Beautiful Wreck (62 page)

I caught my breath and went still.

It was not Heirik. It was Brosa’s hand heavy on my hip.

The previous night came back to me in half-forgotten voices and images, bit by wretched bit. I had thrown off my clothes and slid into bed with Heirik. I’d done it to save his life. But I knew how we were. I’d felt the call of my body, and the solid and steady response of his. With the slightest movement, his hips had fit into mine. He’d pressed his lips to my forehead. I went away marked as his, without hope of living in that love. No hope of living in a daily state of grace, expressing my burning in a hundred small ways, making food and clothes for him, tending a cut on his hand, tying the leather strips of his gauntlets and braids in the morning. These notions were really over.

I felt sick and lightheaded, and more aware of the man who laid against my back now. I’d allowed this brother to embrace and soothe me. Taken powerfully by the radiance of Brosa, I’d let loose all my fresh anger and lust.

Brosa let me go, but something carnal and possessive had been awakened. I had the sense—nei, the knowledge—that his was not just a generous kiss in my loneliest hour. I added the memory of his animal eyes to the heap of shameful moments.

They were so much like his brother’s, those eyes, Heirik’s sun reflected on Brosa’s sea. I confused him with his brother more and more as I laid here, staring at tough grass and sand. I tried to remember the difference. I had to look and find it. I had to see Brosa right now and observe with cold objectivity that he was a separate man. Already open and easy when he was awake, I wondered how he looked in sleep.

I turned over, slowly and stealthily, barely breathing, until I could see.

The sun was making a first weak attempt at the horizon, and in the bluish pre-dawn, his white scar seemed to glow. It came so close to his eye, dipping into the crease of his eyelid like Heirik’s mark did. My heart sped up with fear for him, even now, though he’d cut himself a decade ago.
He was too pretty to be like me.
Heirik’s mournful voice echoed in my mind. I imagined this grieving boy with dead parents, desperate to belong with his big brother.

I dragged my objectivity back into place, like a heavy, sea-soaked dress. It was a physical struggle to put feelings behind me and just study. His nose was too short. His hair, though kissed with joyful gold, was a mess. I imagined the sea green that hid under heavy eyelids. His eyes, when he thought no one was looking, seemed tired. His eyebrows menacing. He slept with gravity. Rather than the reckless abandon of a child, this seriousness was what sleep released.

The heaviness would be forgotten when he woke and smiled. He laughed a lot, so hard that he often slumped against a wall to recover, thumped a friend’s back, raised a cup. He was constantly alive with a kind of jovial kinship. I couldn’t quite understand that this was him. Mirth was his strongest feature, a part of him as much as an eye or ear. It was missing as he slept, and it was almost as though Brosa was absent.

His beard was trimmed close, except for a ski slope of a point on his chin that made him into a benevolent blond devil. Svana’s touch—she had trimmed his hair just days ago. I felt a pang of guilt as I secretly touched my fingertips to her handiwork.

I ghosted my finger along his bottom lip, afraid to wake him, but he slept like a stone. The skin there was unbearably smooth, so soft I could barely feel him. The memory of his tongue sent a rush of blood to sweet places. I didn’t want to get up and run from him, run down the sandy hill and slip into the chaos of waking bodies to pretend I’d never been here. I wanted to stay.

A violent shake startled me, and Kit’s fierce whisper. “Get up, Woman. What are you doing?”

A good and simple question. I tried to imagine how I looked, lying on the ground with Brosa, one finger lingering on his sleeping lips.

Kit glanced down the hill to assure herself that no one else was looking. “It’s a good thing we came up here so early.” It was then I noticed Ranka on tiptoes, trying to see what was happening while her mother pushed her behind her skirts.

I sat up quickly, my drowsiness gone with a nearly audible snap, furs and cloaks tumbling off me. Brosa stirred and opened his eyes.

He was instantly charming. “Vaenn dagan,” he said to Kit, with a wink.
Beautiful morning.

“And you stop, Man.” Kit had been instantly softened by his charm, but she managed to add a “já” that sounded like a deeply indignant tisk. Reproof slipping into affection. “What are you trying to do to Ginn?”

“Not a thing,” I snapped. I stood and brushed black sand from my skirts. “He built a fire and talked to me.”

One of her eyebrows rose in doubt.

Brosa sat up, a broad smile on his face, his own eyebrows, and his hands, raised in a gesture of adorable innocence. Kit hissed affectionately at him, and pulled me along with her, down to the tents for morning meal.

I sat in the scraggly woods of the high ground. A number of women surrounded me, spread out in all directions, dresses sprawled out and snagging on roots and juniper. We picked through the brush to find gripe grass.

“Or you can call it toothflower,” Ranka told me, and she pointed out her good teeth. “We ate it all winter.”

Of course I knew that, having eaten it all winter in stews, or by stolen, uncooked handfuls in the pantry. The only vegetable. Ranka showed me anyway, how to spot the delicate cup-shaped leaves, each curled around a sparkling bit of dew.

She never tired of informing me of everything, and it was nice to let her voice blend into the sussurations of women all around me, and the waves far down on the beach. To let her chatter and announce and instruct in tones that jumped and fell.

I pulled at grass and willed my stomach to stop roiling, but the more my thoughts circled the more it grumbled. I would silence my thoughts then for moments at a time, picking at the greens. Feather-light, they drifted into my basket.

“Look, Lady!” Ranka was calling me.

I gasped when I saw her.

Her lips were stained a deathly blue. She laughed at my surprise, and the darkness dripped like raven-colored blood. It spilled from her mouth onto her white chin. My vision narrowed until I saw only her laughing face, stained teeth flashing, tongue reddish blue. Her eyes shone. The raven, come before death.

“It is just berries,” she teased me.

Betta asked, “Is everything alright, Ginn?”

I shook myself and looked around, pressing my hands to the ground to steady myself. My voice wobbled more than I’d hoped. “Berries?”

“Já, they are juniper,” Ranka began, and she told me they were second year berries that overwintered on the plants. I pictured them hunkered down low under dark, clutching branches. The juniper plants sprawled throughout this little wood above the sea.

Her finger brushed my lips, applying some to me, too. I felt her fingertip stop and touch the space between my teeth. She was still fascinated by it.

“You finish,” she said, and turned away to do someone else’s.

I sat still with my finger halfway across my lower lip, feeling the skin where Brosa’s kiss had been. I’d cheapened and confused my own heart. So weak, reprehensible, to cling to someone who was so obviously a substitute. Gods, how embarrassing.

I looked around me at these women, every one a blue-stained witch, and wondered how many knew that I’d woken in Brosa’s arms. Probably everyone, all over this beach. The chief included. A pang of regret came quick in my chest. I could hardly imagine the pain it would cause Heirik, to hear that news. When in fact, my heart and everything else about me were all for Heirik.

But I was angry at that coward. My emotions veered and swerved.

Ripping gripe grass felt good. I yanked away at plants and thought of the litany of what I’d given him. My heart, my body, the work of my hands. My faith in a future that he couldn’t see. Or wouldn’t risk enough to grasp.

He’d pushed me away a dozen times. This would be the last one, I swore.

The girls and I emerged from the brush with our baskets of moss and greens and tripped down the hill toward the sand. I looked up and noticed Brosa hacking away with a hatchet at something gross and glistening, and as naturally as though we’d called his name, he turned to see us. He stopped chopping and looked up, seemed to notice our supernatural lipstick. Then he put a hand to his heart. “One kiss, Lady,” he called to me. “It’s all I need.”

The men all stopped hacking and looked up. The girls around me laughed, and I ducked my head shyly, a lovestruck maid. He stretched his arms broadly to appeal to me once more. “ I swear I don’t stink …” he shouted. “Too bad.” Everyone laughed lovingly at his charm, and I found myself smiling despite my unsettled mood.

He set himself to chopping again, but not before he gave me one of his devious winks. Gods, he was too easy.

The whale was broken down efficiently, made into parts—muscles, organs, blubber, bones—every one precious and packaged for home. Gone so that it left nothing but a ghostly impression in the sand and an assortment of curious birds.

Hundreds of eggs were packed in Hildur’s nest-like cups, every shade of blue-green, from sun-drenched ocean to a shell so pale it seemed tinted by the exhalation of a sea spirit. Juniper berries for drink and medicine were packed in a big basket, and a leather bag full of shells would serve us as scoops, spoons, ladles.

We were ready for home, but we lingered one more night for a celebration, to thank the gods and the whale. Boys and girls gathered shellfish for our evening meal. Ale and butter were taken from the sledges the thralls had brought from home.

I sat on the rise above the beach, leaning against the big silver log that was starting to feel like my own. Still wanting to be far from happiness. It wasn’t for me. Not with everything that had happened these few nights, what Heirik had done to me, what I had allowed to happen between me and Brosa. Thoughts circled like an infinity of crows.

Betta and Kit thankfully scattered them by appearing with horns of ale. It tasted sour and watery, but it gave me numbness and freedom. I thought Kit must have had another cup or two already. She was happy in the dark, free of Ranka and the baby. She smiled at me, then watched me watching Heirik.

He was bent with some kind of terrible mood. Sitting on a fur-strewn setberg—a seat-shaped rock—that acted as a high seat. Removed and above his family, he was all striking coldness. He sat uncomfortably, drinking and watching. Bunched in irritation, without his typical poise, he was almost beastly.

“Já, he is fearsome tonight,” Kit said, deftly reading my mind.

He softened just once, when Áki’s father approached and thanked him formally for his son’s life.

“There is nothing to thank,” Heirik said gently and genuinely, as though taking the man by the shoulder with his words. “Only remember, when the boy is old enough, he trains with me with ax and spear.”

The man ducked his head, probably terrified, and yet thankful, blessed.

So smoothly, Heirik had turned a father’s humility into great honor. And Heirik himself was transformed by the task. These times when he took adulation from this family still thrilled and saddened me, and I imagined they did the same to him. He would feed them with the work of his own hands, save them at the cost of his own life, and he would and had killed for them. At once a father and a savage. No wonder they were so devoted to him.

People murmured to Áki’s father as he returned to his family by the fire.

And in the man’s wake, Brosa came forward. Heirik instantly returned to his foul mood. He sat up straighter at his brother’s approach, an uncharacteristic rigidity to his spine.

Brosa dropped to one knee. He planted his ax before him like a sword, as though pledging his fealty. Everyone hushed.

He was stunning. Brosa’s clothes were new and opulent, brought from his trading voyage. So crisp they shone. He wore leather as blond as his own beard, lighter than any I’d seen in this land, knee-high boots strapped tight around his great calves. Cool white linen showed at his wrists, unbound by any gauntlets, his sleeves hung loose over silver bracelets. His shirt was open at his throat, just enough to allow the glint of Thor’s hammer to show.

The pale leather and linen contrasted with a tunic dyed the deepest auburn with an underlying touch of crimson—a difficult and rare color to achieve. Embroidered with the palest yellows that reflected and lit up his beard and the streaks in his hair. And oh, his hair. Parted in the middle, he’d plaited it tight against his head the way that Betta wore hers, but just to behind his ears. The rest tumbled wild, halfway down his back. Even with my fingers caught up in it, I hadn’t realized how very long and heavy his hair was.