Our Infinite Fates
POLOGUE SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS AGO
THE RIBBON BINDING THEIR wrists together was red as a wound.
It was late Sólmánueur, and a fine day for a wedding. Scant clouds wisped across the pale sky. The sea lapped at the pebble beach, afternoon sun splicing its surface with fractal shards of gold. Rounded rocks rose through the shallow foam, sprayed with salt and the vague echo of siren song – if one believed in such things, which the bride did not.
But she believed in love, and in the man who stood before her.
The groom’s long chestnut hair was threaded with copper. His beard – impressively thick for a man not yet eighteen – was braided with metal rings and porcelain beads, scented with the pine resin and sage of his best oil. He wore a neat dark tunic and trousers, a gold arm ring, and a leather belt fastened at his waist. From the belt hung a glorious longsword, its hilt studded with rubies. A family heirloom.
A smile pulled the groom’s crooked mouth wide, his eyes glistening with joy. He had known the bride since the day he was born, and had dreamed of this day for over a decade. She was the golden strand running through his life, tying his past and future together in a harmonious bow.
The bride, however, was coiled like a spring. Dressed in a long linen dress of palest cream and beaded silver, she cut a tall, lithe figure.
Every taut line of her body lay in wait.
Half huntress, half hunted.
The groom barely noticed. He was too caught up in the moment, in the caw of seagulls and the felted words of the elder officiating the ceremony.
As formalities were exchanged, their hands remained fastened. The red ribbon had been woven from the tunic of the groom’s late mother, so that she might still play a part in the ceremony. Indeed, the groom felt his mother’s presence there, as both a spectral smudge in the middle distance and a reassuring solidity around his wrist. His heart swelled, pressing painfully against the cage of his ribs.
At the bride’s curious insistence, they exchanged weapons instead of rings. Knives, forged by her brother, the curved silver blades each engraved with the Valknut. Odin was the groom’s favourite god; he found himself inexplicably drawn to the interweaving of past, present and future, to the perpetual knot of life and death and rebirth.
The wizened elder nodded for the groom to utter his vows.
‘By the light of the sun and the power of the gods,’ the groom said, a marble of emotion rolling in his throat, ‘I pledge to love and honour you always.’
He drew his sword and touched the jewelled hilt to his bride’s shoulder.
The elder nodded once more, solemn, almost funereal. ‘I believe the bride has penned her own vows.’
Something strange darted over the elder’s aged face.
Scorn?
The bride shivered. She had been cold since sweating out her maidenhood in the hot springs the day prior, and the elder’s dispassion was unsettling.
A breeze picked up, and the sea whipped itself into sharp peaks.
The bride’s voice was low, crystalline, as she spoke to her betrothed. ‘Like the sway of the sea and the tug of the tides, love is a moving, eternal thing. Let us not be afraid of the wax and the wane, the rise and the fall, the eternal undertow. Each time our souls meet, let us submerge our bodies in the bright-blue cold, and let the waves make us anew.’ A tear slid down the apple of her cheek. ‘I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.’
The groom pressed his warm forehead to hers. ‘I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.’
They waited for a few moments, sure they would soon hear the elder’s blessing of the union. A wave tumbled and fizzed, and a plume of smoke rose from the fresh-lit fire where the meat would be roasted for the feast.
The silence unfolded an inch too far, and a murmur travelled through the crowd.
Confusion registered on the groom’s ruddy face, but the bride’s body understood something dreadful before her mind caught up, a warning bell tolling deep in her chest.
And then came the crisp, cutting words, like the bite of a shovel into frosted earth.
‘Did you truly think I would not find you?’
The bride and groom looked up in horrified unison to find the elder’s eyes glowing like crucibles. Her lined face was washing itself smooth, and her nails lengthened, thickened, blackened.
The groom stumbled backwards. Without pause, the bride swiped her marital blade across his throat, opening a mouth-like slit from which blood choked and gurgled.
He grabbed for breath, but none came.
Shock flashed briefly across his face before he crumpled to the pebbled shore.
The bride fell a second later, gasping, though her own throat remained unmarred. The bloodied blade fell from her hand, the Valknut still glinting in the oblivious daylight.
The last thing they saw before the world blinked out was the red ribbon of fate still binding their wrists.