Free Beautiful Wreck by Larissa Brown Page A

She was transformed by the subject, no longer kind.
    I shook my head slowly, still ignorant.
    “Child, clear your eyes,” she continued. “The gods spilled blood on him. A terrible omen.”
    I was lost. Blood was spilled on him?
    It came to me slowly and dreadfully. “His mark.” I breathed the words.
    “Já, his mark.” Hildur’s fingers grazed a glass bead, a charm that hung from her belt, as if warding off the danger of even speaking about him. She was truly scared, brimming with it.
    “We don’t speak of it,” she explained with irritation, as though I was a willful child who had pestered her for answers. She continued anyway. “The chief was clutched from death by his father’s hands so that he could learn from him and take his place.”
    “Ulf,” I said, reviewing my lessons. “His father.”

    Ulf was there when Signé brought forth their firstborn, Hildur told me. The baby who was now the chief. The moment he came into the world, a blast of wind passed through the house, flattening the heartflame. The servant woman who had helped Signé tried to wipe the blood off the baby, but it would not come. When Signé realized the blood was part of him, she clutched the baby tight to her breast, frightened for his life.
    I imagined her, a new mother, her baby just minutes old and in danger. I saw her tears, her wild eyes and determination. Her kisses on his warm head.
    Ulf drew his seax, Hildur said, and ordered everyone away, the doors shut and bolted. And then with the gentlest love for Signé and for his new son, he set his knife down and placed the baby on his lap. He sprinkled him with water and named him for his own grandfather.
    Something tugged at my awareness, something odd about his father, Ulf, naming him, but the feeling was gone in a second.
    With a name, Heirik had been accepted and could not be exposed and left to die, no matter the family’s superstitions. Still, Signé wouldn’t let anyone touch him. She took baby Heirik in her arms again, and did not let him go for seven weeks. She charmed and glared the family into submission. She bound them in fear, not with a curse, but with a blessing. She blessed anyone who would follow and serve Heirik.
    Signé’s blessings were powerful and not to be spurned.
    “And so we follow and serve him,” Hildur finished. “And he is his mother’s son. Untouchable.”
    Untouchable. They kept using that word.
    In their flutter of assurances, Svana had mentioned I shouldn’t worry, that he would never touch a woman. Could she possibly mean it literally? The times I’d seen him interact with people, he hadn’t reached out. He hadn’t touched me when he knelt and looked in my eyes at the beach. He folded his arms and turned away when we talked at the forge. Ranka’s little voice came to mind. The chief has his own room. My god, what did they think might happen if he touched them?
    “And the eyes of a wolf,” Hildur was still talking. “And that hair. A blue swan.”
    It was a poetic phrase for raven. I thought it was kind of pretty, until she finished the thought. “The bird of corpses.”
    In the uncomfortable lull that followed, I bent my head to my work and really tried to spin. My thoughts kept following paths that branched and narrowed and became mired. It was a birthmark, huge and ugly, yes, but in my world practically inconsequential. It wouldn’t be fraught with fearful meaning. It would probably just be removed.
    This was not my world. Looking out over the vast land, I tried to imagine the depth of belief that could allow such cruelty. For a little boy to grow up without the comfort and joy of touching other people. I kept coming back to his eyes. The troubled thing I’d seen in them when he stood with his uncle, silhouetted against the sky. Maybe he’d seen my loneliness. And now he knew what it looked like from the outside.
    “But you thrive,” I said. “The farm thrives under him.”
    Hildur’s eyes were like sparks on steel, but I