddle, and I felt an unusual stillness. An absence.

It was very late, and the dark was already lifting again. The light of two in the morning was beginning to rise, and with it the steam that emanated from everything. It rolled off the bath and hillsides and house, and the world was mysterious. I felt hidden inside a cloud. When Betta whispered behind me, her voice was like the voice of the mist itself.

“Hello, Ginn,” she said, and I turned to find her changed.

Her hair was a wind-stricken mess around her head and shoulders, the uneven waves of loosened braids everywhere. Long, it trailed down over her breasts, down her back. It was amazing she had such ample beauty always tied up on her head. She looked alive, sensual, her lips and cheeks stained pink. Her eyes sparked with surprise and delight. It was as though the wind were a lover who’d left her tousled and flushed.

“What happened?” I whispered.

“Nothing,” she said, and dipped her head, a way she had of hiding in plain sight. She was so changeable, one minute a direct and fearless woman, the next a blushing girl. “I was just out riding,” she said.

Riding, yes. I dropped into a waking dream of Heirik and I, riding into the depths of the ravine. I walked beside Betta into the house to go to sleep, both of us up too late, and I thought only of the chief. Of seeing him soon.

Scents of cold dirt and musty wool wafted out of the mudroom door, smelling like comfort. Peoples’ cloaks and boots were half gone and Lotta’s doll sat on the bench, propped against the wall, waiting. The latch on the chief’s door was closed tight, as always, giving away nothing. His work ax was gone. Not
Slitasongr
, the beautiful tool—or weapon—he carried like a companion, but the other one, that he took to the woods.