ice in the mouth (you must eat to survive)

Caroline tugs the fur encircling her wrists. It doesn't itch, it's almost too soft. Distracting.

Her jacket is green. It is the color that frost dreams, the vibrant daughter stolen from time which creates the aging year. You see how it goes—don't you. The feverish summer of searching, of denial. The arachnid autumn with the poisoned dart frog leaves, tumbling to the floor in hate. The sick winter, a hard world like the heart has been cored and cobbed and flecked out like black peppercorns.

He is a figure in the distance—angles which strike out from his shoulders like the tops of buildings in cities. He wears fur too. It looks like he has been cut through the landscape, blocks of pure, sleek black against the utter cold white of the tundra.

You could build a wall out of him, you could dig tunnels because his shoulders are sharp and unforgiving. They are like shovels into trenches, like tongues saying words you hate.

Caroline feels the air clinging to her face like spiderweb. The sun screams yellow rays into her eyes. It is gold in the most unfiltered way. They are jagged stripes of paint on the flat ice, on the endless miles of snow, but soundless. Caroline's teeth catch the light like a prism.

She shouts a rainbow across the emptiness.

Klaus!—she calls to him over this freezing landscape. This world where he is hundreds of feet away from her, a small toy soldier with striking fur of sable sucking on the skin of his neck. This world where his gloves are like paw marks into the pure white air. He is black tea, burning in her throat.

He turns, looks back to her and waves. He waves a huge wave over his head like he is signaling an aeroplane. His arm looks like the tail of a black beast, swinging back and forth over endless miles of sugar.

Caroline smiles back. It is frigid here. She bends, squats and pulls the glove off her hand. Her fingers are like the pearl handles of a gun. He says that to her. He says every time she touches something, it dies. That is the price of life. That is what makes her beautiful.

Caroline picks up a handful of snow. She lifts it to her lips. It's sugar! She smiles again, looks back up at his figure in the distance. Her hair curls cleanly over one eye like morning will under the frozen bodies of trees. She doesn't know how he does that. How he always surprises her.

Caroline!—he calls back to her. He throws the vowels like Chinese stars. Nothing about him is kind. That is the way it is supposed to be. They snap like whips as they come sailing across the barren snow silenced straightway. His eyes search for her. They search like a Baratarian does for treasure. He is always poor.

His eyes are like the copper tomb of well. She says that to him. She says every time he looks at something, it wishes. That is the price of death. That is what makes him beautiful.

He sees her lying flat in the snow drifts. The snow drifts of sugar. She barely makes a mark—blonde and pale pulled pinks like taffy, like cotton pulled out over looms. He walks towards her.

Klaus looks down at Caroline's body. Her eyes are shut. His hands are in his pockets and he peers over her like you peer into a cave. Never quite sure what is there. He shades her like a cruciform in this blank pieceless world. The sun bends around his shoulders. His shoulders that look like cities.

Why are you staring at me— says Caroline, eyes shut, grains of sugar on her cheeks.

Klaus thinks for a moment, a boulder thinks, the ocean stills. Klaus thinks her cheeks are like petals full of nectar. He wants to gnash his teeth in them.

They sit side by side in the carriage. Klaus has a horse, ten horses, twenty horses, thirty horses. Four pull the carriage through the shrouded winter world, the place with the cold fields of empty white sugar, the trees with sunken spines and deathless rage. The horses are black, like Klaus in his jacket.

Did you like what I did for you—asks Klaus. The position of his head shifts, towards her, always, like a musket opening its mouth for powder. He is a delicate lion, talons tucked into his paws, under the black gloves made of leather. He is a prince made of oil from automobiles and the jaws of people in their graves. He waits for her answer, the carriage jostles her but his bones are still as stone, as if he were a ghost.

She turns from the window – the bright window with its satin sunlight. The yellow paint carves pastel stripes through the white that goes for eons and eons. The trees fling by like the skeletons of birds in glass museum cases. Caroline's hair burrows through the air in cylinders, her curls are butterflies at her cheeks.

Yes; how did you do that? – she asks. How did you turn the snow into sugar?

Caroline's eyes are smiling, Klaus knows her smile could cause wheat to rot with ergot, could cause nations to starve. That is the price of being beautiful. All of her swords lie snug in her heart.

He wishes to rub his hair against her, to curl his bones into her skin, to devour her. He sees in her, death. This thing, he will never master. He was born without it.

Klaus strives to please her.

I can do all that and more—he says. He is enticing her. He tries to do that like a carcass will a vulture. He tries to lure her near like a hook in the deepest sea.

Caroline laughs. She is bundled tightly against the cold, though she cannot feel it. Klaus smiles in return, tight-lipped, but in the eyes. He likes when she laughs at him.

Caroline knows his smile could cause oceans to de-salt, could cause navies to sink. That is the price of being beautiful. All of his swords are brandished aloft.

She wishes to cover his face with her hands, to burn him new skin, to conduct him. She sees in him, life. This thing, she will never master. She was born without it.

You can't do anything but turn snow into sugar—she scoffs. He is like an avalanche beside her. He is a mountain and she shouts and shouts and shouts. She dares him to come down.

When they arrive back at the lodge Klaus opens the carriage door for her.

This is the country where his blood came from. She thinks he comes here because he wonders if his blood is in the soil. The soil is frozen, it is permafrost. Perhaps it is there, still. Somewhere. The entrails of the mother and father of his mother.

She thinks he could have relatives, living in the little neighborhoods of Oslo. He spits at this idea.

When he spits, he spits blood mixed with tobacco, though he doesn't smoke. He is rotting from the inside, she says. He tells her it is old blood, stuck in his teeth. That she will be next. She thinks he could breed an army, and she could slaughter it.

The midas god Thor and his wife charred Sif, he fertility, she war.

Perhaps that is the way of it, here in this old country with its glacial mountains and its velvet ice block lakes.

Perhaps that is Klaus, with his hideous sledgehammer upending the earth over and over once more. A child who shakes spring from death.

You will never destroy me.

And she, she would not be his wife. Golden-haired Sif with her blood-soaked silver, only the killer. A laborious mother birthing new life through the slaughter of battle.

Whenever somebody tells me I can't do something, I prove them wrong.

Klaus' attendant begins to untack the horses in the paddock. It smells like men and beasts and shit. Klaus rests his hand on the horse's neck. He has taken his glove off. There is bone that is whiter than any sand, that is harsher than any astringent. It rests on the black foamed hair. The horse is exhausted, eyes inflamed. Klaus rests his forehead against the horse. Now he is going to smell like men and beasts and shit.

Caroline looks to the snow, kicks it with her boot. There is a whirl of blood pooling in the sucking black mud.

She kneels to touch it. It is redder than any paint. It is red as strawberry, as beet juice in the sugar. She marvels at it and touches it to her lips. Klaus looks over at her, and she looks up, like he has caught her in something tawdry. He looks as if he wants to kill her, but that is how Klaus looks when he wants to kiss her.

Why is there blood in the ground—he wants to ask, as if she will know. As if this novice girl, this child, this infant will know anything.

But she does know. She buried three people here. Shallow graves because of the ice. She was hungry in the night and she took his servants from their quarters and she swallowed them. There are pieces here and there, hands under his feet, feet under her hands.

She couldn't be more sorry.

But the grass will grow so green there in the spring. The earth is starved for nutrients. The earth thanks her.

They sit across from one another. They are a country apart.

The floor is covered in grass, plains of thick brown fur with tips of gold, the hide of rare bears, it curls over the wood like living creatures nailed into the floor. There is a fireplace, a chandelier made from the bones of elk. They use candles. Caroline is not sure if it isn't for comfort or for anger.

Caroline thinks there could be cave drawings struck into the walls, that she is in the mouth of something old.

Klaus' brother sits at his right ride and his sister at his left. They are both his sin. Elijah's mouth is black like he has been drinking ink. His teeth crack against the silver and pewter as if he were chewing ice. As if he were eating the metal in each mechanical bite alongside the fatty pheasant and the viscous caviar.

It is staining the utensils as he eats, and eats, and eats. Is he never not hungry—Caroline wonders.

Rebekah leaves claw marks in the wood. Caroline can see them from where she sits. There are grooves in the huge panels as if she has scratched every time she has sat in that place. She doesn't touch the cherry-filled partrich or the bilberry-stripped boar. Rebekah only takes the sweet things, but she never touches them.

Her silverware has browned, as if it has sat out for an age, never-polished. Is she never going to eat—Caroline wonders.

And Klaus, the Wolf-king, the Halvblod, he is bent over the table like his vertebrae have frosted, he eats with his hands. His fangs protract from his gums and his polite talons reach out of his skin. He has yellow eyes and he swallows bones whole. Caroline thinks he would prefer if the courses, the lavish courses coming one after the other, if they were still living, screaming below his lips.

He gazes up at her and there is a twisted smile with a black tendril of ram heart lying over his lip like a snapped rein. His eyes are like an ax of gold into the dark trunk of a tree.

Caroline smiles back.

Caroline eats one bite from each plate. Caroline tastes everything. Caroline doesn't forget.

Caroline's mouth is bleeding frigid watermelon juice. She swallows and spits seeds into the fireplace. Klaus likes it when she spits. He likes it when she polishes her bow next to the fire on the floor, and he likes it when she spits seeds as if nothing will ever grow inside of her.

Do you like hunting, Caroline—he asks her, he asks because he is curious to know. He knows she likes to hunt for purpose, but for pleasure, with that swift bow carved of ivory and set with a frieze: a plague overcoming a city in the form of butterflies. Klaus likes to ask questions of her. As if his serpent tongue heralds him deaf and blind, but he can taste her answers.

Caroline never asks how they get watermelon, she doesn't ask why the fois gras is so fresh or why the apples taste as if they have just come off trees. There are no beasts or gardens here. Caroline knows the answers to questions she shouldn't know. As if she were the mountain one screams echoes off from, as if her core were made of stone and ice and her skin prickled with green, green forests that do nothing but live.

I like to see them run—she answers. Caroline likes to test the elk in the forest, the reindeer across the plains. She likes to push them to run harder, faster. She likes to see their nostrils froth with fear and their shrieks over the ice like horns of war. She likes to see them free.

Klaus reached to touch her shoulder. It is a pillar of violent orange and salmon in the firelight. Her shoulder is bare under the cape lined with white fur cast around her shoulders with a leather string.

I love to touch you – he says. His eyes are the aftermath of wars, when the soul is quiet and through death one cannot distinguish vanquished or victorious. When all men look like carcasses.

Caroline's eyes close, the curve of the bow separates their bodies.

Klaus presses a nail into her skin, and there is one seed of blood, the juice of a pomegranate.

How easily you bleed—he says, as if he were made of marble. As if he mistook her for a king.

How easily you break—she answers, as if she were made of marble. As if she mistook him for a king.

The lust in his eyes flares like a field being slashed and burned, so that something might grow there.

He is smoking enough to fill the sky, she is inhaling the smoke like she was born in it, like she has stopped to warm herself by it, like he has called her using signals from the ash. He is easy to see through, like water. She is easy to erode, like earth.

He climbs over her, the bow snaps, he swallows her cherry tongue like the jam in the spread at dinner. She tears his lip open like the flesh of the antelope she grated across her incisors. Klaus has black feathers under his skin, muscles that move like herds of wildebeest, shoving him forward in frantic rush. Caroline falls back into her cape of white fur and crimson suede with the leather ties.

The red is shredded, skin or blood or suede.

He spreads her pearl ankles around his hips and she leans to welcome him as he sinks into her with the exhaustion of an age.

She lets him be tired.

In her bedroom, she holds him in the safe of her vault. Her legs are ice too, colder than the wind on the windows, stretched astride him, hand bearing down on his chest like she wished to open him up like an oyster. To drink everything inside. To peel his heart like an orange.

His eyes are shut. Klaus the deathless, Klaus the bloodhound, Klaus the honorless, honored, here.

She lets him be grateful.

She lets herself love him for it.

Those are secrets to kill and kill for.

In the morning the sun strikes the window glass like a volley of arrows. Her room is beige, the palest and the most feminine. Cream colored suede and reddish fur over great bed columns which lose themselves into the heights of the ceiling. Oak burns in the fireplace like it was pulled from barrels that age fine spirits with sprigs of vanilla.

Caroline pulls her bones from the bed like bread from a hearth, she is warmth baked overnight like sweets to be put on a tray and eaten.

Klaus is standing by the window, he is muted in pale gold and his features are erased like he was made of dust to begin with.

I loved a girl that had hair like this—white enough to see through—he looks to her on the bed, turning him palm over and over in the light from the window. I pulled off her head and used her hair in the bow of my brother's violin, so that I might always hear her voice.

Why can he not tell her of his lovers?

He has seen her with hers, yes, amorous tongues and beaded eyes that commanded him to mercy.

I also loved her sister, not as fair, but wit that dripped like clover honey. She had black eyes and I pulled them from her skull to make ink so that I might write her immortal – he looks to Caroline, as if for approval.

Caroline is naked, shoulders porcelain soft, legs below the furs.

Did you? – she asks. Did you write her immortal? Does your brother play her voice?

Klaus glowers at her, nose and brows erased in the sunbeams, and eyes a cauldron of black that comes from the hollows of dead things. No, I was not inspired to write anything and the ink dried up. No, the violin bent in the heat of Arabia, the strings grew mold.

Caroline stares at him for several minutes, the silence cut between them like cake no one will eat.

What a waste—she says, disappointment buckling her tone. What a waste.

She rises from the bed, naked as the sun, and like the sun, erases more of him.

He kills a great bird for her. A heaving black bird with wings the span of four meters.

He has the bird plucked and her trunk filled with purple feathers streaked with hidden blue and gold.

The trunk is weightless.

Caroline stares at the feathers, in a pile that rises like smoke.

Three hundred pound of heaving black bird for thirty pound of purple feathers streaked with hidden blue and gold.

It doesn't seem fair.

Caroline pulls up a fish for him. A great fish with jaws the size of doors from the belly of the frozen lake carved through an ice hole.

She has the fish fileted and set before him with lemons and tangerines and butter from the strongest cows.

The dish is flawless.

Klaus stares at the fish, gaping and dried like a tomato in the heat.

A great fish with the jaws the size of doors for lemons and tangerines and tomatoes in the heat.

It doesn't seem fair.

At the arch of night, when the back of the world is bent in silent agony, Caroline follows a salamander sliver of lamplight. Her feet are bare as eggless hens, her touch quiet as fleece.

There is a thread of silver winding down the halls made of stalking dark wood. The kind of wood that could build ships that sail to other planets, the kind of wood that won't let disease in, won't let disease out.

Stopping at the corner of the yawning door, Caroline watches him. She is a wraith in lace and peach skin, she is always the peering girl of seven and ten years with eyes like caskets full of flowers.

Klaus' spine angles over the sprawling table carved with the age marks left in the planks. There are books thrown open to giant handwritten pages, dry ink wells, spiders on their dead backs, half empty glasses of wine with the viscosity of blood. The clocks are stopped, and he has several, all discarded across the littered chaos like cockroaches with their legs in the air.

It is like he is strategizing a great war she has no knowledge of, like he has been planning it for years and years and might be losing.

His shirt is torn through the center, it hangs in tatters like a pirate who swears he is a privateer, smeared and smattered with black stains the color of berries and ebola.

His skin is closed, untouched but filthy. Like he was stabbed a thousand times but shows no wound.

Not half a meter from his body there it lays – his heart, ripped asunder from his chest, leaving behind the coinless well, the canyon where no river stays. It is a dead thing, black and heavy like a boulder dredged up from sea. Thick with mucous the color of stinking seaweed, hard on the table and turned on its side like a useless ball with one flat side.

He picks at it, tinkers with it like a watchmaker, pulls clots from the arteries one by one like beads or pearls, he sucks them from his thumb and strips the muscle of coagulations like something has rotted inside of it, thick plugs of mold and pus and ink. His fingers are stained like a painter, like she sees when him walk out from his studio, patting his forehead with a rag.

Klaus looks at the thing, and his expression turns hideous, lips ripping into a snarl that would break the skin of drums, that would drain every lake in the world.

He stabs the heart with a scalpel, gasps like the wind on the city buildings, swearing to tear them down, like the waves on the sunken ship, angry at the squatter. He grips his empty chest with a palm the size of the sea, a palm the size of cities, he cringes and stumbles like an old man.

He roars like glass shattering.

He shoves the table on its side in fury, the books' pages fill the air like paper petals. The wine glasses leak and stain. The cockroach watches crack.

Caroline blinks quietly behind the door, enters the room only after he has left.

She steps on the debris, finds the heart pinned to the table on its side.

It is filth, not good enough for soup or even dogs.

She takes it and she stuffs it like a pie. Herbs and flowers and leaves for the worms that are too far in. She leaves in on her windowsill for three days and three nights, lets a blue finch sleep inside the folds of muscle.

He coughs up lavender for months.

He says everything tastes like olive and pine.

With his body over hers like the constellations over the world he heaves breath that smells like lavender and she has cheeks that fume of fever.

His brows are points in a starform, his parted lips, his lashes like scythes all lined up on his face and shut against his skin.

Klaus is blue and black with his rough edges sliced silver by the warsome moon. Caroline has no words of comfort for him, she has no protective clutch like jaws of life to crops in the frost, crops in the frost. She is white as spilled cream, an entire harvest wasted, an entire harvest wasted, eyes laced closed like with silk from China.

Here is his duty, to live up to this, to live at all, and his hand finds hers like a dead thing finds a tomb.

She opens her mouth.

He pictures her heart in his hand like a tulip in a bulb, her heart beating in her chest like a cat-o-ninetails at his back.

A good kiss tastes like olive and pine.

He closes his jaw over her like frost over crops.

An entire harvest wasted.

In Bergen there is an outdoor market and Caroline's eyes burn from the smoke.

The chill is everywhere, charred animals and fish on ice and rich tarts stuffed with cheese and preserves. The smoke from the pits filters the air, greyed and hickoryed, covers every wet street, every colorless crowd of same-heighted people.

Klaus drinks coffee as bitter as mines, as bitter as coal on the pure white air of her throat. His kiss steams there, like a locomotive.

Their arms are tangled, and Caroline jolts and points, nudges and jumps. He is still as firewood, the people seem to part for him, no one ever touches his shoulders that look like gunmetal over promises of peace.

There are children.

He could have them, hundreds and hundreds and blonde as ash.

There are graves.

She would mourn them, hundreds and hundreds and turned to ash.

There is an old man in the raucous. He is swaddled against the cold, greyed in face like the moon. He has craters for cheeks, blades for shoulders. But they are dull, Klaus notices, not for fighting, more for lying down.

He can smell the cancer in him.

Black as braids in the liver, slow as cinders.

Caroline shoves her nail into her wrist like a wasp, sprays his cider with healing blood. When Klaus is not looking, when the old man is distracted by children and their ash graves and their ash hair.

Klaus smears a branch in his fingers, belladonna and betel nut, a hurried poison from his brother's garden. When Caroline is not looking, when the old man is distracted by children and their brash games and their brash flair.

He dies in two years, in his bed, in agony.

It seems it all happens because they don't agree.

Klaus has hounds—ten hounds, twelve hounds, twenty.

They race to him like disease to a body. Steel-coated bullets like from the bellies of guns. They climb over him like snow on a gargoyle. They ring in him laughter that hits countries miles away, laughter that causes brushfire and drought, snowstorm and mildewed wheat. His laughter is a plague, his happiness with haunt you.

Caroline laughs brightly and they quiver at her voice, tails between their legs, hiding behind their master.

Klaus grins when they quiver.

He looks at her leaning on the fence, the white world struck with Nordic gold behind her.

Caroline is smiling like a spear in someone's chest.

She thinks of the lavender stuffed into his arteries, he thinks of the tulip hiding behind her ribs.

Seven months have passed and she walks silently in the forest. Caroline has a voice like a snare, inescapable. She has learned to feel quiet.

Klaus rides his horse, his horse that is tar-covered, tar-colored, his horse which stenches of gears and metals and motor oils. Klaus is swaddled like an infant, wrapped shoulder to shoulder in a poncho of limitless black, limitless like an equation drawn out in one of his books. He looks like the hive holding anthropods, yellow-jackets, daddy long legs. Caroline thinks he looks like a smoking bandit if the snow transformed to desert, if the sugar were dry chapped earth. Over his eyes he wears a mask.

Caroline steps over fallen branches, walks astride the horse.

Can you make this sugar into snow? – she asks.

No –he answers grimly, as grim as ticks over bloodless beings, as grim as ticks in a bubonic wreck. No; only into vodka.

Caroline thinks vodka would be clear, cold as water and deceiving as the spirit. She smothers the sugar under her boot. She squints in the sun as it slicks through the trees like butter.

Birds land on his shoulders as he sits atop the horse. Birds land on him as if he is as familiar and as common and as old as the trees. A black window ledge with cheekbones that slice like teeth.

Caroline chases Klaus as fog steams from the horse's nostrils, it steams like nuclear waste, like chemicals burning in factories in Warsaw. The horse is silent and hulking, too many muscles over too few limbs, tied against a tree.

Caroline chases Klaus over the ice-struck stones, over the patches of dead leaves, over the icicle-bearded bushes.

She play-shoots poison arrows at his poison chest.

And he play-dies, stumbles back, motionless and mirthless.

She kneels by his body, knees freezing in the cold, joints solidifying. His eyes are shut and his hair is wet and brown and full of sticks.

Wake up—she'll say, as if only her voice can rouse him.

And Klaus will open his eyes, will kiss the snow sugar from her lips with his scorching black tea tongue.

Sometimes Caroline thinks he enjoys that a little too much. Not the kiss, but the dying.

I've thought about it myself, once or twice, over the centuries.

She imagines he would like to die, like to try it.

She imagines that is the migration of the great black bird.

To death, and away.

They are walking side by side, boots over snow, sugar over vodka.

Caroline balks at a white rabbit in her path, rubicund paws and a blood-red nose. It comes to her feet and dies in front of her. Things come to Caroline to die like the birds land on Klaus' shoulders.

There is a dead elk behind a fallen tree in forty yards, and a dead fire further than that.

Sweetheart—Klaus says, consonants like knives in a berry.

Klaus—she warns, vowels shaved like rations.

He shakes the birds from his shoulders.

She looks the dead things in their eyes.

In the coin copper firelight, he rests his head in the chalice of her body. The space over her crossed legs and nestled close to the raspberry abdomen with its brambles and silk and demands.

He tells her stories about Valhalla – the golden halls of the honored dead that he will never enter. The marble that won't hear his bootsteps, the floors that won't skid his shield, the crystal air that won't suspend the mead that tumbles from cups with never empty.

He tells her, as a boy lying beside smoking purple firepits, he would dream of this, before gods were servants, before men were rodents and flay-ribbed prey with ink blot eyes. Before blood sought blood, or so he's told to all that have come after him.

Caroline has her hands in the earth, the cold as if it comes from her. The fire licks the heels of his boots, like he has made it, burning him, ruining him with tests and philosophies and experiments. That is the price of being beautiful. Caroline, full of life, and so the dead things follow her, cling and weep and slither on her skin. Klaus the deathless, and so the living things grow curious and old and brandish their knives to cut and decipher and cook.

That is what they live for, to be taken from.

That is what they live for, to ruin.

Caroline tells Klaus stories about Virginia—the applegreen hills that hide the dead that she will never exit. The school halls marked with her savagery, the indian trails bleeding with all of her misdeeds, the graveyard where she snuffed candles to mark the end of her life.

She tells him, as a girl lying beside a pink TV-set, she would dream of this, before dying to get out of that town meant dying to get out of that town, before men were things to be eaten and tasted and buried in pieces under permafrost. Before blood sought blood, or so she's told to all that have come after her.

His lips are punched with the sugar snow vodka. His eyes are pools that have swallowed stars, leaving the night only to them.

He looks insane.

Her cheeks are pinched with the sugar snow vodka. Her eyes are shells that have scraped away the earth, leaving the night to only them.

She looks terrifying.

He feels drunk off the vodka in the snow, and she feels electric with the sugar in her blood.

She wants to drive him in a race car called Valhalla through seven thousand cities in seven thousand worlds. She wants to burn the faces off people, to rewind the sun like a cassette tape in her mother's closet collection. She wants to make his happiness of her rib, to let vines grow through it.

He wants to find a pink TV-set, and tell her how he turns snow into sugar.

His mask is getting old.

That is what he tells her, to live forever, you must be, you are dying forever.

Caroline hears this and laughs so loud the crows flee from the trees in a giant deluge of black rain. It darts like arrows, like bullets, like chemicals, but none touch them.

That is what she tells him, to die forever, you must be, you are living forever.

Klaus drinks from her with lips as red as dahlias, she holds him to her neck.

Living forever, dying forever.

Snow into sugar, blood into marriage.