Beautiful Wreck (34 page)

The shears in his palm were an elegant if primitive tool, a single curved loop of iron, held under tension. Triangular blades at each end came together like scissors. He weighed them thoughtfully, flipped them over in his hand.

He flicked the shears to indicate one of the sheep. A solid old wether, immensely woolly, dispassionately chewing. The shepherd pulled it by its tail, away from the others. It reared up, and he took it by the shoulders from behind, dragging it over to Heirik.

In the quiet, Heirik knelt and took the sheep to him by the fleece at its jowls. He and the animal had a short, silent communication. Then he stood so that he straddled the sheep, the animal’s face tucked between his thighs, and he began clipping at the forehead.

The shears snicked, crisper and more precise than I expected. He worked from one ear to the other, now pulling back the sheep’s chin with his hand, so he could turn it from side to side. Heirik worked across the back of the animal’s neck, letting the fleece roll down, until soon it was a ruff around its shoulders. He followed the same pattern until he was shearing down its back. The fleece was a thick blanket, folding back in one piece to let a velvety, vulnerable creature emerge. Its head lay still against Heirik’s thigh. Mesmerized.

By the end, Heirik was kneeling, straddling the sheep on the ground, to finish the haunches and lower belly. Then the animal was bare. Heirik let the shears drop to the ground, and stood and turned the wiggling sheep around to face forward toward us, then locked it again between his thighs. The chief picked up the fleece by two corners. He unfurled it against the sky, its perfect shape lifted high on a breeze. His linen sleeves moved with the breeze, too, and a ray of sun lit up two thick silver bracelets on his forearms. There were whoops and hollers and clinks and dull thumps of wooden cups.

Hildur took the fleece from him, and she looked elated and young, almost kind. We would make it through winter, then, and prosper. For this one moment, she didn’t seem to mind that we had a masculine and potent chief. In a little ale-induced trance, I watched his thighs where he still held the sheep. I wanted to climb on Heirik’s lap and feel him rise to me, proof that the test was right.

Then Heirik held up his hands, palms up, and the hush was immediate. The air trembled with expectation and the repressed need to celebrate, but everyone waited for something important.

“Freyr,” he began. He kept his hands raised, and as he spoke he looked past us all toward the sea. His voice was clear, as though it could carry all the way there, to reach the god himself as he sailed his wave-steed.

“You rule over rain and the shining of the sun. Abundance and pleasure. Fruitfulness of seasons, of unions. We are mindful.”

He grasped the sheep’s ear, drew its head back, and with swift precision slit its throat. A sure cut, blood flowed fast and free around Heirik’s bare feet. He squatted to gather a shallow handful, brought the blood to his lips, then stood and held the cup of his palms up to the sky. A gentle and violent creature.

“This is our gift.”

A sudden breeze lifted a red spray from his hands. He dropped them to his sides, and blood ran from his fingertips in thin streams. It pooled around his feet and the body of the fallen sheep. Heirik opened incandescent eyes, and for a moment, he was transformed into the face and soul of the god Freyr himself. Irises of lit amber, hair like black flame. And then he smiled. It was a mischievous half-smile, seductive, smeared with blood. He called “Hár, up!”, challenging his uncle to do better, and everyone cheered. The party had begun.

I sat stunned.

I turned to look at Betta, but she was gone. And when I looked at Svana, her pale cream cheeks were infused with a becoming pinkness. She sighed, eyes fixed on Heirik, and it was dreamy and unsettling. Her gaze was hungry. Gods, it was true. A fertility god had been invoked, and it was real. Could even Svana be moved by its presence enough to see past her disgust? Oh, nei, nei, nei.

He came toward her, and I had a brief and gut-wrenching vision of them together. Of this world had I never come. Svana would want this all—this house, this family, and eventually in spite of her fear, this man. And once she reached out to Heirik, he would be drawn to her, and they would find their way. My heart raced.

But he wasn’t coming for Svana. He was coming for me.

Heirik walked toward me with intent, and I saw the man I’d seen in the wildflowers, in the woods, times a hundred. He had drunk the power of his god and was lit with it, emboldened and free. With a lithe motion, he made wiping his mouth on his shirts seem like poetry. Then he was standing close to me, his hand against the wall at my side. He leaned into it.

“Ginn.” The way he looked at me, sweet and speculative, I would have done anything for him.

“Spin that fleece.”

It was the last thing I’d expected, and I laughed. I was moved by his demand, that he would want that from me for this first fleece of fall, the blessed one. His. At the same time, I guessed the wool weighed five pounds. I was aroused by his nearness and playfulness. I’d say yes, yes, yes.

“You don’t want me to do that.”

“Já, I do.” He smiled again, his lips still stained.

“I’m very, very bad at it.” I was serious. “You can have the thread for tooth floss.”

“Then I will clean my teeth a happy man until I’m with the ravens.” He smacked the wall and walked away to see how Hár was measuring up.

Dozens of thoughts beat like wings in my head. Disbelief. Awakening, physically and in my heart. A wistful sense that this is what it would be like, if he were my husband, coming to see me and flirt with me. Maybe someday stand close against my back and nuzzle my neck like the other couples in this yard. Elated and flushed, I wanted another drink. I thought someone would have to wash the blood from his clothes. I wanted to ask him if I could take care of such things for him, with him. But I knew. I knew that his freedom and intimacy would be gone the very next time we met.

It wasn’t, actually.

The effect of the shearing and blessing was lasting and strong. It suffused everyone, all over the farm. More than one couple wandered off together, suspiciously close to one another if not hand in hand. Hár and Betta leaned against the back of the house, talking casually, intimately. I had the urge to run over and cover and hide them with a giant cloak, ask them what the hell they thought they were doing.

I felt it myself, like a directive in my gut, a desire to take and consume Heirik. To roll in the grass and comb his hair back off his neck with my fingers and bite and kiss his throat.

Where was he?

And where was Svana? The thought of her made me uneasy, like I’d lost track of a dangerous little animal. I looked around to see where she’d gone.

Scanning the gathering and not finding her or Heirik, I told myself a lot of scattered things. Svana was afraid of him. She wouldn’t go off with him, ever. But she was fifteen years old and self-centered, and things were chaotic at her age. Heirik was so young. He didn’t speak to women ever. Only me. I wondered if he even knew how to deflect Svana. And yet. It was Heirik’s place alone to tell Svana if he didn’t want her attention. I had no right to demand anything. He wasn’t mine.

Still, something possessive clawed its way up into my throat and wouldn’t go down until I’d found her.

She
was
with him. About to turn the corner of the house, I heard her voice, tiny and querulous. “Herra?” she asked.

“Svana,” Heirik answered, surprised, his voice like golden light.

It was all I heard before I rounded the corner. I simply stared at them, standing several feet away, and they stared back, a dumb moment. I gasped in surprise when Betta slipped an arm around my shoulders from behind, her timing impeccable.

“There you are!” She drew two other women into the conversation, both of whom wanted to see my beaded necklace.

The girls seemed afraid of me at first, like cats reaching out curled paws. I tried to seem human and normal, as though I hadn’t come from the sea, as though I hadn’t worn Signé’s clothes. They bent their heads to see my necklace, to touch its cunning needle case and winding beads, and I watched over their heads.

Heirik broke off standing with Svana and came toward us.

I thought the two women would fall down and tremble at the sight of him. They used the most formal term of address, calling him their chieftain. Heirik nodded silently to them and to Betta, dismissing them all, then set his eyes on me, and I was very much not dismissed.

“Walk with me.”

He smelled like cinnamon and ale and blood.

“Yes, Chief,” I told him, with a nod that verged on a bow. He walked away, leaving me to smile goodbye to Betta, and to the tiny women, who stood astounded and sorry.

I went off after Heirik, and he led me past the house and the stables, down to the steep grassy slope where we could sit hidden from the house.

He bent his knees and rested his wrists on them. Without gauntlets, his sleeves hung loose, tinged with blood. Stupidly jealous and filled with lust, I wanted to slide my fingers inside those sleeves, touch his bracelets, feel his pulse. His eyes were still electric, drawing out the autumn gold in the grass.

He wasn’t smiling.

“I didn’t like that, Ginn.”

I drew my brows together. What had I done?

“You bowed down to me. You called me Chief.”

I settled into the grass and drew my knees up, too, and wrapped my arms around them. “I’ve been instructed to call you that and nothing else,” I countered with the gentle looseness of two cups of ale.