Beautiful Wreck (64 page)

“Ginn!” His shout came from the darkness.

He ran to me, called to me, and I stood in a blurred panic, found him. I went to him. I burrowed into Brosa’s chest.

“Woman, shhh, what is wrong?”

He shushed me until I could answer. The truth, I thought. “I was so scared, alone here.”

One truth, anyway.

“Oh nei, elskan mín, nei.” His arms crushed me, sorry he’d failed to protect me already, and not even betrothed an hour.
My darling.
He held me tight. He was suffocatingly large and ardent and it felt good. “I won’t leave your side now.” He kissed the top of my head, kissed my hair, a promise.

I turned my head to rest on his chest, and looked up the beach. I saw Heirik there, and my heart sank. I felt the pressure of twelve hundred years of rightness and desire. I had traversed time to find him and no other. These strong arms, Brosa’s, wouldn’t work. I would always mourn Heirik.

He stood outside his tent, arms folded across his chest, looking to the sea. He appeared much as I felt. Miserable. Contemplating a numb death. Then into his solitude walked Svana.

As scared as she was of Heirik, she came to appeal to him anyway. She wanted his brother for herself. She would ask the chief to overturn this crazy decision, just as I had. I couldn’t imagine she’d sway Heirik in some way that I could not. But it was worth a hope, that she’d wheedle and try.

Instead, something odd happened. I couldn’t make out the words, just the song of her voice, and it was not beseeching or fearful. Her voice was lilting, happy, a little bird chirping. In his typical manner, Heirik looked away while he listened to her. He looked down the beach, and I wondered if he could see me. Me, in his brother’s arms.

Then Svana brushed Heirik’s wrist, as anyone might when sharing laughter, casual conversation. I could just make it out from here. Svana touched him.

Heirik didn’t pull away or even stiffen with shock. He simply turned and walked beside her to the big fire.

Brosa felt me shiver and murmured “shhhh” and stroked my back. I was so lost.

“Sit with me, Litla.”

I recoiled at the familiar name. Gods, it was strange how he chose that. “Please,” I asked into his chest. “Please don’t call me that.”

He pulled back to look at my face, and then I saw comprehension and surprise grow in his eyes. I thought maybe he hadn’t really understood it until just now, or believed it. That Heirik and I didn’t just feel attracted to each other. We had a relationship. We were in love. Heirik had a sweet, intimate name for me.

“I will not again,” he promised, and he picked me up like a child and carried me back to where it was dry. He settled me beside him. His hand was warm and confident on my chin. Sea colored eyes found mine, and he smiled his big-hearted smile. And I melted. Exhausted, distressed, needy. Soaked. I sat under the weight of his arm on my shoulders.

“Brosa” I struggled feebly. His comforting, darling nature surrounded me. I had to hurt him now, not wait until it was worse. “I love your brother, not you,” I told him. “He is my heart and blood.”

“I know.” He was calm and unsurprised. “I have seen it.”

He surprised me with his honesty in answer to mine, and with an easy pragmatism. “I don’t love you, either. But my brother will not have you. And I will.” He touched a finger right between my eyebrows and slowly traced the slope of my nose. Somehow it wasn’t patronizing, it was slow and charming and seductive. “You and I will grow.”

Gods, how far I had come. Lost in a wide universe that this man didn’t even comprehend. Somewhere so different that love didn’t matter to a good marriage. True love was something to give up if one had to, and new love could grow as casually and inexorably as a wildflower on a roof.

The fact that I was attracted to him was a bonus, já? That I had found and secured such a beauty as Brosa, such a profoundly happy and honorable man, was the dumbest, incredible luck.

“We will figure this out later,” he said. It was a statement, not a question.

“I will hurt you,” I told him.

“Já, well, let’s enjoy ourselves tonight before you get started on that.”

I actually smiled. In the heart of this miserable night, he made me laugh.

The morning came brisk and clear, with a fine, friendly spray off the ocean, as if it had never been a roiling beast trying to steal the chief and Áki. Trying to steal me. I walked along its edge, skirting the foam and feeling sorrier than ever in all my life. Pressure and dull pain tried to fight their way out of my skull, and I held my wrap tight around my shoulders. I’d pulled my hair together tight, but bits of it splayed and stuck to my face.

Betta bounded up behind me, loud and fast, and she threw her arm around my shoulder. “Too many horns at night, and a woman is thirsty all morning.” She laughed at my expense, and surely to mask my dark mood in front of Hár’s daughters.

“Too true,” Thora added, looking peaked herself.

In fact, Dalla, Kit and Betta all looked drained and wan, wrung out by drink from last night’s party. Svana was conspicuously absent.

They wanted to talk about me and Brosa. They wanted to say how very lucky I was, how gorgeous a husband, young and rich and strong as a boat. He would have his own ship made, they said, a rumor that floated on the morning breeze.

Everyone knew I had a strange relationship with the chief, a kind of intimacy and passion that no one wanted to imagine or examine. My betrothal to Brosa took care of that once and for all. No more swiping at charms or whispering in corners. Their sails filled with relief, they bore down on me with excited plans and questions.

My mind skimmed over the tops of their words, dipping down once in a while, listening just enough to say “hmmm” or “já, I know.” I tried not to hear phrases, just looked at the sand and pictured my lover sitting on his horse by this water, his shoulders strong. I raised my eyes to the row of little caves worn into the rockface and remembered the first time we came here together, how his hand looked when I touched it for the first time, we sat right in that spot, right over there.

“My Da will marry, too.”

Thora’s words made me snap to attention. Hár would marry?

“I heard him myself, talking to the chief last night. He said he would not comment on Brosa, but he had the matter of his own need of a wife.” Heirik and Hár had then moved too far away for her to hear more.

“To think of my old Da,” Thora laughed. “And thirteen babes already. Is it not enough for his balls’ pride?” She and Dalla laughed hard.

I waited a moment to be safe before glancing at Betta. Her face was a mask. She turned away and stooped to pick up a shell, while the girls chattered about who the impending wife could possibly be, from what house, and would she come to live with us, and when, until they soon ran the subject out and turned to my betrothal again.

When Betta and I had a chance, we stole off high up the slope above the beach. The moment we were far enough away, she fell to the ground in a heap of skirts. She looked up at me, and her heart was laid open.

I sat down beside her and put my arms around her, and she shook without a sound, for long moments. She drew a few deeper breaths, one more harsh inhalation, and then she spoke against my shoulder. “I knew, já?” She said. “That he was important, that he would be needed someday, for the family.”

She drew back and looked down into her own lap, seeming to be fascinated with her own white fingers, how they gripped one another. “But now that it is happening, it hurts so much.” Tears broke on the last few words.

I knew that stunned feeling. I knew how it felt to sit where Betta was, staring into a future without someone.

She looked around herself, behind her, as though she’d lost something, and then she lay back in the brush, her wide green eyes seeking the sky. I laid down beside her, and the heavens sat there, indifferent, a blue-steel gray above us.

How would Betta live with Hár’s wife in our house? How could she go on while he held someone else right before her? How could he even do it, for that matter? Betta would need unnatural, impossible courage to watch while he walked out with his wife at night, bedded her there in the pantry, had babies upon babies. My mind raced with the horror of it. The litany of questions that applied the same to me. How would I live with my own husband?

I could never really agree to marry Brosa. When the shock passed, I would really talk with him. I would hurt him, soon. His natural smile would fade because of me.

Men—the whole idea of them—sat like a bundled ache in my stomach. I glanced at Betta and considered whether we could fall in love without them. But no, I loved her, but I didn’t feel that way. I felt something so utterly different. I felt lust for, I had to admit, two brothers. Love for one.

“I knew this would come,” she said to the sky. “I already stopped seeing the fool.” She sat up tall, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and blinked hard, as if to cleanse herself of sadness. But her voice was a hoarse whisper. “I just … wanted him.”

The way she caressed the words, it was like she was touching Hár’s face right now. I could see right into her, feel what it was like when she watched him move and smile. Someday she might have marveled at his features while he slept, perhaps seen them echoed in the face of her child.

Her heart had crashed ahead without knowing how difficult this would be. She couldn’t have imagined it. I snuggled against her side, as if we rocked in the same leaky boat.

It was afternoon when Hár cut his finger off.

Betta and I came out of the woods and brush, full baskets in our hands and determination in her eyes. She’d made peace with needing to face him, and once she’d made up her mind, her courage couldn’t wait. She was that little girl sometimes, the one who wanted a simple, happy life. She needed to see Hár’s face to know it was true, that her hopes were over. It broke my heart to watch her tripping down the big slope toward the beach, baskets and braids swaying, me right behind.

About a third of the way down, we heard a furious bellow followed by a series of poetic Viking curses about goats’ balls and troll piss, loud enough to carry a half mile. Betta dropped her baskets and ran like a scared little kid. I dropped mine too, and matched her.

If I focused on the driftwood, I didn’t need to watch Hár’s hand bleed, didn’t have to see his finger lying in the sand. The wood looked pretty, snowy gray dripping with ruby and cherry and amber. Blood soaked his clothes, and his ax lay slick and red at his feet. We arrived just in time to see him kick it viciously out of his way, calling it something I could only translate as
incompetent cock sucker
. He stomped to the nearby fire, where men had been hammering and sharpening their blades for the past four days.

He sat on a log, as if to warm himself and contemplate the stupidity of his accident. He opened his palm and considered his left hand, now missing half its first finger. Magnus came breathlessly with a soaked cloth. Hár wrapped it—not around his wound, but around his remaining fingers, wincing only slightly though it was streaming with salt water. He curved his fingers into a fist, and without hesitation he thrust his hand into the fire.

Betta turned white as snow and sank to her knees. She rocked back onto her heels, then up again on her knees, her hands like claws in the folds of her skirt, wanting to run to him. But she stayed away. She had such an iron will.

A dozen people had gathered. Thora fussed at her father’s side, and Magnus knelt to ask if Hár needed anything. Hár answered with a roar at both of them. “Get off me!” He grumbled more curses, looked around and barked “Let Betta come.”