Beautiful Wreck by Larissa Brown

like cooked apples and black tea.
    “The leaves by themselves make yellow,” Thora said.
    They were showing me how to dye thread. We worked around a small fire, close to the river. Little Lotta, about three years old, watched with a finger in her slack mouth. Darling and blond, her name was Ginnlaug—“just like you, Ginn!” She was entranced by our work, watching what bigger girls do.
    “The pink brings more trade,” Betta said, then smiled and added, “and it’s pretty.”
    Her big teeth made her seem just ten years old, until her face fully resolved from the steam and became that of a young woman. She held her braids back and leaned over to breathe deeply of the birch water.
    “I’m seventeen today,” she said out of nowhere. With her own long spoon, she joined me in stirring and spreading the soggy greens.
    I grinned and smacked playfully at her spoon with mine. “You didn’t tell me it was your …” I trailed off and couldn’t find a word for birthday in the old language. “… your day,” I ended dumbly.
    “You’ll have flowers for a crown tonight,” Thora said. “Ranka will want to make it.”
    “ I want to make it!” Lotta broke in.
    “You can let your hair down.” I tugged on the end of Betta’s braid.
    “Nei!” Betta reccoiled. She pulled away from me and flipped her braids over her shoulders, outside my reach. Suddenly, I’d been too familiar.
    She never took her hair down outside of the sleeping alcove, she told me. She’d started braiding it as a little girl, when her Ma died and she and Bjarn moved to this big house. Now, nine years later she had a habit of keeping it bound in the same way every day, and no one but the girls she slept with down the hill had ever seen it.
    I thought of little Betta, alone without her mommy in a big, strange place, thrust into the company of giant men and stuck up girls. “You were just eight?”
    “Já. The oldest of the children down the hill, though. I took care of them.” Betta smiled, and for no reason added, “The chief was thirteen.” She cast a glance toward the stables.
    Heirik stood with a couple of boys—Magnus and Haukur—and a bunch of horses. His head was bent in concentration, listening without looking at gangly Magnus, Har’s son, just about fourteen himself. The chief was clearly teaching him something, waiting for the lesson to be absorbed and proof sent back. And not getting the response he needed. The chief’s natural grace was gone, and right now his body was cramped. He was impatient. After just a couple weeks, I knew the subtle physical expression of his moods.
    “Your brother will take over the job of chief, then?” I asked Thora.
    “Já, the baulufotr.” Cow foot. A hundred times dumb, with not enough words for her to express it. He would probably inherit the position, she told me, and keep it if he could. Her idiot brother, with the chief’s holdings, tenants, burdens. From our perch, we could see that his work featured prominent elbows and a lack of physical ease that was stark next to the chief.
    “Soon after I came here,” said Betta, “when the chief was old enough to marry, it was decided he never would.”
    As though drawn by the illicit subject, Svana and Grettis walked up, spinning. They joined in telling me the whole story.
    The chief could not marry. It would endanger all of Hvítmörk if he were to father a child. He could bring heartbreak and ruin. Heirik was not just dangerous himself. He could be a harbinger of something, or someone, far worse.
    Thora summed it up in the crudest possible way. “He’s vowed to keep his bloody atgeirr to himself.” Thrusting spear. It would have been an apt and witty metaphor if it weren’t so cruel. She looked toward the stables as if the chief might have heard her and cursed her in some new, extra way.
    A sudden voice came from behind us. “He is the breaker of rings,” Hildur declared. A phrase for chieftain . She’d been observing us, listening, while