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Two | She lost him because she was powerless

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For her entire life, she wished she would grow up ugly. She wished she looked hideous. She hoped that she had warts and scars and everything else to mar her face so she would not meet the same fate as the other maidens.

Each year, several youthful girls of her village were traded away and volunteered as tributes when their fathers could not pay rent. They were given to the vikings - the brutes who controlled even the most powerful men of their land. Each year when the longships pulled in and docked at their bay, she watched in terror the girls being dragged and bagged away, helpless and petrified. They were thrown onto the ships and sailed off to the vikings' lands to become their slaves, to a life of no return, a life of darkness.

She had lived believing her father would never do the same. She believed her father loved her and her sisters too deeply to want to sell them like livestock.

But she was wrong. When she was 7, she watched her eldest sister being led away by the men to await the same fate as the many others who had gone before her.

She was devastated, she felt betrayed, but she knew it was what her father had to do each year whenever harvests failed them. It was either one maiden's freedom or the whole village's lives. And as the years went by, more of her sisters were sold. Only one of her sisters was spared from such a predicament – half her face was burnt from a childhood fire. Her injury was her cure.

And she wished she'd be ugly until she met him. For the first time, she wanted to be beautiful for nobody else but him.

*

He was a tailor's son who grew up acquainted with the smell of cloths and pigments. He loved to sit by in his father's workshop, apprenticing for him, and that was how he met her. Every time she paid a visit to have new dresses tailored for her and her sisters, he would duck behind the spinning wheel, peek at her from his safe haven, too shy to go forward and greet her.

He was drawn to her, because she always had soot and charcoal on her face, while all the other girls caked theirs with pearl white powder. He was drawn to her, because she always searched for him in the workshop even though he deliberately hid (though never too deliberately). He was drawn to her, because she always remembered to wave at him and make a rose red creep up his temples.

Just the idea of her motivated him to learn the skill diligently, to perfect its art, so that one day, he could make the most beautiful dress for her and only her.

He had noticed that her family's orders had shrunk over the years - from five, to four, to three, to two. And for some unspoken reason, he knew he needed to accomplish it all before the number went to one, then zero.

One morning, the familiar rattling of the wind chimes indicated her arrival once more. This time, she asked his father for only one dress, as compared to the usual 'two' which had happened for a while.

Then she did the unprecedented. She called him. "Peter, please. I need to speak to you."

She led him out to the alley behind the workshop, and she pled with him to take her away. To leave their village and never return. To bring her to anywhere that was far from this place. Her request equally shocked and surprised him. But even when he was more than willing to, he knew he could not agree.

"But I'm just a penniless young man." he had responded. "I can't support you with my half-mastered art. I won't leave this place with you until I can do so."

But he promised her that he would take her away, as soon as he could sew dresses on his own. It was only right for him to do so.

When she asked if he loved her, he could not bring himself to say yes, because he was not qualified to. For a maiden as grand as her, he needed to be far greater before he could confess that to her, legitimately and firmly. He said nothing. She looked at him with an unspeakable sorrow and then tipped her toes and leant in to kiss his lips. His first kiss. The graze of her lips on his fired his determination to make it all work.

He did not know that that was the night the vikings arrived.

The next day, before the break of dawn, he had already risen to practice his craft. Some distance away, from his windows, he watched, for the umpteenth time, Vikings coercing young maidens onto their longships. But this time, he saw her. Her long golden locks were unmistakable, and the dress she wore was the exact one he had sewn with his father, just weeks before. He remembered the lace embroidery he had handpicked for her, he remembered every stitch and detail he had put into that dress for her.

Alarmed, he sprinted out from his workshop and towards the dock. But he could do nothing as he watched them board the ships. When the red ball of a sun peeked out of the horizon and morning came, the ships had sailed. He was left alone, and with a heart that was never to be stitched.