Beautiful Wreck (57 page)

He raised his cup and drank. When he peered over the rim, from under his golden lashes, those eyes were playful. He nodded a barely perceptible bow to me and turned to speak to someone at his side.

Someone. Right.

Sitting next to him was the chief. Heirik was right there, so close his leg was against his brother’s, and I had forgotten about him. For the first time in months, for just a few seconds, I didn’t even know he was there. I flushed with the heat of the fire.

His head bent in conversation, Heirik’s hair was drawn back on top and damp around his face and shoulders, and I could see now how he was leaner. Brosa’s face was less hollow, more accustomed to breaking into a grin. But they held their bodies just the same way, elbows resting on bent knees; they nodded similarly at a comment by Hár. The wolf pups, Hildur had said.

And já, I had forgotten Heirik, but only for one startled second. When he lifted his head and saw me, he gathered me in, and the world could have burned down around me. I’d never have noticed. I knew nothing but those gold eyes. They didn’t draw away this time, but looked right at me with elegant, pure happiness. He smiled like his brother, broad across his whole mouth, every feature lit with it. I beamed back at him, so full of his joy.

Brosa caught my eye and raised one eyebrow in curious surprise.

“Come, Ginn,” Heirik called to me.

Brosa had surely been told about me on their way home from the boat. There were things to tell, about Fjoðr’s death, Ageirr’s aggression. And news of me.

Heirik introduced me anyway. “Ginn has been a guest here for half the year.” Heirik looked at me so warmly, with such pride, as though he’d carved me into existence himself, an intricate little boat upheld in his palm.

Brosa seemed torn with fascination, absorbing both me and Heirik at once. I wasn’t sure which was more impossible, a strange girl who’d appeared on the sand with no memory, or his brother looking happy.

“Já, the girl was saved from the sea,” Hildur broke in over my shoulder. “She has no memory of her people.” Suspicion pinched her words, but Brosa answered smoothly, gliding over her rudeness.

“Well then,” he said with a smile, “Things have been more exciting here than in Norway by a boat length.”

Gods, these brothers charmed me.

Brosa spoke of the water as if it were a living beast that carried them, and yet sought to kill them, too. Churning waves, freezing spray, like fingers, like hands buoying them at times, and then reaching for their bones and sucking them down to their death. He talked about Moki, a man who had fallen in, and how they pulled him out with one of the long oars, landing him like a giant sopping fish.

“It was close,” Brosa said, without laughter. He looked at me to explain. “A man can live only two minutes in that kind of water before he loses his sense and will. No more than ten before he dies.”

The sea was the
whale road
, the choppy, frigid way home, and his words resonated in me. I felt the salt and sand in my nose and lungs, thought of the wheeling birds and sucking waves and wind. The whale road might be the way home for me, too. And for that reason, I would always avoid it.

Voices lifted and settled back down like leaves in the white wood.

We talked of nothing special—the daily life of the farm that Brosa missed, the new horse Drifa. Heirik noted with a wry smile that I’d named her before I’d had a chance to live through a winter here and learn to despise the snow.

We laughed about so many things, all of them so minor they wouldn’t have caught anyone’s attention for a minute in the future. Every small moment that had happened here became a story, many of them more entertaining than I’d realized.

In the midst of the story about the lost sheep, I saw Heirik change. He withdrew, became quiet, and like an unmoored boat started to drift away. Pain came to my chest, to see his easy pleasure leaving.

“Lady, Lady!” It was Lotta, tumbling toward me, so reckless and so close to the flame that I caught my breath and lunged for her. She fell into my arms and breathlessly blurted, “It worked!” One of the children’s little ice cups sweated in her clutching hand.

She gave it to me, and I held it up and looked through it at Heirik, smiling to draw him out. “Look, Chief,” I said. “Now she is as rich as you.”

Brosa laughed, but Heirik didn’t. Instead, he stood and said he was tired, that he would go. Instead of goodnight, he said “Do not follow me, Ginn.”

My face flushed with rejection and embarrassment, and my shoulders folded in and curled around my heart. I watched Heirik leave without the breath to speak, let alone go after him.

Brosa was kind and generous. “You have no idea how many times I’ve heard those words from my brother,” he said. “And still he cares for me.”

Brosa’s voice was a rich but lighter brown, not as thick and resonant. I wanted to look at him and see the truth of what he said, but instead I watched the frost cup in my hand. I felt it changing, dissolving, running down my fingers and wetting my wrists.

Almost immediately Svana came. She sat by us, joking awkwardly that I was keeping Brosa all to myself. I left him to her and went to bed.

I woke early, feeling like a troll frozen in sunlight.

I got up quickly to get my blood flowing, rubbing my calves and shins briskly, before climbing out of bed. A half dozen men who’d come home with Brosa were sleeping everywhere, against walls, on floors, and yet it didn’t even seem as many as were here last night. A few slept in the stables, probably. Two men rolled over on the floor as I stepped over them, careful not to snag my skirts.

In the mudroom, I pulled on someone’s large leather boots, brittle cold under my fingertips. I was about to step into the tunnel, when the friendly slap of a man’s large hand against the wood of the door frame—as if admiring its sturdiness—alerted me to stand back. In ducked Brosa and Hár, stamping their feet and filling up the room with their fur-laden shoulders and the scents of frozen leather and icy clean hair.

They were covered in snow! It gleamed white again beyond the door, as if the winter had merely paused long enough to let Brosa come home. Their faces were vivid red. Brosa’s hair was sun-kissed gold, with ice crystals dissolving in its waves. He saw me out of the corner of his eye, then turned to me and winked flirtatiously. I was dazzled by the whole of him. His presence, his smell, the disarming curve of lips that smiled so sweetly for such a bearish man.

He was trouble, and for some young lady he would be heaven.

He went inside the house, pulling the wooden door behind him. I needed to breathe, needed scalding cold in my lungs. Instead of ducking into the tunnel, I stepped out the door into the blinding white world.

I breathed deeply of air that had come straight off the North Pole. I had to clear my head and still my disorganized heart. The paving stones were snowless, and I stood with my head lowered, sorting their gray forms. I recalled Heirik’s face, the feel of his hair through my fingers, the length of his body pressed into my back, curled around me. The warmth of his skin under my palms. I took a deep breath, gathered myself and went back inside to take the tunnel down to the bath.

When I returned, I shut the door to the main room behind me and was struck, as always, by the cozy prettiness of our house. It was opulent and warm beyond anything I could have imagined in the future as I pored over electronic scans of rocky remains.

My expectations had been wrong about so many things—accents, phrases, the house, birds. Everything. I’d never imagined apricot-colored curtains in a plum and russet winter living room. Never imagined the starlight twinkling of adorable lamps, the iron forged like cupped palms, filled with shimmering oil.

Heirik sat close to Brosa by the fire. He turned a long blade over in his hands, but I knew they must be talking of so much more. Their fierce love and affections passed between them in terms of sturdy walls and honed tools.

Brosa looked up and saw me, and when he smiled it was just as the women had said, just like the sun bursting through a bank of silver-blue clouds. He was shameless in his attractiveness, and I almost stumbled across the threshold.

Heirik looked blank in that calculating way that was never good. It reminded me of when Fjoðr died, when, as Betta said, the chief was thinking. Looking at me standing here, and yet looking through me as if I were made of mist, what logic path was he swiftly following in his mind? I felt his consideration like ice poured down my spine. I came close to the heartstone and said good morning, smiled at Heirik, but he did not give me anything in return.

The night was clear and brittle, bone-cracking cold. Betta and I were out beyond the bath, in the place where we peed. The tunnel made it easy to get fairly far from the house, but the rest of the distance was a slog along a slippery path in the snow, where dozens of footsteps had churned up mud before ours.

I told her I’d just start back by myself, and I lifted my skirts up high to step into the snow.

Being alone struck me. It had happened before, several times since I’d come here, but tonight somehow it was raw and new. I felt my body acutely, as an animal thing. No technology could find me through my eyes, track my voice. No one in any place or time knew my coordinates, the ambient temperature, where I stood in proximity to the closest coffee shop. I fell onto my back in the snow and accepted the pressure of it. The crush of being unfindable. The thrill of no expectations. I flung my arms and legs out to make the shape of a snowbloom.

The sky stole my breath. Unthinkably deep, and I the smallest animal underneath it, solitary and wild. I bared my teeth at no one.