Beautiful Wreck (26 page)

“Fine, Herra,” I said.
Chief
, I called him.
Sir.
And then I bent to whisper nonsense to Drifa, to calm and settle her. In the way of animals, she’d absorbed Heirik’s tension, and her white tail twitched. She took a few steps in place, adjusting herself whenever he touched her. He stopped short of picking me up by the waist and planting me forcibly on her back.

He went to get Vakr and I waited, unsure of whether I should even move. In the silence of my indecision, I heard Magnus whisper, inside one of the animal stalls. “The chief is eager for an early snow.” I heard a girl’s voice, an urgent shushing. Was it Betta? Hidden with him in the dark? Was he her secret crush? Nei, he wasn’t old enough for her. And besides, she wouldn’t sink to taking kisses in the stink of a stable. Not Betta.

The chief came alongside me on Vakr, then. “We’ll go,” he told me. I barely caught him as he rode away.

Dead silent, we walked near one another and yet apart. I could count the sighs and footsteps of the horses. The only sound that joined them was the satiny stirring of the leaves where they curled on their branches. It was a rushing sound like water, and yet dry as fall.

With long moments to think along the way, Magnus’s words caught up with me. An early snow? He was joking, somehow, about Heirik taking me to the woods, but I didn’t know what he meant. I glanced at Heirik, and thanked the gods he hadn’t heard the boy. In his mood, I imagined Magnus would be walking around without an arm.

We rode for more than a half hour, around the far side of the woods to a place where none of us ever went to forage. The trees were thicker here, the snowblooms opening around each one like a knee-high skirt of white and electric green. The blooms ran wild and untouched, thriving, each cluster of blossoms almost as big around as my head.

Heirik tramped on them with ease. He left Vakr by the edge of the woods and plunged in.

I left Drifa and followed him, pushing through the densely packed birches at the forest’s edge. I thought he would deftly turn and duck to move like a quiet animal through the forest, but nei. He attacked it. He swatted big branches—the size of small trunks themselves—out of his face, and let them whip back once he passed. A papery rain of leaves fell on me as I came along behind.

His ax,
Slitasongr
, rested at his side, secure in his belt. He was the one who’d picked this lonely place. Ill and silent dread came as I looked at that gorgeous ax. I wondered, in the way of strange, sudden thoughts, what it would feel like if he killed me. Alone here, miles away and twelve hundred years from help. There were times when I watched him and spoke with him and he was so familiar. I often felt like he was no different than me, or more, sometimes like he was part of me. Then something would remind me of what he was. A creature so wholly different.

Heirik turned sideways to push through the spaces between trees, while I walked through with ease. The birches reached several feet above Heirik’s head. Still, they felt sheltering and sky-high. Their leaves filtered the light and formed patterns on his gold and brown wool. Shifting dark smudges against the soft yellow tones. Sparks of light caught his hair. We came to what he must’ve thought was a good place. To harvest, yes. We could have done it anywhere, but here was where he ran out of steam and stopped. He dropped baskets on the ground and shears fell out, lost among the brush.

The angelica sprawled here, searching for sun, rather than towering in thick stands like it did in open land. The forest felt cool in a lovely way, under the canopy, not cold but fresh.

Where we usually harvested, closest to the house, the women showed me how to keep the plants flowering, always just one more time before autumn, when we would let them go to seed and collect the tiny brown kernels for even more uses. In fall—now, I thought with a start—we would take the seeds and roots. I supposed it didn’t matter out here in the far woods. There grew enough blooms to make mouthwash for a horde of Vikings. But still, I knelt among the flowers gently and showed Heirik how to cut the tops where the branches met, so the plants could live over winter and bloom again in spring.

He crouched down in the brush. He took his knife from his belt, strangled a thick handful of plants and beheaded a dozen at once.

“Slow down, Chief,” I said playfully. His eyes darted to mine, angry, like he intended to reprimand me.

The intention died, though, when he met my eyes. After a long morning of tension and acrimony and confusion, Heirik finally really looked at me, and he gave something up. Something that had been gnawing at him all day. He was so tired from it. He seemed to fall into my eyes like a child into a nest of blankets, and I gathered him with my gaze. I wished I could gather him in my arms, too. I swallowed, gripped my knife handle.

Looking around, I finally saw where he’d brought me, alone among the twisting branches and rambling autumn snow.

It became hard to talk. “They won’t flower again if you do them that way. For two years.” I showed him, again, the little vees where the stems branched off. “Cut above.” I held one stem and pointed, and he took it from me. Our hands were close together, our knees almost touching where we knelt.

“You don’t remember anything,” he stated without looking at me.

My heart stopped for a second. Whenever anyone questioned me about my past, the word stranded sprang to mind. It became harder and harder to lie. The chief could keep me or send me away as easily as changing his shirts.

Today I was more scared than ever, the horrible crunch of bodies against the back door still vivid in my mind. Hár and he had fought about sending me away.

Oh.

They’d fought.

A tangle of logic that had been confused in my gut all night and all morning started to come undone. So slowly, I could almost feel it unwind. Hár had told Heirik to send me away, and Heirik had fought him. He hadn’t agreed. He wanted me to stay.

Heirik wasn’t mad at me. He was mad at his uncle.

Relief felt luscious, stealing over my skin like silk. I felt so stupid for being afraid, felt remorse for that tiny part of me that watched his ax, as though he might ever hurt me. A realization came, that maybe he’d never been alone like this with a woman. Maybe he wasn’t angry at all. Just terrified.

The pain of lying to him was always quick and brutal. “I remember scents and colors,” I offered. “Sometimes.”

“Já?” He seemed surprised. I hadn’t mentioned such a thing before.

I treaded lightly. “The color of a dress, my hands in water.” I looked down at my fingers and thought of vents moving cleansed air. They were true memories, sure, but with each one I spoke I felt dirtier, a liar. I couldn’t tell him what I did really remember. A great many things. Blinding light that shone even in the evernight. Buildings so tall you could live on top of a thousand other people. Farms as flat as wall screens. Writing behind my eyelids. So many changes of clothes, you didn’t wear the same thing once all week.

With drawn brows and silence, I must have looked upset. “It is alright, Ginn,” he said. “You don’t have to remember anything.” His voice promised me safety, a shield against the vast unknown.

I wanted him to hold me. In the cramped longhouse, people touched me all the time, but not with affection. Only Betta really hugged me. I wanted Heirik’s arms around me, just tenderly, let alone with desire. I thought of him living with that same absence and longing, for ten years or more. Since his mother’s death. A lifetime.

“What do you think about?”

He spoke like he was coaxing me, drawing me back.

It was an interesting question. Without a past, what would I have to ponder or dream about? This morning in the field, I’d thought about nothing for big swaths of time, and it was so satisfying and good. It would be easy to live that way, if I really had nothing to reminisce about or regret. Sometimes like today cutting the grass, or sometimes when I rode on Drifa or slipped a needle through greasy wool, I gave in entirely.

“Learning what’s in front of me,” I told him. What I thought about was just that—doing each one thing.

And him. I thought a lot about him.

I’d had the feeling before when I was alone with Heirik, that I could tell him the truth. He would know me, and he would believe and forgive me. But when I opened my mouth to start, I was overcome with the fear of losing him and everything I had here. If he thought I was insane, what would happen to me then? What did they do with crazy women here, in this time and place? I might lose my home, let alone my tenuous hold on his heart.

Heirik was fast becoming precious to me. More profound than that, it was like he was becoming my house itself, my home, my blood. He was so known to me, from the moment I saw him, like knowing my own body. And I wasn’t even giving him the chance to really know me. I wasn’t brave enough to tell him who I was. I hid myself every time we talked. Now, I wanted to give him something. Some safe piece of my heart.

“I think about voices.”

He stopped cutting and stared.

“Voices.” He thought a moment. “Anyone’s?” He asked gingerly, testing my sanity.

“Mmm, all of them really. Sometimes the whole wash of them.” I was forehead deep in stems and thoughts of the field came to me, the entirety of the voices of the longhouse making a path like my scythe blade. “Just … how we all sound when we talk. The men coming in from the fields, from far off sound like sheepdogs.”

He gave a soft and amused “já,” clearly thinking about it for the first time.

“And then when you think about a single person’s voice …” I hadn’t shared even the most basic thoughts about speech with anyone. I hadn’t talked about anything I loved in so long. I started bubbling like Ranka. “A word can be the same. You and I can say ‘hestur’ já? But our voices add depth and meaning …” I was talking so freely about words coming from another’s chest. He and I could say anything, and it would never be the same. He was a man, half a foot taller than me, with Viking bones—the whole instrument on a different scale than mine. “Our bodies,” I started to explain. “Our mouths …”

I saw him and trailed off.

He was sitting up on his heels in the plants, watching me from under dark lashes. His hair was tangled across his forehead. It was hot in the woods, and I wanted very much to take his hand and press his fingers to my lips.

“Munni?” The word for
mouths
slipped from his tongue, a burning ember.

I continued, trying to recapture the conversation. “How we hold ourselves,” I said. “What we do with our hands.”

Gods, everything I said seemed lascivious. I bent to my job, turning away from him to sever a dozen heads.

When I turned back, he had stopped helping me entirely. Not that he’d been doing much anyway. Now he leaned back against a tree, sitting on a crush of underbrush, his shirts loosened at his throat. He had one knee bent, his wrist resting on it, knife dangling casually from two fingers. He looked off into the thickness of trees.

“Your voice …” he said. He tested the knife’s balance, shifting it between his fingers. Hesitated for just a moment, intent on the far woods. “Your voice is deeper than it should be.”

I whispered back, my heart beating hard. “Than it should be?”

“A strong voice for a small one like you.”

The way he said
small one
sounded like a love song. Like a hundred confessions. The way his voice descended, softened, cradled the words. He’d been listening to me, looking at me. I stood inches over the women of his family, and still he found me little. The way he said litla, it was like he held me gently in his hand and was in awe of me. Small but strong.