Chapter 17
Henrik
I had the urge to deflower Ilsa that instant.
If my own pleasure had been the only thing at stake, I certainly would simply have bestrode her and plunged my rigid cock into the tight, pink, inviting cunt that glistened between the girl’s spread thighs.
But Ilsa’s gift demanded better of me than my own pleasure. I had to understand what she had seen.
Even more important, I had to ensure that she would see it again, and more clearly.
This extraordinary young woman had begun to develop her v?lva’s powers: I had no doubt of that, given the relationship I had already observed between her submissive sexuality and her obvious intelligence.
The chance existed, indeed, that she possessed talent beyond that of any v?lva the Sons of Odin had trained in perhaps centuries—perhaps ever.
I kept the fingers of my right hand moving between her thighs, working her gently, milking the pleasure from her sweet fisse as I crouched a little lower at her side.
I had my left hand on her back, exerting just enough pressure to make Ilsa feel that my bodily restraint represented her bondage just as decisively as the cuffs and the iron posts.
Both my hands could feel the marvelous, arousing quivers of involuntary submissive need that traveled through her nervous system, over and over, readying her for her master’s use…
making her need my cock a little more urgently each time.
I waited until she let out a small, desperate sound, pressing back helplessly against my hand, trying to draw my fingers deeper into the sweet, hot sheath of her vagina.
“Tell me about the vision,” I said. I kept my voice level, though my cock ached with urgency. “What did you see on the bride saddle?”
“But… I… I told… I told Giovanna…” She gasped as my thumb moved. “I told her… the… the… bellatrix. I told her… please, Herra…”
“I know you did,” I replied, making my voice a growl and feeling her body arch at the sound of my authority. “Now you will tell your Herra, if you want his tól inside this pretty little cunt of yours.”
“Oh… oh, God… I… please, Herra…”
I stilled my hand. Ilsa gave a sob of frustration.
“The tree…” she gasped. “Roots and branches. Coolness… soothing… almost cold.”
“Yes.” I eased the pressure of my touch just enough to give her mind room to work alongside her body.
The elders had always said that a v?lva’s gift lived in that tension—the space between thought and sensation where a submissive bed thrall’s creative imagination can take hold.
“And something else. You told her there was another girl.”
Her breathing caught. On her face, in profile to me as she gazed down at the smooth stone between her hands, I saw an adorable frown of deep concentration come over her face.
“She was on the tree too… or… I don’t know, Herra.
It was confusing… maybe she was on a different tree that was also the same tree?
But… she was… she was like me, I thought.
A girl, paddled so… so hard by the man, and…
he… he used her… her poor bottom… and she went to her tree the way I went to mine and they were the same, and I saw her in the branches below, and she looked up at me. I thought… she looked Chinese to me?”
I considered that, feeling a frown of my own emerge onto my forehead. Having a v?lva vision without a Son of Odin present was remarkable enough. But the other girl, on the other tree… a Chinese tree…
I had messaged Sven to ask if any of the records held an account of a v?lva seeing another v?lva on the tree.
He had replied that none of the materials we’d digitized over the past decade seemed to contain anything of the sort.
Those records, though, only included a little more than half the annals stored in the archive beneath Rouen.
A shared vision—two women on the tree simultaneously, aware of one another, and one of them perhaps not a v?lva, but something else: something from the East. I kept my fingers moving, steady and purposeful.
“Listen to me,” I said. “I want you to understand something about what you are, Ilsa. About what a v?lva actually is.”
* * *
Ilsa
“Please,” I whispered. The word had taken on its new meaning entirely now. “Please, Herra… please don’t stop.”
“I won’t stop, lille en,” he said, his voice suddenly gentle.
His fingers found a new angle. I sobbed and arched my back on the mat, the cuffs at my wrists pulling taut against the iron posts.
His voice returned to the growling rumble that seemed to work its way into my flesh. “But you will listen.”
I heard myself make a broken sound of acquiescence.
“The Sons of Odin have studied the v?lur for centuries,” he said.
“We have records going back to the first settlements of the Vikings in Denmark. And in all that time, in all of those records, there is not one instance of a v?lva whose gift was truly supernatural, in the way the old skalds describe it.”
He paused, letting his thumb rest very lightly on the small, swollen nub at the crest of my desperate pussy while his fingers continued their work below it. I let out a helpless moan.
“What the v?lur have, every one of them, is something more interesting than prophecy. More useful. More real.”
“What?” I could barely form the word.
“Intelligence,” he said. “Observation so fine it operates below the threshold of awareness. You notice everything, lille en. I’m sure if you think of it, you will realize that you always have.
You read the mosaic that no one else had read in perhaps nine hundred years.
You found the directions and you followed them.
Your mind had begun to assemble the picture long before you understood what kind of picture it was assembling. ”
To my mingled distress and delight, he moved his fingers with greater deliberateness for a moment. I cried out, my hips rocking back against his knowing hand.
“The tree is not a hallucination. It is what your mind looks like from the inside when it does what it does best. When the observations become pattern. When pattern becomes understanding.”
Silence, except for my breathing and the small, wet sounds of his hand working between my thighs.
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 v?lva’s gift, if it was a gift at all, lived inside the bed thrall.
The kneppet?j… 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.”
I pressed my forehead against the stone and breathed.
“I’m going to test that strength now,” he said. His voice had returned to its careful, deliberate register, but something underneath it had changed. “I need you to tell me more about what you see. Describe it to me. Everything.”
His right hand withdrew from between my thighs, and the deprivation was so sudden and so total that I let out a sob that echoed off the curved walls.
But his left hand remained at my breast, his thumb still resting against my nipple, and then I felt his right hand move.
Not to where I needed it. Higher. Further back.
I went very still.
His fingertip found the tiny ring Giovanna had bared and prepared, slick with my mistress’s anointing. My master touched it with the same exploratory delicacy he had used when he had stood behind me at the iron posts.
I moaned from deep in my chest.
“Oh, no…” I whispered. “No… please…”