Free Beautiful Wreck by Larissa Brown Page B

held her gaze.
    “Intelligence,” she said, punctuating the word with a smack of the spindle to keep it moving. “Leadership, fierceness, strength. And a face and body disfigured by an ugly curse.”
    She contemplated this, her fingers expertly pinching fiber, her lips pursed to match. “It is a complex thing, what the gods have given him.”
    I supposed so. No matter how much I might believe or disbelieve about the Norse gods, some force of nature had made the chief into what he was.
    “And you,” she raised her chin at me. “Now the disir have given him you to figure out.”
    There were glances, as though the ancestral spirits who’d invited me were now sitting like ghosts among us on the wall. I dropped the spindle and reeled it up carefully. When I got it back, I placed it in my lap. My hands shook and I couldn’t spin. What could I say in answer to that? I was another complication in his difficult life. And he was a feature of what was to become my lonely existence, too, forever stranded far from home, in a place where no one knew me. Tears stung the corners of my eyes, and I let my gaze blur until the hills and valley were a sad, green wash. A big cloud came and turned it all dark blue.
    “Hildur?”
    Ranka was speaking. I kept looking blearily into the distance.
    “Já, Child.”
    “What does a blue swan look like?”
    “Oh …” Hildur hesitated for just a second. “It’s a terrible beast, little one. A bird as big as a horse. With great black wings that sweep the ground, wider than a man’s outstretched arms. Bloody eyes and claws, and a carrion reek.”
    It was a horrible joke to play on the child, but I imagined Hildur winking to let Ranka know it was just a story to scare and thrill her. Then Hildur finished, in a hiss. “Its beak is gory with the flesh of men. Its shriek rips souls from their dying bodies.”
    And I realized it wasn’t a campfire story. She was serious.
    She must have never seen a raven. She knew of them because of religion and superstition, passed down through the family and clan. But they didn’t fly around the farm, apparently. And Hildur had gone nowhere else in her life, just the coast, the hills, this wall. Had she spent her days in a place so small, such a tiny crevice in the universe, that she’d never seen a black bird? In her mind, they’d grown to be tremendous and gruesome beasts. They ate the dead. When a warrior saw them, he knew his end had come.
    And she thought the chief was aligned with them, because of his long black hair, its intense iridescence. All these girls thought so. They thought he was perhaps one of the ravens himself, come in human form to lead them, willing victims, to what? I opened my mouth to say something. I wanted to tell all of them that I’d seen ravens in documentaries. That they weren’t gigantic beasts, just birds. Big ones, yes, inky black, but just birds. In the city we had crows. I’d seen a few of them eat a lost, old pancake in the park. I’d certainly never seen one eat a dying soul.
    I felt crow-like and dark myself. It came over me like fast-moving storm clouds, anger as rotten as the flesh in Hildur’s vision. It came up in my throat. With a great effort, I didn’t say a word, just turned back to spinning with a vengeance. My best thread all day.
    I could feel Betta looking at me. I saw her in the periphery of my vision. She had the largest, roundest eyes I’d ever seen, clear green and almost expressionless, her whole body transformed into the act of observing. I noticed, then, that all the other women and Ranka were looking downhill.
    The chief was coming from far down the slope. They were stunned, each one mentally comparing the atrocious vision Hildur had just described with the flesh and blood monster who approached. The monster sworn to protect them, who kept them alive and safe. Who was right now working to raise food for them to eat, coming home from chopping wood to keep them warm. He was closer now, and I