Read Online Beautiful Wreck by Larissa Brown - Free Book Online

It was exactly what happened every time I sat in front of a screen and tried to mimic the motions. My stomach clenched in a familiar knot that perversely made me homesick. It made me miss Morgan’s hands turning over her rare spindles to show me their beauty, pointing with her deep blue polished fingernails. The closest I’d had to a friend.
    Hildur’s nails were pale. Her hands were thin and avian.
    She ordered me to keep starting over and trying again, and she remained patient for a very long time. Her assertion—no, command—was that any woman with two hands would learn. “Slow and sure.” Yes, I thought, definitely slow.
    Three more tangles later, she looked at me skeptically. “You make me wonder if you’re lazy, Child. Remember,” she said with a wink, “no battles are won in bed.”
    The girls giggled.
    “Mother!” Svana gasped.
    I gasped, too. Hildur was Svana’s mother? Svana, whose neck was long and lovely like her namesake bird’s, whose hair was soft like buttercream frosting. Ranka had noted her as prettiest on her marriageable list. Tough, middle aged Hildur had made this vision of loveliness. I tried to imagine the housekeeper younger, picture her flitting, lovely, through the trees, presumably with a gorgeous man. An image lost to time. She must have been pregnant when she was over thirty. Svana must be around fifteen.
    “Keep your hands moving,” Hildur chided her pretty daughter.
    “And you can stop wondering, Girl,” she said with a jut of her chin toward me, as if she might dispatch with all my questions in one swift stroke. “There is no real wife of this house, and there will not be until the chief’s brother returns.”
    She said this brusquely, and with absolute finality, and no one—not even her sweet, pouty daughter—spoke up. In fact, Svana dropped her eyes and blushed. There were undercurrents here, underneath the surface of this idyllic pool, and Hildur’s statement had hardly stopped my wondering.
    Varieties of pain—stabbing, dull, constant—occupied my shoulders, my spine, my lower back. I’d spent what seemed like endless days, eight or more hours each, trying to make thread. My fingers were silky soft, my skin a red and tenuous barrier. My neck throbbed, and still I spun for three hunched-over days.
    The time passed in a strange, uneven way. Was it a hint that I might suddenly return? The way a moment watching thread twirl could last a hundred years? The way sleeping seemed to last a second?
    Every time I woke, it was another teasing moment when I expected the soft nudge of my apartment’s voice, the clean light through glass windows, the smell of coffee. Then that still moment of potential would pass, yet again, into the heat and stink of the longhouse.

    To pass the time and keep our blood flowing, we broke off in pairs and small groups and walked and gossiped. And I learned about Betta. Like Hildur, Betta’s father, Bjarn was a kind of hired help. A thrall, but more like an upheld servant. If not for her Da’s healing gift, Betta would live somewhere else, not as lovely and rich as Hvítmörk. He’d made a good life for his little girl. And as a third generation thrall, Betta was free.
    Besides this tale, and lessons about the family tree, there was not much else to talk about.
    Everyone longed to go places. Roundup would come in a few weeks, where they would see other families from the surrounding farms, and from all over this clan’s own land. The women talked about minor intrigues, stolen horses, lazy shepherds. About boys, some that were attractive, some dumb. They talked of Eiðr who was ugly but smart and strong. His big brother Ageirr, a pinch-faced man whose house was renowned for its grimness. It hadn’t always been so sad, and when the women said so their voices were chilly and fascinated. Hands fluttered nervously in clouds of fiber.
    Their words turned broad and free when they spoke of Egil, a bear of a man, descended from one of the greatest