Beautiful Wreck (76 page)

I looked around, finally, and they were my family, the ones who hadn’t gone to the assembly. Ageirr wasn’t here. Heirik wasn’t either. He would still be at the Thing.

There was no sound from anyone, especially Hildur. I glanced down and took in the sight of her flat on the floor, almost lifeless but for a stuttering, shallow rise and fall of her chest. With my free hand, I drew up my hems and gently prodded her with my foot. She was out like a stone. I used my toe to roll her onto her back. My kick had distorted her face, her jaw was shaped wrong and blood leaked from her nose.

She would be out for a while, maybe forever, but I placed my boot on her chest, in case she woke.

THIRST

Horses approached so fast and loud I heard them through the thick house and felt them rattle my bones. I heard Hár and Magnus calling from the yard. The boy’s beloved, newly dark voice, his father’s rasping call.

And then I heard Heirik. Just outside, angry and rumbling. “Ginn!” He commanded me, even now, to answer.

My pulse quickened. I’d made it, finally, all the way. I made it past months of pain, past the lab and back through 1200 years, past Asmund and Mord, past Hildur, through woods and streams, through time and fear itself, to be here where I stood right now. Separated from him by only our front door.

My pulse quickened, but nothing more. No great outpouring of love. No great emotion at all. It was like a fear response in my animal chest, cold and ready. He stepped into the house, breathless, searching for me, and I saw him for the first time in so long.

Everything slowed like in a fighting sim. He turned toward me, as if he were in a virtual cage match, suspended. He gripped Slitasongr lightly, his hand bigger than I remembered, skin blood red, fingernails black with dirt. He stood ungraceful and exhausted, his hair a horrible mess, stuck in strands across his forehead. I noted his dark brows and desperate, scared eyes searching the room for me.

He thought he’d lost me.

He had no idea.

Somewhere deep I had been bracing myself. I’d come home for honor’s sake, for vindication, to release my pain and the chief’s. But I also came to be with him, to try one more time to be lovers, and to have him by my side. I came to challenge him.

It wasn’t tenderness, not romance, or even simple lust. He was just mine, and I was here for all that was mine.

I stood before him, dressed in death, ink soaked into my skin, cold clarity in my eyes, and I waited. I waited, and time resumed, slowly, languidly enough that I saw everything register. The shock as he took me in, his eyes traveling over my face, dress, hands. Knowledge growing, the spark of realization, that I must have gone to my other place and time. Gone long enough to change. Then his face transformed with a lightening wonder that would have charmed me four months ago. A look in his eyes that would have melted me.

“You returned,” he said.

“This is my place,” I told him, and it wasn’t unkind, but I could hear no warmth in my own voice. “She tried to take it from me.”

Heirik followed my gaze to the floor, where I held Hildur under my foot, and his eyes widened. He grinned, and it seemed the sun filled the house. Já, he thought this was wonderful.

For him, anxious hours had passed. A few days of heart-stopping fear that I might be hurt or dead, two days of anguished remorse, maybe. For me, it had been months. I’d felt bone-crushing regret. I’d grieved for so long. I’d felt my own eyes slide closed and give up to the false, flat world. And I had let them.

My relief at seeing him was tempered by all these things that had passed.

In all the time I’d prepared for this moment, I’d thought of a hundred ways to start. I’d thought maybe love would rush fast and free inside me and the past hundred days would fall away in a tangle of bodies and mouths and pledges and endearments. I thought of simply touching him and saying nothing at all, just reaching for his cheek, brushing his beard with my fingers. I thought of telling him that a glimpse of his face on a cold screen was able to wake me, when nothing else could. I imagined starting off by telling him I loved him.

“You think you are a god maker,” is what I said. “You’re not. You are a man.”

He took a step back and cocked his head as if he hadn’t heard me correctly. Brosa came up beside him, breathless, concern across his features, changing to confused wonder when he laid eyes on me.

“Woman, what—” Brosa started, but I didn’t let him speak. I’d risked my life, with a desperate hope that Saga might bring me here again, and now I would say everything I needed to say. I spoke to Heirik.

“—Ageirr and Hildur are responsible for every bad thing that has happened to me. For stealing me away, for my burns and injuries. Ageirr,” I said, looking around the house, though I knew he was not there. “Hildur.” I spat her name, pushing at her with my boot. “Not your curse, Heirik. You are not special like that. You are real.”

Heirik just shook his head and found nothing he could say. Unreadable, even to my eyes. So I went on.

“They have taken so much from us.” My voice was clear like a polar morning. “If we remove them from this life, it will release us.”

The air went unnaturally still, everyone waiting.

I watched Heirik closely, watched all the small motions of his features and moods that I knew like no one else. He was fascinated, and he was considering. Like a season shifting in the course of a minute, his eyes turned from golden wonder to ice-cold rage, not at me, but at Hildur and Ageirr. I watched him come to agree with me, and it was like pure fire in my veins.

“Já,” he said, and that one word was vindication, promise, love song. It contained all of his belief in me, his agreement, his wish for justice. “I will find Ageirr.”

It was quiet for the briefest moment. Unstated words hung heavy, as if he’d really spoken them and they’d taken solid form. I will kill him, the very air seemed to say. And more. I will do whatever it takes. Even die. There was always that chance, even though he flew like a demon in a fight. The chance that Heirik might not come back.

His features changed before my eyes, from anger to fear.

He was afraid? I’d seen him swing his gorgeous ax and cut down men all around, seen him throw a spear with cold precision. But he looked, right now, as though this was the most terrifying moment of his life. Was he hesitating to fight Ageirr? After all the man had done?

After a silence, and a painful breath, two breaths, Heirik spoke.

“Be my wife.”

Oh. Heirik didn’t tremble in the face of death. Only before me.

He stepped close to me, finally, and it was him, my love, touching my face, tracing the tail that curved around my eye. “If only for a moment, Woman. Let us know what it’s like.”

I wished for joy. I wished that the softest and sweetest love would rush in, filling me with warmth and relief and the impossible glory of yearning fulfilled. But what I felt was a cold kind of rightness. It was done. I thought I should be angry. This—Heirik being brave and mine—was all I had wanted, all the time I had known him, and he could never give it to me. Now here he stood, making it seem so simple. Now, after I’d put away hope and happiness with my farm notes and cherry dress. My whole body thrilled with anger.

A thousand times over I would marry him.

“Já, then,” I told him. “Be my husband.”

Only after I’d said yes, did I think to look toward Brosa. His words rang in my mind. She becomes mine now. I owed him an honorable breaking of our contract. He stood, back against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, and at first I thought he was shaking with anger. Then I realized it was with amusement, barely restrained laughter. When I caught his gaze, he raised an eyebrow, and then nodded to me. His blessing.

“Uncle,” Heirik called in a massive bellow as we left the house. “Marry us now.”

Hár looked up from where he stood talking to Byr, and his bushy brows drew together, his mouth opened to speak. But he didn’t. He just looked at me dumbstruck. Finally, he turned to Heirik and nodded.

Hár called on our gods to make this marriage strong, all the while watching me, scanning my face with frank bewilderment. He joined us with the shortest possible ceremony that would suffice for the few witnesses. When the time came, I sat on an upturned log and Heirik placed Slitasongr in my lap like a babe. “For our sons,” he said with teeth gritted. At the threshold of death, he would give me such a thing.

Heirik turned to formally tell the few who stood around us. “Ginn is wife of our house now. Make sure this is respected.”

“Nei—!” An ugly screech came from the threshold. Hildur staggered, bloodied, out into the yard.

Magnus grabbed her by the arm and pledged, “I will make sure, Herra.” It sounded like a final vow.

Heirik bent to kiss me, and I met him with a kiss as empty as a shell. He asked for more. “Give me your sweetness, Litla.”

“It’s been too hard for me,” I told him with clear, dry eyes. “I’ve given up sweetness.”

He looked for a long moment, searched my face and I could tell he found nothing. What was there to find? Perhaps hard determination, sheer will, blue-black ink. No honey for him, no more melting inside and wishing for his heart, no pining desire.

His hand was heavy on my cheek.

He leaned in close and put his forehead to my shoulder, like he always did, and his beard brushed my skin. I drew in a deep breath of steel and leather, and his scent was a sharp memory. It stirred something the way a breeze might, lifting some delicate emotion in my gut and then letting it fall again.

He spoke softly in my ear, his breath waking up the skin of my throat. “Never, Woman. I will find you.”

Heirik stood straight, and said out loud so everyone would hear, “Do not worry for me, then, Wife.”

With cold hands, I gave him Slitasongr, loaning it back to him just moments after he’d placed it in my keeping. And he went to Vakr. I watched Heirik’s back move, his head hanging just the smallest amount, just enough to cut my heart out. The way his hair fell, I could see the leather knot at the back of his neck, and a memory came to me, of the first time I walked close behind him. We paced the house, and he’d turned to me at the end and said he was all grown up.

He wouldn’t turn around this time. He’d faced his greatest fear already, asking me to be his wife, and he’d gotten my stone heart in return. He would ride off in a cloud now, gone to the dust of the valley and the mist of the highlands, to find Ageirr. And he might not come back.