Chapter 11
Henrik
I watched over the Guard’s crystal-clear surveillance feed, intrigued as much as aroused by Bellatrix Hestiaea’s preparation of Ilsa for initiation.
“Giovanna is good at this, no?” asked her master, Leo Aetnaeus.
“Very,” I responded. I meant it: Giovanna could teach our m?dre—the matrons who cared for the Sons of Odin’s bed thralls—a thing or two about bringing out a girl’s submissive nature.
The control room sat two levels below the preparation chamber, Bruno—as Leo Aetnaeus had encouraged me to call him—had brought me to.
The illumination from the impressive array of monitoring equipment showed, just as incongruously as the fluorescent lights of Huginn’s Eye in Rouen, a chamber carved from the same volcanic stone as the ritual bath.
There, Giovanna watched Ilsa bathe with a born trainer’s critical eyes.
Here, Bruno and I observed, seated at the bank of monitors that covered the wall in front of us.
Leo Aetnaeus had his arms folded as he studied the center screen, watching the feed from the preparation chamber with the focused stillness of a gifted accountant conducting an audit.
He had the look of someone who had been born to give orders and had spent sixty years confirming that instinct was correct.
Compact, watchful, with his salt-and-pepper hair trimmed to a precision that suggested it had never been permitted to grow a millimeter past regulation.
The ancient Sicilian coin on his tie pin caught the monitor’s light when he breathed.
“She’s extraordinary,” I said, because it was true and because it was a less complicated opening than one that addressed the heart of the situation.
“She is,” Bruno agreed. His eyes didn’t leave the screen. “She is also on my territory.”
There it was. I leaned forward, my eyes fixed on the scene unfolding above us, though the appearance of the bath and the nature of the activity I observed made it seem like the preparation chamber belonged far below us. All the way down, really, at the roots of the Worldtree.
I enjoyed the cognitive dissonance, which echoed the basic paradox of Bruno and my organizations’ existence in the collapsing modern world.
We did everything in our power to create the feeling—the gestalt, to put it more exactly—of the ancient essences at the lowest substrate of our constructed reality, but we frequently had to compromise and put supercomputers where relics of seafaring warriors or conquering legions should go.
On the screen, Giovanna crouched at the bath’s edge and spoke to Ilsa, who sat in the jade-colored water with her platinum hair darkening at the ends where it touched the surface.
The camera’s angle gave a three-quarter view of the chamber.
The audio feed came through a small speaker on the console, slightly compressed but clear.
“Think about that hair between your thighs,” Giovanna was saying, her voice carrying the quality of patient, inexorable instruction I had long associated with her matronly function, mortifying to an initiate like Ilsa but undeniably productive of superior results in training her for her master’s use.
I watched Ilsa’s eyes go wide as she took in how her mistress’s hand indicated the area below Ilsa’s waist, beneath the water’s surface.
“Think about how it feels now, and how it felt as it grew in. How it made you feel adult, perhaps even how it made you feel in charge of your own body.”
Ilsa’s face on the monitor showed the expression I had been watching develop over the past forty minutes on the feed: the face of a girl whose resistance is not broken but is being methodically, expertly redirected.
Her chin was slightly raised. Her eyes moved to Giovanna’s face and then away, then back.
“And consider,” Giovanna continued, “how you will feel when your mistress removes it. When there is nothing left. When you are bare and smooth and entirely visible to whoever wishes to look at you.” A pause, measured and deliberate.
“Think about that feeling, columba. Let yourself feel it now, before it happens.”
Ilsa’s lips pressed together. The color in her cheeks was visible even through the monitor’s slight compression of the image.
“Remarkable,” I said, meaning it. “I had my doubts, but I’m convinced she did have a v?lva’s vision.”
My eyes flicked over to Bruno’s face. As I’d expected, I saw his expression darken.
“Very well,” he said, turning his own attention from the diverting scene in the bath, after a moment, and meeting my eyes.
“The Guard has decided to trust your accounts of your v?lur’s pseudo-paranormal senses.
I haven’t seen the evidence myself, so I can’t make my own mind up one way or the other yet. ”
“But?” I prompted, relieved that this part of our negotiation at least seemed to have gone smoothly.
“But I see no reason to keep you from initiating her, as long as it happens here, and I can observe.”
I nodded.
“Ideally,” I said, slowly so as not to seem too aggressive, “I’d be able to put her on a bride saddle…”
“We’ll build you one,” Bruno said. “The Guard should have a few of them anyway, so that we can test their efficacy. But I suggest you use Guard methods at first.”
I nodded again, more rapidly and decisively. “Yes,” I said, “it will be interesting to see if she goes to Yggdrasil that way. Though I’ll decline, politely, the offer of a saddle built by the Guard. If I do break this girl the Norse way, it must be in a Norse sanctuary.”
A smile crept onto Bruno’s face. “We’re doing fundamental research here, Magnusson, aren’t we? Our brethren will honor us for the way we break this girl in. As a doctoral candidate, surely she’ll appreciate the irony.”
I forced a laugh, realizing as I did that I felt a growing bond with Ilsa Matthews that seemed out of proportion to the situation.
I certainly couldn’t remember when I had looked forward to initiating a beautiful virgin this much; something about the look on her face as she contemplated her approaching submission…
a mixture of humiliation, fascination, and unmistakable arousal…
It called to me, and I couldn’t wait to discover why.
“Absolutely,” I said.
* * *
Ilsa
I didn’t think I’d ever stop blushing as Giovanna sternly instructed me in how to wash myself.
“You must get that little cunt very clean, columba, and the hair very soft for your baring. Be thorough with that cloth. Now, inside the sheath itself with your fingers.”
She made me repeat the internal cleansing of my vagina while my face burned so hot that the steam from the jade-colored water felt cool against my cheeks by comparison.
The herbs in the bath had made the skin of my inner thighs and the soft folds of my sex feel faintly electric, as though the preparation of my body had begun at the molecular level, long before anything else could reach me there.
I looked up at her with raised eyebrows, sure I must be finished.
My mistress spoke again, her words much more dismaying, “No, Ilsa. You’re not done. Put your finger inside your anus and clean yourself properly there.”
Biting my lip, I obeyed, pressing my middle finger into that most private place.
I scrubbed, my forehead creasing, while Giovanna watched with her arms folded inside the wide sleeves of her red robe and her expression carrying the impersonal patience of someone who had seen this particular mortification many times and found observing the process faintly enjoyable.
“Good,” she said, when at last she seemed satisfied. “Again.”
I did it again, hoping the little whine I heard from my throat would be lost in the echoing dripping of the bath water.
“That’s sufficient,” Giovanna said at last, and held out her hand for the cloth.
I gave it to her. I climbed the carved stone steps out of the bath with as much dignity as I could manage.
That didn’t amount to much. The leather cuffs, collar, and belt clung to every surface they covered, making me hyperconscious that I was naked everywhere else, and that the welts on my bottom had gone from a sharp sting to a deeper, settled ache of which I seemed to become more aware with every movement.
She wrapped a red towel around me, of the same deep shade as her robe.
It was very thick and very soft, and Giovanna used it with the same intensity she had brought to everything else, her eyes moving to my face regularly, obviously knowing the distress she would find there but wanting to assess its exact degree.
She pressed the cloth against my hair, working down my shoulders and arms, crouching to dry my legs from the ankle upward. When she straightened and moved the towel between my thighs, I held very still and stared at the far wall and tried to think about the mineral composition of volcanic stone.
“Think, columba,” she said, moving the towel with the obvious purpose of making me think in a very specific way. I let out a whimper as I remembered her telling me in the bath to meditate on the hair she would soon take away.
I didn’t want to look at her, but it seemed I couldn’t help myself. As she rubbed more firmly, and I whimpered again, I met her eyes. The little smile on my mistress’s face, to my dismay, made me bend my knees and try to press against the towel.
“There,” she said, and took the towel away.
I closed my eyes and swallowed hard to keep from sobbing.
The air of the preparation chamber settled against my damp skin. I stood before her in my leathers, bare everywhere the leather didn’t cover, and waited.
Giovanna moved past me. I turned to watch her, because not watching felt more dangerous than watching, and I saw for the first time the far end of the chamber, which the angle of the bath steps had kept from my view until now.
The bench occupied what looked like a deep alcove in the volcanic stone wall.
That was my first impression, that it belonged to the wall, that it had been built into the chamber rather than placed within it, as though the men who had carved this space had known from the beginning what would stand here and had shaped the stone to receive it.
It was low to the ground, long enough to accommodate a woman’s full length, made of a dark stone that I thought might be basalt, with surfaces worn, I sensed, to the same particular kind of smoothness I had felt on the rowing bench of the longship.
Not merely the smoothness of age but also the smoothness of use.
She took my hand and led me. I couldn’t stop my feet from taking the steps they took. My treasonous curiosity and its even more distressing connection to the helpless need between my thighs drew me on. Giovanna positioned me in front of the alcove, and the bench that extended out from it.
I could see inside the recess. I saw that they—whoever they were—had put a leather-covered cushion there, perhaps an inch thick, at the far end of the alcove. It matched the cushion that I now noticed on the bench itself.
That one occupied a raised section at the bench’s center, wide and padded, its surface worn in a pattern I recognized with a cold lurch of my stomach because I had spent the better part of an evening studying exactly this kind of wear on exactly this kind of surface.
Knees. The wear pattern was from girls’ knees.
My mistress showed me the bench with a kind of ironic pride, as if she felt grateful for the centuries-old traditions of her mystifying organization, but also could see how odd they might look to modern eyes.
Her hand indicated the knee cushion, then the alcove, then the relationship between the two.
“Your face goes there,” she said, pointing to the cushion in the depth of the alcove, “with your hands to either side. Your knees here, spread. Your bottom raised.” She looked at me.
“The position gives your mistress full access to your cunt and your bottom, to prepare you to serve your master’s pleasure. ”
My throat had closed.
Master. She and her nymphobus had used the word before, but it hadn’t truly registered until this moment, here where Giovanna would, it seemed, prepare me in the most shameful ways for some shadowy masculine figure. A man I didn’t know, who would apparently have my body at his command.
I looked at the bench, and at the rings set into the stone at intervals along its sides, and at the D-rings on my own cuffs and belt, and I understood the geometry of what was about to happen. A wave of heat surged into my face.
“Place yourself, columba,” Giovanna said.