Beautiful Wreck (27 page)

He lowered his eyes, seeming surprised by himself. I could see his realization dawn. How very much he had revealed and offered with those simple words. Then he looked up, direct and challenging, and I wondered what he expected. For me to cringe, or bolt. Or perhaps he hoped for the same from me, yes.

“Your voice …” I told him. But in a thousand years I could never describe the voice that had soothed me, steadied me amidst constant fear, that I listened for every morning and fell asleep to every night. The voice I responded to with a rush of blood, my lover’s voice. I could never explain what it did inside my chest, throughout my body every time he spoke. “Your voice changes,” I started. “It’s rough like black sand, and then it turns warm and smooth like melting butter.”

“Butter?” He laughed. Rare big laughter like a flash of wings disturbing the brush.

“Mmm hmm.” I casually watched my own fingers and shears working, not meeting his gaze. I wanted to give him more than that, more than an image that made him laugh. I wanted to return just what he’d given me, small one, the sound of his heart. My voice became very deep, hoarse. “Sometimes when you say certain things, your words turn to honey.”

He asked immediately. “What certain things?”

I’d worked myself into a thicket of snow blooms, and my hair tangled in them. What certain things should I admit? The umbels made lace shadows on the backs of my hands. I felt a little lost.

“Ginn?” He called me back.

“Já,” I looked at him, still a little gauzy headed. “That …,” I told him. “When you say my name.”

The woods had finally relaxed him, and his big body was natural and poised now. The deepest blue ran through his hair, encouraged by filtered sun and shadows. He watched the knife turn in his fingers, then let it slow and stop.

“You are all flowers,” he said. I was confused, then realized he meant my hair. I reached a hand up and found that stems and bits of blossoms stuck there.

“Oh.” I picked out sprigs.

“—Leave them.” He demanded, and then he softened as he always did for me. “Like the grass was, after the field.”

Gods, he had been watching me, closely today, liking and memorizing what he saw. A gorgeous reaction to this came from deep in my body. I sat, settled in the brush like he was, my foot just an inch from his. I shifted, and he did, and our boots touched.

The pendant at his throat captured a bit of sunlight and I tried to focus on it.

“What is that?” I gestured at my own blushing throat.

“This?” He touched the silver, surprised, and while he answered he slipped his fingers absently under his collar and left them there. It was so raw, him touching his own body, I wanted to cry.

“You don’t remember Thor’s hammer.”

I did, but it was easy to shake my head dumbly, unable to take my eyes off his open shirt and hand.

“Every boy makes his. In our family.”

I conjured a vague picture of young Heirik, eight years old, hammering away at a hot piece of silver. “It’s beautiful,” I murmured without meaning to.

He laughed. “I wouldn’t say that much.”

“Okay, then,” I said, laughing too. “It is … well placed.” I blushed at my own words and hung my head.

His voice drew me back. “Don’t go,” he said, hushed, but urgent.

I looked questioningly at him, and he went on. “You will stay at Hvítmörk, já?”

Of course I would.

I got smoothly up on Drifa, feeling graceful, like I always did when I rode her. She smelled furry, her hair pungent in the waning sun. A good smell. Not like the sharp tang of a goat. I lay down along her neck, my face turned toward Heirik, where he stood speaking softly to Vakr.

I didn’t want to leave the woods behind. I wanted to stay lazily draped over Drifa’s body forever, watching Heirik talk to his horse, the orange light of day’s end filtering through the trees behind him. Vakr was one of the only living beings he touched with affection. He was part of his soul, in that way that only an animal can be. Heirik’s whispers to him were a private moment, and he’d allowed me into it.

I’d taken some flowers, not for tea, but for prettiness. A bouquet of long snowbloom stalks hung from my hand, resting along Drifa’s leg. When Heirik looked up, he saw me and froze. He looked disconcerted, almost scared, and it worried me. Again, I’d done something weird. When any of them looked at me that way, I never knew what it was, but it was always something slightly off, the way I tied my shoes or didn’t know how to hang a fish from its head. Was it the way I rested so languidly on Drifa? I sat up.

Heirik shook the look from his eyes, and in one fluid motion got up on Vakr and pulled alongside on my left. We rode home in a honeyed silence. With a slow gait, as if neither of us wanted to get there.

The sun fell rapidly as we walked, and it was evening when we rounded the woods and were almost in view of home. My heart leaped with sudden fear—a giant billow of gray smoke smudged the sky. There was a fire!

Heirik was not worried.

“Wood’s bane,” he said with a note of resignation.
Fire.
“Many are here, then.” He faced me with an unusual gleam in his eyes, apologizing, anticipating. “We stayed out as long as we could.”

Many people were here? Around a fire.

And then it dawned on me, and I felt dumb and a little used. I was nettled, and my words flew out in a mix of future- and now-language. “You were throwing a party anyway,” I stabbed at him. “Whether we cut the field or not.”

“Já,” he smiled at me, then laughed a little, then more. “You are like a lamb after its first shearing.” I did feel lamblike, peeved, naked. But he was so amused, I finally smiled and laughed too.

“Throwing a party,” he said. “I like that.” His voice took on the smallest note of bitterness, like a tiny sour berry between his teeth. “A spear at my own people.”

I gazed out at the smoke rising from the yard in gray billows against the dark sky. “It won’t be fun, then?”

“Oh, já, wild,” he told me with a small, strange smile. “But for me, heiðr.”

It was a simple word, but he said it with a nuance I hadn’t heard in my sterile language lessons. It meant honor, in the sense of duty. It was his job to be generous. That was what I knew. But hearing it from him, in the voice of a real Viking chief, it meant far more. It encompassed all the people who gathered just out of our sight, where that smoke originated, all waiting to revere him. He was honor bound to give a party. But he would also be honored. And it was his due. Betta had said he took it freely.

He should, I thought. He worked hard and got little in return.

Drifa moved closer to him, so close that I felt we were together under a great wing. I viewed the house and party the way I thought he did. I started to understand something I’d seen and heard before, but hadn’t got. An honor-feeding. A generosity that in itself was a reward, for all that he forewent and did for these people.

Men stoked a big fire. They gathered in the yard, boys and young men I’d never seen before, two dozen at least. Close to the blaze, a few poked at it with what looked like spears. The pyre reached as tall as some of the men themselves, and pieces of flaming wood fell dangerously at their feet. Older, bushy-bearded men stood back from the crackling fire, drinking from horns and dark metal cups. All smiling and laughing, demonic in the flares and flashes. The house reflected the fire, its grassy walls rendered colorless gray.

A few women gathered outside the door, one with a lamp shielded in her hand. It flickered softly on her face and lit up her dark blond hair—a cascade that belonged to an angel. She looked like a fairytale princess. It was Dalla! A dark dress lay snug across her bosom, then fell long and loose from just under her breasts. It moved around her legs like water rippled with a breeze. The lamp’s light dipped and danced and she cupped her hand tighter to protect it.

She looked up and stared at me and Heirik, and her face changed. Her sisters and Svana stood around her, and they lifted their heads. Alert little animals with ghost-like eyes. Every one of them stopped to watch us ride into the yard. Around the fire, the men’s voices stopped. Bonfire and lamp light raged on their frozen cheeks.

I turned to Heirik for some explanation, and he was a different man.

He sat on Vakr’s back with a different confidence, tinged with self-importance. Almost arrogant the way he held himself.

He rode slowly into the yard and nodded to the men at the fire, to the women by the door, and in the space of a breath and as if they were one, they dropped to their knees. Everyone, even Dalla. Even Hár.

Oh.

Betta’s words cut through my shock. I’d known Heirik only here in his own home with his nearest family. It was true, I had not met the chief.

Drifa walked slowly among men and women. So far above them, I noted each man’s messy hair or balding head, women’s braids and kerchiefs. I could feel their awe and curiosity reaching for me like fingers. And as we passed by, each of his people were released. Like a great wake closing behind us, they began to stand and rustle about and murmur questions.

Dumbstruck, I slid off Drifa. Heirik motioned to a boy who took our horses and saddlebags with the few leaves and flowers we’d cut. The chief nodded to me and was gone, as he so often was, into the back mudroom, taken by the dark of the house.

I had not bowed to the great man, but instead had ridden by his side. He’d led me to this yard without warning. He didn’t do things accidentally. He wanted to show me this.

Like hurled rocks, it hit me—a feeling that just moments ago I thought I’d understood. Now, I felt it truly. Beyond the responsibility and loneliness, laid a sense of entitlement and superiority. He wanted me to feel what it was like, hovering over this big family and being adulated.

I curled up inside, confused. I was glad that for this moment, the chief was respected. Maybe even in some twisted way, he was loved. But for now, my private Heirik was gone.

With Heirik’s passing, everything erupted. Shouting, drinking, fluttering around with lamps and jabbing with spears. Gruff singing began around the fire, crazy flames leapt. Sounds and images whizzed past me like terrible birds. Giant men roaring in the yard, plain women rendered gorgeous, my cozy house gone mad.

I was a mess, in Betta’s everyday dress sweaty from haying, smudged and sprigged with bark and flowers. I bunched it in one hand, and lifted it up so I could walk with dignity from the stables to the house. I felt the sting of scrutiny. I felt exposed, raw and inadequate.