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)
My Herra’s explanation settled into me. My academic brain judged the basic argument a good one. It seemed to click into place, like a key in a lock.
Pattern becoming understanding. I had always noticed too much, remembered too much, assembled connections that other people seemed not to see. My dissertation adviser had called it intuition, and told me that I needed to learn to produce evidence for every assertion.
But it wasn’t intuition… or it was a very different kind of intuition from what she had meant. It was work. Relentless, unconscious, accumulating work.
The tree had already arrived in my mind, at the edges of the cell, when I understood that. It hadn’t waited to arrive—it had been there all along, the way the inscription had been there in the mosaic border, visible to anyone with the patience to read it. The roots came down through the volcanic stone beneath my hands and knees as if the stone were only a suggestion of solidity, a temporary agreement between matter and time. The trunk and the branches soared somewhere above the low dome, beyond it, into a cold upper air, a height beyond ordinary reckoning.
I pressed my lips together hard and heard a tiny whine emerge from my nose.
I would not tell him. The recognition of what his explanation meant had reached me alongside the recognition of what it cost. If this Henrik person—I absolutely refused in that moment to call him Herra… if he had it right, if the tree represented the shape of my own mind doing what it did best, then the only way I had ever reached it, the only way I had reached it on the bride saddle and in the intake room and in the jade-colored bath, was through this. Through submission. Through sexual submission. Through the humiliating need he was fostering in me with his distressingly skillful hand.
I could only become what he was calling me… what he was making me… here with my knees spread on a mat in a stone cell… letting a gorgeous, muscular man work my body toward a crisis I couldn’t control. The vǫlva’s gift, if it was a gift at all, lived inside the bed thrall.
The kneppetøj… the fuck toy.
They were the same thing. I couldn’t have one without being the other.
My jaw tightened. The tree waited, patient as stone.
His left hand moved from my back. I felt it travel around my ribcage, then it cupped my breast from below with a warm, deliberate lifting, and his thumb found my nipple.
The sound that came out of me then had nothing to do with rational cogitation.
He rolled the nipple between his thumb and forefinger with a slow, considered pressure, and his right hand kept moving between my thighs. The two sensations found each other somewhere in the center of me and became a single, compounding thing that overwhelmed my nervous system. My back arched. My hips rocked. The cuffs at my wrists pulled taut against the posts and I gripped the iron and tried to think about the mineral composition of volcanic stone.
The tree’s roots came further down. A branch moved somewhere in my peripheral vision, above and to the left, stirring in a wind I couldn’t feel on my skin.
I was going to tell him.
I wasn’t going to tell him.
His fingers found that angle again. The one I had never known existed… that Giovanna had found in the intake room… that he had found twice already in this cell… the one angle that made my breathing come in keening gasps. I felt the orgasm rise from where it had been suspended for what felt like hours of accumulated, merciless patience.
He squeezed my other nipple, harder, and the tree was simply there—fully there, not at the edges but present in the cell the way the iron posts were present, rooted in the stone with a permanence that made the cell itself seem temporary by comparison. The roots went down past the aquifer, past the volcanic rock, past whatever bedrock underlay Sicily itself. The branches went up through the dome and beyond it into a cold sky I couldn’t see but could feel, vast and indifferent and beckoning all at once.
“I can see it,” I heard myself say. My voice broke on the last word. “Herra Henrik, I can… the tree is here. The roots are…” A sob. “I can see Yggdrasil.”
His hand stilled between my thighs, and I made a desperate, wordless sound of protest, my hips pushing my spanked bottom back against his palm, in search of him.
“Good,” he said softly. The single syllable carried something I hadn’t heard from him before—not the assessor’s satisfaction or the master’s authority, but something rawer and quieter. “Good, lille en. I thought you might.” His thumb moved, a single slow pass that made my whole body shudder. “The strength of it. To see the tree here, without the saddle, without…” He seemed to stop himself. “The strength of your gift is remarkable.”