‘Tell me who you are, Agnes. Here, let me take your hand so that I might learn a little of you.’
The swift warmth of his fingers tracing the length of my open palm.
‘These are calluses, so you are a hard worker. But your fingers are strong. You not only work hard, but you do your work well. I can see why Worm hired you. See this? You have a hollow palm. Like my own, here, can you feel how it is unfilled?’
The soft depression, the ghost creases in his skin, the suggestion of bones.
‘Do you know what it means, to have a hollow palm? It means there is something secretive about us. This empty space can be filled with bad luck if we’re not careful. If we expose the hollow to the world and all its darkness, all its misfortune.’
‘But how can one help the shape of one’s hand?’ I was laughing.
‘By covering it with another’s, Agnes.’
The weight of his fingers on mine, like a bird landing on a branch. It was the drop of the match. I did not see that we were surrounded by tinder until I felt it burst into flames.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Poet-Rósa’s poem to Natan Ketilsson,
c. 1827
ó, hve s?la eg áleit mig, –
engin mun tví trúande, –
tá fjekk eg líea fyrir tig
forsmán vina, en hinna spje.
Sá minn tanki sannur er, –
tó svik tín banni nyting ares –
ó, hve hefir oreie tjer
eitrue rosin Kiejaskares!
Oh, how happy I believed I was –
no one could have known how free –
even when I suffered for you,
when everyone was mocking me.
Traitor, look at your misfortune –
these are my thoughts, they’re true –
Oh, how this rose of Kidjaskard
has gone and poisoned you!
AUTUMN FELL UPON THE VALLEY like a gasp. Margrét, lying awake in the extended gloom of the October morning, her lungs mossy with mucus, wondered at how the light had grown slow in coming; how it seemed to stagger through the window, as though weary from travelling such a long way. Already it seemed a struggle to rise. She’d wake in the chill night with Jón pressing his toes against her legs to warm them, and the farmhands were coming in from feeding the cow and horses with their noses and cheeks pink with the ice in the air. Her daughters had said that there was a frost every morning of their berrying trip, and snow had fallen during the round-up. Margrét had not gone, not trusting her lungs to last the long walk up over the mountain to find and herd the sheep from their summer pasture, but she’d sent everyone else. Except Agnes. She could not let her walk over the mountain. Not that she would flee. Agnes wasn’t stupid. She knew this valley, and she knew what little escape it offered. She’d be seen. Everyone knew who she was.