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)
“—have to go East before the summer ends,” one of them was saying. “The reports from the traders are too consistent to ignore.”
“What traders?” Another voice, skeptical, closer.
“The ones who came through Hedeby in the spring. Three of them, separately, all saying the same thing. Something stirs in the East. Ymir’s body fights against itself.” The first voice again, and I felt the bench shift slightly as weight settled onto it near my head. “Not a natural stirring. Something deliberate. Something organized.”
It didn’t make logical, realistic sense: three traders, from the East, talking about Ymir’s body. A metaphor, or an unknown kenning, that my dreaming mind had used to tell me something. The detached but apparently still functional part of my intellect registered the idea without real interest.
I lifted my eyes. The dream sky above the longship was the gray-blue of early morning, high and cold, the kind of sky I associated with Scandinavian paintings. The sail, dark red, bellied with a wind I could feel against my bare skin. The oars were shipped. We were running before the wind, and the warriors had the leisure to enjoy their plunder.
Their new bed thrall. Me.
A hand came to the back of my head. Not cruel, nor especially gentle, simply present and certain of itself, and I understood what was about to happen with the same below-threshold knowledge that had let me read the bench before I opened my eyes.
The owner of the hand came around to tower over me, blocking my view of the sky. He had hiked his robe to his waist and tucked it into his belt to reveal the obscene sight of his long, hard manhood, its head purple with blood.
“Open,” said the voice that had spoken of the East. He said it the way one might say it to a well-trained animal, not unkindly, simply with the expectation of compliance. “Show what you have learned so far.”
I opened my mouth. In the dream, I wanted to.
The man whose cock used me first was broad and fair-haired, somewhere in his middle thirties. He had a weathered quality, as if he had spent most of his life outdoors in cold wind. He held my head in both hands and moved with the ease of someone accustomed to this kind of masculine pleasure. In the dream, somehow I remembered what Nymphobus Oceanus had taught me, and I received the thrusting of the thick, hot shaft with a slow pull of air through my nose that allowed me to accommodate his steady rhythm.
“She takes it well,” he said, to whoever stood behind him, his voice a little rough. “She pleases the reðr like a more experienced slut.”
“Magnusson trains them well,” said another voice, from somewhere aft of me. I felt hands on my hips, and then the blunt, insistent heat of a second man pressing from behind against the entrance to my vagina.
No longer virgin, murmured a dream voice in my head. Your Herra took you… fucked you… you are open and available…
I cried out around the cock in my mouth, which made the man using my face grip my head more firmly and make a low sound of appreciation. The one behind me pushed forward steadily, without haste, filling me in a way that my dream body received with a helpless, shuddering clench.
“—the East,” the first man said again, his voice rougher now, his rhythm deepening. “Whatever rises there, it concerns Ymir’s body. The old accounts speak of it. The body of the first giant, from whose flesh the world was made. Someone in the East understands the old knowledge. Not our knowledge, but knowledge of the same root.”
“A rival understanding,” said the man behind me, his hands tightening on my hips. He thrust forward and I sobbed, and the sound came out muffled and distorted around the hardness in my mouth. Neither man paused for it. “Or an enemy understanding. If they learn to use what Ymir’s body holds—”
“Then the tree suffers,” said the first man, simply.
Yggdrasil, I thought. Yggdrasil suffers. The thought arrived with the clarity of something I had already known and had simply waited to remember.
The man using my face came with a guttural sound and held my head very still. I swallowed because there was nothing else to do, and the man behind me gripped my hips harder and fucked me with a quickening urgency that built on everything my bound, helpless body had already been made to feel.
I felt the pressure of my chin against the bench when the first man withdrew. I hung my head, my cheeks burning with shame at how aroused their brutal use of me had gotten me. I looked down, at the ribs of the longship’s hull and breathed through my nose and felt the second man spend himself inside me with a grunt of satisfaction.