Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
“You planned this,” I said, because the bag full of sleeping furs in the car on the drive had not escaped my notice.
Henrik’s mouth moved faintly. “I did.”
“For leisure?”
“For your leisure,” he said. “You’ve worked enough, little vǫlva.”
The familiar phrase warmed me embarrassingly. A vacation. From strategic debriefings, from Sisters of Freya business, from the unnerving seriousness with which powerful men now treated my body and mind when the two worked together. I ought to have relished the rest on its own terms.
I did relish it. I also felt, with mounting heat between my thighs, that the cavern could never belong wholly to the category of rest.
Before we even entered the chamber proper, my pulse had changed. The air itself seemed to thicken with memory. Then the cavern opened around us, and there lay the ship again in its impossible half-light, dark wood and carving and all the condensed symbolic weight of what had happened to me here before. I stopped where I was.
I had wondered if my pregnancy might make the place feel foreign, or render my former self slightly ridiculous to me. Instead I experienced an overwhelming continuity. The girl who had stood here uncertain and inexplicably (she had thought) aroused, and pretending to be a detached observer… she hadn’t vanished. She had simply become a part of what she had once only studied.
Henrik went aboard the longship first and turned to offer me his hand. I took it and stepped into the ship with absurd care, as if boarding not a relic in a cave but a vessel afloat on dark water. He led me to the bench… the same bench. My whole body recognized it before my mind had finished the thought.
I sat beside him. The wood under me was cool—I knew that factually and rationally—but it still felt warm, just as it had when I had first touched it, six months before.
For a little while he only kissed me. Slowly at first. Then with a pressure that reminded me at once of exactly what sort of man my elegant, disciplined, terrifyingly competent partner remained beneath his modern clothes. His palm moved over my side and came to rest on the curve of my belly. He kissed me more softly then.
I laid my hand over his. The gesture should just have made everything tender, and it did that. It also made everything hotter, though. I was his bed thrall, his vǫlva, his kneppetøj, his fuck toy… and I carried his child while I sat on the bench where I had once played with my naughty fisse in secret… and where he had later claimed me with the Pretorian Guard looking on.
I broke the kiss and looked down, breathing harder.
“The roots,” I said quietly, half to myself.
Henrik brushed his thumb over my cheekbone. “What, little one?”
“I can feel them.” I glanced around the ship and the carved chamber and then back to him. “The roots, under everything.”
His expression changed a little, growing graver. “You don’t have to work today.”
I smiled despite myself. “I know.”
He kissed the corner of my mouth. “Do you? You’ve been very obedient about pretending to rest. Not always successfully.”
That made me laugh softly. It also made me want to kneel before him and serve as I should, my mouth full of my Herra’s hardness.
“I’m serious,” he said, not harshly. “You’re not on vǫlva duty.”
The word duty, applied to something so intimately perverse, sent a pulse through me. I lowered my eyes. In six months the title Sister of Freya had become attached in me to meeting schedules, intelligence summaries, pregnancy monitoring, nursing consultations with the matres and the mœðr, and also, inseparably, to the humiliating bodily means by which the men expected their intelligence and visions improved: my anus stretched around my master’s cock atop his bride saddle, rising into the upper boughs of the Worldtree as he enjoyed my bottom’s tightness. The practical and the obscene had long ago fused.
“I know, Herra,” I said.
He stroked my braid once, then my neck. “Good.”
I should have left it there. Instead I heard myself say, “Will you use my bottom anyway, Herra?”
His hand went still against me.
The words had come out with less hesitation than they once would have done. That, by itself, fascinated me. There had been a time when merely imagining myself asking for so shameful a thing would have made me want to disappear into the floor. Now the shame remained fully alive, but it no longer blocked speech. It had become a roadway through which desire and need traveled.
Henrik searched my face. “For pleasure?”
“For a vision,” I whispered, then corrected myself because the distinction no longer held cleanly. “For both.”
His eyes darkened.
I wet my lips. “Put me on the saddle.”
“No.”
His refusal came instantly.
I think some old reflex in me still expected to test boundaries, because disappointment flashed up at once, irrational and hot. “Henrik… please?”