Beautiful Wreck (63 page)

He bent his radiant head before Heirik, then looked up at his brother. Silence and tension hovered. This was something special, a declaration, or a request so great as to warrant splendid clothes and a stance of submission. Something drew me to my feet, to stand and listen. Betta and Kit stood beside me.

“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.